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  NINE HUNDRED NIGHTS

  LIFE IN THE BELLY OF

  THE HEAVY METAL BEAST

  by

  NICK APUZZO

  KINDLE EDITION

  *****

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Nick Apuzzo

  Kindle First Edition

  Nine Hundred Nights

  Life In The Belly Of

  The Heavy Metal Beast

  Copyright © 2011 by Nick Apuzzo

  www.nickapuzzo.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4661-4405-7

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Novels by NICK APUZZO

  Connected.

  NINE HUNDRED NIGHTS

  Life in the Belly of the Heavy Metal Beast

  Reconnected.

  www.nickapuzzo.com

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  DISC 1

  DISC 2

  Bonus Tracks

  Liner Notes

  Also By NICK APUZZO

  About the Author

  *****

  For Mark, Jimmy, Tommy, Kenny, Sean and Dave.

  It never really ended.

  *****

  ACKNOWLEGMENTS

  My close friend Mark (the real-life 'Ingy') and I, live on different coasts, yet we connect with each other every now and then by phone. Without exception those conversations always end up being reminiscences of our nights playing together in a club band in New York and New Jersey in the early 1980's. Those conversations inspired me to write this novel. Mark never stopped believing in the book and never stopped believing in me; he's been my brother from the night I met him in a darkened practice studio in Passaic, New Jersey. Mark edited this book; if you find a misplaced comma or a redundant period, I’m sure he did it to make me look bad.

  My heartfelt appreciation goes to Scott Schweitzer who continues to inspire me with his optimism, dedication and most of all, his loyalty. Scott enables everything relating to my writing that is ‘off the page’.

  My deepest thanks also go to my good friend Jonathan, an extraordinary and tireless mentor who selflessly helped me find 'up' when I was down.

  I’d also like to express my gratitude to Cliff for his friendship and generosity. I’m still waiting on that care package from Nonna.

  I’m grateful to Leah, Lana and Joel for the kindness you showed.

  Finally, thanks to Max at Posh, Jaimi, Ally, Tina, Dana, Stacey, Luke, Jessica, Jules, Kayleigh, Rhiannon, Brianna, Stephen, James, Brittany and Juanita…for the backup vocals in the studio.

  *****

  NINE HUNDRED NIGHTS

  LIFE IN THE BELLY OF

  THE HEAVY METAL BEAST

  *****

  DISC 1

  *****

  Track 1

  Crank It Up

  June, 1983

  It's Friday night and we're the opening act at 'Legend', a heavy metal night club about thirty miles north of NYC, capacity five hundred according to occupancy sticker in the front hall. Yeah right. The last time that there were only five hundred paying customers on a Friday or Saturday night was never, including the night it opened. It's packed every weekend, frequently nearing double capacity. Legend caters to the hard-rock and heavy-metal music crowd: Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday were DJ nights while Thursday, Friday and Saturday are reserved for live acts. Legend closed on Mondays so the staff could nurse their hangovers, get a few hours rest and go through the lost-and-found crate to see if anything fit.

  I'm trying to make my way to the dressing room behind the stage without smacking either of the two guitars I'm carrying into any of the four doorways I must pass through. The dressing room at Legend is a tight fit for a band trying to tune their guitars and change into and out of their stage clothes; for two bands it becomes a mosh pit on a submarine. To make it easier on all concerned, custom dictates that the band that's about to go on has priority, but when I enter I see the black dude who occasionally sits in for a couple of songs with Wild Prophet, the band that's following us with one set of their own later tonight. I'd seen the guy play a few times and he stuck in my mind for two reasons. First, he was black; quick, tell me the name of a black heavy metal band member aside from Jimmy Hendrix…see? It's a rarity. Second, he played the violin! Though he called it a fiddle. I could hit you with the quiz again, but I'm sure you already see my point. He coaxed a powerful and ballsy sound out of his fiddle and it really kicked ass with cover songs from everyone, Accept to Zeppelin. I was about to learn that there was in fact a third dimension to his uniqueness.

  He looked up as I entered and smiled "Hey."

  "What's crackin? I'm Nick." I returned.

  "Dan."

  As I pushed some of the clutter out of the way to make room for my guitars, I absent mindedly muttered back "Dangerous-Dan, the seagoing man with the tropical tan."

  "What?" he laughed.

  I turned and smiled "Nothin'. Hey when the rest get here, it's gonna be a tight squeeze when we're getting changed."

  "No problem, I'm just hidin' out for a few minutes." Dan said evenly.

  "Hidin' out...from what?"

  "There's like a million white guys out there."

  I chuckled "So?"

  "So..." he said indifferently "So ya know…The Man? Whitey? When there's more than five of you in one place I get nervous."

  I unpacked one of my guitars as I considered what he'd said. I stole a couple of glances at him as I searched for my guitar tuner and reached the conclusion that he was either a little crazy or joking…or both. I decided to find out.

