Rock All Night(18)

Forgot you were gone

Just for a second

I screamed your name

I never heard nothin’

I screamed again

And I’m still waitin’

For you to scream right back



The familiar words – You’re the One, you say you’re not… I screamed your name, I never heard nothin’ – pricked at my heart like a needle. It was an angry song, a lashing out – a driving, violent, head-banging tune.

It was also one of their more ambiguous songs, in that I had never been totally sure it was about me. Now, in light of my conversation in the bar with Derek, and then in the penthouse with the band, I was almost positive it was.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Although… if it had been about some other girl, some other woman who had inspired such rage and pain… I think I might have been insanely jealous.

The album version was great.

The live version was unbelievable.

Riley was a force of nature, slamming into the drums with everything she had, eyes closed and face contorted in violent ecstasy.

Killian kept the same notes as the song, but he played with them, throwing in tiny variations, minute changes. Like the Grateful Dead, Bigger allowed – in fact, encouraged – bootlegging at their concerts. And since the set list was never the same, with new covers of songs every night, fans uploaded and spread the music obsessively. There were legions of fans – kind of like Phish’s, or the Grateful Dead’s back in the day – who just followed them around from city to city, because every performance was guaranteed to be composed of at least a third new material.

And Killian was a big part of that. His control was precise – except when he didn’t want it to be. He could be sloppy and ragged when the music demanded it, or razor-sharp or feather-delicate as the situation called for. And right now he was a tornado of sound, the soul of rage itself pulled out of metal guitar strings.


Ryan was a lot less flashy, but powerful nonetheless. That whole special bond between him and Riley? It might have come from their relationship onstage, because he wove the bass in like dark, thick liquid between the solid crashes of her drums. It was a dance between the two of them, and if Riley’s eyes were open, she was looking at Ryan, the two of them communicating in some sort of telepathic fever dream.

The song built to a screaming crescendo, and twenty thousand voices howled the final lines:



I said I forgot

I could never forget

When you left

I will NEVER forget



And then they rode the high directly into another song, a cover of ‘When The Levee Breaks’ – originally a blues song, but made famous by Led Zeppelin on the record Derek had once told me was the greatest rock album of all time.

Riley thrashed away at the drums like she was demon-possessed, her body arching back unnaturally and then propelling her forward as she lashed out with her drumsticks. In Led Zeppelin’s version, there’s a harmonica part – not cutesy, folksy harmonica, but a ragged, blistering wail. Killian mimicked it on his guitar. It didn’t sound like a harmonica anymore, but something supernatural, like a banshee screaming in hell. Mike played the regular guitar part until the harmonica solo let up, and then Killian took back over.

Where Robert Plant’s version was high-pitched, Derek’s was deep and violent, an ugly bare-knuckles brawler of a rendition. And somehow Ryan’s bass tied it all together, giving the song a sludgy, dirty, nasty edge.

The song seemed to puzzle most of the women in the pit, but it got a huge reaction from another core component of the band’s audience: the 70’s and hard-rock freaks, the dude-bros and metalheads. It was weird seeing them out there amongst all the Barbie dolls who had come for their Sex God; there were a few guys in the pit, but mostly they seemed to congregate back on the floor under a hazy cloud of what was probably pot smoke, thrashing their heads in time to Riley’s assault on the drums.

Without pausing, the band launched into another song – one of their own hits, ‘If There’s A Next Time.’ It was a slower ballad, and all the female fans were shrieking again, crying, screaming, as Derek strolled right along the edge of the stage, taunting them with his body, seducing them with his voice.

Only after “Next Time” did they break and speak directly to the audience – the normal “Hello Los Angeles!” patter, though Killian put his own unique spin on it by holding up his lit doobie and saying softly into a microphone, “I must say, your city is lovely, especially its world-class choice of fine herbage.”

The entire crowd roared, although the loudest voices came from the dude-bros in the back.

I glanced over at Casey and Mara. Mara laughed; Casey just seemed confused.

I noticed Ryan looking a little annoyed over by Riley’s drum set.

“Don’t worry, though, police and other assorted authority figures; it’s medicinal,” Killian said quite seriously, which got another roar of laughter.

“What condition are you treating, exactly?” Derek asked him. “Glaucoma?”

“No. Poor dentistry. I am, after all, British,” Killian said with a straight face, which set the crowd off again – and which was its own little joke, since Killian had perfectly fine teeth as far as I could tell.

They launched into song after song, covering all their hits, plus ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ by the Kinks, ‘Been Caught Stealing’ by Jane’s Addiction, and ‘No Leaf Clover’ by Metallica, with Killian somehow subbing in convincingly for half the San Francisco Symphony.