Somebody to Love by Blair Babylon

Author:Blair Babylon [Babylon, Blair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Malachite Publishing LLC
Published: 2015-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Set Me on the Open Road

TRYP was wailing on his drums, really smashing the fuck out of the skins, during “Standing on the Mountaintop,” when in his in-ear monitor, he heard Xan Valentine’s voice crack on the first line of the refrain.

He glanced at Rhiannon where she was swaying by his drum kit. She had stopped dancing and was scrutinizing Xan, though still singing into her mic.

Xan spun, his arms spread and stomping his boots, and his long coat flowed through the air around him. Tryp drummed through the fill between the lines, waiting to hear if Xan’s voice was going to fail again.

Downstage, Xan sang, “Sing it from the mountaintop!” and at the top of the line, his voice broke.

Rhiannon vaulted over her monitor wedge and ran toward the audience, holding a water bottle out to Xan.

Fuck. Xan pushed his own voice harder than he pushed any of the band members, and sometimes he paid for it. They’d had to cancel a few shows a couple weeks ago, a blessed break for the band that had nearly driven Xan out of his workaholic mind. Tryp had never seen someone in—he swore to God—work-withdrawal delirium tremens.

Tryp cracked his drums during the next fill, pissed that Xan was endangering the whole tour by refusing to deal with his voice.

Xan only got two words into the third line “Shout it from the mountaintop,” before he turned away from the audience and grabbed his throat. Rhiannon took his note and sang to the audience, her hand resting on Xan’s back.

Tryp’s drum kit was positioned at the back of the stage, so he had a great view as his frontman struggled to breathe.

Rhiannon finished the song for him and led him offstage. Jonas met them halfway to the wings.

Cadell shook his guitar and called up to Tryp, “You wanna play ‘Eruption’ again?”

“Sure!” he yelled down.

Cadell spoke into his mic, and his voice amplified as he spoke as the sound roadies realized that Cadell now had the ball and should be the primary channel. “Hey, folks. Xan is going to take a break. Tryp and I,” Tryp raised his hands in the air and spun his sticks through his fingers, acknowledging Cadell’s intro and cuing the audience to his existence up there, “have been working on an arrangement of ‘Eruption’ by Eddie Van Halen for guitar and drums, and we’d like to share it with you tonight.”

They ran through the piece, which started out easy for Tryp, just barely keeping time for Cadell just like Alex Van Halen had for Eddie, while Cadell played the Baroque two-handed tapping on his guitar, then they went back to the beginning, and Tryp used the different tonal pitches of his drums to play the whole piece again.

It had started out as just screwing around in rehearsal, of course. All weird stuff does. Cadell had played it, and Tryp had played it back to him, and then Cadell made him do it a hundred more times, taking notes and incrementally making it better every time.

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