Concert

           I have been waiting for this moment for years. This alternative 90's band is my favorite. I love listening to their riffs before the words. I have eight of their CDs. I have their old stuff, and their semi-old stuff, but none of their new stuff. I'm old fashioned. Every band has a hit single and every band knows what their one hit single is. Can you imagine being those five people on the stage of an arena, like a basketball court, amplifiers, distortion, drumset, guitar, bass, maybe a pianist, but not always. Fans screaming for the show to start and calling each of our names. Beautiful young women in low tops jumping up and down to our songs. A slice of Heaven. Sometimes the crowd gets aggressive. People fighting over seats or drunk off their ass, but that's why there's security at all these events. There's a small risk of a terrorist attack, but that's what the metal detectors at the front entrance are for. It is hard work, too. Writing new songs and wanting them all to be hits and not all of them are. Talking to fans about what they want us to sing and play about. Trying to recreate the kind of songs they like. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the amps pick up the mics and there's feedback, but that's what the engineers are for. 

           Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have an ordinary life. I mean, I'm married with kids and that's normal, but I'm on the road all the time, which is atypical. See, most people like to get a 9-5 job, settle down, come home at night, help the kids with their homework, have a home cooked meal by the TV, while everyone watches a TV. Seems nice, but the band is my second family. We also have fights like every other family, even fist fights. But, we sober up and make up. See, it's not just alcohol, it's everything: crack, LSD, pot, crystal meth, fetenyl. You name it, we can get our hands on it, but it eases the tension when we're on the stage in front of tens of thousands of fans. It eases the tension. 

           The annoying thing is when we get recognized. Oh, hey, you're that band. I love you guys. Wow, so and so, come here, you're never going to believe who's here. We get fan mail, we get hate mail, we get venues trying to book us for every event, we get everything. See, we're not death metal, we're not punk, we're not heavy metal, we're alternative, we're 90's alternative.  So, we sing about the real shit going on in our lives. Things like our girlfriend kicking us out of our own house at 3 am, because we're drunk off our ass and looking to score. A lot of our lyrics don't make sense to people who didn't grow up in the 90's. Some lyrics don't even make sense to them. And some things we sing, our fans don't even know what the words are and sometimes we don't and sometimes that's ok and sometimes that's good. Think about Iron Butterfly's song In a Gadda Devita. They were drunk off their ass and trying to say In the Garden of Eden. We get security guards at the motels where we stay before the concert.  We shower, eat, drink, like everyone else, we just know chords and beats.  I love being in the studio recording our shit.  Then, if any of us fuck up, we can redo it. You can't redo it in a concert and tonight is a concert. 

           So, we go backstage and get our performance clothes on and we take our stuff before the show. But, as I get onstage, the stuff isn't agreeing with me and I black out.  Never a good thing to black out on stage. I wake up to the perimedics doing CPR, but something weird happens in the cusp between the pass out and the CPR. I see a white light filled with love, beauty, and forgiveness and I want to go to it, but then I'm pulled back to the concert. I see the EMTs when I wake up. They slowly back away and we eventually perform the usual set, but something's different. See, we're singing about all the bad shit that's happening in our lives, but all I keep thinking about is the beautiful white light. Then, the concert ends, as usual, and the security leads us to our cars, as usual, and we go back to our motel, as usual. 

           We get back to the motel and they check on me to make sure I'm still ok and I tell them what happened and I talk about writing new songs about feeling love, happiness, and contentness, and the other guys tell me that shit won't sell. Nobody from the 90's cares about love, happiness, and contentness. That's the '80's man and the '80's sucked. Well, we not make a '90's song about life being good? And one of my band members said because life isn't good. There are wars, famine, diseases, assholes, bombings, etc. Life sucks in the real world and that's what we're about, man, is showing people the truth so they know it isn't just them. Everybody's life sucks, even the rich people's. 

           But it can't register with me after my NDE. It seems like we should be spreading love through our music instead of fear and hate. If somebody's life sucks and we can cheer them up, maybe their life'll suck less. You're not getting it, you moron. The most people commit suicide at Christmas because they see all these people, with their families, happy, with money, enjoying each other, and that's why people kill themselves, because they think that's real and it isn't. Our job is to show our fans everyone's life's suck and it's ok that their lives suck, since they aren't the only one who's life sucks, everybody's life sucks. Make sense, moron? Well, no. Because if someone's miserable and you give them more misery, they'll be more miserable. Yea, but misery loves company. Does joy like company? I don't know and our fans don't give a rat's ass about joy liking company or not and neither do we. Are we still all on for the next show or do we need to replace you with someone who's more miserble? I think about it. I really think about it and decide . . .