Crystal Passion Ch. 03

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Not that this was the audience who actually came to our gig.

Thanks to the brief news story in the New York Post, the majority of the audience couldn't be more unlike what you'd normally expect at a Crystal Passion gig, even if the number who paid to come through the door was much greater. There weren't many young women: the typical core of our regular audience. In fact, it was a predominantly male, Rock audience who were just like the kids who'd cranked up the volume at Kai's party. There were more men with long hair than you'd generally expect women with long hair at our London gigs. And the leather jackets studded and patched with the names of metal bands like Korn, Queensrÿche and Metallica were worn with absolutely no sense of irony.

The build-up to the gig already seemed likely to invite disaster. The Candy Cream's default background music was upbeat and bouncy, but the venue was more than half full with young men who were vocal about how much they hated 'disco shit' and wanted 'real music'. However much I was enjoying the Nuyorican Soul, someone had to enter the DJ booth and switch the pre-recorded tape to something more to the taste of a Rock fan. Tomiko was the band member with the most technical expertise, but as sound engineer she, along with Crystal, was one of the few of us who actually had something to do this evening. As it happened, it was Judy who volunteered to take on DJ duties. She was the only one in the band who could tell Metallica apart from AC/DC and either of them apart from Slayer. In those days however, nightclubs still played only vinyl and most new metal and rock records were released on CD, so the audience of head banging rockers was treated to a selection of definitely old school rock from the likes of Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi and Van Halen, which to a Rock audience was probably a bit like playing music by Sister Sledge or Frankie Goes to Hollywood in a London club.

On the other hand, what the audience lacked in contemporary Rock music they more than made up for with alcohol: which seemed very much to be their drug of choice and almost exactly the wrong stimulant for a Crystal Passion gig.

As we all predicted, after Crystal Passion walked on stage to a huger roar of approval than we normally got at any of our gigs, with this audience the only way things could go from then on was downhill. When the rock fans saw a naked woman carrying an acoustic guitar and wearing only a pair of plastic sandals, they must have thought that Crystal Passion would be some kind of a pornographic live show. However, when she was followed by Thelma and the Harlot, who dressed for the gig in matching long flowing white dresses and looked about as unprovocative as it was possible to be it was clear to most of the crowd that this really wasn't going to be quite the night of sexual exhibitionism and raucous Rock music they'd hoped for.

Crystal had obviously put a lot of thought into the show. She decided to perform music from her first solo acoustic album, Triad, but also some of the more accessible songs from the other three albums arranged for just guitar and harmony vocals. It'd probably have been perfect for a folk club attended by about twenty folk fans in chunky jumpers and uncombed hair, but it was received with total incomprehension by the present audience. Tomiko on the mixing desk tried to boost the sound into something that more resembled Rock music by a subtle use of reverb and echo and a few sneaky samples, but this was music destined to fall on the deafest of ears. It wasn't ear-bleedingly loud, it wasn't swamped by power chords and the accompanying vocals were neither screeched nor bellowed. And for those who cared to listen to the lyrics, none of Crystal's songs celebrated Satanism, hobbits or teenage angst.

The first song, Roadside Blues, which to my ears resembles Billy Holliday crossed with the Mamas and Papas was received with polite applause. I've heard that Rock groups often moderate the intensity and sameness of their music with a power ballad of some kind. Nevertheless, applause was almost totally absent at the end of the second song, Pig and Prodigy. The boos, catcalls and slow handclaps began early in the third song, So-So Sower. This audience could see no value whatever in Crystal's gentle pastoral tune with its subtle evocation of a traditional English folk song arranged by Vaughan Williams.

From then on, the audience response got steadily worse. Even Crystal—who was used by now to performing to mostly indifferent audiences—could see that the situation was hopeless. Her songs could hardly be heard at all over the slow handclapping and shouted abuse: some of which was very offensive to women, even one like Crystal who probably didn't really much mind being accused of promiscuity or of being indiscriminate in her choice of partners. And when the audience began lobbing empty bottles and beer cans at the stage, it was obvious that after only four and a bit songs, Crystal Passion's first American concert was now over.

"What the fuck do we do now?" Andrea wondered. She was standing just by me beside Tomiko and the mixing console.

