For a few minutes, the crowd seemed to love it. Most of them were still standing, shaking, shouting. One woman up front climbed up on her seat and began to dance. When the Nazgûl got to the first chorus, a hundred voices or so sang out Oooooh, napalm! Oooooh my napalm love! just as thousands had sung it out once at concerts and demonstrations and May Day parades.
Richmond gave it his best, his goddamned best…
Yeah, it’s hot because I love ya!
Oh, it burns because we love ya!
…but even with the audience alive and frenetic and wanting it, even with them ready, even with Maggio playing lead like he hadn’t played in years, even with the bass driving and ominous, even with all the memories on his side, Richmond’s best just wasn’t good enough. Sandy would have been hard put to say exactly when the change began, but begin it did. Slowly, person by person, the audience seemed to realize that it wasn’t Hobbins they were hearing, but a clever plastic simulacrum who couldn’t sing nearly as well. One by one they began to sit down and make themselves comfortable. The second chorus drew a much weaker response. Maggio and Faxon tried hard during the bridge, jamming at each other, laying it down hard and hot as they could, and that seemed to help a little, but only until Richmond began to sing again. The closing chorus was sung by the band, with damn few voices from the crowd helping out. The dancing woman had climbed down off her seat. The applause was healthy, warm, respectful… but tentative somehow.
Now the audience was waiting. Now they weren’t sure anymore.
“And that was one of the old songs,” Sandy said numbly to Ananda. “They’re in trouble.”
“Napalm Love” should have gotten the concert off explosively and pushed the energy level in the hall up several notches, so the Nazgûl followed it with “Sins,” one of the softer of the new songs. It was a bad mistake. The unfamiliar song evoked no memories in the crowd, tugged no emotional chords, and its relative quietness made the deficiencies in Richmond’s Hobbit imitation all that more conspicuous. He did his best, as always, and he still looked a lot like Hobbins up there, he had all the gestures and motions down pat… but the audience was only lukewarm.
Gopher John wasn’t the only one scowling when the number was over; Faxon didn’t look too happy either, and Maggio was already damp with sweat. They went from “Sins” to “Goin’ to the Junkyard,” with its loud, slamming, relentless beat and catchy tagline. Catchy it might have been in theory, but no one in this audience caught it. And that was maybe the best of the new songs, Sandy thought. Standing there in the wings, holding Ananda’s hand, he felt a curious mixture of emotions. Whatever mad dreams Edan Morse might have had about a rock ’n’ roll armageddon were dying there on the stage, and Sandy felt a certain amount of relief at that… yet, at the same time, he found that he was disappointed, more than a little sad.
“Flying Wing” crashed and burned. “Dying of the Light” died, and by then you could actually taste the restlessness in the hall. Everyone was seated. The first Nazgûl concert since 1971, a packed house, and they wouldn’t get out of their goddamned seats; it was almost tragic. The response seemed to weaken with every song the band performed. After “Dying of the Light,” Maggio actually snarled into his microphone, “Hey man, any of you fuckers awake out there? We’re playing some rock, man.”
“No you’re not!” a heckler shouted out.
Faxon gave Maggio a long desperate look. “‘Visions in the Dark,’” he said. That picked things up a little. Gopher John really got into the drum solo, and there were whistles and screams of approval from the house, and Maggio was credible if not inspired on the tricky guitar bits, triggering a few shouts of his own. The applause was a little warmer afterward. But mixed in with it came the voice of the heckler again. “Do the old stuff!” he shouted. A couple of other voices picked up the cry. “Rage for us, Rick!” one kid yelled out, and a woman shouted, “We want the Rag! Give us the Rag!”
Larry Richmond turned around to look at Faxon. Faxon was frowning again. “Anybody out there like cupcakes?” he asked.
No response.
Maggio grinned anyway, and Richmond turned around with a damp, frightened look on his face, and the Nazgûl slammed into “Cupcakes” hard as they could.
“Flop sweat,” Sandy said. “They were going to save ‘Cupcakes’ to open the second set.”
“The natives are restless,” Ananda replied.
“So let ’em eat cake,” Sandy said glumly.
