Armageddon Rag

by George R. R. Martin

  “There.” Ananda pointed to the front row, where Peter Faxon sat on the aisle, concentrating on some papers in his lap. They went toward him.

  Faxon seemed surprised to see him. “Blair,” he said. He set his papers aside and stood up, and they shook hands. “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same question,” Sandy said.

  Faxon smiled thinly. “Don’t bother, I’ve been asking it myself. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing here.” He shook his head. “It’s all your fault. After our talk, I got to brooding a lot. Maybe I realized how much I missed it all. But it was Tracy who really made up my mind. She came up to me one day last month, planted her hands on her hips, and said, ‘I can’t take it anymore. You want it and you know you want it, so pick up the phone and call before you drive us all crazy.’ Next thing I knew, here I was.”

  “Here,” Sandy said. He glanced around. Rotting seats, dust, faded draperies, probably lots of roaches and rats. “Terrific rehearsal hall,” he said. “Was the city dump booked, or what?”

  Faxon laughed. “Blame Morse. Still, I don’t mind too much. Nostalgia. This was where it all began, Blair.”

  “Make it Sandy, please. What do you mean?”

  “This was the first place Nazgûl ever played. We were still Peter and the Werewolves then. We’d done a lot of weddings and high-school dances, a few clubs, and we were getting quite a local following. This place was already in trouble, and it was catering to the teen crowd, showing a lot of horror flicks and beach pictures, whatever the management thought might draw ’em in. Finally they got the idea of doing a live rock show, with all local talent. Local talent came cheap. We were the headliners. Our first concert was up on that stage, right there.” He nodded. “We’d been hashing over the name change for a while, and that seemed a hell of an auspicious moment for it, so when they brought us out, we were the Nazgûl for the first time, and we did a lot of brand-new stuff. The kids loved it, so the theater started booking us regularly. We did six shows, one a month for half a year. At the last one, a guy named Lynch came backstage afterward with a bottle of champagne, a block of hash the size of a brick, and a contract.”

  “The place has come down a little in the world,” Sandy commented.

  “Haven’t we all?” Faxon said.

  “So,” Sandy asked. “How long you been at it?”

  “Couple of weeks.”

  “And? How’s it going?”

  Faxon grimaced. “Let’s just say we got a few kinks to work out.”

  “It’s all that new material,” Ananda said, “that’s the problem.”

  The comment clearly annoyed Faxon. “The new material is what this whole gig is about,” he said sharply. “I told you, I’m willing to throw in a few of the old songs for the hell of it, because they’ll expect it, but the act is going to be built around my new stuff, or it’s going to be built around somebody else besides me. You got that?”

  Ananda put up her hands and smiled disarmingly. “Hey, I’m just the messenger girl, Peter, take it easy!”

  Faxon scowled. “Sorry, but you know how I feel. If Morse doesn’t like it, let him whistle up his surgeons and make a nice docile plastic Faxon for himself.”

  “Ouch,” Sandy said. “Sounds like you have some reservations about Richmond.”

  Peter Faxon turned back to him, frowning. “He’s a nice kid and he tries hard, but he ain’t Pat and he never will be. And I think the whole surgery bit is ghoulish. They warned me ahead of time, but I still had a weird couple of minutes when I met him.”

  “And now?”

  “Oh, hell, the feeling doesn’t last. I knew Pat Hobbins better than anybody, and this kid isn’t remotely like him. He even has a dog, for Chrissakes!”

  “So?” Sandy said.

  “Pat hated dogs. He was mauled by a German shepherd when he was a kid, had to go through the full rabies treatment, and after that he was always scared of dogs. They could smell the fear on him, and they’d growl at him and bare their teeth. If Pat had had his way, they would have gassed every dog in the world. But Richmond takes that neurotic pooch everywhere.” He pointed, and sure enough, Sandy saw Balrog off to the side of the auditorium, his leash tied to an ornate column. “And that’s just for starts. I got nothing against the kid. It’s hard to dislike someone who worships you. But I sure wish Morse had gotten us a singer instead of a dime-store plastic Hobbins.”

  “I take it you’re not worried that Richmond is going to dominate your band the way Hobbins did?” Sandy asked.

