Seven

Gene is the Lost God of Echo

     The guitar made a nasty gargle.
     "Oh, Christ," Leif shrieked, covering his ears, "What the hell is wrong with that thing?"
     "It's called an Echoplex," Gene responded, twiddling about with the sliders. "It's supposed to do this."
     Tom looked skeptical. "You sure? U2 doesn't sound like that."
     Gene glared at Tom. "We're not trying to sound like U2, dipweed. I just said the Edge uses one. So did Hendrix."
     "Man, neither of them is sweatin' any the way you play!" Leif laughed, spewing beer through his nose.
     "Oh yeah?" Gene smiled mischievously, then ripped the basement with a screeching lead. It was an ear-blisterer... and pretty damn good.
     "Okay! Okay!" Tom shouted, as the last echoes of the last note dribbled off into silence. "It's cool! It's cool!"
     Gene smiled. "See. What'd tell you."
     Leif walked over to the black box, which was about as big as a toaster. "Where'd you get this, anyway?"
     "Internet. Cost me two week's salary. Worth every cent."
     "I've never even heard of it."
     "They used to use 'em a lot in the 60's. Now they're collectors' items. See this lever? It moves the tape heads inside the box, controlling the length and pitch of the echo..."
     Tom rolled his eyes. "Here we go!"
     Leif held up his hands. "Skip the tech stuff, okay? It sounds cool, that's all that matters. Wanna jam?"
     "Damn right I wanna jam. Did you guys listen to the tape I gave you?"
     The other two looked at each other. Tom was twirling his drumsticks absently. "Yeah, but, y'know, it didn't really do anything for me..."
     Leif nodded. "Yeah. You know, that hippie crap's okay and all that, I mean I like the Doors and all, but come on! It's not like it's Nirvana."
     Gene's eyes were ice. "If you really listened to it you wouldn't say that. Look, we can play 'Team Spirit' and 'Grandma Take Me Home' all you want; I just want to try some of this stuff."
     Tom rolled his eyes again. "Why bother? I've never heard of these guys; I asked my dad and he never heard of them either, and he was almost at Woodstock."
     "Why should it matter if anyone's ever heard of them? Cool is cool. Can't you make up your own mind if something is cool or not?"
     Leif shook his head slowly. "Yeah, and I made up my mind. It's not that cool."
     Tom nodded. "Word."
     Gene was starting to get pissed, but he shook it off. He'd expected this. "Listen, maybe you guys are just doing this to impress the babes at school, and so, okay, we'll play some goddam Pearl Jam, but I'm taking this really seriously. I want to eventually write our own stuff, and I want us to be different. And until we're ready to do our own tunes, the next best thing is playing really excellent tunes that nobody knows."
     Leif still looked skeptical. "I see your point, but..."
     Tom finished the statement. "... but it could just as easily be that you're saying that to justify playing music that you like, to show how cool you are that you know stuff no one else does."
     Leif nodded. "Yeah."
     Gene grinned, slyly. "So?"
     Leif looked at Tom, and they both shrugged. "Let's jam."
     "C'mon, let's rock!" Tom started banging a beat his drum kit, a fast, stirring, slamming beat halfway between "Rock and Roll all Night" and "We're an American Band". Leif took up the cue, and began to throb out a pulse on the bass, mostly an A, with the occasional flourish. Gene waited for the rhythm section to find it groove, and when it seemed that Leif and Tom were comfortable, he waited for a fill then came in screaming.
     Leif looked at him in amazement. He knew Gene could play, but the intensity of the echoed notes that he heard pealing out of Gene's battered Marshall was a jaw-dropper. He grinned, and focussed on his playing, nodding his head to the beat. Tom looked over and flashed him a thumbs up in between snare hits.
     It was coming together, Gene thought, it was coming together! The sound was meshing; it was really starting to happen. He touched his fingers to the strings in sequence, playing a rseries of repeated notes over and over again, just slightly out of time with the band; wow! The echo reached inside his head and turned his mind inside out; it was incredible, it was exciting, it was... psychedelic!
     Tom shifted the beat a little and Leif started to play around a little more, throwing in some runs and blues scales; Gene took the cue and ran with it, setting the room on fire. He could almost imagine the walls enveloped in flames of sound; waves and waves of psychedelic flame pouring from his amplifier and scouring the concrete. His fingers soared up the neck, finding newer and higher notes, newer and stranger combinations of notes. The flames rippled and cackled.
     Tom and Leif looked at each other and grinned. Man, this was great! This wasn't what high school rock bands sounded like. This was totally cool, totally hot, totally new. Who cared if Gene had some sort of obsession with that old hippie crap? If it made him play like this, he could listen to Perry Como! As long as he didn't want to wear a "Perry" T-shirt on stage.
     Actually, that would probably be pretty hip.
     Tom gave Leif a silent cue, and began to slow the beat. Leif followed him perfectly, and the mood of the jam became more subtle, more somber. Gene broke out of the flame-driven frenzy and turned his sound to water; his echoed notes became the cry of the ocean, vast and eternal. Ghosts sailed galleons across that sound; giant sea beasts called out to one another across miles of rolling waves. The skies surged above, storms brewing; beneath the waves, silence, deep black stillness.
     ...And then everything fell apart. Tom tried a subtle beat switch, into one of those choo-choo-train Metallica syncopations. Leif picked it up ok, but the sudden shift in mood grabbed the magic and sucked it out of the room. Gene's finger hesitated for a second, just a short second, and he knew he'd lost it. The lead came out solidly enough, all the notes were in the right place, but the fire was gone. He played for a minute longer, then waved everybody to silence.
     "What happened? It was going great!" Tom seemed pissed to have to stop playing.
     "No. We lost it." Gene just shook his head sadly. "It doesn't work with those modern rhythms."
     "Well, we gotta play 'em!" Leif insisted. "This isn't the friggin' sixties anymore, 'man'!"
     "Yeah," Tom agreed. "If you're any sort of musician you should be able to adapt. It's not like we're playing friggin' jazz."
     Gene continued to shake his head. How could he explain it to them. They just didn't get it. They probably never would get it. "Look, I can't really put it into words. here's something about those old styles, something almost... magical. Something religious."
     Tom looked at Leif, and they both burst out laughing. "Religious! What l are you talking about!?"
     "Smoke another one, Moses!"
     "I can't put it any other way. Didn't you feel it? Like there was a spirit in the room? A shimmering in the air?"
     "Did you dose before coming over," Leif asked. "Cause if you're holding, you're sharing!"
     "No, I didn't 'dose'. And I'm not so stoned I don't know hat's what either. Come on! You can't tell me you didn't feel it!"
     Leif shook his head slowly. "I don't know, man. It was a cool jam, but spirits? Yeah. Right."
     Tom raised his sticks. "Let's go again, see if we can bring 'em back." Tom launched into a heavy, sweaty beat. Leif nodded, flexed his fingers, and joined in with a slow sort of walking progression. Gene nodded, got into the beat, and let rip.
     They played strongly for another minute, then on a nod Tom and Leif switched back into tithe Metallica beat, laughing.
     "Jesus Christ! That's it!" Gene tore his guitar off his shoulder and headed for his guitar case.
     "Hey, come on, we were just foolin'." Leif tried to stop him.
     "Yeah, let's jam some more. We'll play the '60's', we'll be good, come on."
     "No more today. Maybe next week. It' just not gonna work for me today."
     And Gene stomped up the stairs, carrying his guitar and his disgust with him.
     Leif looked at Tom. "I don't know about spirits, but the air in here just got a lot lighter."
     Tom nodded, scowling, and began tap out another beat.

