Getting in Tune

by Roger L. Trott

  We worked our way through a blistering set of Hey Baby, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, and Movin’ On, and despite the sense of danger that came at me from every corner of the bar I began to relax again. My guitar, which had finally adjusted to the heat, felt natural in my hands, the strings doing what I needed them to do, my pick slashing through the air with ease.

  Few bikers had hit the dance floor, but I felt good about our momentum and was growing confident that we’d be able to pull the crowd along with us. No doubt Mick, again testing the edge of the stage with his blind, dancing feet, felt the same way.

  Then it all changed. And when it did, the end came quickly.

  Like a car running out of gas, our forward motion, which had propelled us nicely into Steve Miller’s The joker, slowed and stalled, killing the song’s drop-dead-cool attitude. Measure by measure, then note by the note, the tempo of the song, kind of tepid to begin with, petered out. By the time we crawled to the final verse, the song had become a regular dirge.

  It soon became apparent that the problem was Yogi, who suddenly sounded like he was playing in a vat of molasses. His beat had become a tortoise race between the snare and bass drum, with the bass drum losing ground to the snare each lap around the verse. I glanced back at him several times before realizing what was wrong. The droopy eyelids, the flinching brow, the reddened face—they all said the same thing: Yogi had sunk into a wine hangover.

  When we finally, mercifully, reached the end of the song, the dance floor cleared. Once again I saw the ragged line of bikers standing along the back edge of the floor. Rob cast a worried look in my direction moments before he and Yogi started into Ace’s sinewy How Long.

  We weren’t more than halfway through the first verse before we were in trouble again. Usually, we’d slide down easily into the song’s sultry groove and let it carry us forward, but again Yogi was dragging the beat.

  I drifted back from my mike to the drums. “Pick it up,” I yelled at him.

  He looked at me in surprise, then jerked the tempo much faster than needed. I bobbed my head, trying to get him locked into the right tempo, but he couldn’t find it. His beat skittered back and forth like a tape player with a wow-and-flutter problem.

  Back on the dance floor, one couple tried to fast dance, then gave up. Another attempted to slow dance before quickly moving back to their table. Even Mick was having trouble following us. His movements became jerkier by the minute as the beat slowed again. Rob and I tried to force the tempo, push it forward, but against the drums we were swimming upstream. By the end of How Long, we were almost drowned out by the growling voices coming from the dark edges of the dance floor. I stepped through the lights to look over at Nita, but her head was turned toward the bikers.

  “What’s bloody wrong with him?” Mick yelled at me, squinting back at Yogi. Sweat beaded his face.

  “Too much wine, I think. He’s already hungover.”

  “Tell him to get his arse in gear before these yobs start chuckin’ bottles at me, right?”

  I retreated and leaned over Yogi’s floor tom. “C’mon, you’re dragging everything.”

  “I can’t help it,” he said, followed by a gaping yawn. “I’m pooped.”

  “You’ve gotta pick it up.” Someone in the crowd yelled for us to start playing. “Get focused or we’re gonna lose this crowd.”

  “I’ll try,” he said, but I could see in Yogi’s slumped shoulders and blank eyes that he was almost out of gas.

  Then inspiration struck; I knew what would help him. I turned my back on the crowd and dug into my pocket, fishing out the vial. Tapping out two cross-tops, I said, “Here, take these.”

  He leaned over and peered into my palm. “What are they?”

  “They’ll keep you awake.”

  Behind us, I heard Mick announce the next song, Traffic’s Rock & Roll Stew. The voices in the crowd grew louder.

  “No way,” Yogi said. “How do I know what they’ll do to me?”

  “Just take the damned pills, O.K.?”

  Mick came up from behind and grabbed my shoulder. “Hey, let’s go! They’re gettin’ pissed out there, right?”

  I kept my eyes on Yogi. “Look, the pills won’t hurt you. Trust me.”

  “C‘mon, c’mon,” Mick said over my shoulder.

  “You owe me, Yogi.”

  I watched him roll the idea around in his head for a few more seconds before he reached out, took the tablets, and downed them with a slug of Pepsi.

  “Hey!” Sam yelled across at us. “Let’s play!”

