Monday Story #4: Thistle

He woke up, leveraged a leg off the bed to gain a sitting position. He sat, sweating in the dark rooms in the back of the club until there two minutes left. It was bright, sauna-hot and slow-motion humid, but when he got out there they all screamed and went berzerk, shouting songs. His name. The guys…

Pierce you fuckeehhhhhaaaahh

Thisssaaahhhh….ther

Pierce Fuck You!

And the place seemed much much smaller than the last time. Six months ago and some days; he hadn’t remembered any of it until right then, plugging in. He stepped into his mic and spoke:

Yes. Everybody…

Berzerk again, only louder. The room seemed smaller still. He turned left with a barely perceptible wave to the guy at the board: a finger pointing up. The system came up with a short buzz, and he felt the subs, distant, seismic, pulsing up his legs, through the stage. He hadn’t eaten in 33 hours and 25 minutes and he’d been awake three and one half hours in the last 24. Last night he’d been 504 miles away from where he stood now. The first song he thought of issued soon after from the sunburst Telecaster hanging around his neck. “Impressive”. He wrote it when he turned 15, doing drugs with his friends.

It’s basically “Sympathy for the devil”…

That’s what he told P, the first time they’d played together, years before.

“A lot of songs are”

P had said it like picking up a cue, like he’d prepared. P had been a stroke of luck.

The song began in near silence. Single, deep bass notes stretched for sustain over a chopped-up 4/4.

If there’s mountains….up in heaven
Mountains…up in heaven

They’d need to be high, up
They’d need to be so high up…

The 4/4 shade gained, became substantial, nano-seconds behind the bass notes, still booming and sustaining. Moving air. He heard a general crowd swoon followed by a thousand rebel-yelling twenty-somethings. Everyone on the place switched gears with the band and suddenly a perfect-feeling agreement settled over the room. Escape velocity. He sang louder.

Cause the smallest mountains down here,
The mountains down here are big enough…

Downshift, four beats, and back up five. Everything modulating and rising. Before the big part, the crowd-pop flood tide collides with the electric shore. The place feels much, much smaller than last time.

You heartless bastard….
You made it all so impressive!

Heartless bastard,
it’s all so impressive

He remembered, not to long after they started up, almost 14 years ago, there was guy who wrote for the Ithacan. He was the music guy, and his name was Larry Biggs. Larry was the first fan of the band thistle. Larry knew it. He wore it like the badge of honor it was, and he told everyone he met (and Larry met a lot of people) that his friend Douglas Pierce was going to save rock and roll. He was evangelically committed to the music, and instrumental in getting the gigs and the crowds during those frst delicate years when they were all so young. The first time LB wrote them up, he used words that Pierce had never forgotten. He loved them so much he’d quoted his friend Biggs in the liners to Big Automatic: “They say that a good Thistle show would make you two inches taller and irresistible to the opposite sex.” he’d written, “This is music for intensity. Music to fuck to. Music to commit a murder to. Music that sounds like some awesome and indefinite THING riding you down and scouring your soul”.

The smallest mountains down here are big enough. Big enough.

He’d never really believe the words, not exactly, but when everything was clicking, sometimes Pierce understood what his buddy was getting at so long ago. But then, always by the end of the song, ( or show, or tour, or year) rolled around, he found he always forgot again.

They played four hours, and after that he slept until thanksgiving in New Hope PA. When it was all over he ran off, ducked through the dusty back offices, almost-jogging back to the dark place at the back of the bus. They came for him later. First the guys, horsing around and banging at the door. Then later it was a girls voice. Her voice?

He nestled deep under the covers in the tiny rolling bedroom. He’d be 300 miles away tomorrow night, and probably sicker than he felt even now. He stared up in the dark, half awake and half asleep for the entire six hour ride.