Rock All Night (The Rock Star's Seduction 2)

We made it to the wings of the stage when a group of crew guys handed Ryan his bass and plugged some kind of a transmitter into Killian’s guitar.

Suddenly a voice reverberated over the speakers.

“AND NOW… GIVE IT UP… FOR… BIGGEEEEEERRRR!”

The pounding surf of voices became a massive roar, punctuated with screams.

Casey, Mara, the guard, and I all halted at the edge of the giant proscenium that divided the sides from the main stage. The rest of the band kept on going. Killian walked out first and immediately became a black silhouette against the spotlights. His fingers were still moving over the strings – but now they were transmuted into sound: a playful, rocked-out version of the 20th Century Fox fanfare. If you’ve ever watched Star Wars, it’s the music that plays just before the actual movie music kicks in. He was ripping across the strings, distorting the sound into ugly noise to mimic drums: ba-da-da-DUNH-DUNH. ba-da-da-DUNH-DUNH. Du-du-du-du-du-DUNH-DUNH. And then he let loose in a Jimmy Henrix-inspired wail that was astonishingly like the trumpets in the fanfare.

It was pretty awesome.

The crowd certainly thought so, because the roaring notched up a good ten decibels.

Riley was right behind him. Under the glare of the lights, her pale skin and mostly-white wifebeater turned her into a glowing angel – albeit a very strange one, with that two-foot tall mohawk.

She immediately flipped off the crowd with both hands, and they thundered their approval.

As she got behind her drums on a riser, Ryan and Mike the backup guitar player strolled out and waved. The female voices got a little bit louder, a little bit more enthusiastic.

Just before he walked on, Derek turned, looked back at me, lowered his sunglasses – and gave me a wink.

My heart skipped a beat.

And then he stepped out into the maelstrom.

The whole place went absolutely nuts.

Thousands and thousands of women shrieked so loudly that the bass roar of the crowd almost disappeared beneath the high-pitched screaming. It was like those old black-and-white clips of teenage girls losing their minds over Elvis or the Beatles – except it was right in front of me, in color, in real life. The spotlights panned over the pit in front of the stage, and it was eighty percent women – teenagers and twenty-somethings, a sea of slender arms and hands reaching up in a wave towards Derek, hands and fingers clutching the air for him, seeking to pull him under if they could.

Riley suddenly counted off the beat, her voice the only decipherable one above the caterwauling as she clacked the sticks over her head.

“One – Two – THREE – FOUR!”

The drums and bass and Killian’s electric guitar all crashed into being at once, a tidal wave of sound as they launched into “Forgot You Were Gone,” their most recent number-one single, and probably the hardest rocking song amongst their hits. Derek’s voice growled after the intro, and he hurtled towards the crowd, stopping just short of the edge as hundreds of female arms reached over the lip of the stage, trying to touch him, to possess him.

Casey and Mara jumped up and down a few feet away from me and screamed along with the words:

Could’ve been

A night of sin

But now you’re gone

I guess you win

But I’m not holding back

You’re the One

You say you’re not

Heart like ice

Body so hot

But I will never hold back

Forgot you were gone

Just for a second

I screamed your name

I never heard nothin’

I screamed again

And I’m still waitin’

For you to scream right back

The familiar words – You’re the One, you say you’re not… I screamed your name, I never heard nothin’ – pricked at my heart like a needle. It was an angry song, a lashing out – a driving, violent, head-banging tune.

It was also one of their more ambiguous songs, in that I had never been totally sure it was about me. Now, in light of my conversation in the bar with Derek, and then in the penthouse with the band, I was almost positive it was.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Although… if it had been about some other girl, some other woman who had inspired such rage and pain… I think I might have been insanely jealous.

The album version was great.

The live version was unbelievable.

Riley was a force of nature, slamming into the drums with everything she had, eyes closed and face contorted in violent ecstasy.

Killian kept the same notes as the song, but he played with them, throwing in tiny variations, minute changes. Like the Grateful Dead, Bigger allowed – in fact, encouraged – bootlegging at their concerts. And since the set list was never the same, with new covers of songs every night, fans uploaded and spread the music obsessively. There were legions of fans – kind of like Phish’s, or the Grateful Dead’s back in the day – who just followed them around from city to city, because every performance was guaranteed to be composed of at least a third new material.

