Rock On

by Howard Waldrop

  Hi Fi and Archie were still hammering away, grimacing, posing, busting strings, until they discovered they were putting out zero sound. It took exactly two heartbeats.

  Slurpee stopped drumming. The sight was so lame it was nearly comic. Double-Ought, ditto.

  The arena manager peeked out from behind the wing curtains. He stuffed his fist into his face, dropping his clipboard to the floor. It landed with a solid, flat whack that almost startled Archie into a power dump.

  Every single preamp, power amp, power booster, contour amp, and PA speaker had overloaded, arcing across protective fuses to crisp the circuitry. The speaker elements and conduits were puddles of chrome plasma. Three of the techs were still writhing from severe electrical hotfoots. The tapes, running at 15 IPS, had flash-melted into useless Frisbees of plastic as the recording hookups had cooked down to slag.

  Slurpee put his sticks down gingerly. Gently, quietly. In his time he had seen sound frequencies blast glass to smithereens, crack rubber, induce coma, roast lab animals. He cleared the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand.

  The arena was littered with fallen garments. Pimp boots, trashy lingerie, metalzoid jewelry, fatigues, jeans, punk shirts, yee-hah hats, dirty undies, halters, tubes, belts, lace, thongs. The empty cavern of space resembled a sloppy flea market . . . or Nicky’s bedroom, he thought, as administered by his first wife.

  Mixed liberally into the piles and wads of unoccupied garb were clinking pints of booze, smuggled dope, fake IDs, smuggled weapons, scratch cash, and several thousand ticket stubs. Somewhere in front was Jambone’s pirate codpiece, nestled in the clothing of the person who had battled for it.

  But no people.

  Jambone cursed loudly and it bounced back to meet him. He gave a disgusted shrug and stomped offstage, past Nicky, lending him only a venomous glance that said, “We have another gig one day and four hundred miles from here and what the ratfuck are we gonna do about this baby-rapin’ mess?”

  Nobody spoke. Not even the arena manager.

  They had all been cowed silent, afraid to make any sound, lest they vanish, pop, the end.

  Nicky walked slowly out to center stage and sat down, right on the edge. His feet dangled where the bouncers in their yellow shirts—

  Had been.

  Okay. Item #1: You want fame, you just got it.

  Item #2: Their gear had completely filled two forty-five-foot longbed trucks. Now it was all useless and ruined. Slowly, Nicky’s head dipped to rest in his hands.

  Item #3: Their audience had completely filled the arena . . .

  The arena manager had left the premises. Presumably to locate a telephone that was not melted into gooey junk.

  Nicky had coveted the covers of Rip and Rolling Stone, not Time and Newsweek. He stayed as he was, sitting on the edge of the stage, until men at last came for him.

  How long? Time had stopped. Who cared?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Gasm has left the arena.

  “Excuse us.”

  Nicky looked up and saw three men in suits. The arena manager was standing out of range behind them. Tattlers always stand back when the poop is about to hit the propeller. FBI? CIA? Secret police? Death squad? Exactly how did you punish someone for something like this?

  “You are Nicky Powers? You manage the band Gasm?”

  Nicky prepared himself mentally for the cuffs. He did not answer. The lead guy seemed anxious to get the particulars correct. He spoke hesitantly.

  Nicky returned the man’s frank gaze. He did not read threat. He read nervous excitement.

  “These gentlemen and I represent the Defense Department of the United States.”

  Call it intuition, but Nicky knew in a flash that Gasm would make its next concert date, no sweat. Not drop one. He smiled his very best dealmaker’s smile and stood up.

  The Oxford English Dictionary credits David J. Schow for coining the term splatterpunk, a type of horror fiction critic S.T. Joshi noted as “utilizing elements from popular culture (especially rock-and-roll music and slasher films) to underscore the violence and sterility of modern life.” Rock musicians pop up in several of his short stories and the band Gasm from “Odeed” also makes an appearance in Schow’s debut novel The Kill Riff (1988), a story of vengeance and madness in the world of rock and roll. A Bram Stoker Award-winner and recipient of the World Fantasy Award, his short fiction has been gathered into six collections. Some of his nonfiction was compiled for the International Horror Guild Award-winning Wild Hairs. In addition to The Kill Riff, he has authored five other novels, the most recent of which is Internecine (2010). Film-writing credits include The Crow, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, and The Hills Run Red.

