Robots vs. Fairies(92)
Most people will tell you that writing about rock & roll in the middle of the heat death of the universe is questionable work in itself, especially if that gig means you wander the world, leaving your wife and kid alone to deal with the collapse of everything, but rock & roller is a personality type, whether I’m covering the End of Days tours or not. I’m a rotten husband. Tania knew it getting in, and so did I, but I convinced myself I was different, and she convinced herself I could change, and together we managed to raise a six-year-old who is maybe the only kid on Earth who actually likes music at all these days.
I’m back to my full-time cash circuit, the guy who follows the heroes of rock & roll from failing town to failing town writing down their dickwad deeds.
The climate’s been deep-fucked for a few years, and the trees are starting to crack down the centers. Fields are flooded and livestock is dying, and elsewhere on Earth, the sun has started to get too close. Frost on the roses and nobody can tell the seasons apart anymore. We get winter in the middle of summer, fall halfway through spring.
Still, all the old gods of rock remain on tour, their knees aching and their bones shaking. Writing about their shows, I feel like I’m writing about the encores of ghosts. The kids don’t come out for rock & roll anymore. They don’t even come outside. The sky’s a weird color, and those of us with death on the horizon don’t find it freaky, but the young have a problem with the way the air feels when it goes into your lungs, like you’re inhaling scotch. A band that can get anyone under fifty in the audience is an aberration.
Tania’s holed up in our house in Seattle now, growing her usual bower of plants that don’t exist anywhere else. Nothing stops her, not volcanic eruptions, not acid rain. Tania used to be a curly headed sweetheart and now she’s wearing a wig made out of snakes. She’s stopped trying to look like she belongs here.
I owe her money, and so about the time tsunamis and dictators are rising up and flowing over the land, I’m shambling my sorry ass to a gig at a dark club in Chicago to do a write-up on some kids with guitars. Akercock is the band. Obscure Elizabethan reference to Puck. I’ve been around long enough to find that annoying. I have no hope that Akercock will be anything better than the crap I’ve lately been covering. I’m expecting guitars and earnest singers doing the usual songs, one of them with a pretty voice, the rest with a little bit of strut and sin, none of it any real thing.
Instead—
I walk into the club and stop in my tracks, because I’m hearing a howl, a trilling sound echoing over the amps, like the song of some animal I’ve never heard of, and then a moan coming out of the mouth of the lead singer, joined by the rest of the band. Five boys, nobody wearing an air mask, none older than twenty-three. Long-haired skinny-legged cocktails of rage and despair, and like that, I’m typing in my head, writing this shit down.
Akercock’s music is a chilling cousin of every great band you’ve ever gone horizontal to—but it isn’t that, not really. It’s sexy, but also hurts the ears. And mostly, they aren’t singing words you know. They’re howling and whirring, like a flock of predatory birds over a kill, or like wind coming through a window high in a haunted hotel. All this is interspersed with electric guitar, and then the band begins to play in earnest, riffing their way across history. The band is a hard-on in song form. The kind of thing that makes you look behind you, because what’s there? Death. You’re never nineteen again, not once you’ve failed to appreciate it.
I’m hitting fifty and I don’t want to talk about my dick these days. No one else wants to talk about it either, but I have no shame when it comes to writing about bands. I’m not above diagramming my own decline.
The lead singer clings to the microphone like he’s drinking its blood. His eyes flash in the dark, and I find myself thinking about the ’10’s, that band that figured out how to phosphoresce and freaked everyone out. Nobody remembers their songs now. Only that they glowed.
Onstage at the KingKill Club in Chicago, Eron Chaos, the five-octave wailing lead singer of Akercock, looks down at the audience like he’s a rabid fox. His hands are covered in blood, and he shrugs for us all: this is the way it goes, boys. Then he licks his hands clean, a cat fixing up his paws.
That’s the on-the-record part, the part I’m going to write for the magazine. The off-the-record is that the guy’s eyes are golden and wide as a goat’s, and the muscles in his chest move like he’s full of snakes. I can see his heart beating, on both sides, and I get a pang of weirdness. He’s way too good-looking to be anyone who grew up in America. He reminds me of someone else I know, but the world is big and there are plenty of things in it.
The room isn’t empty anymore. Little flocks of groupies wearing one-eighth of nothing, raddled girls who’ve been wandering down the road in need of ecstasy and some kind of sainting. Where did they come from? They showed up without any noise, or maybe I’m just that into the music.
The air’s thick with a smell one part civet cat and one part flooded forest, and Eron Chaos stands shirtless in front of a room now packed full of fans, people throwing themselves at him, parking their cars in the middle of the road and running in. A girl perches on top of the bar and swan dives. The crowd carries her to him.
Immortal, I think, and then shake my head. A trite thought to have about a girl with long hair and a tight white dress standing in front of a boy in leather. The whole thing reminds me of my marriage, that same sense of things I don’t know and never will. It makes my heart feel like it’s leaking lava.