As Eezy Duzit went to one of the mike stands, a ragged chant started up and gained both strength and volume: The Five…The Five…The Five…The Five…
“Are they saying ‘You Die’?” Berke asked.
In the space between Duzit picking up his mike and the chant quieting down, somebody out in the midst of the crowd shouted, very clearly, “The Five fuckin’ sucks!” which brought a storm of laughter and more wicked shouts and catcalls concerning The Five’s abilities to suck donkeymeat, eat shit and take cocks up their collective ass.
Nomad turned around and looked into the faces of his friends. On Terry’s scalp and chipmunk cheeks shone an oily sheen of sweat, his eyes huge and frightened behind his Lennon specs. Ariel’s mouth was a grim line, her face pale but her eyes the dark gray of a stormy sea. Though Berke wore a faintly bemused expression, her eyes were dead black and her hands were on her hips in an attitude of somebody ready to kick dogturds off the sidewalk.
Nomad was the emperor. He had to say something in this moment of heat and pressure. He had time for only three words, spoken in a whiskied rasp that even Thor Bronson would have admired: “Tear them up.”
“You’ve heard about ’em!” Eezy Duzit’s amplified voice came out of the huge speaker stacks capable of sixty thousand watts of mind-blowing power. The voice hit rock and came echoing back. “You’ve seen ’em on TV! Welcome to the Stone Church stage, from Austin, Texas, the band that will not die… The Five!”
As a raucous and not altogether sober cheer went up, Berke pulled in a deep breath, squared her shoulders and walked out through the corridor. Nomad stared into Ariel’s face, and she into his. They were following a short set by the Cannibal Cult, whose Asian female lead singer Kitty Kones had, at a breakthroat tempo, screamed songs into the Electrovoice that seemed to be the Korean language mixed with a shrill outpouring of English profanity, as far as Nomad could tell. Whatever she was saying, the crowd had responded with basso woofs and the kind of noise that could bend metal. Her response to their response was to throw her microphone on the stage in the middle of Cannibal Cult’s fifth song and storm off, teeth bared in her white-powdered face.
The stage crew had come on to clear away Cannibal Cult’s mess and set up for The Five. While the band got themselves ready in whatever way they needed to, the crew swarmed the stage to move the Cult’s drumkit off and bring in The Five’s, set up the keyboards, plug everything in, check the sound levels and the stage monitors, and generally get the transition from band to band done as smoothly and quickly as possible.
As Nomad had been waiting for the crew to finish, he’d thought of an incident that had happened in the hospitality trailer just after he’d left Thor. He’d gone into the trailer’s air-conditioned chill and walked between the chow tables set up with pre-packaged sandwiches, chips, fruit, candy bars, soft drinks and the like. His available choices of sandwich had been chicken covered with melted American cheese, turkey with melted provolone cheese, ham and melted Swiss, and some kind of pimento cheese nightmare. Pizzas were on display, all layered with his throat-closing favorite. But when he’d gone to the check-in table to get his stage pass, the very nice older lady on duty had looked at the green mark next to his name and said, “I see you get a special lunch. Are you allergic to dairy?”
“I am, yeah.”
“I’ve got a couple of sandwiches without cheese set aside for you.”
“Oh…okay. Well, that’s great. Um…how did you know?”
“Your manager told us,” she’d said.
Nomad remembered saying to Truitt Allen at the hospitaclass="underline" I’m allergic to cheese.
Where was he, anyway? There’d been no sign of him since he’d unlocked the trailer and they’d taken the gear out, over an hour ago. He hadn’t even walked them to the stage.
Some manager he was.
Over the surly noise of the crowd, Berke started her drum intro to ‘Bedlam A-Go-Go’. It was a snap of snare, a flurry of toms and a bright hiss of cymbals. Then on the bass she pounded a beat that was nearly double what they’d done on the original song, from their first CD.
It was time to get it done. Nomad nodded at Ariel, who walked out along the corridor; he clapped Terry on the shoulder and Terry walked out, and then Nomad got in step right behind him.
The light was a harsh white glare. A dry wind blew into their faces. Above them, a huge canopy of black cloth flapped and twisted. The crowd hollered again, and surged forward against the waist-high chainlink fence that stood about twenty feet from the stage. Uniformed GB Promotions security guards were waving them back, while between the chainlink and the stage, photographers were snapping pictures and news teams were aiming their video cameras.
The band that will not die, Nomad thought as he crossed the stage to his position and picked up his Strat from its stand.
He kinda liked that.
Terry slid behind his Hammond, with the Roland on his left and a rack of effects boxes on his right. He turned up the Fuzz and Distortion settings to their max. On the other side of the stage, Ariel stood in front of her mike and picked up her Tempest. She adjusted for tone. Without looking at the audience she hit the song’s first howling chords—B-flat, D-minor, G—which brought Nomad in to repeat them and add an F chord to the structure. Terry came in with an ear-piercing little stab of notes, and then Nomad got his mouth up to the microphone and half-sang, half-shouted the words as Berke drove the drums into a frenetic, warped disco beat.
“In my dream I had a third eye.
My dog and I we liked to fly
High above the wasted earth,
High above the dirty surf.
We saw a city burning red.
We heard some voices
And what they said,
Come join us it’s party time,
Come join us the party’s fine.
Come on down we never close,
Come on down enjoy the show.
We live it, we love it
But we never can rise above it.
Bedlam A-Go-Go.
We live here, we love it.
The kings and queens of nowhere scenes,
In Bedlam, Bedlam A-Go-Go.”
Nomad looked out across the audience as Terry launched into a short instrumental strut—a demonic boogaloo—between the choruses. He saw the oval shape of the natural amphitheater, which was about the size of two football fields. A control tower stood at its center, topped with a glassed-in booth and bristling with multicolored parcans, follow spots, strobes and other special effects lights. Back and to the left were the turnstiles of the entrance area, and beyond it the ‘Midway’, where vendors from all over the southwest and California had come to display their artistry.
Business was booming among this demographic. He saw blue, red and purple flames tattooed on bald heads. He saw faces transformed into Escher artwork. He saw the calligraphy of a hundred hues written across shoulders and chests and breasts and stomachs, each man and woman their own Book of Life. Here, dancing and capering, was a bearded figure whose original color of birthflesh had disappeared beneath the new skin of blue ink and black proclamations; there whirling ’round and ’round was a topless female with red pigtails and an intricate painting of a multicolored dragon clinging to her back, its arms extending down across her shoulders and the black nails of its claws circling her nipples. Technicolor serpents coiled around throats, arms, thighs and calves. Flowers grew from navels and foreheads were crowned by shooting stars and pentagrams. Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Alice Cooper and Hitler pushed their faces forth from sweat-glistening meat. And there in the crowd…and there…and over there…stood in this blur of constant motion the few motionless figures who stood staring at the performers on the stage with eyes in a visage no longer recognizable as being earthly; they were creations from another realm, a strange and frightening beauty of human matter carved upon and recolored by needles both insane and awesome. There was the face made of layered scales like the gray hide of a desert lizard; there was the face created from a dozen interlocking other faces like a grotesque human jigsaw puzzle; and there was the face that was none at all, but rather a pair of eyes, nostrils and a mouth suspended against a bruise-colored, crackled parchment of indecipherable markings. It seemed to Nomad to be a document of rage.