Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

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Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands Page 19

by Will Carruthers


  We found the venue, parked up and gratefully opened the partially shut door to step out into the wintry Blackpool night. It was only slightly colder outside than it had been in the van. A large man was standing outside of the venue. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt that marked him out as member of security. ‘Are you the band?’ he said.

  ‘Ye-ye-ye yeah,’ we managed to say through chattering teeth.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said, as he turned and entered the brightly lit doorway behind him and began walking down the stairs beyond it. We practically ran after him, eager for warmth, delirious at the prospect of not being cold any more. As we followed the appropriately penguin-suited bouncer down into the bowels of the club, we were quite happy. We had been happy for about twenty seconds when we arrived in the large basement area that was the venue for the night’s performance. It was as cold as the van. It was the coldest venue I have ever had the misfortune to be cold in. We looked at each other in disbelief. There may have been some nervous laughter.

  ‘Err, it’s cold, isn’t it?’ somebody said, with a hopeful smile.

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ the bouncer replied. ‘It warms up when it’s full.’

  He didn’t seem very worried about the fact that we thought we were freezing to death.

  ‘There’s some tea-making stuff through here if you want a hot drink.’

  He kept walking and we followed him with a hope that was increasingly born of desperation. We arrived in a dirty half-kitchen containing four chipped cups and a bowl full of hard damp sugar.

  ‘There is no kettle, I’m afraid, but you can use that tap for hot water. It’s quite hot.’ He pointed at the hot water tap. He was not smiling. ‘All right, I’ll leave you to it, then,’ he said, with a smile. ‘The dressing room is over there behind the stage and your lager is inside.’

  With that, he turned around and walked off, leaving us exchanging worried and disappointed glances.

  ‘What the fuck? I’m not drinking tea made with tepid water from the attic of this shithole. I’ll get Legionnaires’ disease,’ someone said.

  ‘… And it could be fatal combined with pneumonia,’ cracked another half-chilled wag. ‘Let’s get the gear in.’

  We were there to perform, after all.

  We dragged all of the stuff out of the van, set it all up on the stage and did the soundcheck. Soundchecks are always boring. Nobody ever said, ‘Wow, what a fun soundcheck.’ A good soundcheck is one that is not completely agonising and that leaves you half-hoping you might be able to hear something approaching music when you’re onstage later in front of an adoring crowd. If it sounds good at soundcheck it normally sounds shit later so, after a while, even the good soundchecks only seem like horribly optimistic precursors for later despair.

  At least moving around and carrying things had warmed us up for a few precious moments. We went into the dressing room and tried to remember why we bothered. We tried to drink lager. The lager was freezing cold even though there wasn’t a fridge. Sitting in the dressing room was like sitting in a fridge, except there was nothing to eat. It was like sitting in a fridge with forty-eight cans of lager and five people moaning about how cold it was. It was like sitting in the van had been earlier, but now we had cold lager.

  After a while, we gave up, and went off to sit in a pub until it was time to play. It didn’t matter that some of us were spending money we didn’t have. It was warm, and that warmth felt like the breath of heaven. We sat around the table eating crisps and rubbing the feeling back into our hands as we all cracked jokes about how cold we had been. Sadly, we still had to go back to the polar dungeon and play the show. We grumbled out into the street again, hoping that there might be enough paying customers to warm the venue.

  About forty people showed up, and by the time we took the stage our hands and feet were freezing again. It is quite hard to play the guitar when your hands are cold. We shivered through the first few songs, and the audience clapped and danced around a bit, probably in an effort to keep warm themselves. They looked cold. I felt sorry for them but maybe not quite as sorry as I felt for myself.

  The next song started. It was a gentle song from Playing with Fire. ‘It’s so hot and I ain’t got a lot,’ Jason sang in a tremulous and plaintive voice. We arrived at the chorus.

  ‘LOOORD ittt’s SOOOOOOOOOO hot.’

