Kent McDaniel: Riders on the Storm
Five minutes left on break, Kevin checked himself in the dressing room mirror. His page-boy looked okay; he’d just combed it. He tucked a crimson shirt into black leather pants and glanced down at his boots. Scuffed, but that was fine. He glowered into the mirror, then felt embarrassed when Ricky stepped into the picture.
“Nice scowl,” said Ricky. “Jim Morrison would be proud. No, jealous.”
Kevin grimaced.
"Good crowd for a Thursday.” Ricky ignored the look on Kevin’s face. “The owner’s happy.”
“Good for him.”
“Come on, Kev, don’t get moody on me.” Ricky nodded toward the stage door. “Time to rock.”
Kevin lifted his chin. “Sure. Be right there.”
On a dilapidated couch by the stage door, Janet sat drinking wine while she chatted with the club owner. Dressed in green sweater and beige corduroys, even leaning back, she had good posture, and her hair fell straight, red, and golden almost to her waist. Kevin crossed the room and stood at the stage door until he caught her eye.
“Got to go back to work.”
She smiled. “Give ‘em hell,”
He walked through the door onto a large, dimly-lit stage, and joined the rest of the band: organ, bass, drums, and on guitar, Ricky, grinning behind rimless glasses, able to stand still barely a second.
The band started “Break On Through”, and red stage lights came up, splashing a pale glow across the stage. Kevin looked out over the bar. The crowd, whose members spilled onto the dance floor, had grown. He swaggered to the mike stand and grabbed the mike, intoning, “You know the night destroys the day. . .”
As the song drove on, the music absorbed him, and yet his awareness felt somehow removed, as though he were a spectator. He ran through his Morrison moves, picked up from YouTube. The music, the lyrics, the moves made the crowd dance and howl. No one left the club, few left the dance floor before the final encore. To a sultry rhythm, Kevin crooned, “When the music’s over. . . When the music’s over. . .”
The stage lights went off, and he walked into the dressing room, where Janet lay asleep on the couch. He sat down beside her, leaned over, and softly kissed her lips.
With a sleepy smile, she opened her eyes and stretched her arms. “Sounded good, Kevin. As usual. Take the money and run, okay.”
“Sure, I’ll go find Ricky.”
Ricky was at the bar, having a drink with the owner, a stocky man with a lined face. The night’s pay stacked in front of Ricky stood four inches high. That’s why they were Riders on the Storm, a Doors tribute band. The money.
The owner excused himself and Ricky handed Kevin a stack of twenties.
“This is the life, eh?” asked Ricky. “Two hundred a piece every time we play. And we’re working all over the place. How bout it?”
“It sucks.” Kevin said. “I feel like a clown up there. I mean, let’s do a tribute-to-Elvis band. I’ll wear a gold jump suit and we’ll do ‘Hound Dog.’ Maybe we’ll make even more.”
Ricky seemed to consider it. “Come on,” he said at last. “A Doors tribute is hipper than an Elvis tribute. More artistic. Heavier.”
“Maybe the Doors were more artistic than Elvis, maybe not,” Kevin said. “Either way, a tribute band does cheap impersonations.”
“Fifteen hundred a night ain’t cheap.” Ricky smiled. “But, okay, I know what you mean. You wanna sing your songs--not Morrison’s.”
“I want us to do our own stuff, look our own way, move how we want to,” Kevin said. “I’m telling you, we’re just impersonators. It’s sick, what we do.”
“Okay, okay,” Ricky soothed, “but be realistic. Where was it getting us, doing our own stuff?”
“At least it was ours. I don’t write any more . What’s the point?”
Ricky spread his palms. “We worked little dives for peanuts. We make three times as much, now--and that’s after paying two roadies.”
For a moment Kevin stared at Ricky. “I guess you’re right.”
“I got an idea, Kev.” Ricky said. “We start putting ten percent of our take in a special bank account. Then, when we got enough put away, we make a demo tape of our best original material. And we’ll push it to the record companies.”