With Maggio singing lead, his voice rasping over Faxon’s pointed lyrics, and with Richmond concentrating everything he had on his guitar playing, and Gopher John almost exploding behind his drums, “Cupcakes” went down pretty well. After Slozewski’s final lingering swell off his cymbals had closed it, a few people even got to their feet, and one voice called out, “Right on, man! Right on, baby!” But there were other voices, too, shouting for old favorites, shouting for “Elf Rock” and “This Black Week” and “Ragin’” and “The Armageddon Rag.”
By then the band was clearly exhausted. “We’re going to take a little break,” Faxon said. “Don’t go away, we’ll be back.” He unslung his bass wearily and headed offstage, followed by the others.
They were snapping at one another by the time they passed Sandy and Ananda. “It’s no fucking good, man,” Maggio was saying loudly to anybody who would listen. “The songs ain’t worth shit, and that little pinhead kid can’t sing. It’s no fucking good.”
Sandy followed them backstage, along with Ananda and about a dozen other people. Faxon chased most of them out of the room with a single semicoherent growl, but he let Sandy and Ananda remain. Gopher John sat down heavily and opened a beer. Maggio fumbled some black pills out of his pocket—three of them—swallowed them, and washed them down with Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle. Larry Richmond just sat staring at his feet, looking as if he wanted to die. Faxon leaned back against the door and regarded them all sourly. “So what are we going to do?” he asked.
“The kid can’t hack it,” Maggio said. “I’ll sing lead, man. Save our fucking ass. You heard ’em when I did ‘Cupcakes,’ they loved it, they fucking loved it.”
“I did my best,” Richmond said. His voice made Sandy think he was about to break into tears. “I thought I sounded pretty good.” Balrog came padding across the room and put his head in Richmond’s lap, and Richmond petted him absently, and smiled a wan smile.
“You tried,” Faxon said, “we all tried. But it’s not working.”
“Let me sing lead,” Maggio repeated.
Faxon rounded on him angrily. “Fuck off, Rick! You can barely remember the backup vocals you’re supposed to be singing, you sure as hell don’t know the lead parts.”
“I know the old songs, man,” Maggio said. “That’s what we oughta be doin’ anyhow, big shot. They liked ‘Napalm Love,’ didn’t they? Bunch o’ friggin’ assholes.” He took another swig from his Jack Daniel’s bottle.
“He’s right,” Gopher John said.
Faxon looked at him in astonishment. “You, too?”
Gopher John scowled. “I don’t like it either, Peter. The new stuff is terrific, yeah, but it ain’t going over. These people came here on account of who we were. We got to give them what they came to hear. That don’t mean we got to drop the new songs entirely. But maybe we ought to introduce them gradually, you know? Not hit them with a whole mess of music they never heard before all at once.”
“Damn it, no,” Faxon said forcefully.
“Mister Faxon,” Richmond said, “I can do the old stuff better. I know I can. I’ve been singing those songs for years, and I studied the way that Hobbit did them, every word, every move. I can come real close, I know I can. The new songs, well, like John says, they’re real good songs and all, but Hobbit never did them so I can’t be sure how I ought to do them, you know?”
Faxon looked at the three of them in turn, and then swung to face Sandy and Ananda. “I know what you think, ’Nanda,” he said. “What’s your opinio
n, Sandy?”
“You won’t like it,” Sandy said reluctantly.
Faxon frowned. “Go ahead.”
“They’re right,” Sandy told him. He hated to say it, knowing how much the new material meant to Faxon, and how badly he wanted to avoid turning the comeback into a nostalgia trip, but it was the truth nonetheless. “I don’t say the old songs would save the show. But they’d help, sure. These people all came here with heads full of memories. They were on your side to start with—”
“Like a fucking bitch in heat,” Maggio said. “I never seen no crowd wanted it so bad, and we blew it.”
“Yeah,” said Sandy. “When you do the old stuff, you remind them of the first time they got laid, maybe, or the time they dropped acid and had this really great trip, or the time they saw you in concert in 1969, or how you sounded on their old stereo the first time they bought your album, or what it was like singing Nazgûl songs at the demonstrations. Evokes good memories. So it helps. The new stuff has to rise or fall as music, and it’s been falling.”
