The support band gave the stagehands a case of beer in thanks.
The beer math between the twelve guys was gonna be tricky, because Rolls was in recovery now and Eddie Threat had always been straightedge, but it was a nice, and rare gesture.
The verbal thank yous as the trailer door closed were drowned out by shrieks for the headliner.
Crimson lights pulsed on the outdoor stage and washed behind it, where six of the loaders stood, having nothing to do until the headliner was done.
The Labor Day weekend gigs were always fun, but were the siren that warned everyone the outdoor season was coming to end.
The headliner had milked three hits for thirty years, were down to one original guy on lead guitar, his son on bass, the vocalist that replaced the vocalist that replaced the vocalist who OD’d screaming out the name of the nearest big city, forty miles to the south.
Most of the crowd cheered anyway, drunk, stoned.
Kevin Hardigan stood just behind the monitor console, watching the show from the wings, as the drummer kept gesturing at the engineer to turn something up in the sidefill monitor that allowed him to hear the rest of the band.
Guitar?
Vocals?
It was hard to tell.
The rhythm guitarist tripped over a wedge monitor skipping downstage, the singer got hit with a t-shirt and missed a verse, with a prerecorded backing track sounding hollow and phony.
Kevin had his own band, they played basements and sometimes his cousin’s bar, playing a Les Paul copy his uncle gave him when he went to be a medical volunteer in the Amazon.
Kevin was too smart for rock n roll dreams, but liked stagehand work, liked the camaraderie, the party, the flimsy status of having a hi-viz all access, working personnel pass stuck to his t-shirt.
He watched as the night onstage devolved, the musicians angry with the audio crew and each other, the crowd mostly oblivious, sucking down the sponsor’s overpriced beer and for the first time legally, the other sponsor’s overpriced weed.
The setlist was taped to the side of the monitor board, fourteen main set songs and three planned encore songs, including two of the radio hits that had been written when cordless landline phones were a luxury item.
At song twelve the guitarist, the original guy, grey sideburns and botox, stomped on his mute pedal and marched to the wing of the stage as if he was going to hand the guitar to Kevin instead of one of the two techs who had sprung from a crouch to assist him.
Safely out of sight of the crowd inside the big municipal band shell, he pile drove the kelly green SG into the deck, neck first.
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