A Song to Die For (38 page)

Metro patted a shuffle on the chrome handrail leading up from the bus door.

“Interesting,” Kathy said. “So…”

“So, we're recording a Navaho blanket this evenin', not some unnaturally perfect geometric shape. Let it breathe. Let it live. Embrace the imperfection. To err is human. It's organic. Feel it. Live it. Love it.” Luster draped the blanket respectfully across the back of a padded seat. “Anyway, if you screw up too bad, we can overdub it in the studio. No pressure. Let's go have fun.”

Creed waited for the band to file off of the bus, but noticed Trusty Joe still sitting on his bunk. “Trusty?”

Trusty stood and touched the vagrant thread protruding from the Navaho blanket. “This is me. I'm gonna be the imperfection.”

Creed watched in dismay as Trusty started crying. He grabbed him by the arm. “Get off the bus, Trusty. Get some fresh air.”

“It's Houston air!” he sobbed. “I hate Houston.”

“Come on. You'll do fine…”

Once off the bus, Creed could hear the hum of the crowd that had gathered in the open-air football stadium often used as a concert venue. He saw the dread that the crowd noise painted on Trusty Joe's face. He felt like slapping Trusty around a little, but doubted that would help. Maybe he just needed to take Trusty's mind off the whole situation. He had to do something. He was band manager, and personnel issues fell under his list of responsibilities.

“Trusty, what would you rather be doing right now?” he asked.

“I like what I'm doing. I just don't like who I am.”

Creed felt he could relate to that. “What if you were riding Ol' Baldy right now?”

Trusty immediately stopped blubbering. “I wish.”

“Here's what I want you to do.” He stopped at the bottom of the steel staircase leading up the backstage area. “When you step onto that stage, I want you to imagine stepping into the stirrup, and swinging your leg over the saddle.”

“Yeah?” He dragged his sleeve across his nose.

“In your mind, I want you to put yourself astride that big beautiful horse, and show these people what you can do. I've seen you ride, and I've heard you play, man. You're a natural-born horseman, sure as you're a natural-born musician. You don't have to do this alone. Ol' Baldy will help you.”

Trusty Joe drew himself up with something akin to hope. He swallowed hard and put on his game face. “Giddy up,” he growled.

As Creed reached the top of the steps, he found Luster waiting for him.

“Is he gonna be able to play?”

“I think so, Boss. I just gave him a pep talk.”

“Good. Now here's the bad news. Sid is here.”

“Oh, no. He doesn't want to sing, does he?”

“That's the deal we made. Clue the soundman in, okay? It'll be your voice going to tape, and your voice the audience hears during the show.”

“Yeah, and what's going to happen when Sid hears my voice on the record, and not his?”

“He'll probably audit you or something, but you pay your taxes, right?”

“Very funny, Boss.”

“We'll think of something by then. Right now, we have to let him sing, or he'll pull the plug on the whole project and send down the really mean tax dogs.”

“All right, I'll go talk to Hutch.”

“Better hurry. We go on in five minutes.”

With no time to go around the long way, Creed jumped off the front of the six-foot-high stage, into the audience. He muscled his way through the crowd and ran up to Hutch's mixing console to tell him the bad news about Sid's fake vocal.

“You've got to be kiddin'?” Hutch said.

Once Creed convinced him that he was serious, Hutch sent an assistant to hook up another microphone in the wings off-stage. Creed raced back to the stage and began to climb up on it, when he was stopped by a burly security guard.

“I'm the guitar player,” he said.

“Sure you are, bud. And I'll be backing you up on the banjo.”

“No, really.”

“Back off!” the muscle man warned, putting his palm in Creed's chest.

Creed thought briefly about taking him down, but decided that would not make for a good opening act. About then, Luster stepped onto the darkened stage, ready to be introduced. Creed shouted at him, but couldn't get his attention over the crowd noise. So he took off his left boot, and when the muscular security guard wasn't looking, he threw it at Luster, hitting him in the shin.

Bemused, Luster looked for the source of the boot as fingers pointed at Creed and the security man descended on him.

“They won't let me onstage!” Creed said.

