The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  Wrong.

  Two minutes past opening, and On the Brink already seemed too glaring and bright by half. Garris was in a state his mom always termed "cross-eyed with bad anger."

  Fucking cretins, was that all he was capable of hiring? First order: Bum the oil. Recheck the books. Redo the orders. Screw severance for Charity; she could keep the Human League promotional stuff she'd appropriated. Tomorrow afternoon could be spent bartering comp albums and deejay pressings in return for reliable emergency help-Mitchell from the Broadway store, Bianca, who could really rise to a crisis, and for sure Mickey, who wanted everybody to call him Slitboy but was a bonafide stocking and checking fool. Mickey would hold out for drugs but would settle for weed, and Garris always had a bribe lid or two stashed in eternal readiness.

  Garris fought not to plod as he trudged up the wide, Christmas-tree-lit stairway to the Classical Music Nest and fired up the lights. Banners bearing the dour visages of Perlman, Ax, and Pavarotti wafted in the breeze from the air-conditioning vents. Lined up behind the counter were posters featuring famous composers. Garris had pet names for all of them. Mahler was the Mad Doktor. Franz Liszt was Son of Lovecraft. Mendelssohn was Santa Claus Meets the Hell's Angels. Beethoven was the High School Principal. Waist high on the counter was a blowup of Charles Ives with the eyes cut out. Ronnie Colvin had liked to kneel and peer out through the eyeholes like a Chinese manservant in some Victorian murder mystery. There was also a chaotic handwritten chart, much annotated, listing the film scores of John Williams and the classical music from which each score had been plagiarized. Ronnie really had a hard-on to berate Williams. Garris thought that the chart would go, but Peeping Charles could stay. So much for Ronnie's contribution. Let Charity try to blow him full of minimum wage.

  He shut down the cooler. It was nearly forty-five degrees inside the store. He'd turned it on automatically, without thinking. Winter was hanging on too long. It should, by rights, be balmier.

  Garris ascended from the Classical Music Nest and brought the store's third level to life. This was the potpourri section encompassing all recordings not covered by designations like SOUL/R&B, JAZZ/BLOOZE, FUNK/RAP, REGGAE/SKA, THRASH, SPEED METAL, NEO-RAGE, POST-PUNK, NUEVO WAVO, SPRINGSTEEN, MOLDIES, ROCK-ROCK-ROCK, and the challengingly eclectic IMP, the import bins. Up there were sound tracks, and Broadway shows, and spoken word, and foreign language, and three-for-a-buck discs.

  Murphy's Law of Record Stores was in force today, he thought. No sooner did he get up on the third floor than the first customer of the day blew into the apparently abandoned store downstairs.

  "Mornin'," he said loudly, jaunting down with his easy, lanky, sort of loping stride. "I was beginning to think there was no sentient life in the outside world today."

  "The weekday curse," answered the customer, aimiably enough to make Garris feel relief. First customers were traditionally whacked out. They were either the eternally browsing unemployed, who never bought anything but always walked out with the free music papers and whatever else they could shoplift, or older folks -the seniors who rose with the mushroom-cloud blast of dawn just to ask for records Garris could not possibly get for them in a century.

  This man fit Garris' loose definition of normal. His hiking boots were splashed with thin, tan mud, maybe clay, out not clodded with shit that would come off on the store's carpeting. He was tall and rangy, with a healthy backsweep of amber-gold hair just starting to streak with silver. No male-pattern baldness. A broad, pleasant face with character crags around the eyes. A Marlboro man, for sure. He was dressed in stiff new Levi's and a chambray workshirt that had, happily, seen real work. The sleeves were rolled up and the top buttons freed to reveal gray insulated longjohns. Garris' first blush was that this guy had come for some Willie Nelson or maybe the sound track to Honkytonk Man.

  The customer surprised him by requesting Whip Hand. It was turning out to be an interesting day after all.

  "Ah-ancient history," he said. "Your basic three-song band." On seeing the man's questioning expression, Garris elaborated: "Ahem-any of the multifarious, one-note, mostly faceless bands cluttering up our airwaves in phases."

  "Sounds like you have a theory," said Lucas.

  "I'm proud of it, too." Garris leaned on the counter. "A band required to pull one FM hit every six months… or they get the bargain-bin torture. Whip Hand had more than three countable hits. But their musicianship and compositional ability are summed up in three songs. That's as far as they grow. Grew."

  "You're pretty good at this, aren't you?" Lucas was already amused by the performance.