Judy rushed back into the DJ booth and put on Ace of Spades by Motörhead which is famously one of the few Rock tunes that almost everyone likes, but this could only be a brief stopgap on the proceedings. I could see Judy and Bertha in the shadows of the booth frantically flicking through its small collection of vinyl Rock albums for something that could calm down the discontented crowd.

I wandered over to the bar, accompanied by Philippa for moral support, to chat to the owner of the Candy Cream. He was sitting on a stool on the customer side of the bar with a huge lit cigar on which he hardly puffed at all.

"Your band's not gone down very well," Luigi said with an apparently unconcerned smile.

"It's been a fucking disaster," I said. "It's all because our musical equipment's still at the airport. If we'd had our guitars, keyboards and everything, I'm sure we'd have put on a better gig."

"Don't worry about it, dear," Luigi replied as he waved his cigar uncomfortably close to my nose. "Kai warned me not to expect much. It was either opening the club for you lot or shutting it down for the night and not making any money either at the door or at the bar. As it happens, thanks to the New York Post, we got a fuck of a lot more people than I expected and this crowd like their booze a lot more than clubbers on ecstasy and poppers. The bar takings are up, if nothing else."

"But what about the gig?" Philippa asked.

"Fuck it!" Luigi said. "If they don't like your band, well fuck them. If they wanna leave, let them. If they wanna stay, we've got plenty of booze for them."

"So, you don't expect to reimburse any of them?" I asked.

Luigi's face expressed incredulity and disbelief. "Fuck no! They got what they came for. If they don't like it they can fuck off somewhere else. Anyhow, it's about time those old Kiss albums got an airing. I've been thinking about chucking out that Rock shit years ago. Who'd believe kids'd still be listening to the same old shit now as they did twenty years ago!"

So, what was expected to be an acoustic set for a handful of bemused Americans expecting the much larger Crystal Passion ensemble became instead a bad-tempered Rock Disco of precisely the kind that I'd avoid at any cost back in London.

I wandered backstage to where Crystal was sitting in the dressing room with Thelma who was puffing agitatedly on a joint. I don't think I'd ever seen her more desolate.

"I'm so sorry, Pebbles," she said, almost sobbing. "I've failed you all. I've failed everyone."

This gig, however, like so many other less than satisfactory events in Crystal Passion's life gets no mention at all in Polly's biography. It's as if it never happened. I suppose it just doesn't fit her narrative.

And it also didn't fit the narrative of a conservative DJ in upstate New York on a local radio talk show syndicated across American AM radio stations. Samuel Hedrick had seen the article about Crystal Passion in the New York Post and had somehow found out that we'd be performing at Candy Cream which, according to him, was a club frequented by homosexuals, drug addicts and drop-outs. None of us in the Crystal Passion band ever actually got to hear his syndicated broadcast of course. We didn't even know about American talk radio and even if we had we weren't likely to spend any time listening to the ranting of religious, political and social reactionaries. There were too many other things to do in America and some of these, we were beginning to discover, like bagels, Latin dance music and cable television, were not only novel but really quite addictive. The last thing we'd be interested in listening to were the narrow-minded opinions of a middle-aged balding radio announcer who thought that Bill Clinton was too much of a liberal, that homosexuality was the mark of the devil, and who was utterly ignorant of the world beyond the 50 United States.

But had we listened to Samuel Hedrick's Voice of Reason, we'd have heard a sustained ten minute rant about English dykes, long-haired punk rockers and a supposed drug trail from London to New York of Ecstasy tablets and crystal meth, which last he was convinced was the drug after which Crystal and the Passions had been named. His listeners would have discovered that Crystal had vilified the name of Jesus Christ Himself by calling her second album Passing Passion, which he explained in a peculiarly convoluted narrative was intended to cast doubt on the truth of the Resurrection and thereby the entire foundation of Christianity.

We would also have heard Hedrick's advice to his listeners to actively boycott any concert in their locality by these lesbian agitators and dyke blasphemers. If our music was anything as crude and vile as that of the Sex Pistols, the Rolling Stones or Kiss, which Hedrick assured his listeners it most certainly was, then these apologists for Satan, these drug-addled dyke punks and scantily dressed whores should be sent back to London, England, from whence they'd come and where they should have chosen to stay.

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