  Mick glanced at him and then back at me. “You got any more?”

  “What?”

  “The cross-tops.”

  “C‘mon, Mick. You don’t need ’em.”

  “Oh, I do, mate. Believe me.”

  There was no time to argue. Again angling away from the lights and the eyes of the crowd, I dug out two more white tablets and dropped them into his outstretched hand. He grinned, swallowed the pills, and bounced back to his mike stand.

  Turning to Yogi, I counted out the tempo and together with Rob hit the three chords starting out Rock & Roll Stew. Throughout the first verse, I held my breath, knowing that we’d have to survive at least twenty minutes—the time it’d take for the uppers to kick in—before we could count on much from Yogi. But twenty minutes was way too long. Before we even got through the first verse, Yogi’s drumming had deteriorated into a plodding, listless shuffle. Any sense of groove was long gone, making every note, every beat a struggle, like trying to haul a heavy rock up a mountain.

  Rob shot another tense look at me from across the stage. Sam jabbed his sax in a frantic motion to speed up Yogi’s beat. Mick kept his back to us, but I could tell from his stiff posture and violent swipes at the mike that he was furious beyond belief. The dance floor remained empty, and the sluggish, bluesy song seemed to go on forever. Then, nearing the end, a thick voice cut through the smoke of the lounge: “Play some Black fuckin’ Sabbath!”

  Another voice rose up in support: “Yeah, man, screw this lightweight shit! Sabbath! Iron Man!”

  “paranoid! ”

  “Fuck that! War Pigs, man.”

  We ground to a halt, and the beer-soaked voices rattled off more Black Sabbath songs, arguing among themselves about which one was best. Mick squinted back at me and then down at the set list taped to the floor near his monitor. “Sorry, mates,” he said to the crowd, “we’re a little short on Sabbath, right? How about some”—he paused to glance at his set list again.

  I looked down at mine and saw the Doobie Brothers’ lightweight Listen to the Music. Immediately, my eyes jumped across the list, looking for something, anything, that might work better. Steppenwolf jumped out at me. “Hey, Mick,” I yelled at him, “let’s do Magic Carpet Ride.”

  He squinted, sweat dripping off his face, before returning to the mike. “Right, mates,” he said, shouting to be heard above the bellowing crowd, “be cool now. We’ve got some Steppenwolf for you.”

  The crowd hooted back at him. “Sabbath!” somebody yelled again.

  Stiffening, Mick pointed his finger in the direction of the bikers. “Listen up, mates. We play what we wanna play, right?”

  “Oh, shit,” I muttered to myself.

  Somebody in the crowd laughed, but it was a low and menacing sound. I knew I couldn’t let this go on. Without waiting for Mick’s cue, I looked at Yogi, who had his face in a towel, and yelled out, “Stay with me!” and started up Magic Carpet Ride.

  The song seemed to work. A few of the bikers gathered at the edge of the dance floor and bobbed their shaggy heads. And Yogi more or less kept up with us. Maybe my cross-tops were starting to kick in; maybe they would save us. For five minutes—the time it took us to play the song—I thought we’d survived. Then I wasn’t so sure. We finished and the place settled into an ominous quiet. More men, shadowed through the stage lights, gathered at the edge of the emptying dance floor and stood staring at us.

  “Play some fuckin�
� metal,” one of them growled.

  “Judas Priest!”

  Beer bottles started tapping in unison to the stomp of motorcycle boots.

  “Genocide!”

  “Sabbath!”

  I felt panic setting in, as if the room had closed down and was squeezing the breath from my lungs. Across the stage, Rob had turned away from the crowd and was fiddling with knobs on his amplifier. Next to him, Sam nervously mouthed the reed of his sax. A beer bottle rolled across the dance floor and banged against the edge of the stage. I jumped back toward my amp, and Mick, his eyes wide, followed me. “Bloody hell! What now?”

  “Don’t ask me. You’re the one who pissed ’em off.” I scanned the set list, but the titles seemed to merge together.

  “Whatta we do? Whatta we do?” He was gasping, hyperventilating.

  “You O.K.?” I yelled in his ear.