  Voodoo Child

  Graham Masterton

  I saw Jimi ducking into S.H. Patel’s, the news agent on the corner of Clarendon Road, and his face was ashy gray. I said to Dulcie, “Jesus, that’s Jimi,” and followed him inside, shop doorbell clanging. Mr. Patel was marking up stacks of Evening Standards and said, “New Musical Express not in yet, Charlie,” but all I could do was to shake my head.

  I walked cautiously along the shelves of magazines and children’s sweets and humorous birthday cards. I could hear Mrs. Patel’s television playing the theme tune from Neighbours somewhere in the back of the shop. There was a musty smell of manila envelopes and candy shrimps and fenugreek.

  I came around the corner of the shelves and Jimi was standing by the freezer cabinet, looking at me wide-eyed; not sly and funny the way he always used to, but wounded almost, defensive. His hair was just the same, frizzy, and he was wearing the same sleeveless Afghan jacket and purple velvet flares—even the same Cherokee necklace. But his skin looked all white and dusty, and he really scared me.

  “Jimi?” I whispered.

  At first, he didn’t say anything, but there was a chilliness around him and it wasn’t just the freezer cabinet with its Bird’s Eye peas and Findus mixed carrots and original beef burgers.

  “Jimi . . . I thought you were dead, man,” I told him. I hadn’t called anybody “man” for more than fifteen years. “I was really, totally convinced you were dead.”

  He snuffed, and cleared his throat, his eyes still wounded-looking. “Hallo, Charlie,” he said. He sounded hoarse and remote and blocked-up, the same way he’d sounded that last night I saw him, September 17, 1970.

  I was so scared I could scarcely speak, but at the same time Jimi was so much the same that I felt weirdly reassured—like it was still 1970 and the past twenty years just hadn’t happened. I could have believed that John Lennon was still alive and that Harold Wilson was still prime minister and that it was peace and love forever.

  “I’ve been trying to get back to the flat, man,” Jimi told me.

  “What? What flat?”

  “Monika’s flat, man, in Lansdowne Crescent. I’ve been trying to get back.”

  “What the hell do you want to go back there for? Monika doesn’t live there anymore. Well, not so far as I know.”

  Jimi rubbed his face, and ash seemed to fall between his fingers. He looked distracted, frightened, as if he couldn’t think straight. But then I’d often seen him stoned out of his skull, talking weird gibberish, all about some planet or other where things were ideal, the godlike planet of Supreme Wisdom.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I asked him. “Listen, Dulcie’s outside. You remember Dulcie? Let’s go and have a drink.”

  “I’ve got to get into that flat, man,” Jimi insisted.

  “What for?”

  He stared at me as if I were crazy. “What for? Shit! What for, for fuck’s sake.”

  I didn’t know what to do. Here was Jimi, three feet in front of me, real, talking, even though Jimi had been dead for twenty years. I never saw the actual corpse, and I never actually went to his funeral because I couldn’t afford the fare, but why would the press and his family have said that he was dead if he wasn’t?

  Monika had found him lying on the bed, cold, his li
ps purple from suffocation. The doctors at St. Mary Abbot’s Hospital had confirmed that he was dead on arrival. He had suffocated from breathing vomit. He had to be dead. Yet here he was, just like the old psychedelic days, “Purple Haze” and “Voodoo Chile” and “Are You Experienced?”

  The shop doorbell rang. It was Dulcie, looking for me. “Charlie?” she called. “Come on, Charlie, I’m dying for a drink.”

  “Why don’t you come and have a drink with us?” I asked Jimi. “Maybe we can work out a way of getting you back in the flat. Maybe we can find out who the estate agent is, and talk to him. Courtney probably knows. Courtney knows everybody.”

  “I can’t come with you, man, no way,” Jimi said evasively.

  “Why not? We’re meeting Derek and all the rest of them down at the Bull’s Head. They’d really like to see you. Hey—did you read about Mitch selling your guitar?”

  “Guitar?” he asked, as if he couldn’t understand me.

