“The music is not in the notes,
but in the silence between.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
There is beauty to be found in the night’s stars. So often in my youth, when it seemed as though the weight of the world might break me; when my body could no longer handle all the sex; when my mind could no longer cope with all the female attention; I would drive out into the desert late at night to ponder the complexities of life and the stars would answer. As the world around me wallowed in the sanctuary of sleep, I would sit back in my Acura NSX and play a gentle melody on my vintage Stromberg acoustic while gazing up in awe at the vastness of space. Out of the darkest depths of the unknown they shone. Scattered out above the stratosphere to be guided into place by a loving hand and bring forth the gift of life. In those moments, so too was the darkness in my heart alleviated with the light of music. Each note was like a star: a beauty in itself; a bearer of light. But when directed by a delicate touch, could be arranged in such a way as to create the most profound of messages: In my hands I held the meaning of life, and I vowed never to pluck a single note without giving it the consideration it demanded.
It was Friday afternoon and I was sat in the barber’s chair admiring my perm when my beeper went off. ‘This better not be fucking Cameron Diaz again’, I thought to myself. I glanced down - it was Slash and he wanted me to stop by his house to record a solo for one of his latest tracks. ‘Yo! Santiago, keep the change - I gotta roll’. I shouted out, as I placed a $50 on the table and headed downtown. I wanted to swing by the guitar store to try out the latest selection and maybe pick something new to play around with on the track. I pulled up onto the curb (no fucks given), exited the vehicle, then dropped into the press-up position to bang out a quick 100 before strolling through the doors and into the view of Sonia - a young, Puerto Rican dime piece who worked in the store part time until her modelling career really took off. ‘Oh, Papi!’ She gasped, as her eyes darted between my heaving pectoral muscles and luxurious golden mane of curls. She couldn’t help herself. Her mouth hung open as she reached out to touch the top of my head. ‘Don’t be stupid’, I snapped, quickly parrying away her meddling digits. ‘Forgive me, baby’, she gasped, ‘I just want to rip your clothes off right here and do it with you in all the positions - doggy, on top, and conventional’. I gave her a wink. ‘Plenty time for that later, Sonia; but right now I need you to unlock the cabinet to the Gibson specials’.
We walked up the stairs to the main display, where I was stopped in my tracks by the most ostentatious display of poor taste and social retardation I’d ever seen. In front of me stood a fat autistic bastard in skin-tight leather trousers, a sweat-soaked black shirt almost fully unbuttoned, with the sleeves rolled up, and a vast array of fake gold bracelets, rings, and ridiculous looking trinkets hanging off every inch of available skin, making him look as though he’d just been dragged through a fancy-dress shop backwards by his filthy, matted mess of tit-length hair. I turned to Sonia in disbelief. ‘Holy fuck! Who the hell let the LARPer in?’ She stifled a laugh and replied: ‘Don’t blame me, he’s been here for hours fucking about on the guitars, and he absolutely stinks like shit’. As I passed behind him as quietly as I could, I glanced up into the mirror in front of him to see the face that finished off this monstrosity of a man. It was Yngwie Malmsteen, and he was standing over a couple of disinterested young boys who were sat trying out some guitars, drowning out their attempts to play a few chords together with a tireless onslaught of verbal effluvium: ‘I could do that’. ‘Wrong...that’s wrong, you should have added the minor 7’. ‘That bit was okay, but it’s hardly the speed of sound - I can play faster than the speed of sound. You won’t even hear it.’