Kevin sat up straighter. “That’s not a bad idea. Maybe this wouldn’t seem so dead end.” He and Jackie had played together since their junior year at De Kalb, which was where Kevin met Janet--his senior year, when she was finishing her MBA.
He got up and went to get her. They left the club and walked to his car, an ’03 Impala, its white body and red interior like new. Inside, he turned the key and the engine purred to life.
They were in Chicago’s western suburbs, a fifty-minute drive from the north side apartment building where they both had apartments. Janet slept much of the trip, but woke as they turned from the expressway onto Lakeshore Drive. It was three in the morning; a stockbroker, she had to be at work in five hours. As they turned from the drive toward their building, she took a bag of pot from the dash, and by the time Kevin found a parking space had rolled a joint. Listening to blues on the car radio, they smoked. Howlin’ Wolf growled that he was sitting on top of the world.
Inside Janet’s apartment, they made love on her sofa, then she went off to bed. Kevin thought getting high and going to sleep was a waste, but she said made her sleep more peaceful. He wished it affected him that way.
A sound sleeper who normally dreamed little, he’d been having strange dreams, which he could remember only dimly upon waking. The memory of one recurring dream, however, was always clear. In it he walked deserted night streets somewhere in Europe, unlit streets paved with cobblestone and lined with twisted little shops and houses. His footsteps reverberated and he felt vague fear, as though something followed him. He would come to a moonlit plaza with a large fountain at the center. Then low, mocking laughter would sound, and he would awaken. The dream troubled him, as did sometimes--if he was very high--his hearing distant, soundless voices as he drifted off to sleep.
Their building had four stories, Janet’s apartment on the second floor, Kevin’s on the third. When they slept together, they slept in her apartment, which was well furnished, and her bed large and comfortable. His apartment was sparsely furnished and a mattress on the bedroom floor served as bed. For another half hour he sat in her living room looking over Facebook and Twitter on his phone, and then went up to his apartment, tossed his clothes onto the bedroom floor, and dropped onto the mattress and into slumber.
Dreams came. At one point, he watched the World Series with some friends as they tried to remember the team for which Joe Namath had pitched. Then, once again, he walked brooding, ruined streets. At the periphery of his vision, warped figures moved, some midgets, others taller but squat and grotesquely muscular. Along with the echoes of his footsteps, he could already hear mocking laughter. When he reached the plaza he stood a moment in the moonlight, looking at the fountain, toward which he began to walk. In the wan light, a dark figure stepped from behind the fountain.
Kevin walked nearer.
The figure said in a low, almost lazy voice, “You’re mine.”
It danced and Kevin mirrored its movements. Then they stood at the fountain, leaning over its edge, gazing into the silvery waters. The figure was Jim Morrison, but more handsome and diabolic. Kevin’s reflection was a caricature of Morrison, gross and ludicrous. Morrison sneered at it, crooning, “Little boy wants to sing like me, move like me, look like me. Cool. Gonna be me. Be gone I’m coming. He’s going.”
Kevin woke, his heart hammering, the dream more real than the room where he found himself, twilight peeking through the curtainless window. His gaze fell on a large black and white poster across the room, from which Jim Morrison glared through the dim light. Kevin got up, walked to the poster, ripped it from the wall. He carried it into the kitchen and crammed it into the trashcan.
He opened the refrigerator. It was empty but for a couple beers, one of which he opened. He dressed and hurried down to Janet’s apartment. She came to her door in a gray business suit, a bowl of cereal in one hand. She gave him a dismayed look. “You look awful. Did you see a ghost or what?”
He stepped through the door with a nervous laugh. “Funny you should ask.” He described his dream while she listened, her face expressionless.
“You’re losing your artistic identity in this so-called tribute-to-the-Doors band,” she said. “That’s what the dream’s about.” Her face softened. “You can see that, can’t you?” She looked at the beer in his hand, as if just noticing it. “What’s that for?”
“I don’t know.” he shrugged. “I opened the refrigerator and it was there. I don’t know.”