  I was laughing so hard by this point that I could hardly play the bass. I caught Kate’s eye as she was playing the keyboard and she started laughing too. By the end of the song I had tears in my eyes and they were not there because I was sad.

  We finished the set, packed up the gear, loaded it and fucked off as quickly as we could. We sat in the van and steeled ourselves for the crick-necked, draughty hours of motorway winter wonderland that lay ahead of us. I had heard that a sense of warmth can sometimes be a sign of impending death by hypothermia, and I awaited the first signs with increasing hope. We hadn’t even been able to drink enough of the free cold lager to get drunk. It was like God hated us. When we got back to Rugby we all went into my flat for a cup of tea. I went upstairs and got duvets and blankets and everybody wrapped themselves in whatever was clean enough to bear, while we fought for proximity at the measly bars of the gas fire. People began to speak for the first time in about two hours.

  ‘That was fucking horrible,’ someone said.

  We were all shivering and our teeth were still chattering. I put on a record and we stared into space as the feeling gradually returned to our extremities.

  Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

  On one occasion we were due to play at Leeds Warehouse, a rave club that on a good night at full capacity would have held around three hundred sweaty ravers. We were not expecting to play to an audience of three hundred.

  At the time I was quite partial to LSD, and sometimes I was even partial to taking it before a performance. On this particular night, I had eaten a small yellow microdot shortly after soundcheck. By recounting this tale to you, I am in no way recommending that you take LSD before a show … or even at all. I am simply telling you what happened, and due to my unusual research in this largely uncharted field I can confirm that should you ever find yourself onstage playing the bass guitar with three left hands, it is usually the one in the middle that is the real one. The other two are probably phantoms. Also, should you encounter any fireballs emanating from the lightshow during the concert, it is probably best to try to avoid them, even though they may not be real in the traditional sense of the word. Nobody wants to be hit by real or imaginary fireballs while trying to negotiate a tricky descent through the octaves.

  The acid had just begun to warm itself through my glittering receptors when I was approached by Jason. The club was pretty empty and everything was in place for the imminent performance.

  ‘Did you give Dave some acid?’ Jason asked me, with a searching look.

  ‘Why would I give Dave acid?’ I replied.

  Dave was our guitar tech. It would have been foolhardy to give him LSD before a show, especially as he didn’t usually take the stuff at all. He was from the Scottish Highlands and was built like a man who could pull a caber up by the roots and toss it a good distance without too much effort. He was also a thoroughly kind and good-hearted fellow, which was just as well, because if he had been a complete cunt there wasn’t much that fewer than three people could have done about it.

  ‘He’s acting very strangely,’ said Jason. ‘Come and have a look.’

  At this point, the irony may not be lost on you that Jason was asking me, a person increasingly under the influence of LSD, to judge the behaviour of someone who was acting strangely, to see if they might have taken LSD. Funny old world, isn’t it?

  I never told the rest of the band when I was tripping onstage because I didn’t want to worry them, and they never seemed any the wiser. They knew I took it sometimes, they just never knew when, or maybe I just thought they didn’t.

  Anyhow, we walked across the largely empty clu
b and looked out onto the dance floor. Usually at this point in the evening Dave would have been up onstage, carefully attending to business and making sure that nobody interfered with our equipment. He would have been checking the intonation on the guitars, changing strings that weren’t broken, even polishing our beloved instruments in an effort to help us look professional. We had played more than a few shows with Dave and the man had, so far, proved himself to be a miracle of efficiency and unusual diligence.

  On this particular evening, Dave was not up onstage making sure everything was in order, protecting the sacred space of the stage. Dave was not even having a cup of coffee and a sandwich. Dave was performing a weird and fairly intimidating war dance around three terrified indie kids who had, perhaps unwisely, decided to sit in a twee campsite they had made in the middle of an otherwise unoccupied dance floor. They were sitting cross-legged on a little rug they had brought with them, eating some homemade sandwiches.

  I felt the acid come into sharper focus. The lights bulged and a strange tendril of fear crept into my heart. ‘That is weird,’ I said. Obviously, I was not referring to the people eating sandwiches.