  “The pills,” he yelled back, “they’re kicking in, man. They’re makin’ me....” He fluttered his fingers near his head.

  The pounding continued. Another bottle hit the stage near the monitors, and someone screamed out, “Deep Purple!”

  I looked at Mick. None of us was big on the song, but we all knew it. We had no choice. “Smoke on the Water!” I shouted.

  “What?”

  “Smoke on the Fuckin’ Water.”

  Mick just stood there staring at me.

  “Get up there,” I yelled at him. He turned as if to move forward but stayed put. Without waiting for him, I started the song. My left hand shook as I tried to hold down the anthemlike progression of bar chords leading up to the verse, and I held my breath until Yogi came in on the closed high-hat. But when he did, he was right there, right where he should be, square on the beat, sending out a sizzling series of triplets. Then he hit the snare smack on the second beat. Rob came in way down low with the chugging distorted eighth notes, and we were suddenly locked in. I glanced at Yogi, saw his wide, bright eyes, his happy smile, and knew that he was wired.

  Mick, too. Now he came back alive. He pumped his fist at me, moved up to the mike, and started barking out the lyrics. I looked beyond him to the dance floor, where couples crawled out of the shadows and began moving, shaking, throwing out their arms, kicking their feet. A group of bikers came out, and the plywood floor of the stage began to pulse, seeming to rise and fall in rhythm to their stomping boots. I watched, simultaneously fascinated and terrified.

  Now up at the mike for my background vocals, I saw Nita standing at the edge of the dance floor, chin tucked, eyes on me. With sudden confidence, I hit my foot switch for maximum distortion and lit into the solo, my fingers humming on the strings, working chromatically up the neck into the cutaway. I slid back down for eight bars, then back up again. I rode up as high as I could, found the note I wanted, and stayed there, bending all the noise out of it that I could. I glanced at Mick and saw him bouncing up and down as if trying to touch his head to the ceiling. He kept going, and I watched him, holding the note, amazed, knowing that he, too, was fired up by the mixture of fear, adrenaline, and amphetamines.

  The crowd caught the action and started pounding in time to Mick’s bounces. The entire room shook. Someone turned on the disco ball, and a strobe light shot out from the ceiling. Everything became glittery shards of light. Bodies and faces became fragments. I turned, knelt on my left knee, angled my guitar into the amp, scratched up the volume, and coaxed a blue line of feedback from my speaker cabinet. It enveloped me and traveled from my guitar, through the pick, up my arm, past my closed eyes, into my brain.

  And I was suddenly out, free, rising above the stage, looking down, my eyes closed but still seeing the tops of Rob’s and Sam’s heads, the flashing hands of Yogi across the cymbals, the shape of Mick bobbing along the edge of the stage, the hands of dancers clapping high above their heads. In the flashing strobe, I saw Evangeline, Kitten, Beanie and Cecil, Mr. Tom, and Nita smiling up at me. And, in the moments between darkness, I saw a single drunk biker near the back edge of the dance floor lift a bottle above his head, pause, and then fling it toward the stage.

  My eyes popped opened. I raised, turned, and, in a flash of light, saw it. The bottle smashed against the front of the stage, inches from Mick’s feet. As if a grenade had exploded, Mick lurched sideways, arms flying upward. He spun, staggered back. We moved toward each other. He looked at me, his eyes rolled up, turning white. And then he collapsed.

  21

  WITH MICK SPRAWLED on the stage next to the drums, everything came to a grinding halt. Suddenly the houselights came up, shocking my eyes to pinpoints. We struggled out of our instruments while the crowd began to whistle and clap, either thinking Mick’s collapse had been part of our act or celebrating because they had managed to take one of us down.

  I got to Mick first and rolled him over. He was out cold, but I saw no cuts on his face, no blood, nothing. I put my hand on his chest and felt it rise and fall. The others arrived at the body a moment later.

  “Christ,” Rob said, “is he O.K.?”

  “I dunno. He’s breathing.”

  Sam felt for a pulse just to be sure. “Should we get a doctor?”

  In his bare feet, Yogi knelt and peered into Mick’s face. “I don’t think anything hit him.”

  Rob went down on a knee beside him. “Then what’s wrong with him?”

