Rock All Night

59




And thus I found myself driving across the California desert the next afternoon in a 1969 Mercedes convertible with three of the four members of the hottest rock band in the world.

Joshua Tree is almost two hours due east of Los Angeles. Which means we had a good bit further to go from San Diego. Everybody got up late, as they always did, so we didn’t actually hit the road until 2PM.

Derek drove, and I sat beside him in the front seat. Ryan and Killian were in the back. Killian was plinking away on a guitar, as always.

“Beautiful car, mate,” he called out.

“It is, isn’t it?” Derek agreed.

“You’re welcome,” Ryan said playfully from the backseat.

Derek glanced in the rearview mirror. “I’m never gonna hear the end of this, am I?”

“Nope.”

“Did you pay yourself back yet?”

“I haven’t exactly had time, what with all the drug trips out to the desert,” Ryan deadpanned.

Their little exchange sparked a memory from the car dealership.

I turned around and looked at Ryan. “Derek said something when we bought it – do you really handle all his money?”

“Yup.”

I looked over at Derek in shock.

“What?” he asked.

“You let him handle your bank account?!”

“And SEP IRA, and Roth IRA, and investments, and life insurance…” Ryan rattled off.

I stared at Derek with my mouth wide open. “Seriously?!”

Derek shrugged. “I trust him.”

“Yeah, but – that’s crazy!”

“Why?”

“Why don’t you just get an accountant?”

“I already have one,” Derek grinned. “He plays bass in my band. And he’s on call 24/7.”

“Yeah, unfortunately,” Ryan snorted.

“And you don’t mind?” I asked Ryan.

“I’d rather do it than see him blow all his money,” Ryan said, then added disapprovingly, “Which he tries to do anyway.”

Derek shook his head like Not THIS again. “Ninety-five grand is hardly all my money.”

“It is when you could’ve rented one for fifty bucks.”

“I am not going to ride around in a Ford Focus.”

“Then rent a Porsche.”

“I didn’t have a credit card.”

“Which is why I get weird calls at 2AM,” Ryan said to me, then did a pretty funny imitation of Derek’s rumbling voice. “‘Hey, man, I just ran up a three thousand dollar bar tab – can you spot me, bro?’”

Derek laughed. “Think of it as a financial booty call.”

“If it were a financial booty call, then I’d at least get something out of it.”

“I told you, dude, pay yourself a fee!”

Ryan waved him off. “I’m not going to do that.”

“You guys are crazy,” I said, shaking my head.

“One of us is,” Ryan agreed.

“Yeah, but who is it: the guy with the bitchin’ car, or the guy who gets calls at 2AM and does all the work paying for the bitchin’ car?” Derek joked.

Ryan considered, then nodded in agreement. “Touché.”

I looked over the seat at the lead guitarist. “You don’t handle Killian’s money, too, do you?”

“No way,” Ryan joked. “I couldn’t possibly keep up with the volume of pot sales. And I refuse to get involved in anything that might have the DEA banging down my door.”

“Ryan’s a bit uptight,” Killian said to me. “He needs to smoke once in a while, mellow him out.”

“Amen,” Derek agreed.

“Yeah, no thanks,” Ryan said.

“Speaking of which…” Killian said, and brought out a tiny little handheld object.

Since the convertible’s top was down and the hot desert air was rushing past us at 85 miles per hour, there was no way to keep a joint lit – so Killian was instead taking hits off a handheld vaporizer. It was a fancy-schmancy, beautifully crafted piece of metal and plastic that fit in the palm of his hand.

After he took a toke, he offered it to me with a look of Would you like some? He didn’t actually say it out loud, because he was holding his breath, letting the pot vapor work its magic in his lungs.

“No thanks,” I said hastily.

“Somebody else is a little uptight, too,” Derek joked.

I poked him playfully in the side. “Hey – who’s going out to do drugs in the desert for the first time?”

He laughed. “Yeah, to get an interview out of it.”

I looked back at Killian. “Speaking of which…”

“Ohhhh, why’d you have to go and do that?” Killian complained to Derek. “And here I was hoping she’d gone and forgot about it.”

“Not likely, dude.”

“More like not even remotely possible,” I said as I pulled out the Zoom recorder and turned it on. “Okay – let’s try this again. When did you start playing the guitar?”