  "Well they just put out a load of fried chicken."

  He cracked up at that, which prompted me to do the same.

  Our band manager Sean stuck his frowning face in the door, handed me a Molson Golden and said "She's here ya know."

  "Crap."

  "I'll be outside." Sean said and closed the door behind him.

  Dan could see the look on my face as I finished tuning the first guitar. I was in the process of tuning the second one, a new one, when his curiosity got the better of him.

  "Who's out front?"

  "It's nothin'…my…my friggin' soon to be ex-girlfriend."

  "What's her problem?"

  "She's…" I searched for a way to get the point across without getting into a long conversation "…high maintenance."

  "Ohhh. Yeah I see."

  "Ya know if it weren't for the sex…which is absolutely mind blowing."

  "Yeah?"

  I carefully laid the new guitar in its case "The girl has no inhibitions…" I smile to myself "…it's just dirty. But what a pain in the ass."

  After a long silence he asked "Want me to take care of it?"

  I offered him a sip and he took a long swig, returning the bottle to me, his eyes never leaving mine. "Take care of what?" I asked leaning back to relax.

  "Take care of HER. You can't be distracted and do a good show. I'll take care of her if you want me to." he said with an earnest expression on his face.

  I c
huckled, but he didn't move a muscle. He had what I would describe as a 'penetrating gaze'; the kind that's hard to look away from.

  He was insistent and pressed on in total sincerity "I'm not jokin', I'll break her arm if she comes anywhere near you. I'll knock her friggin' lights out, that whiney little bitch." his voice rising in urgency. "Point her out to me!" he said moving toward the door.

  I really didn't know what to make of him, but he was definitely on about something.

  "C'mon man, point that cockteaser out and I'll give her the beatin' of her life man!"

  I stopped what I was doing, turned around and faced him, searching his face for some clue. All at once, he broke down and started laughing so hard his eyes welled up with tears.

  "You're fuckin' abnormal, you know that?" I said.

  He chocked out "No offense man."

  "Oh none taken! It's just that ya know, offering to break my girlfriend's arm off and beat her to death with it…I dunno maybe it's me."

  "About to be EX girlfriend." he corrected me as he laughed.

  "Yeah well…still." I said.

  We both continued to laugh about it a good long time and thus I had learned the third unique thing about Dan…he loved to use 'white guilt' and the stereotype of post-60's black rage, to further his enterprise of twisted humor. The guy was a friggin' genius!

  We've taken the stage and are into our first song, but I can barely hear myself. What I can hear is the 'bounce', the sound coming back at me from the wall behind the bar, which is a good thirty feet away. The bounce is muddy and vague; I mean anything is going to sound like shit if you're hearing it from the bounce. I wander back to my 'stack', its two big four-by-twelve HIWATT speaker cabinets stacked one atop the other and topped by a two hundred watt HIWATT amplifier 'head'; fully assembled the stack is a little taller than I am…however, of the two speaker cabinets, I only use the top one, the bottom one's just for show.

  Scott, our sound guy, insists on a low stage volume. Our amplifiers and drums are mic'd, and the microphones feed into a mixing board that in-turn feeds a ludicrously powerful PA system whose mammoth columns flank the stage. The columns stand twelve feet high and are carefully engineered to blow the lipstick right off of your disbelieving and agonized face. The mixing board controls it all, and Scott controls the mixing board…so you see…he's our Joseph Stalin of sound, a genuine control freak. He insists on a low stage volume, that is, the sound that comes directly from our amps, before the PA system grabs it, because that gives him total control of what the crowd hears.

  When we first got together there was a road crew of three that took turns on the mixing board. Scott, in Saddam Hussein fashion, crushed the infidels and took over the mixing board exclusively, becoming undisputed dictator of our sound. The reason we never steel-toed his ass off to the gulag is that…well the guy is really good at it; he's got a great ear and makes us sound better than we are, more punchy, less splashy. Also, he's absolutely reliable. One time, on a night that we had a gig, Scott's wife went into labor. He was in the birthing room cutting the cord at four in the afternoon, and at nine thirty that night, in the darkened and nearly empty club, as we started a quick sound check we heard his voice from the mixing board "OK… kick drum….kick drum please..." Mister Reliable.

  This afternoon I'd made a long anticipated trip to 48th street in midtown Manhattan to buy an axe I'd had my eye on. It's an azure blue sunburst guitar with a more severe Explorer shape than the Gibson it was inspired by, and has a Floyd Rose system (guitar noobs read that as "expensive whammy bar") installed as well. The new girl had a fat sound, great sustain and weighed half as much as my main girl, a tobacco sunburst '71 Gibson Les Paul Standard. The new girl's action was like a prom queen's thighs…smooth, easy and seemingly untouched. Even so, I had the frets filed down a bit and installed an on-board preamp. Now I'm playing this beautiful new nymph in front of a crowd just hours after I bought her, stretching the snot out of each bend and really riding her hard. Problem is, I can't hear her because our stage volume is low, even standing in front of my stack I can't clearly hear myself. I try to creep up on the front edge of the stage hoping to pick up something direct from the PA column next to me, but I can't stretch that far without falling off the friggin stage.

