Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  We shrugged. At this point, we were able to play in health spas, abandoned nuclear reactors or sweaty shoeboxes with equanimity.

  ‘Do you want any drugs?’ he asked.

  This brought considerably more interest than the previous statement.

  ‘What you got, man?’

  ‘Ecstasy,’ our young friend said, with a serious look on his face.

  At this point in time, despite the distant rumblings of acid house and the heartening appearance of the unmistakeable signs of psychedelia in some members of the general population, we had never taken ecstasy and had no personal experience of its spiritual home, the acid-house rave. Dancing was not way up on our to-do list, and the idea of dancing to house music in a room full of happy people smelling of Vicks VapoRub wasn’t really our thing. We mocked what little we knew of it ‒ like most things that weren’t Spacemen 3 or the music or drugs that we liked.

  We were, however, interested in trying ecstasy, and this was the first time that anybody had actually offered us any.

  ‘Hmmm,’ Pete said. ‘How much?’

  ‘Twenty quid a pill,’ our new friend said. ‘If you want it, I’ll have to give my friends a ring.’

  Pete turned to me. ‘Whaddya reckon? Shall we get a couple?’

  I nodded affirmatively. I’d tried just about everything else by this point, so why not?

  The promoter made the connection and within an hour his two friends were standing in our room at the B&B telling us what was on offer. ‘We’ve got doves and we’ve got this new stuff called Spectrum,’ one of the two very young and certainly glint kids told us with a smile. They went into detail about the subtle differences and relative merits of the two tablets, as though they were wine connoisseurs talking about their favourite vintages. They were obviously enthusiastic users of their own products.

  We bought one pill each of ‘Spectrum’, whatever the fuck that was. We were probably hoping that it was going to be better than ecstasy and that we wouldn’t end up hugging a room full of strangers while dancing to music we didn’t really like. We were, perhaps, not the most touchy-feely, happy-clappy individuals you might encounter in your life. Except for Jonny, of course. He was from Northampton.

  With the two tablets in hand, we made our way to the venue for the soundcheck.

  It really was a health centre. There was no getting away from it. There was a sauna and a jacuzzi, and a vividly carpeted conference room containing a hurriedly set-up PA in the corner. It wasn’t all pecs, abs, squat thrusts and muscle quotas because there was an excessively mirrored bar in another corner of the room. The whole place was perfectly in keeping with the rapidly fading eighties obsession with being a panther in the gym and a tiger in the boardroom, or the estate agent’s or wherever. It was worryingly clean and shiny. This was a place where people came to do press-ups, to preen and to indulge in competitive vanity while admiring how externally beautiful they were becoming in the process. It was filled with jogging machines and tense people in Lycra. It was a place of worship for healthy-looking humans who cared about personal fitness. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t really fit in very well. It was as alien to us as acid house and pretty much everything else we encountered beyond our fairly insular world. We weren’t very well adjusted to the prevailing reality of our times. Considering the crap we had been bombarded with for most of our young lives, it was probably for the best that we had adopted a certain siege mentality.

  We set up our equipment in the corner of the mirrored and carpeted conference room. While we were running through the soundcheck the support band arrived. It was Northampton’s second finest goth superstars, Venus Fly Trap, who were old acquaintances of ours. We left our equipment on the stage and they set their stuff up in front of it while we retired to the dressing room to indulge in our usual pre-gig rituals. The dressing room was a little bigger than most of the pre-show grotholes we were used to. This being a health centre and everything, we were shown into a huge mirrored room full of bench presses and exercise bikes and other contraptions that were used to torment the body into physical perfection. We lolled on the various contraptions and made use of the machines to the best of our ability. Jason struggled to lift a weight while Jonny, who was probably the only one of us with any degree of physical fitness, actually started expending energy on something that looked like a boat on dry land with oars, which didn’t take you anywhere no matter how hard you rowed. As somebody rolled a joint on one of the bench presses, I watched the whole strange scene in the mirrored walls, briefly imagining a keep-fit video featuring the band failing to keep fit. It was not an easy mental image to sustain.