  "You have come to the source, my friend. Let's see if I can do this from memory. Whip Hand's big three were…" Garris paused and squinted. " 'Riptide' was the first hit single, the image establisher. Your basic head-banger in four-four time. Lots of chunka-chunka guitar riffs. More flash than skill. What Frank Zappa called wank-wank music for hockey rinks. Chord bashing."

  Lucas riffled some albums in bins. No telling where Whip Hand would be hiding, in this place.

  "Song number two has gotta reinforce the first hit, right? It's in the same style. Or antistyle, if you prefer. 'Attack Dog.' The lyrics went beyond monosyllables in this one, just barely, and Whip Hand began to embrace the death-and-destruction fix of most basic metal. Um-

  Fangs'll shred ya

  Teeth'll tear ya

  Blood and thunder

  My attack'll scare ya…

  The harmony line was devolved blues, but of course nobody gave a crap about that."

  "You mean there's a line of descension from the Fleetwoods to Whip Hand?"

  Garris broke into an a cappella rendition of "You Mean Everything to Me," then continued: "Then cometh number three. The compulsory ballad. 'Love Mutant.' Real gooey stuff. A lot of double-entendre sexual suggestion, garbage designed to make the readership of Tiger Beat slide outta their seats. Everything else Whip Hand ever did was in the mode of those three. They did way too many covers for my taste."

  "Covers?" Lucas was still reeling from Garris' monologue.

  "Y'know, remakes of old songs. If it was a hit once, it can be a hit again. Beats creativity. Or thinking. They did… christ, everything. 'Changing All Those Changes.' "

  "Buddy Holly."

  "Righto. They did 'Turn Around' by Dick and Dee Dee, and another version of Edwin Starr's 'War.' They weren't the first. They did 'Out of Limits.' They did 'Big Girls Don't Cry,' a heavy metal version, with Jackson Knox's lead guitar substituting for Frankie Valli's falsetto. It was pretty strange."

  " 'Out of Limits' was by the Marketts," said Lucas, trapped in a detour on Nostalgia Lane. "The song was called 'Outer Limits' until the TV show threatened suit."

  "Yeah. Hey, you're pretty good at this yourself."

  "And I'm not a sixties relic, either. I just need to catch up on the last couple of years."

  "Seventies sucked, didn't they?"

  "Beyond prog-rock, Roxy Music and Talking Heads and King Crimson, I'd agree with you."

  "Hah." Garris grinned. It was a very huge grin. "You're my man. You want the most representative Whip Hand album, I'd say get Overkill. Aptly named. It was overkill for Jackson Knox to have six strings on his guitar for the type of crud Whip Hand churned out. Amazingly, he's become a respectable solo act, now."

  "I want to back-trace the history of the group to their breakup. Delineate where each group member ended up. If you've got any videos, particularly concert stuff, I'm interested in that, too. Knox has gone solo?"

  Garris had already slipped a copy of Overkill from the maze of bins. "Yep. Two albums. The first one, High Dive, you can have for two ninety-nine, since nobody wanted it for list." It had been remaindered but had not yet made it to On the Brink's top floor. It had been stocked together with the newer album in hopes of some crossover sales. "Panic Stop is new. But you can get it for six ninety-nine if you buy any other nonspecial list-priced album. Which you just did, with Overkill."

  "Tell me about the breakup."r />
  "Whip Hand disbanded… um, December of 1984. Knox became a solo act. He's touring right now. Brion Hardin took his keyboards through a couple of groups, all losers, before moving in with a band called Electroshock. I think he might've been with Uriah Heep for one album-everybody else was-then Limey Iron, then maybe backed up Johnny Scepter on a tour. That stuff is pedestrian. You a completist?"

  "Not that much of one. Give me what's current."

  "The battle cry of most of my customers. If it's older than six months, they're not interested. Here's Electroshock: Two albums so far. Force Me and The Crash of '86. They'll vanish after their next album, mark my words."

  "Another three-song band?"

  "Only if they're lucky. Now." Garris struck a sort of rockologist's pose. "The rhythm section of Whip Hand was transplanted intact into a more hardcore band called 'Gasm. Your classic black-leather nonsense. 'Gasm started out as a glitter band in seventy-eight, did three albums everybody forgot, and reemerged in 1982 as a sort of biker act-motorcycle chains, bondage gear, special effects, flame pots, hot poses, the works. Chording right out of Learn to Play Electric Bass with the Ventures. Dry-ice smoke, strobe lights, gimmicks out the wazoo. They're so regressive I think they're the only live act that still destroys their instruments. I dunno. Is Ritchie Blackmore dead yet?"