  ‘Shall we go and talk to him?’ said Jason.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and then we both stood there for quite a bit longer as we wondered how to best approach Dave, who was grimacing and twirling in the depths of his strange and frightening Highland haka. He prowled around the three huddled audience members like a stripe-less tiger, sweating and glaring and occasionally cracking a huge and deranged smile at them, presumably to let them know they were not in any imminent danger. It was pretty impressive.

  Jason and I made our way across the dance floor towards Dave, who turned and acknowledged our presence with a deep and frightening stare that contained no flicker of recognition or familiarity.

  ‘All right, Dave?’ I ventured hopefully, gazing into the deep abyss of his peculiar eyes. ‘Everything OK, is it?’

  ‘Aye!’ he said emphatically, as he returned to the dance, stamping, grunting, and shouting at things only he could see.

  ‘Do you think anyone else gave him any acid?’ Jason said.

  ‘Maybe he’s drunk?’ I said.

  ‘That’s not the only thing that’s weird. Come and have a look at this,’ Jason said.

  I followed him across the dance floor and we both climbed the stairs to the stage. Half of my third eye was still warily observing Dave on the dance floor.

  Jason looked down at the floor of the stage. He was not gazing at his shoes. ‘Look at that,’ he said.

  I looked at that.

  There was a lot of that to look at.

  Normally, Dave would have put several neat crosses of gaffer tape on the stage, indicating the places that we were to stand so that the stage lights would hit us in a pleasing way.

  For some inexplicable reason Dave, in the grip of his fever, had been inspired to get a bit artistic. Instead of his usual boring but useful crosses, he had gaffer-taped weird hieroglyphs and magical symbols of unknown and indecipherable origin and meaning across every blank space on the stage. They looked alien … or Pictish … or demonic, or like the gaffer-taped scribblings of a particularly determined and demented child. It was hard for me to tell at this point because the adrenaline had kicked the acid in to such a degree that I felt the need to have a little sit down somewhere less weird and quite a bit further away from Dave and his gaffer-taped art from another dimension.

  ‘Hmm,’ we both said.

  ‘What the fuck is up with him?’ asked Jason.

  ‘I have no idea, man,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t given him anything, and I am pretty sure nobody else has. Maybe we should just wait and see if it wears off? Whatever it is. He seems harmless enough.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jason, looking down at the peculiar symbols on the stage. ‘What else can we do, I suppose?’

  I knew what I was gonna do. I was going to go and sit outside under a tree, or a big tractor, or something.

  ‘All right man, see you in a bit,’ I said, exiting stage left and warily passing our dervish on the dance floor, who was showing signs of neither normality nor fatigue despite his ongoing discophonic exertions.

  I needed to find a tractor fast. There were no tractors outside ‒ no trees either. Sadly, this was Leeds, so all of the posh people had stolen the trees and taken them to York. I was going to have to settle for a beer and a soothing sit down in the street instead. I would imagine my own damn tree.

  ‘Aum,’ I said, settling in to the great breath of the universe. ‘Aum,’ I said, centring my being and bringing my energy down from my overactive crown chakra. ‘Aum,’ I said, with placid determination, as someone poked me and a voice from the universe said, ‘Why did Spacemen 3 split up, then?’

  I tried to focus on the real reasons, and the reasons I was prepared to offer as an explanation. ‘Do you want to know the real reason?’ I said, seriously, earnestly, and with peculiar intensity. ‘You can never, ever, tell anybody else.’

  ‘OK,’ my new friend said.

  ‘I am trying to imagine a tree, our guitar tech has gone bananas, and I am on LSD. Please fuck off,’ I said, kindly.

  He seemed to accept this as a perfectly believable reason for the demise of our previous band.

  ‘OK,’ he said, and fucked off.

