Flesh Guitar by Geoff Nicholson Read Free Book Online

audience that Thursday to see the Jed Rhodes Band. She took her own supply of drinking water and refused to touch anything anybody offered her. She wanted to be there for this big occasion, but she didn’t want to participate in it. She felt someone ought to stay straight, to bear witness, to be ready to call the emergency services if and when necessary.
    It occurred to her that if Tubby Moran was wrong, if he hadn’t ironed out the problems and everyone in the audience reacted the way she had at the club, then Jed and his band would be forced to play the same song, presumably the opening song of the set, over and over again untilthe drug wore off. Jed assured her this couldn’t happen and she hoped he was right. This new stuff was very cool, very mellow, he said.
    As Jed and his band – bass, drums, keyboard player and lead guitarist – took to the stage, the bottles of pink liquid were passed from hand to hand throughout the audience. Some drank more eagerly than others but nobody seemed to be turning it down. Jenny continued to be amazed at the gullible nature of rock audiences.
    The band started to play and the audience were appreciative enough. They paid attention, they listened, they cheered enthusiastically at the end of the first couple of songs, but it was all well within the bounds of normal audience response. Then, in the third number, the lead guitarist took a solo. Jenny didn’t know his work, didn’t even know his name. He was young and muscular and not bad-looking but it seemed to her that the solo was fairly run of the mill. The audience, however, thought differently. From the moment he played the first note of his solo they were bewitched. They hung on his every note, as if they were hearing the music of the spheres. They were truly exultant, truly blissed out. The solo ended and the audience settled down, became sane again, but they had obviously experienced something intense and exquisite and they wanted more.
    And that was how it went for the rest of the gig, a perfectly attentive audience that became electrified every time the guitarist took a solo. Jenny watched and wasn’t sure what she thought. Should she disapprove? Was something deeply immoral going on here? The artistic objections were obvious enough, but it seemed mean-spirited to objectwhen everyone in the place was having such a spectacularly good time. Jed Rhodes appeared to be having the best time of all. No doubt he’d taken twice as much of the drug as anyone in the audience and the look on his face was positively beatific.
    As midnight came around the band tried to take a break, but the audience wouldn’t let them leave the stage. They played for another twenty minutes or so, then tried again. This time the audience threatened to turn ugly and demanded encores, dozens of them. The band was forced to play all through the night, to perform every song they knew, and the lead guitarist was forced to play solos until his hands almost bled. Only when the night sky began to lighten with the onset of dawn did the effects of the drug start to wear off. Only then did the audience quieten down and only then were the band allowed to finish.
    Jenny left long before the end but she’d already seen more than enough. She didn’t get to speak to Jed that night and when she phoned him the next day she was told that he and his band had already left town and started a hastily arranged national tour. She feared the very worst.
    Over the next few weeks she heard plenty of rumours, some were more reliable than others and a few were very strange indeed, but they all confirmed that Jed Rhodes was having one helluva tour. All over the country audiences were going crazy for Jed Rhodes, his band, his music, and particularly for his hot young lead guitarist. Jenny read reviews of the gigs, and sometimes the reviewers were mystified by Jed’s success with his audience, and she supposed these were reviewers who