A tribute show—but first, a reunion show!

The secret show on Osborne Street had nearly been cancelled when the drummer from the headlining band had turned up dead at the last minute. The band, after some deliberation, decided that the show would proceed. It’s what he would have wanted.

Immediate action was taken to find a substitute drummer.

First the bandmates debated whether it was weird and off-genre to hire a session drummer for a punk show. They reluctantly made a phone call or two but concluded that the freelancers all had gigs that night anyway. Then the band’s singer thought of Colin Kliewer, because he was so versatile, but the guitar player mentioned he might not be keen to play with her again, and she mumbled something about pumpkins but wouldn’t specify what the drama was, and they all just assumed she’d slept with him.

Then a buddy of the singer agreed to play and it seemed like the problem was solved, but it turned out the guy was already too drunk to hold a pair of sticks, much less perform a set of songs he didn’t know in less than an hour. And then the guitar player suggested Aaron Brzezinski, and the singer wasn’t sure because wasn’t that guy crazy or something? and the guitar player took greater offense than was probably warranted and pointed out that it was a punk show for God’s sake, and also no, at worst he was a little inconsistent, and then she suggested that maybe they should all just go back to not being a band anymore, as they had peacefully been doing for the last nine years.

The bass player tried to keep the peace, wondering if they could borrow the drum machine used by the band opening for them, in response to which the guitarist and singer suggested loudly and in unison that he "go back to med school, Jake." And Aaron wasn't answering his phone anyway, but it turned out Olivier, the rhythm guitarist, had a friend who had a sister who'd taken up drums only recently but had been working pretty hard at it and could play weirdly fast, and she was coming to the show anyway, because it just so happened she loved the Ballet Llama.

That’s how Hannah Chen got the gig even though she had never played a show before, and even though it was only a few days since she’d become old enough to legally set foot in a bar, and even though she only knew one and a half drum beats, and the second was really just a variation on the first where you added an extra kick on the ‘and’ of two.

Fortunately for her, the four living members of the long-defunct Ballet Llama decided it was more punk rock to recruit a rookie than to cancel the show. They instructed her to play as fast as she could for as long as she could, and they’d take care of the rest. There were very few genres where this trick could work, and it was a long-shot even for them.

***

For a killing to occur before a show had even opened its doors was unusual. The victim had arrived early for sound check—which everyone in the industry agreed already sounded suspicious—and had been abducted while loading in his kit, only to reappear an hour later propped up behind the bar with a rack tom in place of his head and an empty Standard in his fist. The ironic tragedy of the situation was amplified by the fact that, unlike some of his bandmates, Alexandre had had his fill of the music scene by 2010, had gotten his life together, and hadn’t played a show since the band broke up.

The crime scene had been cleared away by the time Hannah arrived, which was fortunate because as much as she enjoyed a morbid reminder of human mortality every now and then, she was already on the verge of puking just sitting onstage behind the kit, fidgeting with the safety pins in her hoody and listening to the band bicker quietly. It seemed inconceivable that in about a minute she was going to be attempting to make actual music with them. She desperately hoped she could reign in her nausea at least until the last song was ending, so getting sick would come across as an act of rock and roll rather than just disgusting.

Hannah had entered, carrying her cymbals and snare, through a coffee shop she’d visited many times without ever suspecting the dark secret it housed in its bowels: the existence of a half-finished, mysteriously stained and many-stickered basement DIY space down the kitchen stairs. A more experienced musician might have instantly lamented at the concrete reverb-trap they were being swallowed into and checked their pockets for earplugs, but Hannah was in the early days of her career, and to her the basement screamed “live venue”.

Now, seated on the drum throne behind the still quibbling singer and guitarist, she looked into the crowd. Two of her friends were pushing their way toward the mosh pit, which both comforted and worried her, since both were known for over-imbibing and becoming embarrassingly rambunctious.

There were a number of faces she knew as long-time denizens of the all-ages punk scene or the music world in general; hanging apart from the swarm she recognized Lucas Yarbrough, the music blogger and sometimes-columnist for the Free Press who’d been hailed for years as the man with his finger most firmly on the pulse of the city, until he’d criticized the local duo Youth Tambour for switching from live percussion to electronic backing tracks and had been accused of no longer understanding what the kids were into.

The bass player, unable to get the other three to stop quarreling and start the show, turned to her, shrugged, and said “You can play now. Fast, please.” So she did.

***

Jo found the ‘secret show’ idea annoying, and the new drummer was understandably terrible, but it was nice to be brought back to the old days when they were first playing; every performance was in a secret and stupid location and nobody had heard of them or came to see them anyway. She’d been the only one of the five bandmates to have any chops on her instrument, but she was new to the scene and was just happy to be in a band.

Hannah's beat, which came in unexpectedly and as loud and fast as promised, interrupted Michaud's griping—something about marijuana not being an appropriate drug for punk music and how could she expect to tap into the energy if she wasn't on the same wavelength as them?

She gave the knob on her fuzz pedal a quarter turn to the right and adjusted the filter. She'd gotten used to using a tidy, transparent overdrive in the Bukowskis and the extra grit felt good. She laid a hand against her pickups as the amp started feeding back and waited for the first chorus, when the two guitars would enter together. She shot a quick smile at Lucas, who leaned against a wall at the back of the room.

Life had been a series of ups and downs since they’d gotten back from tour. Jaymie had immediately returned to work, since he was unionized and it would take more than a short stint as a cult leader for him to lose his job. Jo was, of course, fired. Fortunately, it was the holiday season and the library had needed extra help in the gift shop, so she was brought back to sell cards and bookmarks at exorbitant prices. It wasn’t peaceful the way shelving books was, but at least it was temporary.

