Oh, I'm sure they'll telling the truth when they swear up and down they saw it all, but that's just their heads piecing together all their impressions after the fact. The brain tries to make sense of stuff that doesn't even make sense, you know. It fills in pieces, links things that had nothing to do with each other. And that's what most people's stories are going to be. All they did was hear the sound, see the blood, feel the panic, and then start to run as Gary just never got up.
I can say that I know the truth of what really happened because the horn section is the invisible eyes and ears of every band. We see all, but no one sees us. Think about it; when was the last time you were at a show, watching a great live band, and ever noticed the three-man horn section? Oh, one of them will step out and do a solo once in a while, if they're lucky, but the rest of the time we're just part of the wash of background, as engaging as a light pattern on the backdrop.
And that's the thing -- we're *supposed* to be unobtrusive. We hit the stings, punch the buttons, and stay out of the way the rest of the time. It's not that I'm knocking the gig... After all, I wouldn't want to be the one out in front, getting the full force of all that energy pouring in from a live audience. Sometimes I wonder how, when things are really cooking and hitting on all cylinders, that Gary's head didn't just pop right off.
Of course, that was until the night it basically did. Look, none of us going into that night's show had any illusions about things between Gary and Neal being okay. Gary, that's our singer and bassist, and Neal was lead guitar. He was also the main songwriter, which actually started out as a great dynamic. Gary would stand at the front mic every night, soaking up the love and catching the inevitable pair(s) of panties, and Neal would hang back, tearing it up with his electric axe in ways that mostly went over everyone's heads.
Honestly, when I first latched onto the tour, I thought that was how Neal wanted it. I thought he was one of those geniuses who's happy to prop up a front man who can bear the brunt of all the vibes pouring in from two to three thousand souls loving you all at once. And the main story in the music media was just that... Gary was the flash, Neal the substance. Ever since Lennon and McCartney, the world loves dichotomies like that, two synergistic souls who balance each other perfectly. Together, they were Lifeblood, destined to go down in history as one of the late great Eighties best glam-metal bands... but I guess that's not going to happen now. Or if it does happen, it will be for the wrong reasons.
Because, like most things are in the entertainment biz, everything was great until it wasn't. It's surprising what folks are able to overlook when there's money raining down, but the tour was winding down, and Gary had started publicly grumbling about the fact that Neal had come to him with *zero* song ideas for the next album, and Neal... well, he was just Neal. He started retreating even more than usual. We all just assumed he was spending all his time in his tour bus (the two of them hadn't shared one since the early days) doubling down on his musical geniusness and cranking out his next masterpiece.
After what seemed like a perfectly gimcrack show two days ago, Telly seemed particularly tense. Telly is our trumpet player, always standing on my left, trying to avoid the occasional exuberant side-whip of my trombone slide. I sat down with him near the craft table, both of us coming down off the second encore's typical adrenaline high, but he seemed like he was more jazzed than usual. So I asked him what was up.
"Didn't you see that look?" he asked, and I had to admit that I had no idea what he was talking about. "Neal... when Gary was announcing 'Or Someone Like You', he was just standing there outside of the spotlight. I could just tell that he was staring at the back of Gary's head, and then he turned around our way, and there was this hateful *look* on his face..."
"Hold on," I started. I knew our current livelihood was based on the tour finishing, and wanted to make sure that Telly wasn't just imagining things. "What makes you say hateful?"
The question seemed to take Telly by surprise. "I don't know, I just... it was there, plain as day."
That was when Maria leaned in, her sax still slung around her neck, and yelped, "It's the drugs, I tells ya! The druuuugs!" This was typical of when she decided to interject herself into a conversation she hadn't yet been a part of. This instance actually happened to make a little more conversational sense than most.
She drew back a little when Telly shot back at her, barely holding back fury, "I'm *trying* to talk to Barrett! Do you mind!" I have to admit, I jumped a little too. I hadn't seen Telly lose his cool, ever.
"Sorry! Jeez!" Maria said, throwing up her hands, trying to turn her apology into a joke. Then she put her mouth on her reed and played a descending chromatic scale as she backed away. Soon it was just me and the coronet player again.
