XII. Screaming Thru The Screen
Video Killed The Radio Star, But These Fellas Have Done Worst!
When I found out about his double life, I wasn’t shocked by the idea so much as the image he made for himself. For you see, when dear old Harry Garret, alias Richter, isn’t touring with his favorite three metal machines, he is apparently one of the most prolific stunt guitarists in the music video biz. That is to say, when a solo singer or a band is short an axe-man in their video, they ring up Richter. And no matter the genre, style, or concept, the brown bastard always rolls up dressed like Amadeus in a leather jacket. Frilly shirts, jet-black harness boots, the works. The mutt looks mad as hell wherever he plays. Pop metal records, country guest shots. For God’s sake, the devil himself couldn’t hoodwink me into playing the hook on a rap album, and there his jewelry-clad digits were, laying down a heavy riff.
In a closeup on his guitar so tight, I could tell the costume jewels from the real sterling silver, but I digress.
Above all else, it gets him credits the likes of which we hadn’t seen in ages. Thusly, we decided it was about high-time we break from the live tours, once-in-a-blue moon CDs, and ceaseless spamming of what’s left of the World Wide Web, and make ourselves a goddamned music video.
And what a video we were going to make!
The blessing of our dear friend “cheating” on Metröpolis was that he could get us connections like there was no tomorrow. Guys with the cameras, guys with a sync system, a warehouse we could putz around in, all the amenities. The director, a gray fella going by the edge-tastic name “Lek Trik” was actually a pretty chill fella with a neat eye. Shorter than all of us, but rocking the leather slacks and Chuck Taylors well and absolutely full of ideas.
“Music gets busy as is,” the slim gray nodded, banging out storyboards live in front of our eyes. “I think a black-n-white, lots-of-midnight-type thing works for you guys. Full moons, weathered castles, wrought iron everything.”
It sounded good to me. Richter was absolutely mad for it, but the white knight himself wasn’t too sure.
“Old fantasy shit?” Rory quizzed. “What gotcha that idea?”
“The way Harry comes dressed to shoots, and the way you guys play.” Trik nodded. “Sounds like a cavalry stampede coming down over the hill. Y’all coulda been knights o’ the round table way-back-whenever.”
Our secondary show-off Brett chuckled before adding, “nah, I betcha Comanche blood runs through these cats’ veins. That or Apache. They’s as vicious as you can get.” The tan hound noodled off a couple lines while we were all busting up in hysterics.
What we didn’t realize was that we just gave ol’ Mr. Trik a helluva new direction.
“Hey, how bout that!?” he hollered, the gray launching a furious sketching session. “I know we run around with plenty of the Old West out here in the desert, but I can’t recall any videos lately that really leaned into that.”
When we were told the whole picture, we were hooked! It was still set at night and all that Gothic jazz, but with this funny little storyline about a rambling cowboy wasting vampires and bedding broads. He got his second unit up and filming at all sorts of crazy hours, but got us in the studio as fast as he could. Day One was all about lip-syncing the song up.
And boy howdy was that a draaaaaag.
The song we settled on was an old favorite, “Fair Weather for the Devil.” Nice, four-on-the-floor fuck-you anthem. Good bassline, a patent-pending Richter solo full of freewheeling fretwork. We had to get ol’ Navajo Joe himself in the recording booth because it was one of the tunes we wrote back when the band was still in power trio mode.
Little did we suspect the three-course meal of kickass we were gonna be treated to when he took up the second verse and bit into the chorus lead-in “you ain’t eva gonna stop quitchin’ your bitchin’” and let out a scream that flattened our ears and almost took out the vocal booth glass. The poor boy looked like a pup when he saw us on our backs with our boots in the air, but three thumbs up told him it was the take to beat.
Anyhow, we now had ourselves some perfect video single material. But man, was that sync system a Stone Age marvel. We gave the fella the file, and at first it was playing fine, we were getting into the instrumental fine, but then it started going on the fritz. Take after take and we hadn’t even “sung” a line.
Then it started playing a whole step down. Now for me, Richter and I knew the tuning by heart, so I wasn’t budging. Unfortunately for Brett, his tan digits tried to play catch-up with the impromptu key shift. So now our new recruit’s getting pissed with himself, and we’re wondering what the hell’s going on with the system.
