All American Horror of the 21st Century

Wasted on the Young. Cody Goodfellow-2

Our revolution passed unnoticed, but almost every year, whenever the collective psyche demands it, it happens again. There are no flyers, no ads in The Reader, because everybody who gets it just knows. Over the years, only the abduction methods have changed; construction roadblocks, window-washing bums, fake cops, a bogus Veteran’s Day parade. Most who were at that first show still come out, though our numbers are dwindling.

Only a handful of newbies are in the crowd tonight, recruited by veterans like me or snatched up in an audience raid, so there are never more than a hundred. Most of them act cool, but a few clueless jackasses hoot and push as the crowd files in, anxious to start moshing.

The hall fills in pretty quick. The crowd hangs back from the stage, where a couple graying geezers in faded tour t-shirts set up the gear. Rayray notes the absence of turntables with disdain, but is intrigued by the old Moog synthesizer with patch cords like an antique telephone switchboard. Ali stares at each person in the crowd one at a time. I’ve lost track of Wet Kid.

I’m starting to come on hard. Shiny chrome waves of euphoria detach me from my ego, and I have to fight my way back. Most of us vets still take whatever they were on the night of the last show, cranky crystal meth and black blotter laced with rat poison, to relive the experience as fundamentalist gospel. Others have wisely given up drugs, but the intense grins on their faces betray the force of the flashback. Every lost sensation is unlocked and made new by bearing witness. I prefer to experiment, to get close to the kids I bring, to see it anew through their eyes.

Every underground scene dies a long slow death as the tourists close in, until nothing’s left but posers ogling each other over the bleached remains. If we could, we’d huddle over our secret like Freemasons, but we must risk the fate of every cult phenomenon that pop culture has hijacked and raped, and seek out new blood. We must, or the scene will devour itself.

I don’t need to look at my watch when the naked man in the ski mask comes out onto the stage to thunderous applause. He picks up a bullhorn and launches into a furious tirade in Japanese, Spanish, and bits of English so mangled by squealing feedback that nobody understands a word. The crowd is hushed, but for a lone catcall, instantly squelched, from the gallery. Ali poses for a painting. Rayray gets in my face and moans, “Where’s the f*****g band?”

On cue, the masked emcee holds up the gun.

“There was this experimental noise band,” I tell him. “Hot underground s**t, fifteen years ago. They invented the whole audience abduction gig. A doomsday cult followed them around Japan, and they say two kids died in Europe, just from the sound. Well, when they played here, they sucked. The crowd hated them, so they f****d with us. Stood still for ten minutes at a time, shouted s**t about America and our town, and how we were all faggots. So the crowd pulled them off the stage and clobbered them. We were going to storm the stage and loot their gear when the singer came out with a gun.”

For the first time, Ali looks interested. “And then what happened?”

“Watch.”

The emcee stomps out to the levee of monitors at the front of the stage and waves the gun at the crowd, shrieking at the top of his lungs. The crowd parts under the gaze of the barrel like cockroaches in a spotlight, but ejects a hapless emo kid with a faux-hawk. He tries to blend in, but a shield wall of locked arms elbows him into the open.

The emcee levels the gun at him and points at the drum kit. The kid gets lifted and passed up to the stage by a raging sea of hands. Looking at everything but the gun, he awkwardly shuffles behind the drums and sits on the stool. The emcee squawks nonsense at the new drummer, who just looks blankly at the floor.

The emcee cuffs him with the gun, opening a red rip in his cheek and closing one eye. Screaming curses, the kid picks up the sticks and, like a retarded mechanical monkey, tries to play. The emcee hoots approvingly and charges back downstage.

The next one doesn’t wait to be hit, but jumps onstage and picks up the guitar. He actually knows how to belt out a few punk chords, and he launches into a crude but spunky solo.

The emcee shoots him in the foot. The crowd goes wild.

Funny, how the guitarists always do that, and always get shot. If Ali notices that the guitarist is Wet Kid, he gives no sign.

The emcee looks for someone to man the clunky keyboard. Jumping up with his right arm in a Nazi salute, screaming, “Pick me pick me pick me, motherfucker!” Rayray is elected, and crowd-surfs onto the stage.

The bassist is an indigo-haired girl of about nineteen. She sobs and tries to bolt, but this always happens, too. The emcee hooks her by the throat and slams her into a wall of amps covered in kanji graffiti, makes her kiss the gun. The taste of metal and a whisper in her ear turn her into a puppet. When she straps on the bass, smeared mascara tears twinkle on her blank face like black ice.

Front and center, the emcee stands frozen with his back to the ritually enraged audience. He lifts his arms high like a conductor, a victim directing his own firing squad, the terrorized band watching every drop of sweat on his naked body for a cue or a clue.

A single, delicious whimper escapes the bassist. The drummer bites his lip like he’s simultaneously trying to plan an escape and the greatest impromptu drum solo since John Bonham. Rayray fidgets and grins and throws up fake gang signs at the crowd, looking for his friends in the darkened hall. He doesn’t even notice Wet Kid bleeding on the stage, a few feet from him.