She'd also been on two dates with Lucas. A few days after arriving home from tour, she'd spent an afternoon gearing up to send him a message and feel things out, but had eventually given up in a small fit of diffident frustration, wondering if this was how men had felt trying to ask people out for the last several hundred years. Maybe that's why they felt the need to yell inappropriate things at you sometimes as you jogged across Broadway to get to the donut shop near your apartment.

After failing to message him, she’d realized it might be simpler to download a dating app, take a selfie, and see if they matched. They had.

Lucas grinned back at her and jerked his chin to draw attention to some very wasted teenagers fighting over a bag of Old Dutch potato ships. She watched as one of the boys toppled backwards into a heavily stick-and-poke scored young woman, setting off a human domino effect that took down four or five pierced and tattooed attendees before being absorbed by the mosh pit.

When she looked back Lucas was tapping notes into his phone, as he'd warned her he would need to do sporadically. Her back pocket buzzed.

Normally she had a no-texting-onstage policy for herself, but Michaud was still shouting incoherent greetings to his friends and making liquor demands in French (which Jo kept meaning to learn but hadn’t gotten around to yet), and Hannah’s frantic drumming was evening out and starting to settle into a groove, almost in time with Jake’s fast-picked bassline.

“Jo Connors inspired mass chaos at a punk show on Friday night. The mere pre-show presence of this skilled (not to mention striking) guitar heroine was enough to send numerous inhalant-crazed partiers into infatuated hysterics…”

Jo rolled her eyes. She decided she’d probably sleep with him; if not tonight then sometime soon. She put her phone away and snapped, “Mich!” and he said “Ok, Jesus!” and started the show.

***

The band played one of their biggest hits right out of the gate: “C'était une Danse, Maintenant c'est un Bloodbath,” which somehow felt appropriate that night. When it finished, Michaud waved at Hannah to stop playing.

“Hey, nous sommes de retour!” he yelled at the audience. “Bienvenue, merci d'être venu, blah blah blah…C’est un Safe Space, ok? So you better fucking behave yourselves.” With that, he cued her to start up again, and she played the drums, as hard and as fast as she could, for the next twenty-three minutes, which was the entire duration of their set.

The mosh pit was in full swing by the second song. Close to the stage, a girl who looked too young to have made it past the door stood texting placidly in the centre of the pit, which had somehow formed a serene hurricane’s eye to accommodate her without disturbing a hair in her perfectly twisted messy bun.

Hannah could see her friends, Johnny and Bo, who were clearly several drinks in and not interested in responding to the nuances of the music. Johnny’s scarecrow arms thrashed to the beat of their own drummer, which was understandable considering the drummer onstage had only been playing for two months.

A few people were forced to dodge out of his way; a slight young man managed an artful backbend-twist maneuver that just barely saved a fresh-looking septum piercing from being separated from his face by the wind-milling arms. He managed to get upright and forward-facing again, revealing himself to be the most beautiful boy Hannah had ever seen. Her sticks nearly skipped a beat, but they didn't, because by this time Hannah was a pro.

***

By the time they were playing “I Won’t go to Work (le Travail est pour les Morts)” Jo had re-accustomed herself to the genre and was playing little improvisations on the riffs, which she knew was going to make Michaud furious.

They stopped before the second last song, so that Michaud could toss a few obscenities at the crowd and thank them once more for coming. They let Hannah pound away underneath, since she seemed to be in the zone.

“Fuck you! Did you think we were gone forever? Vous aviez tous tort, motherfuckers!”

It occurred to Jo that he might be overdoing it. She wondered if he felt he needed to prove, at twenty-eight and with a comfortable job in arts admin, that he hadn’t lost his teenage fire.

“We’re still on social media,” he said. “Mais peu importe, so fuck it, who cares.” He mimed spitting onto the stage. “This is Hannah, bienvenue Hannah, plus de cowbell, s'il vous plait, Hannah!” The audience cheered or booed or screamed indifferently, it was impossible to tell. It was time for the last song, “Note pour Moi-Même.”

“I have to make a note…” he sang quietly, the frayed remnants of his voice cracking on each word. He hadn’t practiced enough in recent years to maintain his vocal stamina, but the crowd was eating it up anyway. He was supposed to be accompanied in the intro only by a gentle descending bassline but they hadn’t told Hannah to stop, so she kept wailing underneath the peaceful verse. Jo liked the effect.

“Not to live the life they wrote… For me.” He skipped the next few lines to gulp his beer and cuss affectionately at some punks who were moshing with inappropriate fervor compared with the lull of the first verse; or possibly he’d just forgotten the lyrics.

“I have no regrets/’cause I know I won’t grow up and forget…” he croaked. Someone passed him two shots, for himself and the new drummer, but their instructions were lost in the din and he took them both at once in the three-beat break before the chorus.

Jo and Olivier shattered into the drum-bass oasis for the climactic moment of the set.

“I’ll fight until I float/Je vais me faire une note!”

Hannah sped up, moved by the intensity of the chorus, and even Jo had trouble playing her palm-muted lead line fast enough. Hadn’t they said this girl had only been playing for a couple of months?

“Note! Pour! Moi-Même!/Never to forget again!” Michaud lost his voice entirely on the sixth repetition of the line, kicked over the mic stand, and stumbled into the frothing pit, where the breakers descended onto him and he was immediately consumed by the current. Jo might have been impressed by his antics once, but Jo had been playing with Jaymie Brzezinski for the last four months and now it would take more than the old Sid Vicious shtick to catch her attention.

She finished the song and, feeling simultaneously triumphant and cliché, dropped her guitar against the face of the amp, where she left it feeding back shrilly while Hannah battered away at the drums and the room thrashed and howled its ecstasy.