Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron’s Guitar Chronicles.
An hour later, I was doing that. The audience didn’t seem to care much what we did. The place was only about half full and those that were there were indifferent. We adopted a “so what” attitude and drew into ourselves, like a tight rehearsal. Bart and Chris were grooving together and for the first time I thought of them as a rhythm section, not as Bart the rebel-from-conservatory and Christian the hired gun. I hoped Chris decided to stay with us. After the third song Ziggy even stopped playing to the audience and started playing to me. I had to smile a little as I watched him prance and stare at me. Then he shook his hips and his tongue crawled out of the side of his mouth… I played back to him, egging him on with riff after riff, gritting my teeth while my hands did their work. In the chorus of “River” he slid up to me on his knees, sort of like he did that day in the park way back when. When I shook my head sweat flew off and he lifted his face to catch it like rain or a blessing. I closed my eyes as I slipped into the solo there, and from that point on I don’t remember much until there was some polite, obligatory applause coming from the audience and we were leaving the stage.
Backstage the food was pretty much gone and someone had propped a door open, letting chilly air in. I had no urge to sit in one of the folding chairs and paced up and down while the others poked through the trays of wilted lettuce. Ziggy threw himself down into one of the flimsy chairs, but the move lacked dramatic effect because the chair just wouldn’t catch his weight. He blew a damp strand of hair out of his eyes. His face was dark with annoyance. He saw me watching him and said, “Tough fucking crowd.”
“Yeah, I guess. Glad we didn’t do this show first.”
