Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

‘Do you think it’s because we didn’t give them any beer yesterday?’ said Jason. ‘Maybe they are pissed off because of that?’

  We were stoned and a bit paranoid, I suppose.

  ‘I’ll do the talking,’ said Pete. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  So we walked down the hill and up to the rough-looking house with the stuff in the garden, stuff that nice people didn’t buy from garden centres. The three of us stood at the door and tried not to look scared, as Pete reached over and rang the bell.

  ‘Ding, dong,’ the bell chimed and, after an agonising eternity, the door opened and the looming shape of a grizzled and hairy biker stood facing us from the doorway. He was wearing full leathers and colours. He was grim-faced, and so were we.

  ‘Spacemen 3?’ he said, with a serious expression and a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Yeah,’ we said.

  ‘OPEN UP YOUR MIND AND LET EVERYTHING COME THROUGH!’ he shouted, gleefully breaking into a broad smile. ‘We fucking love you lot. Come in!’

  To say we felt relief would be an understatement. We felt like we had narrowly avoided a possible maiming. We walked through the front door laughing. We followed the leader into the front room, where we were introduced to the group of Angels that Jason and I had scuttled past the previous day. They were laughing about the fact that we had practically run away from them with the shopping trolley. ‘You didn’t even give us a beer, you tight bastards,’ one of them said, laughing again, as they handed over tins of beer.

  We thanked them and sat down in a line on the sofa.

  The Angel who had answered the door offered Pete a ride on his motorbike. Jason and I sat on the sofa drinking beer, looking through the Hells Angels’ photograph album.

  ‘When we have a party and someone falls asleep, they get their picture in here,’ one of the Angels said, opening the album. ‘Here’s Harry at a party we had last month,’ he continued, jerking a thumb at his friend in the chair opposite and then pointing a dirty fingernail at the photo.

  Me and Jason leaned in and tried to focus on the picture.

  It was hard to tell what was going on in the blurred photograph but it seemed to involve some fire and our new friend Harry looking a bit surprised.

  ‘If anybody falls asleep, we set fire to their balls with lighter fluid and then wake them up and take a picture,’ we were told.

  ‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA,’ we all laughed.

  They flipped through the family album and showed us the photographs of variously distressed Hells Angels waking up with their balls on fire. After a while, Pete got back from his Angels’ guided tour of St Austell and we all said our thanks and goodbyes and left. We were pretty pleased that the Hells Angels liked us but, as we walked back up the hill to the studio in the woods, we joked about how we probably wouldn’t be attending the party we’d been invited to.

  Wide Awake in a Dream

  After a week down at the studio, I got a lift back up to Rugby with Pete, while Jason stayed behind to work on his songs alone. On the ride back to Rugby we got to talking about drugs.

  ‘Do you still take speed?’ Pete asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘I have some with me, but I haven’t used any for a while.’

  He was watching the road with a disapproving expression.

  ‘It’s really not cool, man, you know,’ he said. ‘It takes more off you than it gives you, and it’s terrible for gigs and stuff. I’d really rather you weren’t taking that stuff when you are in the band, man.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, because being in the band was more important to me than taking drugs … ironically enough.

  ‘But will you turn me on to some smack?’ I said.

  I’d asked Pete for it before, but he’d been reluctant to give it to me despite my protestations that I had already been doing bad things.

  ‘Oh, I dunno, man,’ he said. ‘It’s really not a good idea.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I still want to try it. Just show me where I can buy some.’

  I wound the car window down and threw my half a wrap of speed onto the motorway as a bootleg of the Beach Boys’ Smile sessions played in the car and the mood swung from the jovial and the silly to the dark and the tragic, and back again, in the space of moments. From vegetables to surf’s up, from columnated ruins, to she’s going bald and back to a broken man too tough to cry.