Telly was looking at the floor a little ways ahead of us, his brow furrowed, thinking hard. "They're going to break up, I can tell. Sooner instead of later. Just make sure you keep enough of your walking money socked away so you can get a bus ticket home if you have to."
After that, I thought the best way to get to the bottom of the situation was to talk to Neal. We spent that night en route to the next city, but in a rare scheduling occurrence, the guys had no press to do during the day. We all ended up with a free afternoon, so I took it as a chance to reach out. Not that I was totally on board with Telly's paranoia, but I did want to see if I could suss out some unrest. If nothing else, I could then put my fellow hornsman's mind at ease. (Although I did do what he said and resolved not to spend any more of my per diem money than I needed to, in case the tour went bust... can't blame a guy for being cautious).
Neal had taken to staying pretty much on his tour bus until right before sound check, and then ducking back in as soon as the applause died. No one knew what he was doing in there, but only because no one seemed to want to be the one to go check. I suppose they were afraid of what they might find, or didn't want to be the one to interrupt the genius if he happened to be at work on the next hit song that would keep us all flush for another year.
I had been on Neal's bus before, and while I might have been under the influence of something or other on all those occasions, I certainly didn't remember it being like *this*. It was like the guy had scooped up the rubble of a bombed-out guitar store and dumped all over the inside. It was all disembodied strings, frets and pickups strewn across every horizontal surface. I wasn't even entirely sure where the guy could have slept.
"Hey, Neal," I said, gingerly pushing aside a pair of guitar necks that were hung from the ceiling close to the door. I felt like I was entering some kind of madman's lab, or sacrificial temple, here to see the crazed genius at work.
"Hm? Oh, hey. Come on in, Barrett." The voice came from somewhere near the back, from what appeared to be a melting pile of electronics. Fortunately, he turned out to be right behind it, although it appeared that he was actively burning things with a small soldering iron, trying to Frankenstein some unrelated musical instrument parts together.
I had my spiel all planned out. "There were a bunch of us going to go out and hang at this place nearby that we heard about," I said. "I knew that you-- " (not "you and Gary", just "you") -- "didn't have any press to do, so I thought I'd see if you wanted to join us."
Instead of looking up, Neal merely shifted his head up a little from what he was doing. "I appreciate that, man, I really do," he said, sounding perfectly rational, and immediately followed it with, "Here, come and take a look at this." He very well might not have heard what I was saying to him.
I skirted around the pile of mechanical parts he had surrounded himself with and tried to get as close as I could. If he thought I would be able to understand what he was doing from just looking, he was mistaken. Something to do with circuit boards and chips and those little candy-looking things with tiny multicolored bands around them. "What you working on there?" I asked, wondering how much of the soldering fumes he was breathing in. They were starting to make my eyes tear up.
"Did you know," he said, never stopping his work, "that music is the oldest form of communication? Older than written language, older even than spoken language?"
I'd never heard that before, and had been hoping for more emotionally revealing small talk, but it seemed like it would be best to play along for now. "Sure," I said. "That makes sense. It must go all the way back to the first time someone bashed rocks together just because they liked the sound of it."
Neal still didn't look at me, kept at the electronic abomination he was working on, but seemed to perk up. "Do you ever wonder when the first time was that music made someone... feel something?"
He was losing me, but fortunately he didn't seem to expect me to say anything, because he barreled right on. "When did someone first make someone sad with a musical sound they had made? Or the first time they made someone angry? Or turned on? Or did it to hurt them?"
I was about to ask what he meant by that, but then I had a mental flash of someone dragging their nails down a chalkboard, and understood. "There was always a first time," he said. "And I think if there's anything the world is missing right now, it's firsts. Sometimes I have to ask if there's anything left out there that hasn't been done. Maybe music has run out of things it can do. I hate to think it, but maybe it's true."