Luster scurried to the edge of the stage. “Hey, that's my guitar player,” he shouted at the guard. “Help him up here.”

The guard smirked and gave Creed a boost. “Sorry, man.”

“Keep up the good work, dude.”

Some local deejay began introducing the legendary Luster Burnett to an audience of more than ten thousand that had gathered early for the Dixie Houston show. Luckily, it was a lengthy intro, so Creed had time to scramble for his guitar. He strapped it on, turned it up, and tightened the B string to bring it into tune. The deejay was finishing his intro with …

“… so ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, the great Luster Burnett and The Pounders!”

Creed looked at his boot lying on the stage. No time for that right now. Metro clicked out the tempo for the opener with his sticks. Creed turned his volume halfway up and got in on the downbeat with a big Strat power chord. Suddenly, thoughts of Sid, Trusty Joe, the live recording, his errant boot, and just about everything else on his mind melted away. Nerves unwound. Tension twisted into positive energy. Damn, Hutch was a great soundman! Every cubic inch of atmosphere onstage filled with a perfect blend and balance. He was so thankful he had never said a harsh word to Hutch. Every member of the band plunged into the groove of the classic country hit. And then, Luster started to sing.

Creed looked up, almost surprised to see ten thousand faces staring back at the stage. This song was older than most of the fans, yet their looks of pleased astonishment told him his confidence in his band was well placed. Their expectations for the opening act were probably modest, but Creed could tell now that they were glad to have arrived early to stake their claim to turf in front of the footlights. He smiled at some kids on the front row. They smiled back. This was starting to feel like fun again.

Luster didn't speak a word to the audience until after the third song, and then Creed finally had a chance to pull his left boot on. He caught Lindsay's twinkling eyes as she laughed at him.

”So much for the old gold-and-platinum country,” Luster was saying. “Do y'all want to hear some new outlaw music?”

Metro was already clicking out the beat for “I Believe My Luck Is Gonna Change.” After three new tunes that seemed to get just as big of a rise out of the crowd as the old stuff, Luster began introducing a special guest from St. Louis, Sid “The Kid” Larue. Creed racked his Strat and slipped off the back of the stage as Sid nervously shuffled up to the microphone Creed had vacated. Backstage, Hutch's assistant waved him over to a corner and handed him a Shure 58 microphone.

“You know what we're doing, right?”

“I think so,” the assistant said.

“Make sure the monitor man knows that that guy onstage needs to hear himself in the monitor.”

“But your voice is in the mains, right?” the young trainee said.

“God, I hope so.”

The intro done, it was time to sing, so Creed remembered that he was going to tape, dreamed up an imaginary audience to sing to, and let the lyrics rip. It was weird. He was backstage, singing to no one but a few confused stagehands, yet he could hear Sid's voice coming from the monitors onstage. Sid had been lectured repeatedly to sing the song exactly like the record and Creed did the same so that his vocal came out exactly on time with Sid's. To make things stranger, he could just barely hear the echo of his own voice out in the main speakers blasting sound out to the audience. He couldn't believe they were actually getting away with this.

The song done, Sid took a bow and turned to walk offstage. Creed passed him as he raced back to his guitar. “Good job, man.”

“That was a kick!” Sid said. “The crowd loved it!”

“Thank you,” Creed muttered to himself as he stuck his head through his guitar strap. He nodded at Metro, who clicked the tempo for the next tune, and cranked up his volume for one of Luster's golden oldies. With the worry over the Sid Larue fiasco behind him now, his instincts took over and he just played. Suddenly, he felt as if his hands were playing every instrument onstage. He felt something he had been missing since before the war. He was part of a band. A band! A real ensemble of six parts working together in one machine. Six parts, all intentionally flawed by their maker like a bunch of Navaho blankets, yet somehow seamlessly merging their talents together into an invisible spell cast over the masses. Music! Look at the power! It made people move, smile, dance, groove. Girls were swaying, waving their arms above their heads, undulating hips and shoulders like wisps of smoke rising from a snuffed candle. Guys were bobbing their heads, biting their lips, playing guitars made of air—part of the groove, part of the band in their own fantasy worlds.