I bit my tongue and carried on walking to the other corner of the store, where I took a special edition Les Paul down from out of the cabinet and plugged it into the amp. I closed my eyes, trying to forget about the fat disgusting toad in the corner and began playing a few beautiful pentatonic scales. It sounded great - ‘time for some Stevie Ray Vaughn’, I thought to myself. Amazing. ‘This guitar is really something, Let’s see how it handles some Derek Trucks-style blues’. My measured, emotive style of playing resonated out across the store, touching the hearts and souls of all those who were fortunate enough to experience the artwork of a true virtuoso. I opened my eyes once again to see Yngwie glaring at me with a seething look of hatred. He was panting like a dog on a hot day; his bloated face a flaming furnace of jealous vexation. He snatched a guitar out of one of the boy’s hands and proceeded to crank the amplifier all the way up to 11. ‘Steppeth aside, young plebeians, for I, the honourable Malmsteen of Sweden, am about to unlock the gates of hell with a brutal loop of arpeggios that will slay any mortal in its path...tell that slut at the front desk to hold on to her pussy’. I tried to act as though I was unaware of the commotion now going on in the corner, but as he balanced himself on top of the amplifier and began the spectacle with a star jump that launched himself two inches into the air, I couldn’t help but look. He stood with his legs as far apart as his leather trousers would allow and proceeded to furiously play the most horrendous-sounding scale I’d ever heard; his sausage-like fingers raping and pillaging the fretboard up and down as he amused himself by running through his portfolio of obligatory facial expressions that feigned orgasmic pleasure. I recoiled in horror as he fired out a cacophonous mess of notes with one hand on the neck, while reaching across to sprinkle some ‘magic’ down onto the fretboard with the other. He started sweating profusely as he pulled out every clichéd trick he had in his arsenal: sweeping up and down the strings as fast as he could, tapping out some painful sounding collection of ill-fitting notes, then driving his stupid guitar towards the skies as he wrenched down the whammy bar to create a scream that harmonised with the one that my heart was now doing. Each note, so finite and fragile, being mercilessly consumed and cast aside by this gluttonous pig of a guitarist who couldn’t comprehend the value of what he was destroying. This wasn’t music! It was murder. A holocaust! If this was music, life was a mistake!
I couldn’t take it any more. ‘BUTCHER!’, I screamed, as I got up off my stool. ‘You unforgivable butcher!’ I charged at him from across the room and delivered a powerhouse of a straight right hand that lifted him clean off his feet and catapulted him backwards over the amplifiers. ‘AAAAAH! My fucking back! My fucking back is fucked!’ He cried out, as he writhed around on the floor in agony. But I wasn’t about to let up now - this man was guilty of crimes against humanity, and justice would be delivered in the form of a colossal beat-down. As he tried to crawl across the floor to take shelter behind a drum kit I ran up behind him and administered a donkey kick to his fat ass that split his trousers down the middle and propelled his head directly through the bass drum. ‘Please! I’m stuck!’ He screamed, ‘My fucking head is stuck...please, it’s dark in here, I can’t breathe!’. I ignored his pleas for mercy and delivered a volley of kicks up into his pendulous sack of a stomach. ‘OOOF! OOH-AAR! I’ve just had my second lunch!’ He cried, ‘I’m going to be sick!’ I knelt down beside the bass drum so that he could clearly hear what I was about to say: ‘You raped that guitar, you fat fuck’. ‘You mercilessly butchered every single note because you wanted to show off how fast you were, but it sounds like pure, unadulterated dog shit, and now you’re gonna pay’. I got up and ripped the hole in his leather trousers wider to expose his naked backside. ‘No! Oh, God….NOOOO!’ He begged, ‘I’m getting raped! Someone help! Please, I’ll pay you 50 gold pieces!’ I walked on over to the wall and took down a garish-looking Ibanez - the perfect guitar to be shoved up the ass of the worst player of all-time. In one quick swoop I violently directed the head of the guitar up his ass then immediately covered my ears to protect myself from the piercing wail of the humiliated hack of a musician who lay before me. Justice was served. I grabbed him by the legs and pulled him out from inside the bass drum, then, using a broken-off guitar string, knelt down and removed a front portion of his scalp and the filthy streak of hair attached to it. As I walked down the stairs I flashed a smile at Sonia and tossed her the macabre trophy. ‘Have that turned into a violin bow for me, baby’, I said. ‘Sure thing, hot-stuff’, she replied, ‘but first, how about we go into the back room and you finger me like you did that guitar earlier; I bet I’ll sing just as sweetly’. I glanced at my watch (Patek Philippe), still plenty of time to spare. ‘I’m sure you would, mamacita. I’m sure you would. Let’s go’.