I tried to square what Neal was babbling about with what he was doing on the workbench -- by this time, I had figured out that he had laid his instruments across some kind of tray table across a bunk, which he was currently sitting on. Being a hornsman myself, I can't say that I really know what's going on inside the electric doodads that professional guitarists are endlessly tweaking and stomping on, but I knew enough to tell that Neal was working on some kind of pedal contraption. You know, the kind that makes the guitar play some kind of effect once they're depressed? He had it upside down and with its guts out, but at least that much I could tell. He was trying to jimmy some kind of circuit board inside the plastic housing, but it was a little too big to fit. What he seemed to be attempting was to soften the housing with the heat of the soldering iron, enough so that he could bend it and gain that extra eighth of an inch that he needed.
He was talking all the while, too. "The only thing music can't do, as far as I know, is take on a physical form. Like a force, something that can move real objects around. Imagine that, right? Like a symphony that could assemble a building as it was played... but you have to start small. Maybe just a few atoms at a time, at first. Just enough to put a thought in someone's head. Or take one out, maybe. Like a transplant. Of course, you'd have to be careful not to change *too* much... But who knows what else you could do? What do you think?"
To be honest, I had been so fascinated by watching Neal actually succeeding in the physical process he was undertaking that I absorbed the words he was saying, without understanding them. To show empathy, I parroted some of them back: "Start small, sure. Build up to the big stuff... Say, Neal, what's that thing actually going to do?"
He stopped working, as if realizing for the first time that he wasn't working in complete privacy. I watched the tattoos on his upper back stiffen along with the muscles, their lines turning suddenly rigidly geometric. He paused for a while, and when his voice returned, it was notably cagey. "New effect for an upcoming show. Keep an ear out for it, it'll... be really impressive. I think. You'll have to stop by after the show and tell me what you thought."
The plasticky smoke in the bus suddenly seemed thicker than it had before, and I felt sudden pressure in my bladder. "So, how about coming out with us?" I asked again, barely managing to remember my pretense for coming in here.
"Nah, thanks," Neal said, his voice back to normal. "I want to make sure this device gets tested. But bring me back an order of onion rings from wherever, okay?"
I left the bus not knowing that Neal's next gig would be his last. But I did bring him the onion rings; a burly security guard had been posted outside his tour bus by then, and said he'd pass them on. Could have sworn I heard him crunching on one as I walked away, though.
---
"Thankth for the thuthenanth, thuckers!" Maria crowed as she snatched up a bottled smoothie off the end of the craft table and sped away, legs flailing like a Muppet.
Telly and I just looked at each other. We were long past thinking that Maria's nonstop antics were funny, but he did manage to acknowledge it by nodding at me and intoning like a game show host, "That word was 'sustenance'... 'sustenance'."
I had only just managed to breach the subject of talking to Neal when Maria had interrupted us, so I picked up from the same spot. "So Neal's in his bus, building some new kind of gear. He didn't seem angry," I said, "just very... intent. Is that maybe what you saw?"
Telly looked up from the table, from which he was assembling what promised to be a truly epic deli sandwich. "Not exactly. Look, maybe you're right, it was probably nothing at all."
Maybe it says more about my state of mind than anything else, but that statement reminded me of what Neal had said amid his ramblings, about the possibility that music could move physical objects. Because I felt like all of Telly's interest had been transferred to me. Or maybe I had siphoned it off without realizing. But then again, he hadn't seen the pedal contraption the guitarist was working on.
"No," I insisted, "I think you're on to something. He seemed kind of obsessed with that tech project."
While apparently contemplating which of the three mustards to slather on the monstrosity he had built, Telly muttered, "If the guy wants to build a new rig for himself, what do I care? As long as he doesn't stop writing horn figures into his songs..."
It was no use. Telly had led me down the path, and was now refusing to follow where it led. That was fine. I'd figure it out on my own. I was mulling over what my next move should be through that afternoon's sound check, with my eyes firmly rooted on the back of Neal's head. But he made no unusual moves, which is why I didn't feel a burning need to say anything to him before the show. I was so intent on watching him that I didn't see the oversized pedal until we were into the concert's third song.
