The Devil's Metal (17 page)

“Barry’s in here,” Lester said, taking me to
a closed office and rapping on the door.

“Just a minute,” said a voice from inside.
Lester looked at me and smiled, all puffed cheeks. For such an
abrasive and iconic writer, he looked like nothing more than a
giant child.

“Have you ever spent months, years, looking
for a certain record?” he asked me in a lowered voice, looking like
he was confessing a delicious secret. “You know, the b-sides and
the shit you can’t find anywhere?”

I nodded and didn’t have to think long.
“Yup. The UK version of
Let it Bleed
. Finally found it in a
secondhand store in Olympia.”

He smiled even wider, then tried to look
serious. Lester’s face didn’t
do
serious. “You’ll do all
right here, kid.”

Then he left me, moseying back to his place
at whatever desk was his, while the door to the office opened and
Barry poked his head out, eying me warily. Bowie’s “Width of a
Circle” drifted out from a giant record player sitting on his
bookcase.

“Dawn Emerson?” he asked. “Come in.”

I gave him a quick smile and stepped into
his office, taking a seat across from his desk. He came around and
flopped casually down in his chair with a sigh.

“So you’re Dawn…or is it Rusty now?”

Barry wasn’t exactly like I pictured. I
would have thought he’d have long straggly hair and a rampant
beard, but he was clean-shaven and wearing a button-up shirt. He
was older than I assumed too, maybe in his mid-thirties.

“Just Dawn,” I told him, silently cursing
whoever had come up with that nickname. Jacob, probably.

“So, Dawn…tell me how it is.”

I launched into a short recap of the last
few days on the road, made easier since I just had to recite it all
for Mel in the letter. I tried to keep out the boys’ bad behavior
but Barry was smarter than that and wanted to hear everything. I
told him about the backstage blow job antics and Robbie on ludes. I
left out the part about me being high and fooling around with him,
and for that I felt like a bit of a traitor.

Barry didn’t seem too surprised at any of it
and leaned back in his chair thoughtfully. “So are they treating
you right?”

“Oh yeah, everything is fine. They’ve all
been lovely. Of course, well, not Graham as you know. But most of
them.”

“He’s an odd one,” Barry remarked. “But
every band has its dillhole and that’s Hybrid’s. It could be
worse.”

“I guess so,” I said with a shrug, hoping I
seemed cooler about it than I was.

“So that’s it.” He got up and went to the
record player, flipping the LP over. “Nothing else really going
on?”

My eyes followed him, confused. The acoustic
jangle of “Running Gun Blues” began to play
; I count the corpses
on my left, I find I’m not so tidy
.

“I’m not sure what you mean?”

“Oh, I guess you don’t. It doesn’t matter.
You have a few more weeks.”

I pursed my lips in puzzlement.

He noticed and continued. “The Cobb…I mean,
Jacob, he had told me that this tour was going to go down in
history and that’s why you needed to be there to record it.”

I snorted. “I don’t know why Jacob would
tell you that. Granted, I’m not queen of the road, or even the
highway, but…I really don’t see anything historic about it. What
else did he tell you?”

He sighed and flapped his hands and came
back to his seat. “That was it, really. He sounded so sure of
himself, I guess he thought he needed to sell the band to me. But,
who cares man, we would have loved to run a piece on Hybrid anyway.
Jacob’s got a reputation for stretching the truth.”

“And breaking people’s noses,” I added.

“That too. Well, that settles that. Just
keep doing what you’re doing, Dawn. Keep organized, keep your eyes
open.”

I got the impression he wanted me to leave
and started to get out of the hard chair. “Do you need me to mail
you some of the pieces I’ve written so far?”

I don’t know why I asked because I really
didn’t have much to send. I hoped he wouldn’t call my bluff.

He didn’t. “I trust you, Dawn. We’ll get it
all sorted out afterward. After all, the band is paying for you to
be there, not us. So, you know, do what the fuck you like!”

It probably would have made me feel better
if Barry had told me to work hard and turn in some glorious piece
of writing, but it seemed that the editor of Creem didn’t really
have the highest of hopes for me or for this so-called tour that
was going to go down in history. What a crock of shit.