Peter Faxon shoved his hands into his pockets, looking royally pissed. “It looks as though I’m outvoted,” he said. “All right. We’re not going to drop the new material entirely, I won’t stand for that, but we’ll mix it up a little more second set.”
“Who sings lead?” Maggio demanded.
“Larry,” said Faxon. “You’ll open with ‘Ragin’’ and he’ll take it from there.”
“He’ll fuck it up, man, I guaran-fucking-tee it.”
Richmond finally got angry. “Screw you, Maggio,” he said.
Maggio laughed at him. “Whoaaaa,” he said. “I’m scared, look at my knees shake, the little wimp kid is getting his temper up.”
“I ought to…” Richmond started, balling a fist.
Maggio jumped up. “C’mon, kid. Try it. I just want to see you try it.” He sneered.
“Cut it out!” Faxon screamed.
Maggio turned on him. “You gonna make me, big shot? Huh? That it? You gonna make me cut it out? Gonna make me leave the kid alone? What is it, the little queer give you blow jobs when we’re not around, is that it? That why you’re stickin’ up for him, huh?”
Ananda let go of Sandy’s hand and walked between them. She looked straight at Maggio and said, “I’m going to make you cut it out, Rick. Do you want me to call Edan about this?”
“Shit no,” Maggio said. He sat down very suddenly, and picked up the Jack Daniel’s. “No one can take a little fucking joke anymore,” he muttered. “No goddamned sense of humor.”
“Thank you,” Faxon said to Ananda. Sandy was looking at her with a certain amount of astonishment. “Now,” Faxon was saying, “we’ll give them ‘Ragin’’ to start with, and alternate old and new stuff from there. I’m going to talk to Malcolm, up the sound of the instruments a little. The vocals are the weak point, so maybe if we overpower ’em we’ll be all right. We’ll close with ‘Wednesday’s Child.’”
“Wrong,” snapped Maggio. “We wanna get called back for a fucking encore, don’t we? No way that’s gonna happen if we close with the new shit, man.”
“Damn you, Rick—” Faxon began.
Gopher John Slozewski stopped him before he got started. “Take it easy, Peter. I hate to say it, but Maggio’s right. You know he is. Save ‘Wednesday’s Child’ for the encore, if we get one. Close with something they know.”
Faxon looked close to meltdown, but he kept it under control. “All right,” he said helplessly. “What’ll it be, then?”
“The Rag,” Maggio suggested.
“No,” said Faxon. “Too long, too complicated, and we haven’t rehearsed it. We’re not ready for the Rag. Something simpler.”
“How about ‘What Rough Beast’?” Gopher John said.
Faxon thought a moment and nodded wearily. “OK,” he said. “If that doesn’t get them off their asses, nothing will. Can you do it, Larry?”
“Sure,” Richmond said, brightening. “I’ve done it hundreds of times. You ought to call me Pat, though. Mister Morse says that everybody should call me Pat.”
“Fuck Mister Morse,” Maggio said gleefully.
“Get Reynard in here,” Faxon said to Ananda as he collapsed into a chair. “I’ve got to talk to him about the lighting.” She nodded and departed.
It was some twenty minutes when the band returned to the stage. They moved desultorily, and the restive crowd greeted them with scattered polite applause. The house lights went down again, and the Nazgûl spent a moment or two tuning. All of the energy seemed to have drained out of them, except for Maggio, who was wired on speed and grinning like a maniac.
“You know something, suckers?” he growled into the microphone when Faxon had given him the nod. “You assholes made me mad last set!”
A few whoops of pleasure greeted this declaration, and one or two loud voices shouted back the straight line: “How mad are you, Rick?”
“Shit, man,” said Maggio. “I’m positively ragin’!” Slozewski’s sticks stuttered across snares and toms to underline his words, the guitars seized the opening bars angrily, and Maggio ripped into it.
Ain’t gonna take it easy
Won’t go along no more
Tired of getting stepped on
When I’m down here on the floor
The crowd was trying damned hard to have a good time, Sandy thought. At the chorus, a hundred voices screamed out “Ragin’!” A few couples popped out of their seats and started dancing in the aisles, and there were whistles and shouts of encouragement. The Nazgûl seemed to feed on it. The music picked up, and Maggio sounded madder and madder as he plunged on. His Telecaster roared with anguish and frustration, with the helpless desperate rage that ran through every line of the song.