We found out on the suitably numbered Take 13 when a shot of sparks ripped out from the black box, and the last thing we heard was a tone of signal feedback that could wake the dead and behead them the second they shot outta the grave. We left it to Rory to clear the air as he hulked out on his crash cymbal and damn near threw the whole fucking kit around in an ape-shit fit
“FUCK THIS SHIT, WE’LL DO IT LIVE! I AIN’T GONNA FUCKING DO 15 MORE TAKES OF THIS GODDAMN, MOTHERSUCKING HORSESHIT!”
I could see the fear in Lek Trik’s eyes and I pulled him aside after slapping the white-hot hurricane back into sanity.
“Look, we can do it just fine without all the tech.” I sighed. “We’ll be more animated, more into it, and we can get this day locked in.”
Our gray-furred movie magician steepled his fingers, buried his snout in ‘em and came back up with the answer. “Let’s go for it. If it doesn’t perfectly sync, we’ll cut back to the storyline or save it with some abstracts.”
Live it was, and live we played. And I mean LIVE. Our white-furred drummer worked himself up to such a rolling boil he was beating the batshit out of his snares. The only time I ever heard his foot that heavy was one of two times I ever let him drive my pickup. I was feeling like a million dollars, belting the song out bar-for-bar, right on the metronome.
Then it came to Brett, and off-the-rails things went. Again.
The poor bastard’s voice was cracking like a preteen with his first Playboy, he didn’t know what the fuck was going on and it slipped us all up. Rory was about to be the first white wolf to turn beet-red at the speed of sound, but I steadied him as I sauntered over to our new recruit. He was getting pissed with himself.
“Yo, Brave, take it easy on yourself.” I nodded. “We can roll it back to the downbeat.”
Our tan guitarist sighed, gave himself a slap on the muzzle like a car dealer on a hood, and gave the thumbs up. We gave him plenty of runaway with the count-off, took it from the downbeat, and off he soared at last.
And when I mean soar, I mean you shoulda SEEN the faces we were getting from the crew. Whole packa hounds, black, white, red, cyan, all jaws on the floor and damn-near wall-eyed at the sight and sound of our soulful rhythm man. Got even better when we came out of the chorus and into the solo section where Mr. Harrison “Richter” Garret—and I’m still not over how he does this—nailed the solo from the record NOTE FOR NOTE. Brown bastard mutt managed every accent, every arpeggio. He made that Strat scream for mercy and beg for seconds, and I just remember me and Brett moving in close to him, grooving on our axes, and just milking the moment for all the rock-n-roll drama we could.
When we finished the song, we got a standing ovation from the whole crew.
“Great, now for the closeups.”
And just like that, we all collapsed on the floor, simultaneously. None of us passed OUT mind you, but after giving that raw and hard of a performance, and knowing we got to go in and do all that lip-biting “bedroom eyes” B.S., we begged to take five, and by the grace of Trik’s line producer, we got it.
We drank our beers (or gin in Rory’s case), milled about, and got to chopping it up with the crew. The camera operators who knew Harry from other gigs were cracking each other up with their favorite cock-rock poses.
“We got the nice wide leg sweep,” Harry leaned down. “We got Elvis the Pelvis, grinding all over the butt of his guitar. Bite your lip a lil’ more and it looks like she’s taking it in the jack.” He went on like that for ages.
I was fixing to give Brett a pep-talk, but Trik had that covered.
“Remember when Art Blaine was really big?” the gray director nodded, leg kicked up against the warehouse wall. “He was like the crown jewel of the airwaves for a solid year? Yeah, I directed one of his later clips. That schmaltz-fest ‘Like The Leaves.’ Swell guy, meh song, but during that he was getting some real stage-fright. Big black hound, built like Nic but lean, voice smooth as butter, and he was getting jitters on the set. I think it was just so big. The huge plaster fountain piece, the running water, the colored sky. It was like a real PRODUCTION, and I don’t think he’d done many clips like that.”
“How’d he get over it?”
“Well first it was my coaxing.” Trik grinned. “Weird beatnik dude like me just telling a pop star like him to chill was enough in some cases. But the real trick was—”
SKREEEEEEEEEEE!!!
In a split-second, a new set of doors was opened in the steel walls of the warehouse. We lost about two halogen lamps, and one key grip was sent flying into Rory’s kit.
Luckily, neither was hurt.
But when a second asshole came screaming through those freshly made thresholds, me and the boys realized we had a chase on our hands.