God, it felt good! The vibes from the amps, the monitors, and the drums massaged him from every angle, lifted his weight from his feet until he felt as though he were floating. Metro was pounding the pedal under his right foot so hard that blasts of air were shooting out of the front of the kick drum and hitting Creed in the back of his calves, the force of the air plastering denim to flesh.

The next thing Creed knew, it was his spot for a lead break on guitar, and he found himself hanging his toes off the front of the stage—literally teetering on the brink, looking at the smiling face of a pretty girl right between the toes of his boots. He did a Chuck Berry shuffle over to Trusty Joe, who was poised to pick up the solo.

“Saddle up, Trusty!”

“Yee-ha!” the fiddler railed.

He thought about that talk Tump had had with Metro, back at Bud's Place—the discussion about the beat as a pocket. Metro had taken it to heart, because the groove was in his hip pocket now, somehow powerfully lazy. Luster was windmilling his guitar with his right arm, Lindsay was showing off her pearly whites along with her flawless swoops and stretches on the pedal steel. Trusty's hair was blowing back under his hat brim for some unexplainable reason.

And then, too soon, it was all but over. The last song had commenced. Creed caught some movement stage right and glanced that way to find his band manager, Kathy, standing there, looking perfectly, wholesomely gorgeous in a tie-dyed tee knotted around her waist to reveal her midriff above skin-tight, hip-hugging bell-bottoms, her hair falling over her shoulders. He smiled at her, and she took his breath away with the look she gave him.

Just as quickly, though, her expression changed to one of confused surprise as she looked beyond Creed to the left wing of the stage. Curious, Creed turned left and found the source of Kathy's shock. Dixie had come out of her bus in her nightgown—a skimpy one—to see who was rocking the stadium. When she recognized Creed, her mouth dropped open, and it occurred to Creed that Dixie probably had had no idea that he was working with Luster Burnett.

Dixie worked it wickedly. Having picked up on the flirtation between Creed and the gal in the tie-dye and bell-bottoms at stage right, she gave Creed one of those old come-hither looks and actually flashed her left breast at him as she adjusted her nighty. Creed grinned at her gall and shook his head. He knew as well as anyone in the world that she was trouble, and that he should tear his eyes away from her, but damned if she still didn't possess something of a spell over him. He knew it was foolishness, but he caught himself thinking … What if they patched things up? What if Luster and The Pounders toured with Dixie? What if he felt his naked skin pressed against hers again, after several years of separation?

He shook his head as if a bee had stung him and looked away from the shameless Dixie. He looked stage right for Kathy, but it was too late. She didn't play that game. That breathtaking look she had given him before Dixie arrived was gone like a bullet from a hair-triggered gun. Kathy wasn't even looking his way. She was gazing out over the audience, disappointment clear on her pretty face.

What had just happened? Creed had been simply doing his job, living and loving the dream onstage with a kick-ass band. It reminded him of a well-known fact. No matter how tight the music onstage, there would always be trouble waiting in the wings, and it was often disguised as a woman.

 

39

CHAPTER

Back on the old Silver Eagle, the band gathered and passed around cold beers, every member beaming. Metro was going on and on, in Spanish and English, about the size of the crowd and feel of the big stage. Lindsay and Tump were sitting together at the dinette, sharing a cigarette, both unable to erase their grins. Sid looked proud just to be a coattail clinger to the whole experience. Luster couldn't sit down. He slammed beer after celebratory beer, chiming in about the set like one of the kids in his band. Only he and Creed had ever played a stage that large. Trusty just looked relieved.

Kathy was smiling, but still refused to make eye contact with Creed. He tried not to let that bother him. He had done nothing wrong, other than maybe stare a little too long at a scantily clad old flame. What did he care if Kathy got jealous over it? She was off-limits, anyway. It wasn't as if they were going to have a relationship or something.

Someone was pounding on the bus door, so Creed looked out of the window to see Nigel Buttery. He opened the door and let the friendly Brit aboard.

“Nigel!” Luster said. “Well?”