Sandy could feel it filling him, inflaming him. “That’s good,” he said to Ananda, loud enough to be heard over the music. “That sounds almost like the old Nazgûl.” She nodded agreement.
The crowd felt it, too. More of them were up now, and when the Nazgûl hit the second chorus, half the audience raged along with Rick. He sneered at them, as he had sneered in the old days; he sneered and sweated and his fingers tortured the strings of his guitar and he spat poison at them, at all of them, at all the world. And they loved it! The roar that greeted the final chorus was deafening, overwhelming even the music pouring through the stack of huge amplifiers. Maggio ended the song with a primal scream, guitars screaming along with him, Slozewski’s drums exploding into an orgasm of hard-driven sound, the lights flashing red to white to red to white to red to white in a strobelike fury, and the crowd ate it up. The applause went on and on, and there were shouts of “Yeah, man!” and “Do it!” and things less intelligible, mixed with more whistles and foot-stomping. For one song, at least, the Nazgûl had broken through, and the audience was with them again.
Maggio was drenched when he finished, his tee shirt turned a darker shade of red under the arms, and all down the chest in a wide V, but he was smiling. Faxon was less sure of the victory. He licked his lips nervously, and he and Gopher John laid down a real heavy bottom on bass and drums to lead into “Dogfood.”
Before the song was half over, the hall was dead again. Sandy stood there and watched it die, watched the dancers find their seats, watched the gap between listeners and performers yawn ever larger. The Nazgûl could see it, too. You could read it on their faces. Larry Richmond looked as though he might break down at any moment, but somehow he staggered to the end of the song. There were a few catcalls mixed in with the weak applause.
From then it went from bad to worse.
Even Peter Faxon had had enough; he abandoned the new material entirely after “Dogfood” and tried to win back the affections and enthusiasm of the house with the safe stuff, the old familiar hits. He called for “Elf Rock” next, the very first Nazgûl smash, off of Hot Wind out of Mordor, a silly bubble-gum sort of song that Faxon had come to hate despite its popularity, or maybe because of it, but Richmond couldn’t summon up enough
innocent teenaged bounce to do the song justice, and “Dogfood” had left him so shook that he actually screwed up and forgot an entire verse on “Elf Rock.” The others covered for him, but the audience knew the song, and they shouted out their disappointment. Lots of booing afterward.
“This Black Week” had been the big hit off the Black Album; it was a long song, nearly ten minutes long on the album and often twice that when the Nazgûl did it live. It had seven distinct parts, a different sound and color for every day of the week, opening with an almost dolorous beat and a wash of glum blue illumination and Larry Richmond singing:
Monday is a blue day, baby, Monday is the pits
Once it would have been a sure crowd-pleaser, but not with Richmond singing the Hobbins part. Sandy noticed a couple leaving during Wednesday, and a few more people drifting out by the time the Nazgûl got to Saturday.
When that sad endless week had ended, Sandy could look at the Nazgûl and taste their despair. Larry Richmond stood like a lost little kid, his red denim and black silk a pathetic mask that couldn’t disguise what a fraud he was. Maggio was still sweating and looking miserable, too conscious of his flab to remove his shirt. Instead he took something from his pocket and swallowed it. Gopher John slumped over his drums wearily, like a man who’d rather be off somewhere in a pin-striped suit, hobnobbing with his fellow Chamber of Commerce members. And Peter Faxon was in pain. It was no use. Faxon decided to cut short the agony, no doubt, and called for “What Rough Beast” to close the debacle.
The clean, searing acid of the opening licks came over wavery and halfhearted. The drums plodded when they should have pounded. Larry Richmond sang the opening lyric in a high, strained voice.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
And Faxon, Maggio, Slozewski chorused:
He’s coming!
And Richmond said:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
And again the Nazgûl promised:
He’s coming!
Richmond frowned down at his guitar, coaxed a building counterpoint out of it to follow Maggio’s lead, tossed back his white hair, sang: