Axel locked his teeth around the lid of the beer bottle, wrenched until he felt it pop off against his tongue, and pocketed it in his cheek while he drained half of the third bottle of beer before the concert. The pill that bastard drummer had given him was starting to kick in, and the sound colours were moving through his brain in interesting geometric ways as he played the bottleneck against the strings of his Les Paul. All he ever thought about was metal, and the other metal, and drink and drugs and occasionally things that sucked because they weren't metal, but today his mind was full of crap and if his usual get-smashed-before-the-gig routine wasn't helping block it out, that meant that this wasn't going to be fun.
He tuned his E string. Since when was music about shit like reality show contestants singing about carbon-neutralising the starving AIDS-addicted whales? Even legends like Clive Winston were catching on to that public sort of feed-the-world-let-them-know-it's-Christmas-time wankery and making benefit concerts like this whole stupid Aid-Aid thing he hadn't been able to turn down and was going to go on stage to play a set with Clive for in twenty, twenty-five minutes.
He hadn't turned it down because hey, music. Hey, starving orphans need rock too. Besides his bastard drummer was all melting over Clive like a fretboard in Hendrix's hands and Clive was all saying Axel would get a hell of a lot of time with which to play at everyone who would listen, and yeah, that was what music was for. For playing - he strummed an E chord, which was in perfect tune - and for listening to. And for getting drunk at and starting fights with people who didn't like it the way you did, like with any religion.
But then Clive had been all knowing and winking and eventually Axel had asked him what the real plan was, and he'd been kidding, but Clive hadn't been. Clive had merely adjusted those stupid little glasses he was wearing and said, his eyes full of the unfocusedness of a man who didn't think the real world was worth seeing after having journeyed to the bright colours at the centre of his mind time and time again:
"Right. You see, whatever the heck your name is, it's really pretty bad. People are like, oh hey, it's Clive!, he's bloody good, let's buy his records! That's the kind of stupid attitude that gets passed around when the world's full of stupid stupid people. So what I'm going to do is go out on a bang, I mean, in a bang, yeah? Well, not a real bang, and not a real 'out', if you want to be technical. So I hold this great big benefit gig and get guitarists from all over the whole world to come and play for orphans and stuff, and on the last night we all play a great big version of my song, my big hit everyone knows, you know, the one they say's about the A-bomb but came to me in a trip - goes all, like, da-nanana, naaa-a na - " -
- and he'd tilted his head and waited for about thirty seconds before snapping his fingers, "I know the song, so whatever - so you all come on stage and I go up to the front and I die of a heart attack, and they all say 'oh look, it's Clive, poor little sod, all those drugs caught up with him right, let's haul him into the ambulance'. And I wake up and go on to be a music producer where no-one's heard of me, and I can be away from my fourth wife who won't take off her, her wooden prosthetic, even when making love - and the charity'll be happy too because all those people will tune in for the finale. And people won't forget but they'll ignore."
And he smiled wistfully with a smile like a submarine. "Bye! Goodbye, Clive the legend! Here's an obiturary, now be dead in peace, and if the guy doing mixing on Judy Nails' latest album looks a bit like Clive but with some facial hair shite, then it's just that whole Elvis in my laundrette thing and I'm a stupid conspiracy theorist nut-head-some-bastard like that guy from the Green Party."
And as Axel stepped on stage and Clive headed to the mic at the front, he realised what really pissed him off about Clive was that he'd broken the cardinal rule. Music was never something you did for yourself. If you did it for yourself you weren't any better than some asshole American Idol contestant, even if you did it with a guitar.
He missed playing sets to a bunch of muddy people and cows and chemical toilets that oozed blue crap and he could smell that stink of blue crap and rain and cow shit and weed right now just thinking about it, but he was doing it for love and that was what mattered.
The spotlight illuminated the immaculate suit Clive wore. How, thought Axel, with a powercord and a yell of rock-filled passion, the mighty had fallen.
"Candle seeps within the desk/ the patchy holes of humming moss/ the banah-ba-banah-da-ba/ he's the fish within the rocks -
And the song was over far too soon and he started to mechanically decimate his guitar so he could get back to the real world, and as Clive stepped forward, he heard it, a two word prayer.
A guy near the front of that steaming pile of people, waving a sign, yelling two words.
Maybe it was the heat, maybe the hate, maybe the fact that the pill the bastard drummer gave him didn't crossbreed well with alcohol or maybe that a part of him was still all damn it's Clive Winston I'm playing on stage with Clive Winston he couldn't be more amazing if he exploded, but they reached his heart.
He took a step forward, banging his strings. He yelled over the screech of feedback, Clive looking over his shoulder in horror.
"You want Free Bird?"
Confusion from the crowd, from Winston.
"I said," yelled Axel, feeling like himself for the first time in a really long time, "you want Free! Bird!!?"
The crowd went wild.
Axel sauntered to the front of the stage, bowed dramatically, and then grabbed onto both sides of Clive's sequined wasteband and pulled.
--
The headlines that day said AID-AID GETS OBSCENE, $1500000 MEDIA FINES. NME hinted that Clive was doing a remix album as a collab with Judy Nails. A few people were outraged and wrote letters to the paper saying they were. No-one else cared.
As Axel stubbed out a cigarette into his beer can, he smiled. He'd done his bit to save music, and all of a sudden chicks were sending him fanmail, because apparently they were into the sort of thing he did. Life was good.