hot action

This is going to be rock'n'roll week on hotaction.ca.

The show is over and the bar is closed.

I walk across the stage towards the back door with a dark-haired woman. I pull her along behind me with two of my fingers hooked over the top of her belt.

The place has pretty much emptied out. They've turned on the harsh overhead lights. The stage is a mess of broken glass and tangled cables.

Amongst all the debris lie fragments, the wooden pieces of a smashed guitar.
~~

~ After three years of dicking around with synthesizers, I'm singing and playing electric guitar in a rock band again. It feels like a part of me is waking up.

~ 1987. Wake up in the middle of the night to a television broadcast of static. Imagine kicking in the screen with a steel-toed boot. My face glows blue with the fantasy.

~ It seems that my rock life is inextricably tied to my sex life. I started playing in bands at around the same time I started being seriously sexually active--in my late teens. Sometimes I wonder: how do normal people get laid?

~ Of course getting on stage is just a big advertisement for myself. You want a man who's energetic, good with his hands, attention to detail when necessary, not afraid to get a little rough...

-"We dance to all the wrong songs. We enjoy all the wrong moves." - Refused

~ In my teens it was the Stooges, Black Flag. Into my 20s things got even crazier--Mohinder, Assfactor 4, Antioch Arrow. What Heartattack Magazine used to call "fast, frantic, fucked-up, hurry-up, let's-go, gotta go music."

Loud fast raw and beautiful. Just fucking GO.

~ Is your sex life like this? Energy and chaos and never knowing what's going to happen next.

~ You know that if you come within ten feet of me you might get hurt. Except maybe it's the kind of hurt you like.

~ Play every show like it's your last. There is only one thing certain in this world, and that's that nothing is certain in this world--nothing.

~ People die. People have died.

~ Every time you get up on stage, think of all your friends who can't be here because they're dead.

~ I have things to do before I die.

~ "Before I die, I will fuck her. When I do, she will moan Mozart." --Steve Albini.

~ Doing sound for open mic night: one sensitive singer-songwriter guy after another. Why does it all have to be so mopey and slow? I'm looking carefully at your cute girlfriend, thinking, Is this woman getting the slamming she really needs?

~ Your well-crafted songs of love and loss are admirable. But the more talented you become, the less I can relate.

So predictable, where's the urgency? We want rock'n'roll to be dangerous again.

~ And so shall this room be saturated with beer and blood and the smell of wet pussy.

~ Turn it up. I too am very sensitive but in different places. So turn it up until I can feel it.

~ Right now I feel full of fuckability.

~ A piece of paper torn from a notebook, with scribbled lyrics to a Colour TV song:

"Three-Legged Fox." (F# Minor)
My instincts are predatorial. Of my intent there can be no doubt.
I ate the guts of the hare that challenged me, keeping me alive 'til the trap gave out.
Warm weather, cold weather, makes no difference. I am the master of all these woods.
I took the worst winter had to throw at me.
Who knew that springtime could hurt that good.

Killing is survival.
Healing is revolution.

My instincts are predatorial; of my intent there can be no doubt.
A lightning strike sparks a blaze that encircles me.
But my fire burns from the inside out.

~~
It went out of tune, so I threw it across the stage. And then I jumped on it. I didn't mean to destroy the damn thing. But once it all started, it just felt like I was watching it all happen, like in a dream.

I will have to find another instrument for tomorrow. I will worry about that... tomorrow.

Because right now there's hot breath at my neck and her hand on my crotch and my mind is clear and focussed and proceeding smoothly along its one track.

~
Next: "She's a rocker."