  Gradually, I managed to rein in the skittish horses of my mind and settle into some sort of vaguely stable equilibrium. I was not new to this, and even though the peculiar events from earlier had unsettled me at lift-off, I was now cruising at a reasonable altitude with serenity. Some turbulence was to be expected. So what if Dave had decided to have a dance? Why not? Let it all hang out? Peace and love? I was in a good band and everything was groovy? The audience was friendly, though sparse, and nothing was going to stop the show? I did not pay too much attention to the question marks at the ends of my own self-assurances. Sometimes you just have to kid yourself, though, right?

  It was nearly showtime, so I made my way into the club. Passing the bar, various faces loomed in and out at me through the tracers and twinkling lights, like strange underwater creatures peering through the windows of a deep-sea exploration vehicle. The crowd was decent, the lights were pleasing, and I was feeling ready to make some music, so I mounted the stage and made sure everything was in order with my equipment. Everything was as I had left it after the soundcheck. The only thing missing was my bass. My trusty Gibson Thunderbird was nowhere to be found.

  ‘Has anyone seen my bass?’ I called out to the rest of the band, who were also getting ready to play.

  ‘Nope,’ said everyone.

  I began to experience a little confusion.

  I looked around for Dave. Dave was not onstage. Dave was still giving it the large and weird with his dance floor boogaloo. I approached him warily and tapped him on the shoulder. He snapped around and gave me a peculiar grin. Sweat was pouring off him, and light, and other stuff that doesn’t have a name yet.

  ‘Err, hi, Dave. Sorry to bother you, man, but, err, have you, err, maybe, by any chance, seen my bass anywhere … please?’

  He grinned again, and a weird gleam appeared in his eyes that I could not blame entirely on my own perceptions. Keeping me fully in the headlights of whatever the hell it was that had gotten into his eyes, he pointed a finger at me. Then, very slowly, deliberately, and with a most unreassuring smile, he gave me the ‘follow me’ signal with his outstretched, hooking and crooked finger. Was he leading me into his eyes? Was he taking me down the rabbit hole? Was he about to chop me into pieces? I had neither earthly nor extraterrestrial idea at this point, but being bass-less and with the show rapidly approaching I was left with little choice but to follow him. We walked onstage and began to cross his wasteland of incomprehensible squiggles. The gaffer-taped runes began to make sense to me. He had spelled out my doom in silver symbols that I had been too naïve to understand earlier, and now I was being led to the scaffold to pay the price for my ignorance. It was my fault for taking the acid in
the first place. I kept walking. It was my fate. He led me down into the dungeons in the bowels of the club, where doors creaked and lost souls wailed, as I grimly trudged behind him towards the end.

  He led me into a cupboard and there, like the holy grail itself, was my bass, lying on a bit of cloth on a table. Dave walked over to it, took it gently in his hands, turned solemnly to me, and offered it to me with a tear in his eye.

  I looked at it. I looked at it again. I looked at it a third time just to make sure that it looked as horrible as I thought it had looked the first time I looked at it. Wires were hanging from it. It had been largely discombobulated, dismantled and disassembled and, unfortunately, this was no hallucination. Bits of it were missing. Bits of me were missing.

  I took the bass from him. A bit of it fell on the floor. The echoes of its impact echoed along the ruins of time. I wanted to cry.

  Dave was smiling a beatific smile and I was due onstage in five minutes.

  ‘Uhhhhhhh,’ I said. I put my gutted and previously beloved bass back onto Dave’s operating table. ‘Uhhhhh,’ I said again, in an effort to verbalise my feelings and come to grips with the situation. ‘Fuck it, Dave. Nice job and everything, man, but maybe I will just use another one tonight. Don’t worry about it.’ I said this in an effort to placate him. Dave smiled and he seemed to understand even though he had clearly lost his reason. Even I could see that. I ran back over the stage because the trip down into the dungeons had, in fact, been a frightening and purely mental journey brought on by my quite justified intimations of impending wrongness.

  I found the bassist from the support band. ‘Sean, mate, lend us your bass. Dave has taken mine to fucking pieces.’

  Sean laughed, ‘What? What did he do that for?’

 

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