  Faxon laughed. “I wish. Larry Richmond couldn’t dominate the Pillsbury Dough-Boy.” He glanced at his watch and sighed. “Well, it’s about that time. Have a seat, Sandy, and give a listen while I make atonement for all my sins. I warn you, it might be painful.” He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, and all heads turned in his direction. “Enough fucking off,” he announced loudly. “Let’s do it again.”

  Sandy and Ananda settled into seats in the front row, along with a dozen other spectators. A few sound men took their positions, and one by one the Nazgûl got ready. Behind the drums, Gopher John washed down the last bite of his sandwich with a swallow of beer and grabbed his sticks. They were Pro Mark 2Bs, big, long, fat, heavy sticks, marching band sticks, mean-looking sticks, but they seemed almost fragile in his huge, knuckly hands. Though still clean-shaven and gaunt, he was wearing jeans and a loose-fitting purple shirt, and he looked a lot more like Gopher John than had the pin-striped businessman Sandy had interviewed in Camden an eternity ago.

  Maggio came on stage with a cigarette in his mouth, his belly bouncing under a blood-red Nazgûl tee shirt that was at least fifteen years old and two sizes too small. After a long final drag, he dropped the cigarette to the stage, ground it out underfoot, and picked up his guitar, the same familiar Fender Telecaster he had played in the old days. He started to tune it, and muttered “Fuck” loudly into his microphone.

  Larry Richmond, in crisp new blue jeans and an embroidered denim shirt, stood in front, his Gibson SG already tuned, his boots polished and gleaming, his white hair falling softly to his shoulders. He licked his lips anxiously.

  Finally there was Peter Faxon, blond and handsome, with a stern, businesslike look on his face as he slipped on his bass, a darkly gleaming metallic black Rickenbacker. He tuned it as the sound man fiddled, and when he got the nod at last, he turned to the others and said, “All right, here we go again. Let’s try ‘Sins.’ And, Rick, it would be real nice if you could try to sing the same words as the rest of us, you know?”

  “Hey, fuck you, Peter,” Maggio snapped.

  Down in the front row, Sandy’s hand found Ananda’s. He felt as nervous as Larry Richmond looked. For more than half a year now he had been chasing the chimera that was the Nazgûl, playing their old songs over and over until he knew them all by heart, obsessed by the music and the meanings. And it had all been leading up to this. Here in this ruin of a theater where the music had begun, it was about to begin again. The long silence was now to be broken once and forever, the tide was about to turn, the rage and the love and the dreams that they had lost were about to be summoned back to them, and the true and terrifying voice of the Sixties was going to be heard once more in the land. The Nazgûl were taking flight.

  Maggio’s Fender whispered softly, almost gently, and Richmond came in flawlessly behind him with the sweeter sound of the Gibson. Gopher John laid down a tentative beat on snare and bass, and Richmond began to sing.

  Oh, lately I been thinking on my sins

  “Sins,” was almost a ballad, the music deceptively soft although the lyrics were wickedly double-edged. The Nazgûl followed it with “Goin’ to the Junkyard,” a feverish hard-rocker about trashed lives, with a hot, heavy baseline and a chorus that said, Everybody’s goin’ to the junkyard! Maggio switched to a red, rocket-shaped Gibson Firebird for that one, and grabbed for some piercing, distorted chords that sounded like a busload of schoolkids caught in a metal compactor. He went
back to his Fender for “Good Ol’ Days,” a little bit of kick-ass country rock that featured Faxon on Cajun fiddle.

  “Dogfood” had the kind of trenchant political lyrics Sandy hadn’t heard in a decade, all about Pekinese getting the gout while kids starved to death in Asia. “Visions in the Dark” was cryptic, dreamlike, with a sound like a bastard child of acid rock and heavy metal that was really big brother to them both. It had a drum solo for Gopher John and a few bits of guitar work in it that only Hendrix and Clapton and the old Rick Maggio could possibly have handled, lots of fast intricate chords, screams of pain that sent Maggio to his Wah-Wah pedal, dark wavery echoes, black on black, that needed lots of Echo-plex and phase shifting.

  Maggio sang lead on “Cupcakes,” another loud hard-driving piece of rock with pointedly feminist lyrics. His ground-glass macho voice was made for the song, although its ironies were probably lost on him. Faxon went to keyboard for “The Things That I Remember,” a bittersweet love song, and to synthesizer for “Flying Wing” with its promise of transcendence among the stars. “Dying of the Light” was Faxon swiping Dylan Thomas, and none of the Nazgûl was going gently into that good night.