Just like everyone else, I'd love to say that what happened next was an accident. And like I said at the start of my admittedly long-winded and rambling tale, anyone who saw it rearranged the deck chairs in their own minds enough so that they believe it. Except for me, and I can't really blame it all on the fact that I was seeing it from my unique angle back on the horn dais. It was because I had seen what Neal was working on in his bus that afternoon, and the fact that the contraption was now sitting right next to his foot, and probably had been from the very start of the show.
I don't know what caused the bad blood between Gary and Neal, I honestly don't. But I think even the most clueless person there that night, jacked up on the glam-rock testosterone, could have sensed it. It seemed like every time Gary headed over to Neal's part of the stage, to lean on him during a guitar solo, or to playfully run circles around him to the delight of the crowd, Neal wouldn't have it. He would back away, wedge himself into a tight space between the taller amps, so that Gary physically couldn't get to him. Was he trying to silently warn Gary, I sometimes have to wonder? Or was he trying to keep his distance?
And then there's the darkest part of me that considers this: perhaps distance was a crucial part of what Neal planned to do. Or maybe he wasn't entirely sure of what he had prepped. Maybe, just maybe, this was all an experiment to him, and he wanted to see just how far his pedal effect could reach. Because, you see, I had been mulling over his incoherencies for hours, and one little bit of it had stuck in my craw. "Start small..." he had said. "Just enough to put a thought in someone's head..."
I started watching Neal like a hawk at that point, from my spot between Telly and Maria, as we stood on our raised dais near the back of the stage. By that point in the tour, my muscle memory was so ingrained that my hands probably could have been chopped off and they'd still come in on time every time, so I could pay close attention. And what I saw was very different from what the official story came to be that night.
First of all, Neal set that water bottle down there. Yes, it was Gary's, and Gary did kick it over early on in "Or Someone Like You", but only because Neal had swigged from it between songs, and set it there. It was clearly outside the circular holder near the monitor that kept it out of the way and in a generally not-knocked-over state. But I think the timing for that was to make sure that water on the stage would be noticed afterward. And it kind of locked Neal in to his plan too; if he had waited until the next song, roadies would have had time to notice, come out and clean it up.
Second of all, there was the sound that infernal pedal actually made when Neal activated it. I was watching his foot the entire time, and he stepped on it right in the brief interval between the last note of the second guitar solo, and the triumphant power chord that signaled the reprise of the chorus. Until this point, Gary had been doing the shtick he always did during the instrumental parts of the concert, dashing around interacting with the other musicians before he had to come back in. He would unfailing wait until the very last second, when he had to barrel back to the microphone stand to start belting his part again.
This was usually his m.o., and this night was not a notable exception. Except this time, when Gary grabbed the mic stand at the end of his dramatic slide back into lead vocal mode, I saw Neal's foot press -- lightly, almost daintily -- on the pedal I had seen him constructing. At the same moment, his plectrum went slamming across all six strings, while he casually swung the neck of the guitar in Gary's direction.
Immediately, Gary's vocals cut out, swinging up through the notes into the ultrasonic range as his vocal chords clamped together, his head cocked to one side, and he slumped to the floor, as if all his bones had instantly been vaporized.
It took a few seconds, and there was time enough for me to see Neal lift his foot off his new effect pedal, before people realized that Gary hadn't slipped, or thrown himself to the floor in a theatrical pratfall. Halfway through the second line of the chorus, Neal stopped playing. He didn't rush over to his compatriot's side, just stopped strumming and turned to look at where his partner had fallen.
Brandy and Tanya, the backup singers, were the first to rush to Gary's side. By this time the rest of the band had abandoned the song, and an excited, frantic hush had fallen over the audience. Tanya was the first to scream, after having reached Gary first, rolled him onto his back, and seen the blood streaming from every part of his face.
That scream spread like the sound waves it was made of, rolling out over the crowd, picking up new notes as the audience joined in, and bouncing back at us until the stage was awash in horrified tones of anguish. Telly and Maria jumped down off our little dais, and rushed forward to see if they could help. Neal hadn't moved, and neither had I. I wanted to see what he was going to do next.
