Rock All Night(73)

“When I was a boy.”

“What age?”

“Five, I think.”

I waited.

He just looked back at me placidly.

“Killian – ” I warned him.

He sighed, resigned. “Me grandpop had a bunch of old 45s. You know, the little records? Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters. He was in a band back in the ‘60’s, back when the Stones were comin’ up, and back then they were all into the blues, so that’s what he had mostly. I used to sit in front of the record player and just listen to ‘em, over and over. I was obsessed. And so I asked for a guitar for my birthday. Didn’t get it. Said I was too little, hands wouldn’t fit right. And I basically said bollocks to that, and I nicked 20 quid from me mum’s pocketbook – it was payday, I remember that – and I walked down to the pawnshop and I said, ‘I want a guitar.’ And the pawn broker gave me the most rubbish one you’ve ever seen. Acoustic. Looked like somebody’d taken a hatchet to it, but I was so f*ckin’ proud of it. Took it back home and hid it in the attic where nobody would look for it.

“A few days later me mum figured out who stole her money, and asked me what it was for. I was afraid she’d make me take the guitar back if I told, so I said it was for sweets. She said that was a hell of a lot of sweets, and where were they. I couldn’t think of anything, so I told her I gave them all away to my friends. So she thrashed my hide, but at least I got to keep the guitar.

“Anytime I was alone – which was quite a bit, actually – I snuck up to the attic and plugged away at it. Basically taught myself to play. I would ask street musicians how to do such and such, and they would laugh and show me, and then I would go back to the attic and practice what they showed me, and that’s how I learned.

“Then one day me mum found the guitar, and brought it out and asked, ‘Where’d you get this,’ and I said, ‘I bought it.’ And she said, ‘Where,’ and I said, ‘The pawn shop.’ And she said, ‘With what,’ and I didn’t answer her. And she said ‘Tell me or I’m goin’ to give you a beatin’,’ so I said, ‘With that money I nicked and said was for sweets.’ She got all angry at me, tellin’ me how she was going to go back to the pawn shop and sell back the guitar – until I yelled, ‘But I can play it.’ And she said, ‘No you can’t, you’re too little,’ and I said, ‘Yes I can.’ So she gave me the guitar and I played it for her. It was bloody awful, though I guess it wasn’t too bad for a five-year-old who taught himself to play. And Mum was gobsmacked. She started crying, and after that she bought me a proper guitar, and she found a fellow round the way who was in a band, and he gave me lessons, and that was that, as they say.”


The way he recounted the story in his lilting accent was charming. I could imagine a five-year-old Killian defiantly standing up to his mother, desperate to keep his guitar.

Ryan looked at him strangely. “I never knew that.”

Derek looked in the rearview mirror. “Neither did I.”

Killian sighed, exasperated. “I’m giving up all my secrets today, apparently.”

And he did. I grilled him for the entire car ride, finding out when he had joined his first band (he was 14 – everybody else in the band was 17 and 18, but they let him in because he was ten times better than any of them). I found out when he had started smoking pot (14 again – he was introduced to it by his fellow band members). I found out that he was an only child, that his father had died when he was a baby, and that his mother had raised him by herself with help from her parents.

Plus I heard a host of colorful stories about Miles.

They had met when Killian was 24 and did some session recording for a band that Miles was managing. Apparently Miles was every bit as scary back then, too. No one knew where he’d gotten the scar on his face, but he had it when Killian met him. It was rumored that he’d gotten into a knife fight with a thug who ran a venue and cheated one of Miles’ bands out of their cut of the door proceeds. Miles got thirty stitches; the thug got two weeks in the hospital.

“But that’s just a rumor,” Killian said.

“Do you believe it, though?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said seriously.

It was funny – over and over again, Derek and Ryan would exclaim, “I didn’t know that.” Apparently it wasn’t just me; Killian was extremely reserved with everyone around him. But he kept to his promise, and answered every question I posed him.

The one thing I couldn’t pin him down on was his romantic history. He hemmed and hawed, and would only admit to ‘seeing some bird named Lucy’ or ‘going around with a lovely girl named Jane.’

“As in ‘Mary Jane’?” Derek joked.

“Come on, Killian,” I prodded. “Details.”

“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell,” he said primly, and would say no more on the topic.





60




On the way to Joshua Tree, we stopped in a little town called Yucca Valley to get provisions. It was so small and out of the way that not a single person in the tiny grocery store recognized the band.

“Don’t forget the orange juice,” Killian commanded. “We have to have orange juice.”