  Lucas laughed as Garris wound his way to the appropriate bins.

  "Right here in the 'has bin,' " he cracked. "Here ya go-meet 'Gasm. Hold your nose." He handed Lucas two albums. Pain Threshold and Primal Scream, the latter a two-record live set.

  "I don't know how to thank you," said Lucas, shaking his head with comic bewilderment.

  "This music will scare the tread right off a snow tire. The fundamentalists were burning Pain Threshold last year; it was supposed to have Satanist propaganda backward-masked into the grooves. This was when Judas Priest canceled their Palladium show and Ozzy Osbourne got sued for allegedly prompting some kid's suicide. Sales went through the ceiling. The bible thumpers are the best thing to happen to the record business since Paul McCartney's phony death. Or John Lennon's real one, come to think of it. Double Fantasy would've died if poor John hadn't."

  Lucas pored over the discs and nodded sagely. "Dangerous stuff, huh?"

  "You betcha. When the Mad Mommies started raising hell about record labeling, the PMRC and all that crap? 'Gasm was one of the first to put a warning label on their record."

  Lucas saw the sticker on the shrink-wrap of Pain Threshold.

  WARNING! This record contains music that has been SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN to pollute your precious bodily fluids, grow hair on your hands, kill your goldfish, and cause mass starvation in the Third World. If you subject yourself to this music, your soul will fry in hell forever, world without end, PLAY IT LOUD!!!

  "I mean, mommies across the country have got to protect their young'uns from stuff like 'Doncha Want To,' which is getting a lot of airplay. Very complex."

  Garris contorted his face and twisted his hands into arthritic claws, growling, "Want-cha-HUH! Need'ja-HUH! Gonna GETCHA! Oomph! Ack!" Then he faded back to normal. "This is timeless music for our age. 'Gasm moved from power pop to a grunt phase. Kind of like crossbreeding Black Sabbath with Ted Nugent. Godzilla meets Con Edison."

  "Jackal Reichmann," read Lucas from the personnel notes on the rear cover. "Percussion, assault and battery, machine gun. Tim Fozzetto, bass guitar and vegetables."

  "Videos on 'Gasm we've got. They stole a riff from the Plasmatics-nuking stuff for the cameras. Backing up their latest song by dynamiting a high school or flying a plane into a cliff. A cliff by the ocean, let's not forget art, now. They did a film, interspersing concert footage with shots of good old American boys blowing away Vietcong and El Salvadorans. It was released theatrically. Throw Down Your Arms. It isn't out on video yet." He winked at Lucas. "Except on bootleg."

  "What are you waiting for, a straight line?"

  Garris grinned his economy-sized grin again. "Forty-nine ninety-five. Go for it? I thought so. Now, after all the dust clears, we're left with Mr. Whip Hand himself. Gabriel Stannard, the incredibly photogenic rock and roll vocalist. The poor man's Robert Plant. That would be Plant in his Zep phase, of course."

  "Of course."

  - the vest is hooked into a flat spin. Kristen's eyes do not follow it-

  "Gabriel Stannard." Lucas' mouth tasted the name, tested it.

  "When he went solo, most of Whip Hand's audience went with him. He's set up a Rod Stewart-like personality subcult. An album per year, each album with a different backup band, each band with enough superstar cameos to guarantee it works. He gets billing under his own name only; it's in his contract. He even hired Electroshock to open for him on his last tour. Pass a little butter back to his old buddies, right?"

  "Just the keyboardist. Hardin."

  Another name.

  "Yeah. But he's tossed scraps to all his old band members since his split-off. There are plenty of videos on him, plus two albums. Pleased to Meet You in the Alley and Caught Unawares. Say, if you don't mind my asking, what's all your research for?"

  "Article," said Lucas without pausing. "One version goes to Parents magazine. The other goes to Gallery. The research also goes into a longer piece, middle-of-the-road, MOR, that'll get into Time, if I luck out."

  "A good version and a bad version. Pro and con. Time, huh?"

  "My title for Parents is 'Rock Corrupting Our Children-Myth, Cliche, or Reality?' For Gallery, it's 'Group Sex in Large Arenas.' "

  "And for Time?"

  "I don't know. Something Time-like and bland." Lucas knew his answers did not have to be complex. Just convincing.

  "How about 'Rock's Bastard Family Trees'?" said Garris. "Or 'Music to Kill Yuppies By'?"