  ‘Shall we take this pill?’ Pete said, which was surprising, as we had never taken stimulants, psychedelics or uppers prior to a show before. I suppose it was looking like it was going to be a weird night anyway and he was just entering into the spirit of it.

  ‘Yeah, man, why not? I reckon I’ll just do a half though and see how I go,’ I replied. Safety first, right?

  We each split our little yellow tablets in two, swallowed half, and went back to playing on the exercise machines while laughing at our own pathetic reflections. After about three minutes we took a break and went back to rolling joints. We didn’t want to exhaust ourselves before the show, or anything.

  The night rolled on and the health freaks cleared out and the music freaks began to arrive. Maybe a few of the healthy people stayed on to watch, but I doubt it. I was beginning to feel the first soft roll and waves of the ecstasy. There were tracers, streamers and a few faint visual distortions but it was all very easy to handle. It didn’t feel like it could swing horribly out of control and take you off your axis in a blink, as was sometimes the case with the heavier psychedelics. I felt kind of warm and fuzzy and just a little bit trippy.

  ‘Shall we do the other half?’ I said to Pete, who was laughing and clowning around like he sometimes did when he was in a good mood.

  ‘Yeah. I think so. This feels fairly mild doesn’t it?’ he said, with a little glitter in his eyes.

  I nodded and we both swallowed the other half.

  We were professionals. We could probably deal with it.

  Just then there was a commotion outside the dressing room, and a loud shout heralded the entrance of a gang of extremely wasted young men. ‘WOAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH,’ they shouted, as they piled into the multi-gym unannounced, staggering and laughing amongst themselves. One of them went over to the weights machine and started bench-pressing weights. Jason, Pete and I exchanged knowing and worried glances, while casting fast eyes over the new arrivals in the inner sanctum of our dressing room. They seemed pretty oblivious to our concerns, and a couple of them started skinning up joints on the expensive gym equipment. It was a worrying situation and not just because we were on drugs ‒ there was nothing unusual in that. What was unusual about this was that the people who were now making themselves comfortable in our dressing room were not the kind of people we normally saw at gigs. These were full-on football casuals and, up to this point in the eighties, it was very rare to see a gang of casuals at a gig looking for anything but trouble. These were the same people who would normally be up for giving us a kicking if they caught us in the right situation. These were the gangs we avoided on Saturdays when the home game was on in Coventry; the same people who would stop off in coaches in Rugby on the way back from a game down south and wreck the town with glee before moving on again. This gang of casuals from Ellesmere Port were extremely wasted, but not in the usual way, because rather than taking their sport in terrorising us and smashing things up, they were just laughing and lolling around, rolling joints and playing on the gym equipment. One of them walked over to where we sitting. ‘All right, lads. You don’t mind if we skin up in here, do ya?’

  Pete just laughed, because I guess his pill was kicking in and what the fuck else were we going to say? There were seven of them, and there was no security around. We were just happy that they didn’t want to give us a beating and that they seemed frie
ndly. We rolled some joints, while they rolled around on the floor. They were actually really friendly, or maybe we were, it was hard to tell. We were all getting on well, even if their eyes were going in different directions now and again, and some of them were gurning and pulling weird faces. It never occurred to us that they might have actually come to the gig because, as I mentioned, the football crowd didn’t really do gigs at that time.

  Pete decided it might be time for a bit of peace and quiet. ‘Hey, thanks for coming in and rolling joints and stuff, but we could do with getting our heads together a bit because we are going to play a gig pretty soon,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said the head casual, ‘we’ve come to see you.’

  With that, he turned round, let out a loud battle cry and lead the way out of the dressing room. All of his mates mustered themselves to the best of their ability and followed him out hooting and roaring.

  We looked at each other in disbelief.