Janet carried her unfinished bowl of cereal into the kitchen and poured it down the disposal. She turned and smiled. “You’ve only slept a couple hours and I bet you’ve got a hangover. You could do without dime-store psychology, I guess.”
Kevin took a drink of beer and poured the rest down the sink’s drain. “Yeah, my mind is sort of in a fog. What a dream.”
“Why don’t you lie down in my bed?” she asked. “The shades are down. Maybe you can get back to sleep. Call me when you get up.”
When she closed the door behind herself, Kevin yearned for the beer he had just poured out. One more remained in his refrigerator, and for a long moment it drew him. What was he thinking? He didn’t drink in the morning. Could one dream throw him off that far?
Instead of going back to bed, he turned on the burner under Janet’s red teakettle. From the cabinet, he got a jar of instant coffee and spooned some into a cup. When the water boiled, he filled the cup, walked to the living room and turned on the TV. He sat on the couch, watching American Pickers, then switched channels to watch the second half of the Today Show. When that finished, he watched The Childers Show, which featured several former men who’d undergone sex-change operations and had children from before.
When that was almost finished, he decided that Ricky was probably up. Kevin switched off the TV, rolled a joint from Janet’s stash and went upstairs to get No One Here Gets Out Alive, a biography of Morrison Ricky had lent him. Right now, Kevin no more wanted it than he wanted Morrison’s face staring at him from the wall.
It was October, the morning was overcast and new-fallen leaves rustled under his feet as he walked to his car. The drive to Ricky’s house took just ten minutes, and though Ricky answered his door in pajamas, he held a steaming cup of coffee.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Not much. I woke up early.” Kevin handed Ricky his book.
“Great book, huh?’ Ricky asked. “The Doors started out as a bar band and look how far they made it.”
“Right,” Kevin agreed, without enthusiasm. That was then in L.A., he thought, this is now in Chicago. Their band had moved there after college. For almost a year they’d worked shit day jobs, playing when they could. Then Ricky sold them all on the Doors tribute band and they became Riders on the Storm--three years ago now.
Kevin took out his joint. “How about trading me some coffee?”
Ricky got Kevin a cup of coffee and put a vinyl album by the Electric Prunes on his turntable--sixties psychedelic pop, and one of Ricky’s prized possessions. The two friends sat listening to the music, drinking coffee, and smoking pot. Ricky turned on the TV, and sound off, they watched a game show emceed by by man in a sports coat and no tie. As the Electric Prunes wailed, the host soundlessly laughed and talked with the contestants and guest celebrities. Kevin began to feel disoriented and was glad that when the album ended, Ricky neglected to turn it over. For a moment, they watched the silent game show; then Ricky said, “That’s good pot.”
“Yeah,” Kevin agreed. “I’m high.”
“Are you up for tonight?” A hint of anxiety frayed Ricky’s voice.
“Yeah, well,” Kevin said, “I’ll be okay. I haven’t slept much, but I feel all right.”
For another hour or so, they talked, mainly about plans for the band. Kevin described his nightmare to Ricky, who told him not to worry about bad dreams. Around one Kevin left.
At his place, he called Janet, who said she was working until around seven. They agreed that he should pick her up on the way to the gig. After the call, he went to the bedroom and laid down. Sleep came, but in short, dreamless interludes, between periods of semi consciousness. Following one of his dozes, he opened his eyes and looked at the clock. It was nearly six.
He went to the closet and put on a purple collarless shirt and burgundy denims. To complete his costume. he stepped into a pair of ankle-high shoes with buckles and donned a blue jeans jacket.
Lakeshore Drive to the Loop took twenty minutes. Around the corner from Janet’s office, a small, dingy liquor store squatted among the skyscrapers. For no reason he could explain, Kevin stopped there, and from a short, bald clerk, who eyed everything with hostile indifference, bought a twelve-pack of beer. He carried it under one arm into Janet’s building, signed the visitor’s register, and rode the silent, empty elevator.