“When I was a boy.”

“What age?”

“Five, I think.”

I waited.

He just looked back at me placidly.

“Killian – ” I warned him.

He sighed, resigned. “Me grandpop had a bunch of old 45s. You know, the little records? Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters. He was in a band back in the ‘60’s, back when the Stones were comin’ up, and back then they were all into the blues, so that’s what he had mostly. I used to sit in front of the record player and just listen to ‘em, over and over. I was obsessed. And so I asked for a guitar for my birthday. Didn’t get it. Said I was too little, hands wouldn’t fit right. And I basically said bollocks to that, and I nicked 20 quid from me mum’s pocketbook – it was payday, I remember that – and I walked down to the pawnshop and I said, ‘I want a guitar.’ And the pawn broker gave me the most rubbish one you’ve ever seen. Acoustic. Looked like somebody’d taken a hatchet to it, but I was so f*ckin’ proud of it. Took it back home and hid it in the attic where nobody would look for it.

“A few days later me mum figured out who stole her money, and asked me what it was for. I was afraid she’d make me take the guitar back if I told, so I said it was for sweets. She said that was a hell of a lot of sweets, and where were they. I couldn’t think of anything, so I told her I gave them all away to my friends. So she thrashed my hide, but at least I got to keep the guitar.

“Anytime I was alone – which was quite a bit, actually – I snuck up to the attic and plugged away at it. Basically taught myself to play. I would ask street musicians how to do such and such, and they would laugh and show me, and then I would go back to the attic and practice what they showed me, and that’s how I learned.

“Then one day me mum found the guitar, and brought it out and asked, ‘Where’d you get this,’ and I said, ‘I bought it.’ And she said, ‘Where,’ and I said, ‘The pawn shop.’ And she said, ‘With what,’ and I didn’t answer her. And she said ‘Tell me or I’m goin’ to give you a beatin’,’ so I said, ‘With that money I nicked and said was for sweets.’ She got all angry at me, tellin’ me how she was going to go back to the pawn shop and sell back the guitar – until I yelled, ‘But I can play it.’ And she said, ‘No you can’t, you’re too little,’ and I said, ‘Yes I can.’ So she gave me the guitar and I played it for her. It was bloody awful, though I guess it wasn’t too bad for a five-year-old who taught himself to play. And Mum was gobsmacked. She started crying, and after that she bought me a proper guitar, and she found a fellow round the way who was in a band, and he gave me lessons, and that was that, as they say.”


The way he recounted the story in his lilting accent was charming. I could imagine a five-year-old Killian defiantly standing up to his mother, desperate to keep his guitar.

Ryan looked at him strangely. “I never knew that.”

Derek looked in the rearview mirror. “Neither did I.”

Killian sighed, exasperated. “I’m giving up all my secrets today, apparently.”

And he did. I grilled him for the entire car ride, finding out when he had joined his first band (he was 14 – everybody else in the band was 17 and 18, but they let him in because he was ten times better than any of them). I found out when he had started smoking pot (14 again – he was introduced to it by his fellow band members). I found out that he was an only child, that his father had died when he was a baby, and that his mother had raised him by herself with help from her parents.

Plus I heard a host of colorful stories about Miles.

They had met when Killian was 24 and did some session recording for a band that Miles was managing. Apparently Miles was every bit as scary back then, too. No one knew where he’d gotten the scar on his face, but he had it when Killian met him. It was rumored that he’d gotten into a knife fight with a thug who ran a venue and cheated one of Miles’ bands out of their cut of the door proceeds. Miles got thirty stitches; the thug got two weeks in the hospital.

“But that’s just a rumor,” Killian said.

“Do you believe it, though?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said seriously.

It was funny – over and over again, Derek and Ryan would exclaim, “I didn’t know that.” Apparently it wasn’t just me; Killian was extremely reserved with everyone around him. But he kept to his promise, and answered every question I posed him.

The one thing I couldn’t pin him down on was his romantic history. He hemmed and hawed, and would only admit to ‘seeing some bird named Lucy’ or ‘going around with a lovely girl named Jane.’

“As in ‘Mary Jane’?” Derek joked.

“Come on, Killian,” I prodded. “Details.”

“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell,” he said primly, and would say no more on the topic.