I gave him a grateful smile and said those
famous of famous words, “You won’t regret this.” Then I stepped out
of his office and into the bullpen. The two writers in the corner
were laughing with each other and smoking, paying no attention to
me. Lester Bangs was nowhere to be seen, like I had only dreamed
him up.

I went back to Maureen and got her to ring a
cab for me. I asked her about some of the writers like Patti Smith,
who had gone on to form a band, and Mike Saunders, who coined the
phrase “heavy metal” a few years before, and she was a little more
enthusiastic about my time with Hybrid, confessing that she had a
crush on Mickey.

“Don’t tell Noelle that,” she added before
snatching up the ringing phone. “We need more women in rock.”

***

If you asked me, sometimes there were too
many women in rock. And I didn’t mean Noelle, who was an anomaly in
her own right, or the female music critics like Lisa Robinson (whom
I wished I had seen at Creem). I mean the groupies.

Hybrid’s groupies.

And in particular, the GTFOs.

After I caught a cab from Creem’s office
back to the venue, I was immediately thrust into the show with a
new determination. Even though the tour wasn’t shaping up to be
uniquely memorable in anyone’s eyes aside from my own, and
definitely wasn’t going to go down in history, I wanted to do the
best job I could. So, as I did in St.Paul, I went back into the
crowd and tried to capture the show from the view of the fans. The
longer I was on the road with the guys, the less I felt like a fan
and the more I felt like one of them. A jaded Dawn was the wrong
Dawn.

By this time, after several shows in a row,
I was getting a bit used to their sets, and knew exactly what
numbers were coming next and found it easy to organize my show
thoughts. I used most of my time to watch the band from different
areas of the venue and tried to pick up the flavor of the crowds.
The Detroit crowd was absolutely nuts and the hardest and toughest
group I’d seen so far on tour. Drinks were spilled, people were
crowd-surfing, stomping on each other, pushing and shoving. It was
an angry bunch, but the kind of anger that gets fueled by beer and
hard times. Rock and roll was Detroit’s outlet and I finally
understood why Creem chose the motor city as its headquarters.

But in all of this musical chaos, there was
a glowing constant. The tall white body of Sonja, who stood right
before the stage, dressed in a long white cloak that never seemed
to get an ounce of dirt, sweat, or cigarette burns on it. In fact,
the men and few women around her seemed to keep their distance as
much as they could, despite the squeezing and crowding of everyone
else on the floor.

I was on the floor too, to the side where
the ground sloped up a bit, and I watched her closely. She was
swaying slightly with the music, her pale thin hands grasping the
rail in front of her, her vibrant eyes focused right on Noelle. She
watched her like she was trying to bore a laser through her
head.

Hybrid began to play their sludgier cover of
Sabbath’s epic “Children of the Grave” and it opened with only
Noelle’s plucky bassline. It was at that moment that she decided to
look up, perhaps feeling Sonja’s intense, heat-filled stare, and
she looked absolutely startled, her eyes shining with surprise
beneath her heavily shadowed lids. Noelle’s surprise continued to
her fingers, where she messed up a few lines and was unable to get
back into it until Graham came down with the drums and Sage and
Mickey launched into the famous riff.

It was one of those screw-ups that was
unfortunately noticeable, but no one in the audience cared after a
few beats as the driving sound caused the human waves to crash
against each other.

Noelle noticed though, and Noelle cared.
After the show, she went straight for the bottle of Smirnoff in the
backstage lounge and started gulping it down like water.

“Hey, leave some for us,” I said jokingly,
putting my hand on top of it and bringing it away from her
mouth.

She shot me the nastiest look, the kind that
usually preceded a few tears.

“Stay out of it, Red,” she snapped, so I let
her guzzle it down until she had a coughing fit and started leaning
against the wall for support.

I looked around the backstage area. The guys
were heading into their dressing room and laughing with each other,
followed by some Detroit-based groupies whom I hoped were normal.
Mickey didn’t even pay me and Noelle any attention, nor offer his
girlfriend any words of consolation, which I thought was a total
dick move. Only Sage, the patriarch, came over.

