She said, stop talkin’ while you can, you got a lot to lose.
Get down on your knees and count to ninety-nine by twos.
Bad cop,
She was a bad cop…”
The beams of yellow and blue lights crossed in the air above the audience. Everybody was standing, some holding up cameras. Nomad didn’t care if so-called unauthorized videos got onto YouTube. There was a party going on; it was all good. Maybe most of the people here had come to see the headliners, but for right now The Five was front and center, it was their time to show their stuff. Berke’s drums were pounding the room, and then Terry started playing an organ tone that began as high-pitched and beautiful as a cherub’s voice and suddenly dropped as low and nasty as the fevered gibberings of a meth-charged demon.
“Bad cop!
She was a bad cop!”
On the heels of the opener, Terry started up the pulsing Vox-toned intro to one of the ’60s songs he’d brought in, ‘Your Body Not Your Soul’ by the Dutch band Cuby and the Blizzards from 1968, and Nomad launched himself at it as Berke’s Ludwigs thundered at his back and spinning red lights descended from the ceiling. It was another fan favorite, suited to Nomad’s persona and voice, and he could rip the motherlovin’ shit out of it. Ariel stepped out front just after the chorus to demonstrate that her white Schecter Tempest could shred up a storm. The band moved on into the next song on which Nomad and Ariel shared lead vocals, a slow tempo bluesy tune titled ‘Called Your Number’.
“Called your number,
Nobody was there,
Loving you is leading nowhere.
Called your number,
Won’t you answer please?
Or cut loose this pain that is holding me.”
It ended with a primal scream of guitars, Nomad and Ariel playing in harmony and then at dissonance. Next up was ‘When the Storm Breaks’, which Nomad introduced as their new video from their third and latest CD, called Catch As Kukulkan, on sale at the back with the other merchandise. “I hope we can get everybody out of the warzones and bring ’em back home,” he told the audience as he stood in the white spotlight. He was going to let it go at that, but he couldn’t. “Bush and Cheney are fucking liars, man,” he added, and braced for the impact. Most in the audience whooped and hollered what Nomad took to be agreement; some were silent, and maybe too drunk already to disagree. Then Berke started the beat, Mike came in with the bass and they powered into the tune. It got a pretty good response, which Nomad appreciated since the song was so different from what they usually did.
At the set’s midpoint, Nomad and Ariel stepped aside for Berke to do her drum solo that became a duel with Mike’s bassline, and Terry brought the organ growling in to battle with both of them. This display of musical chops always went over well, and Nomad noted that Berke’s female fans—also fans of Gina Fayne, an outspoken citizen of their Nation—were exuberant in their dancing over on the left side of the stage.
Nomad had read an article on Yahoo once that said Finnish scientists had run a test on a rock band to see how strenuous the work was. They’d found out it was as tough as being a manual laborer for the comparable amount of time. The job of being a guitarist and lead vocalist was like digging a ditch or moving furniture; the drummer worked as hard as a bricklayer, and the bass player’s exertions were similar to those of a butcher. The body temperature went up to a hundred degrees, beads of sweat popped, and the pulse varied between one-hundred-twenty-eight and one-hundred-forty-four beats per minute. As the show wound down, he was feeling every bit of that and they still had the last number and encore—if the crowd wanted one—to do. They finished their regular set with ‘Desperate Ain’t Pretty’, which was a high-octane rocker that ended with a furious rolling blast of toms and cymbals from Berke, then they went off-stage for a couple of minutes to let the stew boil. When they returned and took their places, Nomad thanked the crowd for their response, reminded them that The Five CDs and T-shirts were on sale at the back, and then he intoned into the mike: “The universe is permeated with the odor of kerosene”, which was the opening of the second retro song that Terry had brought in, ‘The Blackout of Gretely’ by the garage rock band Gonn from 1966. It was a dinosaur-stomping earthquaker that Nomad sometimes feared could send a club crowd out into the street in a riot, if they were drunk enough. The song finished up in a dirty fuzz of distorted guitars, Nomad shouted, “Thank you, Dallas, and party on!” into his microphone, Berke threw the drumsticks into her throng of admirers, and The Five abandoned the stage for the next band’s setup, leaving the club’s crew to move their equipment to a holding area.
They were backstage in a dressing-room for only a few minutes, chugging down bottled water and hitting the tray of raw vegetables and three pepperoni pizzas, one without cheese, before George came to the door. “Great show, great show!” he told them, which if he said he meant. “Hey, John! There’s somebody out front who wants to talk to you.”
“Later,” Nomad said, settled in a folding chair with cheeseless pizza between his teeth.
“Yeah, well… I told him you’d be tired, but he says he’s got to hit the road. Drove a couple of hundred miles just to see you, he says. He’s asking you to sign six CDs and four T-shirts.”
“Later,” Nomad repeated. He frowned when George didn’t leave. “Come on, man! Give me a break!”
“Six CDs and four T-shirts,” George said. “Won’t take long.”
“Send the guy back if he’s so eager. We’ll all sign for him.”
“I already asked him. He says you have to come out there, and he just wants you.”
“What’s the dude’s story?” Mike was sitting with his bootheels up on the pizza table. “Sounds weird.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Nomad said to George, countering his last statement. “I’m eating right now, tell him to wait.”
“You should go ahead,” Ariel told him. She was sitting next to Terry, both of them on folding chairs, and Berke was slumped over on a wooden bench, kneading the tight muscles at the back of her neck. “Maybe he runs a fan page.”
“All I know is, it’s money,” George said. “And it wouldn’t hurt any of you to come out of the cave and meet your fans.”
“This isn’t a meet-and-greet,” Nomad reminded him. He realized George wasn’t going to leave without some kind of compromise. “Okay,” he said, raising his hands in surrender, “give me five minutes.”
“I’ll tell him.” George started to leave but caught himself. The staff handled the merchandise sales in the larger clubs like this one, true, but it might help if the band just walked out to the counter for a couple of minutes. “Listen,” he added, “you’d better pray the day never comes when nobody asks you for an autograph. I mean it.” He left before any further comments could be thrown at him.
Nomad let seven minutes go past, and then he stood up and said, “Okay, let me go do this.”
“Nice to be the chosen one,” Berke told him. “He’s probably a freak, got a doll in his bed with your face on it.”
“Look who’s talkin’,” Mike said.
Nomad went out of the room, down a short flight of stairs and through a door past the burly black-clothed security guard into the main part of the club, where knots of people were standing around talking and drinking, waiting for the next band. Instantly he was seen, recognized and shouted at, toasted with uplifted beer cups, focused upon by a half-dozen cellphone cameras, slapped on the shoulder, high-fived, all of it. Some girls rushed toward him, grinning, while their dates stood back at a distance. Nomad kept moving, even as the path before him began to close up. This was why he didn’t particularly like to come out into the audience area after a show in a large venue, and why really very few musicians did: you never knew if somebody’s drunk girlfriend would try to grab your ass, and the equally drunk boyfriend would start swinging on you, or some high-flying cowboy type decided he didn’t like all the attention you were getting and he wanted to see if you were really as tough as you thought you were, or some nutjob had decided you’d stolen a song he wrote in a dream and he wanted to let you and everybody else in the club know about it, or somebody clung to you like you were made of superglue and started telling you how great you were and how there’ll never be another voice like yours and could you please listen to this homemade CD that’s got some kickin’ shit on it, or…well, you just never knew. All those things had already happened to him, and more.