“RICHTER! MADSKINS! ON YOUR RIDES!” I bellowed, and my brothers-in-arms were bolting right behind me.
“NEED ME, NIC?” Brett hollered back.
I stopped on a dime and looked dead at him. “If anyone comes driving through like that, open another mouth in the back of his neck.”
Brett drew his pistol, checked his magazine, and gave me the nod.
“Besides,” Trik added, eyes wide and reeling from the shock, “extra set of hands can’t hurt getting this cleaned up.”
I was in my blue Hilux, Harry in his red-and-white hot-rod, and Rory back on his beast of a bike as we all wisely sped around the warehouse and towards the two cars.
They were faded white sedans, hailing from those halcyon 1980s. A Corolla and a Starion, a match-made in import heaven.
My Hilux joined the Japanese rendezvous and sidled up alongside the Corolla.
“THIS IS OFFICER RIDGEFIELD OF HELL PATROL.” I roared over the pickup’s speakers. “IDENTIFY YOURSELF.”
They identified as a round of .357 Magnum from the business end of a Ruger, which drilled against my bulletproof glass. Harry came up on the opposite side and split the bastard’s skull with his credentials. We left that first sedan to its fate of rolling over as we bolted up to the Starion. I was ready to give this creep a second riot for blitzing through and spoiling a good chunk of our film shoot. Come plowing through in your fat-ass sedan, taking out a heap of gear.
Then I saw her face.
Her face told a story all her own. A young red wolf, nothing but a tank-top and jeans, running her ride flat-out, cradling her husband with a hole in his gut. She looked over to me with the kinds of eyes I hadn’t seen in ages. The sorriest damn eyes. I gave a gentle nod, flashed my badge and spoke over the speaker.
“Medhub is just ten miles south of our current path. Keep ‘er on the floor, we’ll follow suit.”
She gave me a catatonic nod, but she understood. We steered her like tugs along an ocean-liner to the MedHub where the nurses and on-site doctor got right to work.
Gal’s name was Melanie Lake, her husband Tom, and the bastard who we polished off for them was a sordid little creep named Kasdan Clash. White wolf, 5’ 5”, wasn’t as mangy as our other crooks, but when I gave Harry the deets, he came back with a profile from HQ that spelled it all.
“Good old-fashioned highwayman.” the brown mutt sneered. “Never takes no for an answer. Though he actually had a warrant out on him for arson.”
“Long may he rest in piss.” Rory spat.
Our red stranger began to apologize for the commotion in the warehouse, but to all our surprise, it was the white, half-gloved hand of Rory that patted her shoulder and quelled her nerves. “Hey, I’d be lucky enough to have a woman drive the way you do in a situation like that. Technically I DO, she’s just a little on the wilder side.”
When the word was out that Tom was gonna kick out alright, we bid our adieus, informed the chief, and hightailed it back to the shoot.
It was around 4 PM we got there, and while there was still plenty of sun, we saw that most of the crew had hightailed it, save for our intrepid director and our second guitarist
“I take it this was a union job?” I hollered through the still-fresh hole in the wall.
“Nah, sent them out to do some second unit. But you ain’t ever gonna believe this.”
Turns out Mr. Trik had a portable editing suite and was cooking like a crack addict on this video with what he had shot so far. Most of it was just us playing, but every time we built up the chorus, he cut in some crazy-ass shots that brought the energy up to 11. He got shots of Rory’s freak-outs, one time Harry slammed his guitar down after a lip-sync louse-up, and when our favorite Injun belted out “bitchin’,” we were all treated to a heart attack as we saw Mrs. Lake plow almost dead on into the camera before crashing back into our own performance.
“Watcha think?”
A solid half-minute of silence from our hapless asses was broken by a shit-eating grin on Rory’s face and the loudest laugh I ever heard rip from his lungs.
“Never a frame wasted then?” he guffawed before bringing him in for a mean bear-hug. “That’s good shit man.”
Shit good enough keep us there filming all the closeups he could ever want. When we finally got the finished video, man was it a trip. Sure the “stampede” was a buncha funky model puppets, but the guy and gal he got in this were a helluva couple. And there we were, singing ‘bout ol’ Beelzebub and his thankless ass. It was fast, it was loud, it was fun. It was a damn fine piece of art, and we made sure to keep Mr. Trik on speed-dial for all future video engagements.
Only problem: the bastard didn’t chart. C’est la vie.
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