John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

From “An Interview With Rickenharp: The Boy Methuselah,” in Guitar Player Magazine, May 2037:

GPM: You keep talking about group dynamics, but I have a feeling you don’t mean dynamics in the usual musical sense.

RICKENHARP: The right way to create a band is for the members to simply find one another, the way lovers do. In bars or wherever. The members of the band are like five chemicals that come together with a specific chemical reaction. If the chemistry is right the audience becomes involved in this, this kind of—well, a social chemical reaction.

GPM: Could it be that all this is just your psychology? I mean, your emotional need for a really organically whole group?

RICKENHARP (after a long pause): It’s true I need something like that. I need to belong. I mean—okay, I’m a “nonconformist,” but still, on some level I got a need to belong. Maybe rock bands are a surrogate family—the family unit is shot to hell, so… the band is family for people. I’d do anything to keep it together. I need these guys. I’d be like a kid whose mom and dad and brothers and sisters were killed if I lost this band.

And he sang,

Singing it insolently, half shouting, half warbling at the end of each note, with that fuck-you tone, performing that magic act: shouting a melody. He could see doors opening in their faces, even the minimonos, even the neutrals, all the flares, the rebs, the chaotics, the preps, the retros. Forgetting their subcultural classifications in the unification of the music. He was basted in sweat under the lights, he was squeezing sounds with his fingers and it was as if he could feel the sounds taking shape in his hands the way a sculptor feels clay under his fingers, and it was like there was no gap between his hearing the sound in his head and its coming out of the speakers. His brain, his body, his fingers had closed the gap, was one supercooled circuit breaker fused shut.

Some part of him was looking through the crowd for the chaotichick he’d spotted earlier. He was faintly disappointed when he didn’t see her. He told himself, You ought to be happy, you had a narrow escape, she would’ve got you back into boss blue.

But when he saw her press to the front and nod at him ever so slightly in that smug insider’s way, he was simply glad, and he wondered what his subconscious was planning for him… All those thoughts were flickers. Most of the time his conscious mind was completely focused on the sound, and the business of acting out the sound for the audience. He was playing out of sorrow, the sorrow of loss. His family was going to die, and he played tunes that touched the chord of loss, in everyone…

And the band was supernaturally tight. The gestalt was there, uniting them, and he thought: The band feels good, but it’s not going to help when the gig’s over.

It was like a divorced couple having a good time in bed but knowing that wouldn’t make the marriage right again; the good time was a function of having given up.

But in the meantime there were fireworks.

By the last tune in the set the electricity was so thick in the club that—as Mose had said once, with a rocker’s melodrama—“If you could cut it, it would bleed.” The dope and smashweed and tobacco smoke moiling the air seemed to conspire with the stage lights to create an atmosphere of magical apartness. With each song-keyed shift in the light, red to blue to white to sulfurous yellow, a corresponding emotional wavelength rippled through the room. The energy built, and Rickenharp discharged it, his Strat the lightning rod.

And then the set ended.

Rickenharp bashed out the last five notes alone, nailing a climax onto the air. Then he walked offstage, hardly hearing the roar from the crowd. He found himself half running down the white, grimy plastibrick corridor, and then he was in the dressing room and didn’t remember coming there. The graffiti seemed to writhe on the walls as if he’d taken a psychedelic. Everything felt more real than usual. His ears were ringing like Quasimodo’s belfry.

He heard footsteps and turned, working up what he was going to say to the band. But it was the chaotichick and someone else, and then a third dude coming in after the someone else.

The someone else was a skinny guy with brown hair that was naturally messy, not messy as part of one of the cultural subcurrents. His mouth hung a little ajar, and one of his incisors was decayed black. His nose was windburned and the back of his bony hands were gnarled with veins. The third dude was Japanese; small, brown-eyed, nondescript, his expression was mild, just a shade more friendly than neutral. The skinny Caucasian guy wore an army jacket sans insignia, shiny jeans, and rotting tennis shoes. His hands were nervous, like there was something he was used to holding in them that wasn’t there now. An instrument? Maybe.

The Japanese guy wore a Japanese Action Suit—surprise, surprise—sky-blue and neat as a pin. There was a lump on his hip—something he could reach by putting his right arm across his body and through the open zipper down the front of the suit—and Rickenharp was pretty sure it was a gun.

There was one thing all three of them had in common: they looked half-starved.

Rickenharp shivered—his gloss of sweat cooling on him, but he forced himself to say, “Whusappnin’?” It was wooden in his mouth. He was looking past them, waiting for the band.

“Band’s in the wings,” the chaotichick said. “The bass player said to tell you… well it was Telm zassouter. ”

Rickenharp had to smile at her mock of Julio’s technicki. Tell him, get his ass out here.

Then some of the druggy feeling washed away and he heard the shouts from the audience and he realized they wanted an encore.

“Jeez, an encore,” he said without thinking. “Been so fucking long.”

“’Ey mate,” the skinny guy said, pronouncing mate like mite. Brit or Aussie. “I saw you at Stone’enge five years ago when you ’ad yer second ’it.”

Rickenharp winced a little when the guy said your second hit, inadvertently underlining the fact that Rickenharp had had only two, and everyone knew he wasn’t likely to have any more.

“I’m Carmen,” the chaotichick said. “This is Willow and Yukio.” Yukio was standing sideways from the others, and something about the way he did it told Rickenharp he was watching down the corridor without seeming to.

Carmen saw Rickenharp looking at Yukio and said, “Cops are coming down.”

“Why?” Rickenharp asked. “The club’s licensed.”

“Not for you or the club. For us.”

He looked at her and said, “Hey, I don’t need to get busted…” He picked up his guitar and went into the hall. “I got to do my encore before they lose interest.”

She followed along, into the hall and the echo of the encore stomps, and asked, “Can we hang out in the dressing room for a while?”

“Yeah, but it ain’t sacrosanct. You come back here, the cops can, too.” They were in the wings now. Rickenharp signaled to Murch and the band started playing.

Standing beside him, she said, “These aren’t exactly cops. They probably don’t know these kind of places, they’d look for us in the crowd, not the dressing room.”

“You’re an optimist. I’ll tell the bouncer to stand here, and if he sees anyone else start to come back, he’ll tell ’em it’s empty back here ’cause he just checked. Might work, might not.”

“Thanks.” She went back to the dressing room. He spoke to the bouncer and went on stage. Feeling drained, the guitar heavy on him. But he picked up on the energy level in the room and it carried him through two encores. He left them wanting more—and, sticky with sweat, walked back to his dressing room.