  We pulled up at Pete’s parents’ house in Dunchurch. It was a huge place, almost a mansion. He parked the silver MG Metro in the driveway and we walked up to the imposing front door. Once inside, we stopped in the hallway for a moment and I was introduced to his mum and dad, who greeted us both cheerfully and asked how the recording had been going. It was all very nice. His mum made us a cup of Earl Grey tea and then we both disappeared upstairs to his bedroom.

  Pete’s bedroom was actually two rooms, and they were both painted a vivid shade of postbox red. The small sitting room had a huge framed Lichtenstein poster with the word ‘WHAAM’ printed across it in a primary explosion of colours and jet fighters. There was a vast army of plastic toys and figurines marching across the windowsill, and a huge collection of desirable vinyl propped up against one of the red walls. I sat on the sofa while he disappeared into the bedroom and began to rummage around in a well-hidden corner.

  When he came back he was carrying a syringe and a dirty spoon. He began to prepare his hit. I looked through the door into the bedroom and saw that the scarlet carpet around his bed was covered in long black cigarette burns where he had obviously nodded off and dropped his lit cigarettes. It was a good thing it was a good quality carpet or the whole mansion might have gone up in smoke. It was fairly intimidating being in there. It was such a nice place to be getting ready to take heroin for the first time, and everything.

  The brown powder was in the spoon with a little pinch of citric acid, and Pete stirred the contents with the orange plastic sheath of the insulin syringe. Next, the lighter went under the spoon until the contents bubbled and then he gave it another stir. It didn’t look very hygienic. Although there was a solution of some sort, there was also a dark scummy ring, and all sorts of floating bits and bobs sitting in the small puddle of the spoon. It looked like water from the canal, and it occurred to me that, no matter how wealthy the family you came from, when it came to heroin, it seemed like you just had to do the same illegal, stamped-on shit that all the poor people did too. Pete bit off a piece of cigarette filter, tossed it into the spoon, and then placed the point of the syringe gently into it and sucked the shallow depths into the thin plastic syringe. He stood the syringe up vertically, with the spike to the ceiling, tapped it to bring the air to the top, and then pressed the plunger until a tiny jet came out of the hole in the needle.

  His sleeve was already rolled up, so he tied his arm off, pumped it, and slapped the crook of his elbow until what was left of his veins appeared. He licked the spike and slid it in amongst the scars and the soft skin.

  After a little digging, a blood-red flower appeared in the head of the barrel and he began to press the plunger. When it was all the way in, he withdrew the plunger, flushed the syringe with blood and then re-injected it. He took the needle out, pressed his finger against the entry wound, and then laid his head back and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, he handed the needle over to me and I repeated the procedure with a tiny bit of the heroin I had bought on the way. My tolerance was so low I would get off on a tiny dose. I rolled my sleeve up, licked the spike (like that was going to make a difference to anything) and then felt the first sharp touch of the blunt needle in the crook of my left arm. It wasn’t my first time with a needle, but I had never learned to like the experience. I fought the urge to pull my own hand away and waited for … I don’t know what. What I’d heard? What I’d imagined? I waited to feel different, because I knew enough about drugs to know that most people’s descriptions were nowhere near to the experiences themselves, and that perhaps everyone’s experiences are different anyway. How do I know how you fe
el pain or pleasure? Eventually after a while of digging around in the crook of my elbow I hit a vein and I saw the flower of my own blood in the clear plastic of the insulin syringe.

  I began to press the plunger and felt the heat of the liquid enter my bloodstream.

  Afterwards, we both walked downstairs. I felt a bit sick, but I didn’t really care. I could have thrown up on the carpet in front of his mum and I wouldn’t have felt terrible about it. I would have felt bad … but not terrible.