  The entire floor of the previously spotless multi-gym was now covered in ripped-up Rizla packets, bits of cigarettes and joint ends. We looked around the thoroughly besmirched room and then looked at each other and laughed. We were becoming increasingly fangled by this newfangled drug. The little pill was now in full effect and after the excitement of the pre-match pep talk from our new-found partners in crime, I thought it might be the right time to take a little stroll around the venue and see what other surprises the seemingly sleepy town of Chester might have in store.

  The lights were pulsing gently and my reflection was looking more peculiar than usual as I did the soft walk above the vibrant carpet past the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. I wondered why the mirrors went all the way up to the top of the room. Surely nobody was that tall? Even with steroids. I felt a little spongy, but the dark light and the music that was oozing from the distant doorway seemed as friendly and inviting as a warm cushion. I made my way towards it like a happy cat. I heard the dreamy sounds of ketchup leather and a Formica ringtone as what was left of me entered the incipient bacchanal with a glowing sense of anticipation.

  Of course, what I was hearing was not the sound of ketchup leather ‒ that would have been absurd ‒ but after a couple of years of hard reality training, I had reached the point where I didn’t always take my own brain too seriously. What I was actually hearing was the sound of Venus Fly Trap getting ready for the evening’s performance. I entered the smoky churn of beer and fags and found a slouching semicircle of offbeat hooligans and random alternative types who were struggling to pay attention to the band as they took the stage. The black-clad singer was preparing to take the loosely assembled crowd of indie kids, drug specimens and casual casualties on a tour of Northampton’s gothic culture. Alex Novak stood perched at the microphone like a pale-faced graveyard raven in sunglasses. The guitarist, an affable hobgoblin profoundly drunk beyond the capacity to tune his guitar, seemed to be finding his own inability to function in any useful way absolutely hilarious. He would tune his guitar for five minutes, crack a joke, ask us how we were all doing, and then play some horrendous chord from another dimension. ‘How you doing, CHESTER?!’ he screamed down the microphone in his Northamptonian‒Scottish bastard brogue.

  ‘CLOOOONG,’ his supposedly tuned guitar replied, in no way corresponding musically with any of the other instruments onstage. He was chatting away merrily to the increasingly confused crowd as he made another failed attempt to tune up, while the rest of his band tried to remain cool and oblivious to the fact that their guitarist was making a royal cunt-up of the show and was thoroughly enjoying himself in the process.

  The singer glanced over at him nervously and said, ‘Sorry about this, folks.’

  This spectacle of marvellously inept entertainment went on for a full fifteen minutes. We were totally absorbed in his epic struggle to tune his guitar. The entire audience were willing him to succeed. There were shouts of encouragement and laughter from the dark. Eventually somebody took pity on him (and us), and lent the guitarist a guitar tuner, which he accepted with a loud laugh and a, ‘I’ll be right with you, folks!’ He looked like he was having difficulty being right with himself never mind anybody else. We were so wasted that the lack of a performance was actually becoming a performance in itself.

  It was almost disappointing when he finally sprang to his feet and triumphantly played a chord that was in tune. This excited him so much that he whinnied, leapt backwards and crashed into the band’s precariously balanced keyboards, sequencers and drum machines. He landed in a hopelessly confused pile of expensive equipment, the crowd gave him a heartfelt cheer and a round of applause, and that was that. The show was over. It was only left for the rest of band to help the guitarist up and out of the tangle, take a bow and leave the stage.

  Shaking my head, I looked around the slowly filling room. It had been an interesting evening so far and we hadn’t even played yet.

  When we arrived onstage the room was full of hash smoke and loud voices. A well-packed and more than comfortably numb crowd had gathered around the front of the stage area in loose abandon. We climbed over and through the sprawled audience carrying our carefully pre-tuned guitars and took our places. We plugged in while the floating drone world of ‘Ecstasy Symphony’ faded into nothing. The audience let out a cheer of appreciation as the first teasing notes and peals of feedback announced the approaching onslaught. The crowd hushed as Pete leaned in and said his customary, ‘Good evening. Thanks for coming. This is a song from Texas,’ and the s’s of the last word fluttered and echoed through the speakers across the minds of those of us who were feeling the same.

