Rock All Night(17)

“You doin’ alright there, man?” Derek grinned. “You’re lookin’ a little green.”

“Screw you,” Ryan said good-naturedly.

“What?” I asked, not sure what the joke was.

“I get serious stage fright before every show. And he – ” Ryan pointed at Derek. “ – loves to rub it in. Does it every time.”

“It’ll be fine… twenty thousand people, tops… piece ‘a cake,” Derek said with faux sincerity.

“If I vomit, I’ll make sure to do it on you.”

“Puke on Riley, not me. I think she’s into that sort of shit.”

“Fuck all y’all,” Riley shouted from her seat, where she was still seated with her eyes closed as she continued to play her invisible drums.

Miles suddenly appeared at the mouth of the room. “It’s show time, ladies and gents!”

Derek looked at me and flashed me that heart-stopping grin. “You ready?”

“…I guess.”

He jerked his head. “Let’s go, then.”





13




The first thing I heard was the roaring. It was like the pounding of the ocean surf, but made out of human voices.

As we cleared the concrete tunnel, I could see the spotlights flashing out in the darkness – just quick glimpses of them, interrupted by the framework of the stage.

Ryan’s family was waiting by the exit. Casey looked like she was about to pee, she was so excited. Mara was trying to be cool, but she was hopping up and down just a centimeter, like she wanted to jump but was holding it back. Ryan hugged his parents – said “Don’t worry, they’ll be fine” to his very worried mother – and then his parents departed, and a bald security guard fell in lockstep with us as Mara and Casey joined the group.

We made it to the wings of the stage when a group of crew guys handed Ryan his bass and plugged some kind of a transmitter into Killian’s guitar.

Suddenly a voice reverberated over the speakers.

“AND NOW… GIVE IT UP… FOR… BIGGEEEEEERRRR!”

The pounding surf of voices became a massive roar, punctuated with screams.

Casey, Mara, the guard, and I all halted at the edge of the giant proscenium that divided the sides from the main stage. The rest of the band kept on going. Killian walked out first and immediately became a black silhouette against the spotlights. His fingers were still moving over the strings – but now they were transmuted into sound: a playful, rocked-out version of the 20th Century Fox fanfare. If you’ve ever watched Star Wars, it’s the music that plays just before the actual movie music kicks in. He was ripping across the strings, distorting the sound into ugly noise to mimic drums: ba-da-da-DUNH-DUNH. ba-da-da-DUNH-DUNH. Du-du-du-du-du-DUNH-DUNH. And then he let loose in a Jimmy Henrix-inspired wail that was astonishingly like the trumpets in the fanfare.

It was pretty awesome.

The crowd certainly thought so, because the roaring notched up a good ten decibels.

Riley was right behind him. Under the glare of the lights, her pale skin and mostly-white wifebeater turned her into a glowing angel – albeit a very strange one, with that two-foot tall mohawk.

She immediately flipped off the crowd with both hands, and they thundered their approval.

As she got behind her drums on a riser, Ryan and Mike the backup guitar player strolled out and waved. The female voices got a little bit louder, a little bit more enthusiastic.

Just before he walked on, Derek turned, looked back at me, lowered his sunglasses – and gave me a wink.

My heart skipped a beat.

And then he stepped out into the maelstrom.

The whole place went absolutely nuts.

Thousands and thousands of women shrieked so loudly that the bass roar of the crowd almost disappeared beneath the high-pitched screaming. It was like those old black-and-white clips of teenage girls losing their minds over Elvis or the Beatles – except it was right in front of me, in color, in real life. The spotlights panned over the pit in front of the stage, and it was eighty percent women – teenagers and twenty-somethings, a sea of slender arms and hands reaching up in a wave towards Derek, hands and fingers clutching the air for him, seeking to pull him under if they could.

Riley suddenly counted off the beat, her voice the only decipherable one above the caterwauling as she clacked the sticks over her head.

“One – Two – THREE – FOUR!”

The drums and bass and Killian’s electric guitar all crashed into being at once, a tidal wave of sound as they launched into “Forgot You Were Gone,” their most recent number-one single, and probably the hardest rocking song amongst their hits. Derek’s voice growled after the intro, and he hurtled towards the crowd, stopping just short of the edge as hundreds of female arms reached over the lip of the stage, trying to touch him, to possess him.

Casey and Mara jumped up and down a few feet away from me and screamed along with the words:



Could’ve been

A night of sin

But now you’re gone

I guess you win

But I’m not holding back



You’re the One

You say you’re not

Heart like ice

Body so hot

But I will never hold back