  “Your Strat, the one you used at Woodstock. He got something like a hundred and eighty grand for it.”

  Jimi gave a dry, hollow sniff. “Got to get into that flat, man, that’s all.”

  “Well, come for a drink first.”

  “No way, man, can’t be done. I’m not supposed to see nobody. Not even you.”

  “Then what are you going to do?” I asked him. “Where are you staying?”

  “I ain’t staying nowhere, man.”

  “You can stay with me. I’ve got a house in Clarendon Road now.”

  Jimi shook his head. He wasn’t even listening. “I’ve got to get into the flat, that’s all. No two ways about it.”

  “Charlie?” protested Dulcie. “What the hell are you doing?”

  I felt a cold, dusty draft, and I turned around, and the Patels’ multicolored plastic curtain was swinging, but Jimi was gone. I dragged the curtain back and shouted, “Jimi!” But nobody was in the Patels’ armchair-crowded sitting room except a brown, bare-bottomed baby with a runny nose and an elderly grandmother in a lime-green sari, who stared at me with eyes as hard as stones. Above the brown-tiled fireplace was a luridly colored photograph of the Bhutto family. I apologized and retreated.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you? I’ve been waiting outside for ages,” Dulcie said.

  “I saw Jimi,” I told her.

  “Jimmy who?” she demanded. She was bleached-blond, pretty, and tarty—and always intolerant. Perhaps that was why I liked her so much.

  “Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix. He was here, just now.”

  Dulcie stopped chewing gum and stared at me with her mouth open. “Jimi Hendrix? What do you mean, Jimi Hendrix?”

  “I saw him, he was here.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re out of your fucking tree, you are!”

  “Dulcie, he was here, I swear to God. I’ve just been talking to him. He said he had to get back into Monika’s old flat. You know, the flat where he—”

  “Pree-cisely,” Dulcie mocked me. “The flat where he died.”

  “He was here, believe me. He was so damned close I could have touched him.”

  “You’re mad,” Dulcie declared. “Anyway, I’m not waiting any longer. I’m going down to the Bull’s Head for a drink.”

  “Listen, wait,” I told her. “Let’s just go round to Monika’s flat and see who lives there now. Maybe they know what’s going on.”

  “I don’t want to,” Dulcie protested. “You’re just being ridiculous. He’s dead, Charlie. He’s been dead for twenty years.”

  But in the end we went round to the flat and rang the doorbell. We saw the grubby net curtains twitching, but it was a long time before we heard anybody coming to the door. A cold gray wind blew round the crescent. The railings were clogged with newspaper and empty crisp bags, and the trees were scrubby and bare.

  “I don’t suppose they even know that Jimi Hendrix used to live here,” Dulcie sniffed.

  Eventually the door was opened about an inch and a woman’s pale face appeared.

  “Yes?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I know somebody who used to live here, and he was wondering if you’d mind if he sort of came back and took a look around. You know, just for old times’ sake.”

  The woman didn’t answer. I don’t think she really understood what I was going on about.

  “It wouldn’t take long,” I told her. “Just a couple of minutes. Just for old times’ sake.”

  She closed the door without saying a word. Dulcie and I were left on the step, under a cold north London sky the color of glue.

  A black woman in a shiny Marks and Spencer’s raincoat pushed a huge, dilapidated pram across the street. The pram was crowded with children and shopping.

  “Now what are you going to do?” asked Dulcie.

  “Don’t know,” I told her. “Let’s go and get that drink.”

  We drove down to the Bull’s Head and sat by the window overlooking the Thames. The tide was out, so the river was little more than a dull gray ribbon in a stretch of sloping black mud.

  Courtney Tulloch was there, and so were Bill Franklin, Dave Blackman, Margaret, and Jane. I suddenly realized that I’d known all of them back in 1970 when Jimi was still alive. It was a strange feeling, like being in a dream.

  What had John Lennon written? “Yea though I wart through the valet of thy shadowy hut, I will feed no Norman.”

  I asked Courtney whether he knew who was living in Monika’s old flat, but he shook his head. “All the old faces are gone now, man, long-gone. It’s all changed from what it used to be. I mean, it was always rundown and seedy and all that, but everybody knew where they was, black and white, bus driver and whore. Nowadays these kids run riot. It’s like the moon.”

