[rpf - classic rock] music for the neck downward - R

[ishie]

Originally posted: 12 June 2006
Title: Music for the Neck Downward
Rating: R, for language
Length: approx. 1600 words
Fandom: Rolling Stones RPF
A/N: *bites nails* Concrit desperately wantedneeded. Familiarity with the individual members of the band is recommended, otherwise this is going to make no fucking sense whatsoever (the lack of overt identification was the whole point, or so says the voice in my head). The section titles are from song lyrics and quotes by the band.

i. all this time i'm a woolworth's storeThey call him the new guy, even though he’s had their back for longer than some of their children have been alive.

The whole world seems different now without the cushion of alcohol. It’s sharper. Clearer. In rehearsals, the notes slid up and down and bent away from his fingers, like the lights that dance off sweaty skin on nights like this. He ducks his head and the world shrinks down to the patterns that haunt his fingertips and the sound that waits in the air and the shock that still courses through his veins whenever he hears the screams that echo as his name is called.

He clutches the neck of the guitar that the kid helps him sling over his shoulder and grins. A thousand butterflies swarm in his belly and he’s surprised, maybe even a little scared. They haven’t done a show like this in years. For a minute, he can’t remember if he’s ever done a show like this with them, or if he’s remembering something from that life before he became one of them.

The strings are tight under his fingers and he touches the pins to see if they need turning, even though he knows there’s no need. It’s a sort of a ritual, this. He stands in the darkness at the back of the stage before the spots come up and pretends that the audience won’t be able to see him. Most of them don’t, he knows. They’re waiting for the showman, the crazy fucking lunatic who never stops moving and eats his own words every night.

He sees a flash of reflected light to his right and hears the roar of the crowd suddenly treble in volume and he looks up and to his left and there’s that grin that makes him think of a thousand nights of Jack and coke and pungent smoke and he waits for that first chord, the one that never fails to make the rafters quake.

It’s showtime.

ii. i love digging back through the pastHe digs his hands deep into the earth and watches the years crumble and shift. The cool damp feels like heaven on his cramping fingers.

He was always the old man, but now he's aged beyond anything he ever thought possible. It feels like a dream at times, all those years of jets and cars and women. Like it all happened to someone else and he watched, floating high above the smoke and the din.

On Thursday mornings, a man drives him into town. He likes to walk through the narrow lanes and listen to the sound of families behind closed doors. Once or twice, he's passed someone in the street and seen the knowledge of him break across their face. He smiles and keeps walking.

Not long ago, one of them called and asked, "How?" Despite the words he recited for reporters at the time, he still isn't sure of the answer.

iii. as far as i'm concerned, art is just short for arthurIt’s a primal thing, the music. It oozes out of his pores, permeates his blood, bubbles up from some spring buried deep inside and vibrates with his heartbeat. He hears it in everything, from the roar of an engine to the breeze through the trees. People keep asking where it comes from, the lyrics and the licks and everything else, but they never seem to understand the answer that they get.

He sees those skinny little hips swivel and twist next to him and he rips into that chord, that fucking chord, that mistake or dream or whatever the hell it was. If it hadn’t been for that pokey little music shop and one tiny piece of equipment, who knows what might have happened. He could be just another bloke working in a dead-end job and drinking to the glory days down the local of a Friday night. He thinks maybe he would have been happy.

A girl in the front row who’s barely older than his youngest flips her shirt up as he turns. What feels like a laugh surges up through his chest and he flips his pick down to her. She screams and bounces and he thinks, “The hell I would.”

He’ll never tire of this. They’ll have to pry his gnarled fingers from the strings at the end of all things.

iv. it hasn't always gone that wellFor years, he didn't speak to a single person who didn't in some way reproach him for leaving. Even when they didn't say it out loud, he heard it in the sweep of their hands or the set of their jaw.

He wonders. Sure, of course he wonders. How could he not? He turned his back on golden palaces and ran with open arms into obscurity. He knows, though, that had he stayed, he would have fallen even farther. So many didn't make it out alive, including the one whose place he took.

He could blame them, but what would be the point? When he finally stepped back into the sun after so many years of darkness, everything glittered like gold. This was the real thing, the world behind the curtain. This wasn't a schoolboy's fantasy done up with painted faces and powdered noses.

When he remembers to forget the money and the fame, this is why he pities them.

v. the world of this is a load of crapIt’s ridiculous, really. All the time and effort and sheer bloody-mindedness and what do you get at the end of it? A sweaty shirt, quivering bones, and less than twenty hours until the next one.

Still, he wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. They say they'll keep going until someone says stop. He knows that means him, but he can’t imagine ever being the one to do it. That would be like cutting his own arms off, and that’s his life, isn’t it?

He can’t remember the last time he had to worry about money, or food, or all the little things that made the workaday world such a trial. He'll never forget waking up and thinking “this stops now or I’ll lose everything.” Sometimes he can’t believe it went so far before he was ready to ask for help. After everything he’d seen, all the friends he’d watched as they sunk further into oblivion, to have fallen into the same hole was a bit humiliating, really.

He’s supposed the rock, the island of calm in the midst of the tumultuous seas. They look to him and for him and he’s supposed to be whole and solid and ready to go on in 4/4 time.

Maybe this is both his penance and his reward. Maybe that’s why he’ll never be the one to say no.

vi. we piss anywhere, manIt all comes down to this in the end. A tasteful marker graces a place hardly anyone visits, a silent reproach to bitter friends and lost sons. It's never quiet here, though. Birdsong dissolves in the air like soap bubbles, lightly caressing the time-worn stones. The wind whistles through trees and rattles dried stems in their plastic vases. On windy days, scarves are snatched from the heads of old ladies to slither through the short grass, a faint sussuration of sound to accompany a broken melody.

If you stand still enough, you might hear the songs that were silenced too soon.

vii. any vague resemblance of my life to a playboy's is merely coincidentalThis is love; this is a life-long commitment. What's a home and hearth to this?

He sits at the keyboard and just barely fingers the keys; a slow waltz fills the empty stage around him before sliding into something else. The name of the song eludes him but the lyrics are ready and waiting when he opens his mouth.

Down at the lip of the stage, a curly-haired boy walks hand in hand with a girl with a halo of blonde hair. Were he a different man, that boy would be decades older -- or maybe he wouldn't even exist at all. It's a mess of generations, this wandering tribe that swells and shrinks with each new city and country. Their family trees have twisted and grown into banyans, a dark-canopied grove forever set off by a strange and unnatural appearance amid tall, smooth trunks and fringed leaves.

He looks down at the keys and is shocked for a moment to see these old hands upon it. It's the same shock he sometimes gets in the morning, when the new light falls harshly upon skin that creases and sags. In his mind, he's still the slender youth who shook hair out of his eyes and shimmied for the cameras. In the mirror, though, he's a dinosaur, an aged relic of a time when the world laid itself bare before them.

No one would ever believe it, but he knows the name of every girl who ever fucked him. He doesn't need a meticulously kept notebook with places and dates and times; he can still feel the satin of their skin on his and smell each puff of their breath. He has spent a lifetime cataloguing their expressions, hoarding their admiration and their contempt.

His bed is wide and never empty, but he sometimes wonders how cold it will be in the end.

vii. i'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm forty-fiveEvery night, as they walk or stumble or ride away from the darkened venue, someone from the crowd will turn to a friend and say, “They’re sixty fucking years old, for God’s sake,” and even though they and thousands more have just seen the evidence of it firsthand, they can’t quite wrap their heads around it.

On some level, all of them know that this happens, but they don’t really give a shit. They never really have.