Max Collins: Scratch Fever

JON, ON STAGE , sweating, singing, mouth against the wire mesh ball of the microphone, hands on the black keys of the keyboard, looked out across the underlit, crowded dance floor, smoke drifting like fog, and saw somebody who was supposed to be dead.

He blinked the sweat away and looked again.

She was gone.

But he had seen her. Recognized her. He shouldn’t have been able to — her hair was different, still long, brushing her shoulders, but streaked blonde now, heavily so — and she wore tinted glasses with dark frames. He’d never seen her in glasses before, but she had the kind of face that a change of hair and the addition of glasses made no less distinctive.

It was mostly her mouth, he supposed: full lips that wore a faint, permanent pout, like Elke Sommer, but cruel, somehow. Smug. A feature that attracted and repelled, promised and threatened. As did that shape of hers — big boobs, tiny waist, wide hips, perfect ass. She was a sexual exaggeration, a Vargas girl come to life. She was Julie.

Julie, in white skirt and jacket and black cardigan, looking like a businesswoman, coldly chic, talking to Bob, the club manager, a six-four former farmer who was sitting with her over at the bar, stage right, handing her a drink.

Only that had been before Jon blinked.

Now Bob was sitting next to an empty stool, looking toward the back of the room, the drink in his hand extended toward nobody.

Shit , Jon thought; she saw me , too, recognized me. He felt a chill, despite the heat of the stage lights, the row of alternating red/blue/yellow spots strung on a pole above him, the system the band carried with them.

No. She wouldn’t have recognized him; she wouldn’t expect to see him playing on stage with a rock band. She wouldn’t know him with his hair cut off. He was just another musician, short, muscular, curly haired; there were hundreds of people who looked like him.

Yeah. Sure.

The song was over, he suddenly realized (“Pump It Up,” by Elvis Costello), and he should be introducing the next one, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He glanced over at the list of songs taped to the monitor speaker next to his portable organ (an old Vox Super Continental double keyboard), but the salty sweat in his eyes kept him from being able to focus on it.

The rest of the band, Les, Roc, Mick, Toni, stood and looked at him, waiting, and there was one of those two- or three-second pauses that most audiences don’t notice but seem an eternity to the people on stage, and then his eyes focused and he saw on the typed song list “Accidents Never Happen” just below “Pump It Up.”

“We’d like to do one by Blondie,” he heard himself saying, his voice echoing across the hall, “featuring Toni. She isn’t blonde, but she’s more fun.”

Toni did a little Debbie Harry salute/smile at the audience, and the faces out there smiled back at her, accompanied by a few laughs, and they went into the song.

The band — which was called the Nodes — did a lot of Blondie material, because Toni did resemble Blondie’s Debbie Harry just a little, though her hair was brunette (but then again so was Debbie Harry’s, really), and she had a similar busty little figure and could mimic Ms. Harry’s voice to perfection, as well as half a dozen other women’s, from Ronnie Spector to Pat Benatar to Lene Lovich, which was no small feat. Toni was the most popular member of the band, and Jon didn’t mind. But Les, Roc, and Mick did, and that was probably the major reason this was the band’s last gig.

After seven very successful months — they’d been playing the Wisconsin/Iowa/Illinois club circuit and pulling down $1500 a week, which for a band without a hit record was good money — the Nodes were going their separate ways. Or at least Les, Roc, and Mick were going one way, staying together as a trio, while Jon and Toni went another, to a tryout in St Paul, next week, with a new band. Girl singers and keyboard players were always in demand.

Besides, there was a split in musical tastes among the band. Jon and Toni both liked new wave rock, like the Elvis Costello and Blondie numbers that dominated the song list; but the rest of the band (who had been together for years under various names, among them Eargasm, Fried Smoke and Deep Pink) were into heavy-metal rock, and it was at their insistence that material like Aerosmith and Ted Nugent stayed on the list, much to Jon and Toni’s distaste.

The club they were playing was called the Barn, and it was in the country, between two cornfields, ten miles outside Burlington, Iowa. Part of it actually was a barn, or had been before it was turned into a restaurant, with the rough wood and red and white checkered tablecloths and barbecued ribs you’d expect of a restaurant that used to be a barn. A huge tin shed had been erected next to the restaurant and in this, still in a rustic manner, an Old Town setting had been created, with fake storefronts lining either side of a big dance floor. Between storefronts and dance floor were more tables with red and white checked cloths, and there was a bar on either side, plus another in back, in the area that connected the restaurant and the club.

The audience here was a young one, teens to late twenties, with enough people in their thirties to make it a difficult mix for a band to please. The drinking age was twenty-one, but fake I.D.s were more common than real ones in clubs like this one. The manager, Bob Hale, insisted that the bands he booked in play “nostalgia,” which meant fifties and sixties rock, and the Nodes carried plenty of songs in that area. And the band dressed like a British sixties group: sportcoats and skinny ties and short hair. Even Toni had a Beatle haircut and wore a skinny tie with her white shirt — of course, the white shirt and tie were all Toni wore, that and pantyhose, the shirt hitting her mid-thigh, like a mini-skirt, which was Jon’s idea of “nostalgia.”

Jon knew that to exist as a band in the Midwest it was necessary to cater to slightly crazed club owners, like Bob, who wanted bands that could appeal to everybody. The Nodes’ tongue-in-cheek clean-cut look helped accomplish that, and the songs by the Stones, Kinks and Beatles, plus sixties camp like “96 Tears,” “Dirty Water,” and “Woolly Bully,” pleased the patrons in their thirties as well as the eighteen-year-olds.

At the end of “Accidents Never Happen,” tall, skinny lead guitarist Roc went into “Cat Scratch Fever.” Several male voices, out in the smoky crowd, yelped and hooted. It was a popular song. It was also Jon and Toni’s cue to step offstage for a break; neither her vocals nor his keyboards were required on that opus, and besides, they hated it.

There was a little room off to stage right, behind one of the fake storefronts, where he and Toni went to wait out the song.

He could hear Roc’s toneless voice echoing out there: “Make her pussy purr...”

“Why do they like that shit?” Jon asked.

Toni was sitting on one of the hard black flight cases a guitar amp was carried in; her short, nice legs were crossed as she unscrewed the cap of a bottle of Cutty Sark.

“You mean Les and Roc and Mick,” she asked, “or the crowd?”

“Both.”

“Beats the fuck out of me,” she said, and took a swig of the whiskey; her little-girl face lit up as it rolled down her throat “Then again, this is Iowa,” she added.

Out in the other room, Roc’s guitar whined; people whooped.

“If Iowa sucks so bad,” he said, “why’d you leave New Jersey?”

It was a question he’d asked many times these past months.