  But Dave said, “I know who took that flat after Monika left. It was John Drummond.”

  “You mean the John Drummond?” I asked him. “John Drummond the guitarist?”

  “That’s right. But he was only there for a couple of months.”

  Dulcie said, “You’re being really boring today, Charlie. Can I have another drink?”

  I bought another round: snowball for Dulcie, Hoisten Pus for me. Courtney was telling a joke.

  I hadn’t realized that John Drummond had lived in the same flat as Jimi. For my money, John had been a better guitarist than Jimi—technically, anyway. He was always more single-minded, more creative. He’d been able to make his guitar talk in the same way that Jimi did, but the voice that had come out had been less confused than Jimi’s, less angry, less frustrated. And he’d never played an uneven set like Jimi did at Woodstock, or a totally disastrous one like Jimi did in Seattle the last time he ever appeared at a concert in America. John Drummond had played first with Graham Bond and then with John Mayall and then his own “supergroup,” the Crash.

  John Drummond had reached number one both sides of the Atlantic with “Running a Fever.” But then, without warning, he’d suddenly retired, amid newspaper reports of cancer or multiple sclerosis or chronic heroin addiction. That had been the last that anybody ever saw of him. That was—what?—1973, 1974, or something like that. I didn’t even know if he was dead or alive.

  That night in my one-bedroom flat in Holland Park Avenue, the telephone rang. It was Jimi. His voice sounded distant and powdery.

  “I can’t talk for long, man. I’m in a call box in Queensway.”

  “I went to the flat, Jimi. The woman wouldn’t let me in.”

  “I have to get in there, Charlie. No two ways about it.”

  “Jimi—I found out something. John Drummond had that flat after Monica. Maybe he could help.”

  “John Drummond? You mean that young guy who kept hanging around wanting to play with the Experience?”

  “That’s right, amazing guitarist.”

  “He was shit. He couldn’t play for shit.”

  “Oh, come on, Jimi. He was great. ‘Running a Fever’ was a classic.”

  There was a long silence on the other end
of the phone. I could hear traffic, and Jimi breathing. Then Jimi said, “When was that?”

  “When was what?”

  “That song you mentioned, ‘Running a Fever,’ when was that?”

  “I don’t know. Early seventy-four, I think.”

  “And he was good?”

  “He was amazing.”

  “Was he as good as me?”

  “If you want the God’s honest truth, yes, he was.”

  “Did he sound like me?”

  “Yes, he did, except not many people would admit it, because he was white.”

  I looked down into the street. Traffic streamed endlessly past the front of my flat, on its way to Shepherds Bush. I thought of Jimi singing “Crosstown Traffic” all those years ago.

  Jimi said, “Where’s this Drummond guy now? Is he still playing?”

  “Nobody knows where he is. He had a number-one hit with ‘Fever’ and then he quit. Warner Brothers couldn’t even find anybody to sue.”

  “Charlie,” urged Jimi hoarsely, “you’ve got to do me one favor. You’ve got to find this guy. Even if he’s dead, and you can only find out where they buried him.”

  “Jimi, for Christ’s sake. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “Please, Charlie. Find him for me.”

  He hung up. I stood by the window for a long time, feeling frightened and depressed. If Jimi didn’t know that John Drummond had played so well—if he wasn’t aware that John had reached number one with “Running a Fever” then where had he been for the past twenty years? Where had he been, if not dead?

  I telephoned Nik Cohn and he met me in this stuffy afternoon drinking club in Mayfair. Nik had written the definitive work on pop in the sixties, Awopbopaloopa Alopbamboom, and he had known just about everybody, including the Beatles, Eric Burdon, Pink Floyd in their UFO days, and Jimi, of course—and John Drummond.

  He hadn’t seen John for yonks, but about six years ago he had received a postcard from Littlehampton on the south coast, saying nothing much except that John was trying to get his mind and his body back together again.

  “He didn’t exactly explain what he meant,” Nik told me. “But he was always like that. You got the feeling that he was always thinking about something else. Like trying to deal with something that was going on inside him.”