“Everything all right here, Noe?” he asked
in a low, smooth voice. His eyes darted to mine for a second, then
returned to her scrunched up face. This was the closest I’d been to
him since the whole ludes fiasco, when I was so fucked up I
imagined a monster was on the bus.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Noe said,
spitting out her words. “I’m sick of this, I’m sick of
everyone!”

“Okay,” I placated her, trying to smile and
calm her down. “Where do you want to go?”

She took another swig of the vodka before
Sage expertly plucked it out of her hands.

“Hey,” she protested, reaching for it.

Sage placed his hand on her shoulder and
firmly held her in place. “You can have this back, but you have to
share it with us. You can go wherever you want tonight, but Dawn
and I are coming with you.”

I raised my brows at him.
We are?

He ignored me and leaned closer to Noelle,
tipping up her chin that ran wet with a few tears until she was
meeting his eyes. It was amazing how much power he had over them
all. Then I caught the softening of Noelle’s expression and a
subtle parting of her full lips, and I realized maybe he had more
power over Noelle than I thought. She had transformed into an
embarrassed, shamed rock star into…well…she kind of looked like a
girl in love.

I looked away, feeling like I had stumbled
upon some weirdly intimate moment.

“You up for going out, Dawn?” he asked after
a few beats.

I turned my head and shot him a quick smile.
Noelle was wiping underneath her eyes and trying to suck things up,
and his expression toward me was expectant. Almost pleading.

If Sage wanted me to go out on the town with
him and Noelle, I wasn’t going to say no.

“Of course,” I told him. “Where are we
going?”

He clutched the vodka bottle tightly to his
chest and surprised me.

“The Motor City,” he sang in a voice that
sounded like he ate a pack of cigarettes and washed it down with
gasoline, his best John Lee Hooker impression. “The Motor City is
burning.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was all sorts of interesting being
squished in the back of a cab with Sage and Noelle. None of us had
opted for the front seat, and he wanted to give Noelle the window
in case she felt like vomiting, so I was in the middle and leaning
up against him.

To be honest, I never wanted that cab ride
to end. There was something deliciously romantic about being in the
dark of a moving vehicle, feeling a virile man’s arm brush against
yours, his hip flush to your side, as you watch the city lights
move past. Detroit wasn’t burning but my heart was starting to,
licks of flames that threatened to one day consume me.

We were silent in the back and we all passed
around the bottle of Smirnoff like little teenagers. Our cab driver
either didn’t notice or didn’t care. It was probably the latter.
Only near the end of the ride did he start chatting up Sage about
the best Detroit bands like MC5 and Alice Cooper. I listened with
interest, never getting to hear Sage talk about the music he liked.
He had as much passion for Iggy and the Stooges as I did for
Hybrid.

Sage had asked the driver to drop us off at
a little dive bar on the western outskirts of town. It was a
strange neighborhood, the city meeting the suburbs, but Sage said
he’d been there once before and that the owner gave musicians free
drinks.

We settled into the bar. It was surprisingly
crowded given its location, a mixture of blacks and whites, middle
class and lower class. The jukebox was playing jazz music, there
were bowls of nuts on all the tables, and tacky Christmas lights
lit up the ceiling. The air was perfumed with the smell of rum,
smoke, and cheap cologne. It was kind of perfect, just the type of
place you’d end up with a rock star.

We took our seats at the bar, a cold piece
of carved copper, and Sage ordered us all a round. We had left the
vodka behind in the car, and we were all sufficiently buzzed. Well,
I was buzzed. Sage seemed large and in charge and Noelle was
steadily getting wasted. Several times I had to keep my hand at her
back so she wouldn’t fall off the stool. Soon, we had the bartender
serving her virgin drinks.

“I can’t believe I screwed up,” she mumbled
into her hands, making it almost impossible to understand her.

“Honey,” I said, even though I’d never
called anyone honey before. It felt right and I rubbed her back
gently. “Who cares? That’s what makes live music so great. You
recovered. No one noticed.”

I turned to Sage for support. He only gave
me a little nod, a motion for me to continue. I wondered how often
he had to play the consoling role here.