He left it at the sixth floor and walked down a carpeted hall, until he reached a glass door with Whitehead Investments lettered upon it in gold. It was unlocked and he eased it open, then walked through the receptionist’s alcove into a big room with half a dozen desks, all of them empty but the one where Janet sat peering at a computer screen. She looked up, and at the sight of him and his package, raised her eyebrows.
“What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion.” He shrugged. “A whim.”
She changed into jerans and a sweater, and they left.
In the car, he opened a beer as they pulled onto the Eisenhower.
As they merged into the traffic, Janet, said, “You know, I was wondering. When you guys decided to do a tribute band…”
He glanced her way and she continued, “Why ‘Riders on the Storm’--The Doors?”
“For one thing I can sing like Morrison.”
“Yes, you can.” She nodded. “Very well. But your range also goes quiet a bit higher than his.”
He cocked his head in a shrug.
“You use those higher notes sometimes in your own songs,” she said. “Which I really like better than Morrison’s.”
He drew back. “You like my songs better than Morrison’s?”
Yes, I do.” Her face was calm, guileless. “Some of them are actually happy. Or love songs.”
He didn’t know how to feel. Stunned? Glad? Incredulous? Then he thought, You’re lovers. What do you expect?
He watched the road and gave his head on tiny shake.
What were The Doors’ songs about?” she asked. “Violence. Death. Insanity. Lust, evil, alienation, the occult. It’s all dark--dark.”
Kevin said, “OK, but for my money, none of the other Sixties bands had a lyricist interesting as Morrison. And The Doors played way better.”
She touched her hand to his arm. “You don’t seem happy doing the Doors tribute anymore.” He gave her a sidelong look.
“Are you sure you want to stay with the band?” She dropped her hand. “What if you got a day job and when you’re off write songs and market them?”
Kevin opened another beer, splashing foam against the windshield. “I’d rather die first.”
Janet mimicked surprise. “Aren’t you emphatic tonight.”
“No way I’m working nine to five.”
Her voice grew chill. “That’s what I do.”
“Yeah, you’re a stockbroker. I was an English major.”
The rest of the way, they rode in silence. At The Far Side, they crossed the nearly empty parking lot and stopped at the brown metal door behind the club. Kevin’s knock brought Ricky to the door. “All right,” he laughed, “let’s get this thing going!”
The rest of the band was sprawled around on the room’s couch and chairs. The club kept a large plastic trash can in the room, filled with ice and beer; Kevin added his beers to it.
Ricky joined him. “Couldn’t wait til you got here?” He grinned. “Must be the full moon.”
"The full moon.” Kevin chuckled lowly. “Yeah, we all want to howl at the moon.”
They joined the others, who were passing around a joint that Janet had just rolled. Kevin had no pot, but by show time he’d downed a couple shots from the bar and a coffee. Normally, none of the band drank on stage. It detracted from what they hoped was their slick, professional image. But tonight, Kevin strode through the doors to the darkened stage, grasping a beer. As the stage lights came up and the band began their signature song, “Riders on the Storm,” he raised the can in a long, stiff-armed salute to the crowd. While the musicians had partied, the club had filled, and here and there, raucous cheers greeted the music. Kevin drained half of his beer and stepped to the mike, chanting softy, “Riders on the storm…Riders on the storm...”
Onto the dance floor couples drifted and to the languid rhythm danced. The song pulsed with a sexual tension that it never quite released, and Kevin found his body moving to the music without conscious effort on his part. His Morrison moves paraded themselves, a sense of abandon gripping him.
The song ended to polite applause. Before anyone could leave the dance floor, the band kicked off “Peace Frog,” all hypnotic, funky drive. The dance floor filled. The song concerned blood and violence, and Kevin had always conceived of it as a protest. Suddenly it came to him that it was more a celebration, and an undertone of exultation stole into his voice as he sang. “Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven…Bloody red streets of fantastic L.A.” The teeming crowd, everyone in the club, were drunken savages. At that moment, Kevin loved them, loved the music, the night, the full moon, his ecstasy only sharpened by a faint tinge of horror.