  "Not bad." Lucas made a big deal out of whipping out an index card and scribbling down titles. "If I use it, you'll get the thrill of seeing your name in itty-bitty letters where your family'll never spot it."

  "That's great," Garris said, sounding like Tony the Tiger.

  "You got a first name?"

  "C-h-i-c, pronounced chick, and no jokes, please."

  "Right. Well, Chic, what does this mess come to?" They stacked the records and tapes on the counter next to the ever-ready register, which sat there humming. Lucas noticed an X-shaped wooden dump loaded with rolled-up posters, racked like skinny wine bottles. "Got any good shots of Stannard in there?"

  Garris withdrew a white cylinder. "Your standard-issue wet-dream pose." He unreeled it for appraisal.

  Gabriel Stannard was frozen amid defocused, saturated primary colors and bleary circles of diffused spotlights. He was in focus, they were not. His mike glinted a mean chromium. One fist was upthrust in a power salute. He was wearing the glittering golden vest on his otherwise naked, sweat-sheened chest. Perhaps he had a whole closetful of them to toss out to the hungry faithful. He was not looking at the camera… and by extension, his dead poster image could not be aware of who evaluated it.

  "I'll take that, too," said Lucas.

  "You can just rent the videos, if you want. Buying them outright can get expensive. Dupe it at home."

  "No, I'll buy 'em. There're deductible, you know.".

  "Oh, right, for the article. In that case, I'll give you an itemized receipt. Two hundred and sixty-three seventy-two, with tax."

  When Lucas peeled off cash, Garris' eyes bugged only a little bit.

  "You said Jackson Knox is touring right now?" Lucas said as Garris recounted the money. "I'd really like to catch him."

  "He does clubs now. Strictly under-two hundred capacity. Unless it's local, I wouldn't know about him; he's kinda small league. There's a copy of Realer Dealer in that stack over there; it'll have the club lineups for all of May, and if it's not in there, you'll find it in The Rag or the weekend section of the Chronicle."

  Lucas paged through the pseudo-underground tabloid. Undergrounds, born of the 1960s and rebellion, had been co-opted. The Freep was dead, dead, dead. Now the "alternat
ive press" wore suits and ties and used credit cards. News-wise, they were an alternative to nothing, except perhaps boredom at some bus stop. He turned to a section mastheaded Hot Dates and scanned for Knox's name. He was not disappointed.

  The ROCKHOUND-formerly the Black Cat Bone, this recently refurbished club showcases quality small acts on weekends and local talent on weekdays. Full bar, 21 & over, upstairs lounge, dance floor, sandwich and munchie menu. Table seating for 100. Cover charge on weekends. 5/12: Bates Motel; 5/13: punk night; 5/14 Slim Slick & His Slick Dicks plus Urban Wreckage; 5/15: 'Yuppie Chow; 5/16-17: Jackson Knox; 5/18: The Hangovers. (415) 747-4414 after noon daily.

  Lucas began to dig out change for the paper, but Garris waved his hand at it. "No charge. You've bought enough to warrant a ton of freebies in any decent rock shop. Which, by the way, is why I threw in Overkill for free, too."

  Lucas slid the tabloid into the On the Brink bag, one of those sturdy brown jobs with handles and an imprinted logo on both faces. "Thanks again. You don't know how much help you've been, and I'm grateful."

  "My pleasure." Garris beamed, looking for all the world like this year's big winner of the Nice Guy Award. His shitty morning had been handily reversed. He stood there, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands thrust into his pockets, his hair drooping into his eyes. "I'll watch for the article. The Gallery version, I mean."

  When Lucas walked out of On the Brink with his purchases, Jackson Knox's date at the Rockhound was five days away.

  6

  NOBODY WANTED TO FUCK WITH a semi. Those who dared, thought Gunther Lubin, were flirting with superior trouble.

  Red lights and traffic, therefore, became even less than annoyances. Backing the truck up the narrow alley inlet behind the Rockhound had proven too much picayune hassle, so Gunther had floored it in reverse, gracing an asshole Honda Civic with a door ding as penance for parking too far from the curb. He barreled the top-heavy truck around the block and through an intersection without watching the traffic lights. Horns howled. Tires striped the pavement. Gunther spat out the wooden match he had been chewing and pulled his rig into the alley from the opposite end. The wing mirrors cleared phone poles by about an inch on each side as he skinnied the truck in skillfully. Once he made it, crawling out through the cab window was no biggie. Halfway out, he.snatched his roadie pass, still on its waxed-paper backing to preserve the stickum, from the clip on the pilot-side visor.