The Front Man (Tectonic Shift, Part 2 of 3)

Max plugged his mic into his Yamaha JX 15 guitar amp. He shifted between harp and vocals with a cheap Behringer distortion pedal. It wasn’t great but it was all he could afford, and if he pulled back on the bass and reverb and cranked up the treble he could get something like clean vocals. He could switch to dirty with the pedal. Sometimes he needed to get dirty with the harmonica, but because of the little practice room they used on Sunday in his apartment building the feedback just screeched at him when he kicked the switch. It screeched at him worse than his wife screeched at him for not being able to hold down a job. So he could never get the balance he needed between clean and dirty in his music. He could never get the balance he needed between clean and dirty in his life.

Simon would arrive soon. Simon was a medical research consultant. Simon had balance, but music was all Max had.

Max sat back and found himself doing variations on obscure jazz riffs nobody ever taught him because he could never afford lessons. He and Simon had been together for six years now, and as Max developed his own sound, moving further and further away from where they began, Simon kept trying to figure things out. But Max didn’t bother trying to understand things, because Max was too simple-minded. The universe was a deformed horseshoe and Max had no idea where he was going. He just let It drag him along with it. He just found his way in between Simon’s rhythms, faking melodies as he stretched things out across the face of the music, closing his eyes and opening his heart and weaving something he couldn’t understand. And then he had to open his mouth and scream at the metal heads because The Beer Garden was the only place they could get to play regular. And you had to play to the crowd.

Max struggled so hard. The harmonica came so naturally, but the singing just came and went as his mood shifted. He loved it and hated it. He struggled so hard to hold the audience, and the more he struggled the more he loved and hated it. But who else would sing his songs.

Simon came in at 12:00 on the nose with his multi-settings amp, mixer, tuner and his custom-built guitar and he started plugging in. Simon tossed six new songs at Max’s feet. It was an entire set.

“I want to sing these at the next gig,” Simon said.

Max was weaving his harp around an imagined rhythm running through his head. “…when I fall in love…” but the melodic pattern was so distorted, looking for order but trading off between harmonics and controlled dissonance, just moving between the two because that’s where he found himself at the time. It didn’t sound like anything without the rhythm in his head, or the rhythm of Simon’s guitar. He stopped abruptly and looked up at Simon.

Of course it was only fair. He and Simon were two sides of the same band. It was only balance. He trilled “…it will be forever…” but everything was suddenly off in his head, the progression off, and he couldn’t find the resolving note. He just kept leading himself into more melody, different melody, shifting, his harp and heart spiraling into a bottomless pit of music, the thought of losing his own words, all the effort he had put into shaping his own voice, all that gone. Six years of singing gone. Everything else was falling apart for him. His home, his family. He shifted the root note on his harmonica, the key signature long since worn away, and he warbled a strange scale up and down the instrument. It was only balance; it was only fair.

“Max?”

Max put the harp down and picked up the pile of looseleaf, guitar tabs scrawled over lyrics. Something interesting could find shape here. “I think…” he said holding the pages in his hand. He had seen these songs before, but Simon had never before gathered them together like this. Simon had never asked like this. Max felt like he was dying. He felt tectonic plates shifting. “I think… something is either one thing or it’s something else.”

Flesh Reckoning was dead. Let the metal heads at The Beer Garden go their own way. They were taking the music out of him by turning him into a clown for them anyway. He was tired of performing and he just wanted to play. Let’s see if they could destroy Simon like they had managed to destroy him.

“It’s your show now, Simon. Tell me what you want.”

To be continued…