The music drove on, and the crowd lapped it up. The band played double their usual set, almost two hours. A round of beers came up to the stage and the whole band drank.
At last, they took a break. In the dressing room, they helped themselves to more beer from the trashcan. Ricky collapsed merrily into a beat-up lazy chair. “Man! What a set! We were incredible.
They all laughed. Janet came up and put an arm around Kevin. “I’m just wondering how you guys are going to keep it up for two more sets.”
Kevin took a drink and set his beer down. “I don’t figure to do two more sets. I figure we take a half-hour break instead of fifteen minutes. Then I figure we do one more long set like the last one. That ought to take us to closing.”
“Sounds good to me,” Ricky said. “Nobody’s going anywhere after that set.”
Janet looked from Ricky to Kevin, a V between her eyebrows
Kevin said, “We don’t have to follow the same routine night after night. That sucks.”
The quizzical expression remained on Janet’s face.
They took a half-hour break and Ricky was right-when they came back, no one had gone anywhere, but more had come. The club was wall-to-wall people, palpable excitement in the air.
Everyone in the band had a drink somewhere on stage. With the lights still dimmed, they started “Backdoor Man.” Then almost simultaneously, the stage lights came up, Kevin began to sing, and the dance floor filled. For the next hour and a half, the dance floor never emptied.
“These song’s we’re doing are all from the Sixties,” Kevin intoned before their last song. “People think it was all about Peace and Love. No.” His voice rose. “Freedom that’s what it was about. Forget ‘Don’t do this. Don’t do that.’ If it feels good, do it. If it feels good--do it.”
Screams of agreement rose from all around as the band kicked off “Moonlight Drive.” It was their second encore, and afterward the houselights went up, the crowd starting to drift away.
Later, Kevin, Janet and Ricky stood in the deserted parking lot, as the moon sank in a sky growing paler. The equipment was dismantled and loaded in the truck, the bar closed, the rest of the band gone. Other that their own, the only car in the lot belonged to the club owner, who was still inside. The houses around the lot were dark, unlit. Around the outer edges of the parking lot, stood a few gaunt trees.
Holding an empty beer can, Kevin leaned against his car, arms crossed, staring over the leafless trees. Janet sat on the front fender of his car, slouched.
“I can’t believe you’re gonna quit!” Ricky stood in front of Kevin. “We’ve got a great band. We’re working! The money’s good. What do you want?”
I told you,” Kevin said patiently. “I’m going to L. A.”
“You’re going to L.A.” Ricky almost sneered. “Like Morrison. I can’t believe this!”
“Believe it, I’m gone,” Kevin answered. “I’ll find a band out there.”
“L.A.,” Ricky jeered. “Maybe Morrison is possessing you, just like in the dream.”
“You know what, man?’ Kevin asked softly. “I don’t even care.”
Janet climbed off the car and looked at Ricky. “Morrison isn’t possessing anyone,” she said. “Kevin’s just becoming a better impersonator. He wants to go to L.A. and maybe live on the streets, like Morrison. Make it to the top, like Morrison.” She looked at Kevin. “Maybe he wants to die before he’s thirty, too.”
Kevin scratched his head, yawned. “Well anyway. I’m leaving tomorrow.” He threw his empty can onto the lot.
“I don’t know, man,” Ricky said. “I think you’re blowin’ it.”
Janet smiled bitterly. “Do what you want, Kevin. I think your bad dreams are just getting started.”
He laughed at her. To his own ears the laughter sounded cruel and far away.DSS
Kent McDaniel, of Carbondale, IL., is a writer and musician, and has also been "a teacher, janitor, factory worker, hay hauler, trade-checker and clerk." He hosts a radio show, Down Home Cookin' on WDBX-FM 91.1.
Musician burnout? Flight from reality? To keep these good stories coming, donate here to Downstate Story.