“Is this for real?” Ali asks. “Am I really seeing this?”

“This is real,” I promise.

Ali cracks a smile. “Cool ...”

“The singer didn’t want revenge ... he made us get up on the stage and do it better. He went into the crowd and got kids who never played before, but the energy of the moment and the anger of the crowd took them over, and made them shine.”

The emcee drops his arms. All at once, the band, with all their fear and confusion boiling over, begins to make godawful, glorious noise. A scalding wave of red, random feedback rises behind them, gathers force and blows the crowd back on their heels long before reaching its full height. This is where it takes off.

The emcee picks up a microphone and turns to search the crowd. A final offering comes surfing in, flailing and screaming, and hits the stage on his knees. The emcee captures his whoop of agony with the mic, leaves it in his hands and dives off.

The crowd encloses the stage like a snake around its lunch. The hysterical terror of the hostage band squeezes through the ugly jumble of sound as a galvanic twitch, a staccato undertone that leaps from one inept player to the next and makes it much more than music.

Rayray has a blast, mashing keys and twisting knobs like he’s trying to cause a meltdown. His demented noodling catapults flaming beehives of tortured waveforms into the mix.

The drummer pounds out a sloppy tocsin that pupates and becomes a perfect hummingbird heartbeat as his fear burns away and becomes exaltation.

The bassist loses herself in the monotonous spanking motion of her untrained hands. Tears stream down her face, but her frigid dollhouse smile says most of her has transcended for good.

Wet Kid wobbles and has to be pushed back up on his good foot, but his prescient fingers weave fitful bits of structure into the chaos, like glimpses of godlike faces in a forest fire. While Wet Kid struggles to stay upright in the puddle of blood from his foot, his hands are set free to improvise insane chain-lightning stampedes up and down the face of the tsunami still building in our midst.

The singer screams for an ambulance and tries to push a spear of fractured tibia back into his leg.

Out of the clash of rigid ceremony and raw hysteria, the sound that emerges is at once utterly new and totally familiar. None who hear only bootlegs of it would ever call it music, but nothing else will ever do for us what this sound does, right here and now.

I look at Ali and he looks at me. He has lived all his life to see this, and he will live a lifetime before it is over. I envy him, but the undertow of joy pries us apart and sucks energy from us like batteries, draining and feeding it back, a geometrically escalating circuit of worship.

The aging audience feeds the band its dead dreams and its ulcerated rage. The band, terrified and exhilarated, roars back with the raw, obscenely naive power of youth, so engorged with frustrated desire to express itself all at once that the flow of time loops and stretches, snaps. The sonic maelstrom we’ve created crushes itself when it can rise no higher, but we keep feeding it.

Until it breaks—

The ceiling ruptures and comes crashing down in a fountain of black water. It floods the stage and shorts out the monitors, but the music only gets better. That last inhuman peak of ecstatic perfection is bridged as the band is electrocuted, galvanic overdrive raping muscles and nerves and lightning shooting out their eyes and fingertips, screams of such unholy pitch as to shatter the spotlights.

The shriek of the nameless newborn god conjured up by their suicidal summoning blows the crowd back. Blue arcs leap and stab at one or another of the hardcore pilgrims kneeling to pray with their heads in the bassbins.

I stand precisely where I stood at that first happening, and at every one since. My posture, my thoughts, my emotions, are exactly the same. In that moment, I am my entire life, and will never, ever die.

Rayray’s eyes bug out and pop like egg yolks. Smoke belches out of his two new mouths. The drummer’s spastic legs kick out the kit and he bellyflops in the glowing water. The bassist leaps high into the air again and again, bloody fingers strangling melting steel strings, blue hair ablaze. The singer gyrates and humps the stage, splashes of electricity arcing off his scrawny body so gorgeous that some newbie girl tries to mount him as he dies.

Wet Kid wails out a solo too high and wild for human ears as steam leaks out the swelling fissures of his pressure-cooker skull. His hyperactive hands, so instinctually brilliant, make me regret that I didn’t get to know him better. But he tells me everything he’s ever had to say in that instant, far better than he ever could with words.

The circuit blows out. The stage lights go brown, then black. The strings are cut. With a final resounding cannon blast, the amps explode, hurling their cones across the stage.

In the dark, perfect stillness reigns for about five seconds. Then the crowd erupts, pounding the floor, their hands, each other, screaming out more joyously than any religious fanatics; for this moment, glimpsed for the first or the fifteenth time, is a window into infinity.

I look at Ali, who looks at me, and gives me a thumbs up. The generation gap is bridged. I feel neither old nor young, but ageless. In this kid, I think I have finally found someone who gets it.

* * *

More often than not, when a writer tries to capture the argot and patois of Rock ‘N’ Roll Yout’ Speak, we get an exercise in translation instead of an experience of communication. Or it’s just plain messed up: You know, hep smoke a Cosmic Reefer, Dude-o. Not so with this examination of Youth Gone Wild, by Cody Goodfellow, who, despite a name better suited for Robin Hood’s second-in-command, proves himself the Compleat Amerikan Lingo-Slinger.