  They wound up with “Wednesday’s Child,” a long wild number with an endless bridge during which the drums went airhammer mad and the guitars screamed and clawed and Faxon’s Ricky went down and down and down. It ought to have been a goddamned apocalypse of a song, the sort of song that gets the audience to its feet, that drags ’em up kicking and hollering, that makes ’em shriek and shake and lights up their blood like it was gasoline hungry for a match. It ought to have been the kind of song that goes on for fifteen, twenty minutes at a concert, and nearly starts a riot, or a war.

  It wasn’t.

  Not the way they did it.

  In the front row of the old theater, Sandy was very conscious of the faint smell of mold, and of the bedbugs in the seat beneath him. When he should have been lost in the music, he found himself thinking of decay, on stage and off. At first he was excited and afraid, but as song followed song, numbness set in… and finally a strange cool feeling that was both relief and disappointment.

  All the fears that had so obsessed him that winter seemed very faraway and foolish now as Sandy sat in the rotted-out old movie house and watched three middle-aged men and a green kid try to recapture a magic that was long gone, a sound and a promise and a spell that had passed from the world forever in 1971 when a bullet came screaming out of the night to write a message in blood, a message that said THE END. Edan Morse and all his talk of power in music and the tide that must come again and hours coming round at last seemed pathetically self-deluded all of a sudden. Sandy found himself thinking that it was no wonder that Jared had laughed at him. He deserved to be laughed at. He felt like laughing himself, but instead he just ground his teeth together grimly and continued to listen.

  It wasn’t the songs. All the material was new, every single song, and while some of it was obviously less good than the rest, nearly all of it was still nine cuts above the stuff you heard on AM radio these days. Faxon hadn’t lost his touch. He was still eclectic, unpredictable, and sharp as hell. The characteristic sound was still unmistakably Nazgûl; fast, driven, with a hard, heavy beat, complex muscial lines, lyrics that meant something. It was mean music, but not mean in the way so much punk was mean; the points were razor-edged and threatening but never nihilistic, the violence was an evil, not a good, and something in the music itself partook, not of chaos, but of a kind of new, resurgent order. It wasn’t even that Faxon had dated himself, or stood still. These songs were not rehashes of the old Nazgûl hits—they were evolved, they were ghostly musical phantoms of what the Nazgûl would have sounded like in 1972 and 1973 and 1974 if West Mesa had never happened. The best of them were as good as anything the Nazgûl had ever done. In the old days, “Goin’ to the Junkyard” and “Wednesday’s Child,” for sure, would have been top ten, with a bullet, within a week of release. And maybe some of the others as well.

  No, it wasn’t the songs. It was the band. The Nazgûl had lost it.

  Faxon gave the most credible performance, maybe because he had lived with the material for so very long. His bass and his voice were sure and steady, and he was never less than professional on the other instruments he took up during the course of the rehearsal. But he was seldom more than professional, either. The fierce concentration that had so often marked his features in the old days, as he sweated blood to keep up with the more naturally gifted musicians in the group, had been replaced by a look of embarrassed frustration. The edge was off. He was competent; no more, no less.

  Rick Maggio was more and less, in turns. Faxon’s pointed comment at the beginning of the set had been on target: more than once, Maggio seemed to be having trouble remembering his lyrics. Sandy noticed him faking it on both “Dogfood” and “Flying Wing,” and on “Visions in the Dark” he got so wrapped up in his guitar playing that he forgot to fake it and actually sang a different line than the other three, bringing the song to a screeching halt and initiating a brief, ugly exchange between him and Faxon. To give him credit, though, he did know all the words to “Cupcakes,” and he sang it with energetic, evil glee. On lead guitar, his skill seemed to come and go. The wild, difficult parts of “Visions in the Dark” would have been tough sledding for him even in the old days, before drugs had ruined him; now they were way beyond him, but Maggio did his best. Sandy saw him sweating, and once or twice he was almost there, and for a line or two his fingers would almost conjure up the old brilliance, almost, closer and closer… and then he would fumble, and the moment would be gone. He managed very nicely on “Wednesday’s Child,” was impossibly leaden on “Good Ol’ Days,” and seemed an almost total stranger to what he was supposed to be playing on “The Things That I Remember.” By the end of the rehearsal, his tee shirt was soaked with sweat and his face was a dead fish-belly white, and ugly.