  We got in the car and Pete drove us down to my flat. I sat in a chair in the corner of my room, smoking a joint with a heavy feeling in the back of my head and a strange taste (that was almost a feeling) in my mouth. I closed my eyes and opened them again, after an hour, or a minute, and I focused on the large yellow poster over the gas fire. Martin Rev and Alan Vega looked out at me in monochromatic black on yellow, while the bold typeface proclaimed, ‘Suicide.’ Suicide. Suicide. Live Suicide. My head nodded back as though it belonged to another body and I fell into something not quite like sleep. Even though I was aware of where I was, and who I was, the colours of dreams lit up and I started to see things as I would in a dream, even though I was still quite awake.

  The dreams I had have stayed with me until this day. I don’t know why, because I slept this same sleep a few times afterwards but I have never remembered another single dream.

  At first I had a vision of a clean white fridge standing in a vague light. I was standing in front of it – or my vision was, because I, as I knew myself bodily, was not in the picture at all. As I watched, the door of the fridge opened by itself and a surging tide of shiny, black, scuttling cockroaches vomited out of the cool white interior. In real life so many cockroaches could not have fitted into this fridge. The flood of insects kept on pouring out and I could not turn my head to look away.

  I was discomforted by this, but not horrified, and I watched with a cool disregard and detachment, as though I were watching it on TV and not on the private movie screen of my own mind’s eye.

  The insect scene shifted and I found myself face to face with a disembodied head. A witchy crone’s face regarded me with something close to malevolent humour. She cracked her lips to reveal broken teeth and a rotting mouth, and then she began to laugh at me. I could feel the derision in her mockery and in her bright and dark eyes. Her cruel laughter washed through me until I felt a chill inside despite the warmth of the drug.

  I snapped my eyes open and looked around the room, feeling dazed and unsure of my reality. I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke kick and curl from the lit end.

  It is the only opiate dream I ever had that I remember, and I can still see it as clearly as that night twenty-seven years ago.

  Isn’t that strange? I know that some of you will be wishing I’d shut the fuck up about this, and part of me really, really, wants to ‒ but then, the culture of silence and shame around this subject has killed a lot more people than any discussion ever has. Consider that, and then consider it again, and then consider if my talking about this in any way glamorises the truth of it. If it does, think about that wave of insects again and the fact that I lacked the sense to be as spooked as I should have been by the vision.

  Back to the Bolts

  I went back to the bolt factory and talked to my foreman about the situation I was in. I was going to need more time off work to go and be in Spacemen 3 and there was no way that the factory could let me go for four weeks. I had to choose between my job and being in a band. It was no contest.

  At the time in Britain, the government had just brought in a law that meant that if you walked out of your job without another one lined up, you would not be eligible for dole money for six months. I believe they are called benefit sanctions these days. Being unable to claim benefits was quite a strong disincentive for quitting any job, and it wasn’t like jobs were that easy to find. I explained this to my boss and he was sympathetic. I couldn’t just quit. He had to give me the sack, which would improve my chances of receiving money from the state. He agreed to concoct a story about my bad timekeeping and my inability to stay awake while I was at work, even though I had never been late for work in all the time I had been employed there. We agreed that I would work one more week, then I could leave and he would give me the covering letter saying that I had been asked to leave by the company. I thanked him and he wished me luck in my new career. I left his office and went back to my last few days tending to the titanium bolts. They would just have to go into space without my help from now on.

  When the week was finished, I got my notice of termination and went down to the dole office to sign on. I filled in the paperwork and made the arrangements for getting the small amount of money from the state that would cover my living costs and rent. I was now a full-time musician and there was no job for me to go back to. I didn’t have a care in the world.