     Gene lay back on his bed, overwashed in a sour feeling. Truthfully, the jam hadn't been all that bad; those guys were a tight unit, everything a rhythm section should be. And they had really been soaring for a while. He could probably do some pretty good work with them.
     But they just didn't get it!
     He pressed a button on his remote control; Love's "Seven and Seven Is" began to surge out from his speakers. He smiled.
     This was what he was talking about; the fire, the resonance, the raw mystic power of this song; the drama, the ambience of the production. The energy, the spirit of the damn thing! It should be obvious to anyone who listens to the song what psychedelic music is all about; it should be obvious to anyone who listens to the song exactly why psychedelic music means so much, why its loss is such a gaping wound in the psyche of music. So obvious! But they just didn't get it.
     And that was the problem. They didn't get it, they never would get it. To them, it was just another song, just another series of chords, with dumb lyrics that didn't have anything to do with getting laid. To Gene it was something cosmic, the voice of a lost time, a time that had probably never even really existed. It was real, it was magic, it was psychedelic, it was the music that seemed to be coming from inside your brain, from the place where the neurons are at their most sizzling, crackly.
     And as the drums reverberated across the room, he realized that he felt better. Felt like doing something. Not guitar, enough of that for the day... His computer seemed to beckon. He turned on the power, fired up the modem, drummed along on his leg while the processor got up steam.
     "Seven and Seven Is" ended; there was a whirring as the CDs switched in the changer. Oh yeah, he'd left it on "random". It was a cool way to listen to things; and he always let the last song played serve as a prophesy of how the day would go. Today's had been "Isn't it a Pity", George Harrison; not psychedelic, but fitting. What would the next song be, and what would it tell him about the future?
     A series of power chords and a blistering fuzz-guitar lead. The Plasma Miasma. All right! Gene started singing along as he clicked onto his internet connection. "Help me to get out of my mind..." He spun around in his swivel chair as the web browser loaded.
     He had made his default page his newsreader, and, in honor of the music now washing through the room, he pulled up "alt.music.psychedelic". He played a bit of air guitar while he waited for the page to load.
     The "alt.music.psychedelic " page loaded and Gene scanned the subject headers. Spam, spam, spam. He ignored anything that said "Free". Someone wanted to talk about The Rain Parade... too modern for Gene's tastes. Skinny Puppy!?!! Someone was gonna get flamed for that one. Not psychedelic by a long shot. New Yardbirds site... might be worth a look.
     Then his eyes jumped in and out of focus as he saw the next header. Wow! The Plasma Miasma! At the same time he was listening to them on the CD player! How trippy! He had to check this out.
     He clicked on the subject header and waited for the page to load. The Plasma Miasma. The "Arkham Sound". Even though some of those great old local LPs had been reissued lately, imports mostly, the bands were still pretty obscure, even among collectors. And the Plasma Miasma were the best...
     Holy cow!
     His jaw dropped as he read the message. It was short and simple, but Gene knew that it would change his life forever.
     It read: "Reports of my death have been overrated. Fire Brisbane, oh-so notorious leader and singer for The Plasma Miasma, is still on this earthly plane, despite rumours on this forum to the contrary. I know, for I am he. Anyone who wishes to contact me may easily do so. fire@miasma.com"
     The song on the CD ended in a roar of echo. Another song started, another CD, this time the Magic Castle with "Open the Door". As they spun lyrics about throwing open the doors of perception and stepping through into magic realms of undreamed-of wonderment, Gene called up his e-mail program and began to type.