And Killian was a big part of that. His control was precise – except when he didn’t want it to be. He could be sloppy and ragged when the music demanded it, or razor-sharp or feather-delicate as the situation called for. And right now he was a tornado of sound, the soul of rage itself pulled out of metal guitar strings.

Ryan was a lot less flashy, but powerful nonetheless. That whole special bond between him and Riley? It might have come from their relationship onstage, because he wove the bass in like dark, thick liquid between the solid crashes of her drums. It was a dance between the two of them, and if Riley’s eyes were open, she was looking at Ryan, the two of them communicating in some sort of telepathic fever dream.

The song built to a screaming crescendo, and twenty thousand voices howled the final lines:

I said I forgot

I could never forget

When you left

I will NEVER forget

And then they rode the high directly into another song, a cover of ‘When The Levee Breaks’ – originally a blues song, but made famous by Led Zeppelin on the record Derek had once told me was the greatest rock album of all time.

Riley thrashed away at the drums like she was demon-possessed, her body arching back unnaturally and then propelling her forward as she lashed out with her drumsticks. In Led Zeppelin’s version, there’s a harmonica part – not cutesy, folksy harmonica, but a ragged, blistering wail. Killian mimicked it on his guitar. It didn’t sound like a harmonica anymore, but something supernatural, like a banshee screaming in hell. Mike played the regular guitar part until the harmonica solo let up, and then Killian took back over.

Where Robert Plant’s version was high-pitched, Derek’s was deep and violent, an ugly bare-knuckles brawler of a rendition. And somehow Ryan’s bass tied it all together, giving the song a sludgy, dirty, nasty edge.

The song seemed to puzzle most of the women in the pit, but it got a huge reaction from another core component of the band’s audience: the 70’s and hard-rock freaks, the dude-bros and metalheads. It was weird seeing them out there amongst all the Barbie dolls who had come for their Sex God; there were a few guys in the pit, but mostly they seemed to congregate back on the floor under a hazy cloud of what was probably pot smoke, thrashing their heads in time to Riley’s assault on the drums.

Without pausing, the band launched into another song – one of their own hits, ‘If There’s A Next Time.’ It was a slower ballad, and all the female fans were shrieking again, crying, screaming, as Derek strolled right along the edge of the stage, taunting them with his body, seducing them with his voice.

Only after “Next Time” did they break and speak directly to the audience – the normal “Hello Los Angeles!” patter, though Killian put his own unique spin on it by holding up his lit doobie and saying softly into a microphone, “I must say, your city is lovely, especially its world-class choice of fine herbage.”

The entire crowd roared, although the loudest voices came from the dude-bros in the back.

I glanced over at Casey and Mara. Mara laughed; Casey just seemed confused.

I noticed Ryan looking a little annoyed over by Riley’s drum set.

“Don’t worry, though, police and other assorted authority figures; it’s medicinal,” Killian said quite seriously, which got another roar of laughter.

“What condition are you treating, exactly?” Derek asked him. “Glaucoma?”

“No. Poor dentistry. I am, after all, British,” Killian said with a straight face, which set the crowd off again – and which was its own little joke, since Killian had perfectly fine teeth as far as I could tell.

They launched into song after song, covering all their hits, plus ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ by the Kinks, ‘Been Caught Stealing’ by Jane’s Addiction, and ‘No Leaf Clover’ by Metallica, with Killian somehow subbing in convincingly for half the San Francisco Symphony.

They played Katy Perry’s ‘Roar,’ too, at which point Casey and Mara lost their freakin’ minds – although in Derek’s hands, the girl-power anthem turned into something more like an MMA tournament intro song, dangerous and menacing, as a fighter strode onstage to beat the crap out of his opponent.

They continued on like that, alternating their own songs and those by other bands, putting their own unique spin on other people’s hits. It was an incredible two hours of raw, visceral energy and sexual tension, with Derek teasing and cajoling, taunting and seducing the crowd – especially the women. There used to be a saying about the Rolling Stones, back when they were in their prime and performed to mostly female crowds: ‘not a dry seat in the house.’