  If Maggio was erratic, Gopher John Slozewski was just off. Maggio had at least had his bar bands to keep him in shape; Gopher John had simply been out of it for too long. His drum solo on “Visions in the Dark” was lackluster, he seemed simply unable to sustain the kind of wild frenetic drumming that “Wednesday’s Child” needed during its bridge, he stumbled more than once and often seemed to be playing a half-beat behind the rest of the band and struggling madly to catch up, as if his reflexes had simply grown too damn slow for the kind of music that had once been his trademark. At the end of “Wednesday’s Child” he tossed his stick up in the air. It was an old bit of business that Sandy had seen him do a hundred times in the old days. Lots of rock drummers used similar flourishes, tossing up a stick and then catching it again; Gopher John’s claim to fame was that he threw his stick higher than anybody else, and caught it without looking as it came down right in his hand just in time for him to smash the hell out of his cymbals. Today the stick went up and up, turning end to end against the old movie screen… and finally came down ten feet away, in front of Faxon. Gopher John didn’t even seem to have the energy to scowl. He looked tired and confused, as if he could not quite grasp why everything was going so terribly wrong.

  And then there was the kid. The ghost that wasn’t. The other three might eventually jell; with time, their old skills might be recaptured. But Faxon had been right about Larry Richmond; he was not Patrick Henry Hobbins and he never would be. He looked like Hobbins, dressed like him, he did his best to ape all of Hobbins’ stage mannerisms, but it was awkward, self-conscious parody at most. The kid actually wasn’t half-bad on rhythm guitar. If anything, his playing was a cut above that of the real Hobbins. But he just did not have it as lead singer. His voice sounded a lot like Hobbins’ when he spoke, but when he sang it seemed weak, washed-out, straining. The hard-rockers demanded a certain explosive verbal energy of the lead singer that Richmond couldn’t supply; the softer songs cried out for a voice that could wring emotion from the lyrics, and Richmond’s best efforts sounded hollow and fake. He didn’t have the r
ange, he didn’t have the power, he didn’t have the anger to sing like Patrick Henry Hobbins had once sung. All he did have was white hair, a familiar face, and a denim suit, and it wasn’t enough.

  It was no damned good, and they all knew it. The Nazgûl, Sandy, Ananda, and everyone else in the theater. When the last chord had faded away, Peter Faxon took off his bass, made a disgusted face, and walked off backstage without a word to anyone, visibly fuming. Maggio said, “Fuck you too, asshole,” after him and stomped away in the opposite direction. Gopher John got off his throne wearily and went over to pick up his stick. And Larry Richmond spied Sandy and leaped off the stage, grinning. “Hi,” he said cheerfully. “I saw you halfway through the set.” He stuck out his hand. “Remember me?” he asked inanely. “We met in Malibu. I’m Pat Hobbins.”

  Sandy took the hand but shook his head. “No, you’re not.”

  Richmond looked hurt. The expression was somehow incongruous on that pale face that was so much like Hobbins’. “You didn’t like us?”

  “Some of the songs have promise,” Sandy said carefully, trying to be kind. He didn’t think Richmond half-realized how bad they had been. “You’re going to need a lot of practice, though.”

  Richmond nodded, but he seemed aggrieved. “Yeah. We’d sound a lot better if only Peter wasn’t so stubborn, though. We ought to be doing the old stuff. That’s the stuff I know. We do a lot better on the old stuff. Well, we’ll get the hang of it.” He looked around, and smiled. One of the gophers was walking toward him with his dog. “Hey,” Richmond said. “Balrog liked it, anyhow. Didn’t you, boy? Didn’t you, huh?” He knelt and ruffled the top of the dog’s head and batted him playfully, and Balrog barked happily in affirmation. “Hey, that’s right, Bal, we did good, huh? Soundin’ better and better, huh, Bal?” Richmond grinned up at Sandy and Ananda. “Bal’s my toughest critic,” he said. “If he don’t like the way I’m singing, he starts barking during the set. You heard how quiet he was, didn’t you?”