  He pealed out the familiar and menacing start to ‘Rollercoaster’. The band came in behind it with the force and the fury of an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force as the noise of the crowd was consumed by electricity and intent.

  I met someone some time ago and his eyes were cleeeeear to seeee …

  Jason was howling out the words, the music was making shapes around them and the band moved up a gear, causing the one-note monster to change shape, grow and charge through the room on a rampage. I glanced up from the note I was currently fixated on playing to see fifty faces lost in the moment and surrendering to a higher power. It was a sound so beyond the usual, so fit and trim and devoid of extraneous fat that it could have worked out on every machine in that health spa and left them a twisted pile of wreckage. It was lean, supple and rippling with spare power. Maybe I was imagining it. I was on drugs, after all. The song ended after a quick eternity and the feedback trailed off into a silence ripe with explosive possibilities. The crowd gave out a great release of pleasure and the first joint was passed onto the stage from the people sitting pinned and transfixed at the front of the stage. We passed the joint between us and got ready for the next workout. The two-chord juggernaut grunge of ‘Mary Anne’ stomped across the boards of the ceiling with a grand sense of purpose. Pretty babe I understand a bit about the way that unappreciative crowds can fuck with one’s sense of reality BUT it doesn’t matter because you and me, we can just hold each other’s hands and go for a walk on the beach and fuck ’em … what do they know anyway?

  It offered the possibility of consolation in the face of alienation and it was like God was talking to you in a way that was actually possible to understand for a change. Like a beautiful sunset and a wide spread of sky. Like the waves chewing at the cliff and the birds singing overtones in a winging chorus above you. It rippled and it slid and it shimmered as it glid and everything that was anything else didn’t really matter for a while, which certainly made a change. I wasn’t even worried about screwing it up this time because how could it be possible to screw up something so awesome and beyond and downwrong right. It was a force of nature and all we’d done was put the wires in, get ourselves in the right trance, mutter the invocations and BANG!

  There it was, hanging in the sky, waiting to spread its jewelled wings and soar.

  ‘Things’ll never be the same’ howled out proclamations of ce
rtain doom from lost souls, stretching a minute to an hour, saying the same thing about irrevocable change and about how somewhere in our hearts things wouldn’t be the same once we’d put love in our veins. That shifted into the desire and the striving for transcendence of ‘Take me to the other side’. I took myself, sliding, up to that top octave on the bass and held it for a perilously long time, until that high thin note hid itself in the drone, and when I ran back down the neck, the bass came surging up like a shark out of the deep blue sea.

  I have a passion sweet Lord …

  It was like I wasn’t playing it at all. I was just there, holding the bass and letting it do what it had to. Something was in the saddle and it wasn’t us, or at least that is the way it felt to me.

  Despite the fact that I was on drugs, the entire experience cannot be put down solely to the drugs. If I had been sat in a car park in Kidderminster considering my carbuncles, I would not have been having the same experience at all.

  I knew exactly where I was and I was thoroughly enjoying it. Sorry about that.

  We dragged the crowd through the mire and maelstrom and they kept us well supplied with marijuana during the journey. After every song a joint would appear at both sides of the stage and then cross over between us, to exit at the opposite side of the stage before the next song began. I have never been passed so many joints during a performance, and the air was thick, onstage and off, with heavy smoke. The two security men watching the show were also smoking joints, having presumably realised early on that they were on the wrong side of a losing battle and that we were having more fun anyway.

  We slipped into ‘Starship’ and the riff growled and crunched into a low orbit and then, exactly as planned, the spaceship faltered, stalled and fell into chaos and confusion, breaking up in the far curve of sky and showering down sparks and smoking curls of broken metal that briefly rested and reshaped, before sucking themselves back together again. They reformed like a puddle of clever metal, finding its original shape and form again, so that the crash seemed like the dream of a dream falling and not the end instead.