  It was time to head back down to the studio and the little bubble of Playing with Fire in Cornwall. Pete was driving down, so I snagged a lift with him. Although he was a proficient and able driver, Pete piloted his vehicle like a fucking maniac at times and he seemed to take pleasure in cutting things as finely as possible regarding blind bends and overtaking. I rolled the joints and he shouted at the other drivers as we somehow avoided collisions with other road users and inanimate objects. Miraculously, we made it as far as Cornwall and it was dark by the time we drove through St Austell. On the journey down I had accepted certain death so many times that the inevitability of it was no longer a matter of so much concern to me. As Pete was rallying the car up the dirt road towards the house of the hippies in the pouring rain, he turned away from the windscreen and informed me, with some gravitas, that he could no longer see anything and that he was probably about to crash the car. I looked out of the window and tried to think about something else as the Beach Boys sang and played out the fractured genius of Smile for the hundredth time on the journey. ‘Eat a lot, sleep a lot, brush ’em like crazy,’ came the advice from the weirdest of California as death drove past in the opposite direction and we pulled up, surprisingly in one piece, outside the cottage.

  In the morning, Thierry, the drummer from France, arrived to record some live drums and to rehearse for an upcoming show in London. Pete immediately started to torment him. Thierry’s English, although much better than our French, was not perfect. He was often left struggling in silent incomprehension as we chattered and yammered away in street slang and Midlands dialect while he struggled to keep up. Pete noticed that he was listening, and so began to use the phrase ‘in theory’ a lot in his conversations, taking great pleasure in the fact that Thierry would perk up and start paying even more attention thinking the conversation was about him in some way. Not only was Thierry more stoned than he had ever been in his life, he was also being mind-fucked by a master. It did little to relax him into the alien situation he had volunteered for.

  The first call of duty for him was to drum on a song called ‘Suicide’. ‘Suicide’ is not an easy track for any drummer, requiring immense stamina, accuracy and concentration throughout its sometimes interminable length. It is hard work.

  Thierry started off pretty well, keeping it steady with the click track and the guide organ riff but, after three or four minutes, his tempo would start to lag, or he’d lose the bass-drum pattern, and he would be stopped and told to start again, with increasing exasperation and frustration on his part. That didn’t help his playing at all. It was too tricky to get the drop in right, and this was long before anybody had access to a digital editing suite, so it had to be one perfect take or nothing. As the afternoon wore on, Thierry’s efforts to get it right became more and more wrong, despite his heroic efforts and the sweat on his brow. After two or three hours they recorded a take just to make him feel better, despite the fact that it was obviously not working.

  ‘Yeah. That’s cool, man. Nice one,’ Pete said, while pulling faces and exchanging dubious looks with Jason and me. ‘We can fix it afterwards.’

  In the
end, the drums on ‘Suicide’ were sequenced and played by hand from drum machines. Thierry managed to play the maracas on ‘Che’, and that was the end of his recording career with Spacemen 3.

  The upcoming gig was a different matter. With only a couple of days to go there were no options. Thierry was going to be the drummer for the evening, and that was that. We set up the equipment and began the two days of rehearsals that would see us fit to play our first headline show in London together. Spacemen 3 were never the most diligent band when it came to rehearsals. I don’t think anybody enjoyed the process, but it was necessary, so it was done. It was the complete opposite of the graveyard band I had played with for a year and who had never done a show. Spacemen 3 was a military operation by comparison. There were songs and cues and strict endings, and starts and woe betide anyone who missed them. Pete was a fairly serious taskmaster when it came to matters of musical precision on the part of his bandmates. I guess the fruits of that are partly evident in the music we left behind, even if it was sometimes a nightmare to be involved with. Luckily, I was focused on music and little else and was content to set my ego aside and endure the pain of repetition in order to serve the greater whole. We were going to play an old set of Spacemen 3 songs, and I was familiar with all of them. The parts had been written ‒ I just had to learn to play them. They were all fairly straightforward and the only real difficulty was endurance and persistence. I suppose I am a fairly stubborn bastard in some ways, which has served me well in my musical career, even if that only means I can play one note for a very long time without losing touch with most of my mind.

  Over the course of the two days we sweated and worried ourselves into as precise a band as was possible, given the limited time we had to do the work. Thierry and I were mostly functional as a rhythm section, and Jason and Pete knew the territory well enough to carry the band if we stumbled and fell mid-song.