Xo

coming.

 
     

Chapter 7
    REELING THROUGH HIS mind was Jackson Browne’s “The Load-Out” from the seventies album Running on Empty, the tune an homage to roadies.
    A sort-of homage. You got the impression the singer came first.
    But don’t they always?
    Still, nobody else ever wrote a song dedicated to Bobby Prescott’s profession and he hummed it often.
    Now, close to midnight, he parked near the convention center and climbed out of the band’s Quest van, stretching after the marathon drive to and from Bakersfield to pick up the custom-built amp. Kayleigh Towne preferred that her musicians use amps with tubes—like old-time TVs and radios. There’d been a huge debate about which was a better sound: solid-state amps versus the tube models, with the tube purists contending that that older technology produced an indescribable “clipping sound” when played in overdrive, which digital amps had never been able to duplicate. Not surprisingly this had been Bishop Towne’s philosophy and when the Old Man, as his own roadies called him, was performing, the stage was filled with Marshall JCM2000 TSL602s, Fender Deluxe Reverb IIs, Traynor Custom Valve YCV20WRs and Vox AC30s.
    Bobby was a guitarist as well (there weren’t many roadies, techs or personal assistants in the music world who couldn’t sit in at a show if they absolutely had to). He himself thought the richness of tubes was noticeable but only when playing blues.
    He now unlocked the stage door at the convention center and wheeled the big unit inside. He also had a box of light mounts and safety cables.
    Thinking again of the strip light falling that morning.
    Jesus …
    Performing could be a dangerous business. His father had been a recording engineer in London in the sixties and seventies. Back then, the serious-minded professionals Robert Senior worked with—the Beatles and Stones, for instance—were outnumbered by crazy, self-destructive musicians who managed to kill themselves pretty frequently with drugs, liquor, cars and aggressively poor judgment. But even taking bad behavior out of the picture, performing could be dangerous. Electricity was the biggest risk—he’d known of three performers electrocuted onstage and two singers and a guitarist hit by lightning. One roadie had fallen from a high stage and broken his neck. A half dozen had died in traffic accidents, often because they fell asleep, and several had been crushed to death when gear trucks’ brakes failed and the vehicles jumped the chocks.
    But a light coming unfixed? That was weird and had never happened in his years as a roadie.
    And endangering Kayleigh?
    He actually shivered, thinking about that.
    Tonight the cavernous hall was filled with shadows cast by the exit lights. But rather than the ill ease Kayleigh had described that morning, Bobby felt a low twist of pleasure being here. He and Kayleigh had always been in near-total harmony, except for one thing. To her music was a business, a task, a profession. And concert halls were about acoustics only. For Bobby, the romantic, these places were special, almost sacred. He believed that halls like this continued to echo with the sounds of all the musicians who’d performed there. And this ugly, concrete venue in Fresno had one hell of a history. A local boy himself, Bobby had seen Dylan here and Paul Simon and U2 and Vince Gill and Union Station and Arlo Guthrie and Richard Thompson and Rosanne Cash and Sting and Garth Brooks and James Taylor and Shania and, well, the list was endless…. And their voices and the ringing sound of their guitars and horn sections and reeds and drums changed the very fiber of the place, he believed.
    As he approached the strip light that had fallen he noticed that someone had moved it. He had left instructions that the heavy black light fixture shouldn’t be touched, after he’d lowered it to the stage. But now it sat on the very edge, above the orchestra pit, a good thirty feet from where it had stopped swinging after it fell.
    He’d ream somebody for that. He’d wanted to see exactly what hadhappened. Crouching down, Bobby examined the unit. What the hell had gone wrong?
    Could it be that asshole, Edwin Sharp?
    Maybe—
    Bobby Prescott never heard the footsteps of whoever came up behind him. He simply felt the hands slam into his back and he went forward, barking a brief scream as the concrete floor of the orchestra pit, twenty feet below, raced up to break his jaw and arm.
    Oh, Jesus,