  Now I'm aggravated. It's unreasonable to prevent me from turning up. Who's the guitar player and who's the fucking sound drone? Screw that fascist! I make my way back to my stack and crank it to eleven. The sweet blast bypasses my ears entirely and hits me in the brain straight through my skull. Bliss. I improvise a couple of riffs to hear the full capability of the new girl and I'm really pleased. I turn toward the guys with a big smile on my face to see everyone else in the band looking at me as if I'd just bitten the head off someone's poodle, but that doesn't bother me and I just keep playing.

  After a moment or two, I can tell that 'Stalin' has turned me way down through the PA, but my HIWATT can really scream so I'm still pretty audible. I can't see his face because of the stage lights. I meander back and punch up the midrange a quarter turn to give it a bit more presence and notice Kenny looking at me through his signature tinted aviator glasses.

  Kenny's our insane bass player. I don't mean that in an endearing way; Kenny is fucking crazy. We don't have to keep him in a harness or anything, but he IS…irrational crazy. Not Son of Sam crazy…more like…Andy Kaufman crazy, which is to say you have to keep an eye on him since he is, at times, a danger to himself and others. He plays a Fender Precision bass guitar through an Ampeg amplifier that has two fifteen inch speakers built into its cabinet and that's stacked atop another cabinet that holds two more fifteen inch speakers. He's looking at me while chewing at the ends of the red bandana loosely tied around his neck. I can tell that a thought is roaming, like a jackal, through the post-apocalyptic wasteland inside of his skull; he shoots over to his amp and cranks it. I've never heard him at full volume and it feels like someone is hitting me in the chest with a short handled sledge.

  Jimmy, our drummer, can't do much but pound harder, but he does and his level is meeting ours. Once he begins playing, Jimmy's all business. The times that I've climbed up onto his drum riser and carried on conversation with him during a show, I was lucky if I got a quarter of his attention. He's all about the mission, and he likes it that way. On sheer talent, Jimmy's probably the best of us; the guy has great chops and perfect time. Perfect. Christ, I can picture him as an old man on his death bed, and in his last gasp he shudders and his old limbs rattle out a perfect flamadiddle.

  Ingy is our other guitar player and my counterpart…the Rocky to my Bullwinkle. His real name is Mark England, but somewhere along the line, and there's no consensus on where that was, his last name was morphed from England to the phonetic familiar form 'Ingy'. Everyone calls him Ingy, I swear that I've even heard his mother call him that on occasion. He plays a white other-worldly shaped Dean through a fifty watt Marshall head that sits atop a single two-by-twelve bottom. I'm looking at his face and I instantly divine his dilemma. If he cranks his amp up he might blow the speakers, but if he doesn't he'll be branded 'a collaborator'. Here's one of Ingy's defining characteristics, he's worried about it and if there were a world of worry…Ingy would be a continent unto himself. I wouldn't quite call it anguish on his face, but I can see that he's definitely struggling with the situation. I have little sympathy for him and I'll tell you why; Ingy is a VERY funny guy and if he had an opportunity to embarrass you in a way that entertained him, he would have absolutely NO reservations, regardless of the situation. Example…on one occasion he and I were in a bar and I met this girl, and she was smokin'-hot. I buy her drinks and chat her up for a while and everything is going great. I excuse myself to visit the restroom; when I was returning I heard him say to her as I approached "Here comes Rubber-Sheet-Boy now." In the few short minutes I was gone he'd concocted a bullshit story about me being a chronic bed wetter. He was so believable when he did these things, and needless to say, she disappeared pretty quickly. So pleas
e excuse me if I enjoy seeing the man squirm.

  On an unrelated note, Ingy recently broke up with Wendy, and though he'd never admit it, we could all see he was an open wound. I step up to the mic and say "This one's for Wendy." tossing him a wink.

  Tactless? Maybe so, but it proved to be the straw; he cranked it up and the speakers didn't blow.

  Our singer is the Reverend Tommy Charik; he's an actual somehow-mail-order-certified reverend, from a Jewish family no less, yet is a self-described agnostic. Why the 'Reverend' certification then…I really never wanted to know, that way I have what lawyers call 'plausible deniability'. Tommy is in the dressing room backstage since we're in the middle of an instrumental; he likes to leave the stage at times like these, times when he isn't the center of attention. I don't hold that against him because in my experience it's one of the traits common to a good front-man and singer. You gotta have huge balls to work a horde of beer soused over-sexed miscreants who routinely wear sharp metal things attached to their clothing as a fashion statement, and in that respect Tommy's packin' grapefruits.