would only deepen and grow richer, and for a moment I think I believed that the day would not follow, that with the death of Roy John Harlow and his music, something had been freed, some last smoke of the gone world faded, some change come full, and what passed for day would from now on and forever be something else, something new and green and hopeful, with its own music to suit. Maybe I was wrong, but it didn’t matter. I turned again to Darcy, and—as the sun began to warm my back and seagulls mewed, wheeling above the ancient pier and the dancehall, looking dilapidated in that brimstone light—I moved with her in a sweet hectic celebration of what we had lost, and what we loved, and what we did not understand.
Lucius Shepard earned his living as a rock musician in and around Detroit for almost a decade. Stories like this are informed by his journey through the outlying precincts of the music business, a time he now views as a kind of affliction. His fiction has been awarded many honors including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming is a new collection, Five Autobiographies, and a novel, The End of Life as We Know It.
The Big Flash
Norman Spinrad
T minus 200 days . . . and counting . . .
They came on freaky for my taste—but that’s the name of the game: freaky means a draw in the rock business. And if the Mandala was going to survive in LA, competing with a network-owned joint like The American Dream, I’d just have to hold my nose and out-freak the opposition. So after I had dug the Four Horsemen for about an hour, I took them into my office to talk turkey.
I sat down behind my Salvation Army desk (the Mandala is the world’s most expensive shoestring operation) and the Horsemen sat down on the bridge chairs sequentially, establishing the group’s pecking order.
First the head honcho, lead guitar and singer, Stony Clarke—blond shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acid-head and the look of a speed-freak behind it. Then Hair, the drummer, dressed like a Hell’s Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn’t kidding—he wore earrings, natural hair, a Stokely Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, bass, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer, and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore Early Hippy clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corporation dropout. There’s no business like show business.
“Okay, boys,” I said, “you’re strange, but you’re my kind of strange. Where you worked before?”
“We ain’t, baby,” Clarke said. “We’re the New Thing. I’ve been dealing crystal and acid in the Haight. Hair was drummer for some plastic group in New York. The Super Spade claims it’s the reincarnation of Bird and it don’t pay to argue. Mr. Jones, he don’t talk too much. Maybe he’s a Martian. We just started putting our thing together.”
One thing about this business, the groups that don’t have square managers, you can get cheap. They talk too much.
“Groovy,” I said. “I’m happy to give you guys your start. Nobody knows you, but I think you got something going. So I’ll take a chance and give you a week’s booking. One a.m. to closing, which is two, Tuesday through Sunday, four hundred a week.”
“Are you Jewish?” asked Hair.
“What?”
“Cool it,” Clarke ordered. Hair cooled it. “What it means,” Clarke told me, “is that four hundred sounds like pretty light bread.”
“We don’t sign if there’s an option clause,” Mr. Jones said.
“The Jones-thing has a good point,” Clarke said. “We do the first week for four hundred, but after that it’s a whole new scene, dig?”
I didn’t feature that. If they hit it big, I could end up not being able to afford them.