He did nothing, so I did nothing. But everyone else in the place was in motion: security guards were rushing in from the sides of the stage, knocking aside band members who were coming forward to see what had happened to their singer; the auditorium crowd was backing away from the stage like a single, screaming amoeboid mass, so quickly that the empty first row of seats became exposed like bared teeth within instants; the doors at the back burst open and let in searing points of outer-world light before the house lights were suddenly cranked to ten as someone hit the emergency alarm. Through all this I stood stock still and looked down at Neal, who seemed to be the only person not jostled by security and emergency teams as they piled onto to the stage. All the security people had parted around him like an inrushing sea.
He looked down at his guitar, as if puzzled, but made no move to get over to Gary. Not that he would have made it because of the growing crowd, but I was still confused as to why he wasn't trying. Then a surprisingly conscientious guard hooked him by the arm and whisked him off stage, which made no sense to me until after I realized that only Neal and I knew what had just happened...
The official cause of death was deemed electrocution, the combination of spilled water and poorly grounded mic stand. We weren't even fully evacuated from the venue when the word came down; I suspect that so many people had burst out into the auditorium's surrounding streets in the mad panic that followed Gary's sudden, tragic death that it was safer for us to stay indoors, for the time being. So I ended up sitting in a back hallway, one so narrow that I could prop both my back and feet up on opposing walls, with Telly and Maria simiarly slumped nearby.
Maria, of course, was the one to break the silence, delivering her bon mot quietly, barely above a whisper: "Well, *that* didn't go very well." The clacking of her sax keys was the only sound, as her fingers compulsively ran through scales just for something to do.
Now that he wasn't the first to, Telly could speak up. "What the hell just happened?" he asked, to no one in particular. I certainly wasn't going to be the one to tell him, so the silence drew out, the echo of his voice caroming around in the tiny hallway. Then, as if it were news, "I had a feeling something was going to happen."
My head sprang up, seeing an opportunity to get an answer from him. "Didn't you say something about that the other day?" I asked. "A look you saw on Neal's face or something?"
"Huh," Telly said, and then his face turning to confusion. "There was something I thought I saw... but now I can't remember what it was."
"A look," I said. "You said you saw a weird look on Neal's face."
When Telly turned his eyes to me, there was absolutely no recognition in his eyes at all.
"When did I say that?" he asked.
"Just the day before yesterday. We were coming off stage..." My voice trailed off, because the look on his face told me that the particular memory had totally escaped him. And fast on the heels of that, I thought: did it escape, or was it removed?
"Start small," Neal had said. "Just enough to put a thought in someone's head. Or take one out, maybe." And for the first time, I considered that maybe I hadn't seen Neal putting his pedal together for the first time. Maybe he had already done that, and tested it to make someone forget something. What I saw was him taking something that had been proven to work, and juicing it up. Turning it up to eleven, you might say.
("Of course, you'd have to be careful not to change *too* much. But who knows what else you could do?")
That's when I got up and walked away. I must have been moving a little faster than usual, because I heard Maria's muted, halfhearted solo strains of "Yakety Sax" following me.
If all these mental skeins were getting properly woven together, I was starting to see one hella thick rope forming. And it boiled down to this: Neal had killed Gary, with music. The very thing that supposedly brought them together in the first place. And while the world will continue to think it was some kind of accident, I believe I know better.
Which is why I've gone into the communal dressing room and am talking into this portable cassette recorder. I want a record of it, just in case. Because I realize that I'm again in a unique place, but this time a moral one: Gary asked me to come see him after the show, and I think I know what that means. I think he has realized that he said too much about what his new sound can do, and figures he can wipe my memory so that I'm just in the dark as anyone else.
He's already done it to Telly, so he clearly knows how to do it. I think what he did to Gary was a matter of scale, or volume, or whatever the hell you want to call it. Gary and I have always been cool, and I doubt even he wouldn't be able to explain his way out of a second musician that dropped dead in his presence in one night. So it really just boils down to me and what I want...
Do I want to know what I know? If you knew something this terrible, and someone gave you an off-ramp, a way to *un-know*, would you take it? All I have to do is throw this tape in the trash, or stomp it under a heel, and I have that opportunity. For real. So now... I'm just going to sit here until I decide...
[Seventy-three seconds of tape hiss follows, then a click]