  Before anyone could speculate, Yogi reached back, grabbed a cup of water from the floor near his drum set, and flung the contents into Mick’s face.

  I started to push Yogi away, but Mick’s eyes popped open. The eyelids fluttered three or four times before the pupils rolled down into place. His eyes shifted from Yogi to me, and in a blurry voice, he asked, “What happened?”

  I heard feet on the stage and looked back to see Evangeline and Nita. “Can I help?” Evangeline asked. Nita stayed behind me. I felt her gentle hand on my shoulder.

  “What happened?” Mick asked again, his accent disappearing in the blurriness of his voice. With Evangeline’s help, he pushed himself into a sitting position and woozily looked around at us.

  Sam shifted back, and Cecil edged his way into the circle around Mick. “You O.K. up here?”

  “He fainted,” Yogi said.

  “I what?” Mick asked.

  “You fainted. My sister did the same thing once in a school play.”

  “Oh, shit.” Mick rubbed at his eyes.

  Cecil glanced back into the lounge, and I realized people were now hooting, hollering, stamping their feet. The juke box had been started up—I heard Rod Stewart singing Tonight’s the Night—but it didn’t cover up the noise.

  “You gonna be able to go on?” Cecil asked.

  I looked at our singer. “How about it, Mick? Can you finish out the set?”

  “Fuck that,” Rob said, standing and glancing toward the mayhem on the dance floor. “This is fuckin’ crazy. I’m finished.”

  Cecil shook his head and glanced back into the lounge again. “I threw that fucker out, but the rest of ‘em are gonna tear this place apart unless you keep playin’. It’s happened before. Tom’s freakin’ out.”

  As if on cue, a bottle came whizzing out of the crowd, missing Rob’s head by several inches before smashing against the wall behind the drums. Rob went back down on a knee, his eyes wide, his fingers furiously working at the bridge of his nose.

  “The hell with Tom,” he said, his voice rising with hysteria. “I’m not going back out there.”

  “You walk off,” Cecil told him, “and they’ll trash your equipment. I guarantee it.”

  “Somebody needs to call the cops,” Sam said, his voice steadier than Rob’s but still strained.

  Cecil shot him a hard look. “You know how many of these guys are packin’ drugs and guns and knives and shit? It’d be a war in here.”

  From behind me, I heard Nita murmur, “I think he’s right.”

  My gaze rotated from Mick, who was still trying to shake the cobwebs from his head, to the dance floor, where a dozen bikers had gathere
d near the foot of the stage, stomping their black boots, creating a steady, ominous sound. Faces with bristling beards and red eyes glared up at us.

  “Yogi,” I said, “help me get him up.” I got under one of Mick’s arms, Yogi grabbed the other, and we pulled him to his feet.

  “How’re you feeling?” I asked Mick, propping him up.

  He turned his head and squinted at me. “Me head’s light, mate.”

  His accent was back, so I took hope. “Can you sing?”

  “Sing?” He shook his head back and forth. “No, mate, I’m knackered.”

  “C’mon, let’s walk it off

  Evangeline shoved her way between us. “Stop it!” She put her hand on Mick’s cheek. “Can’t you see he’s hurt?”

  “Christ,” Rob said. “Look at him. He can’t even stand up.”

  They were right. Mick was finished. I knew that if I pulled away, he’d fall back down. “Over there,” I said to Yogi, motioning with my chin toward the back of the stage, behind my amp, where our cases were stacked. We dragged him over and laid him out. Evangeline found a towel and put it under his head as Nita left to get him some water.

  Our moving to the back of the stage encouraged more chaos out front. I heard glass breaking and a shout, and I knew that we’d never make it out of the bar if we stopped playing. Cecil, who had been standing to the side while we dealt with Mick, grabbed my arm. “You guys better do something fast, O.K.? I’m goin’ back out there to make sure Beanie doesn’t get killed.”

  I watched him leave the stage, shoving his way through the bikers on the dance floor, and motioned Rob, Sam, and Yogi over. “We need to play something, at least until things calm down in here. Maybe Mick’ll come around.”

  “Play what?” Rob asked, his voice still higher than usual. “Who’s singing?”