Solitude Creek

I
Frenzy

Chapter One

The roadhouse was comfortable, friendly, inexpensive. All good.

Safe, too. Better.

You always thought about that when you took your teenage daughter out for a night of music.

Michelle Cooper did, in any event. Safe when it came to the band and their music, the customers, the waitstaff.

The club itself, too, the parking lot—well lit—and the fire doors and sprinklers.

Michelle always checked these. The teenage daughter part, again.

Solitude Creek attracted a varied clientele, young and old, male and female, white and Latino and Asian, a few African-Americans, a mirror of the Monterey Bay area. Now, just after seven thirty, she looked around, noting the hundreds of patrons who’d come from this and surrounding counties, all in buoyant moods, looking forward to seeing a band on the rise. If they brought with them any cares, those troubles were tucked tightly away at the prospect of beer, whimsical cocktails, chicken wings and music.

The group had flown in from L.A., a garage band turned backup turned roadhouse headliner, thanks to Twitter and YouTube and Vidster. Word of mouth, and talent, sold groups nowadays, and the six boys in Lizard Annie worked as hard on their phones as onstage. They weren’t O.A.R. or Linkin Park but were soon to be, with a bit of luck.

They certainly had Michelle and Trish’s support. In fact, the cute boy band had a pretty solid mom/daughter fan base, judging by a look around the room tonight. Other parents and their teenagers too; the lyrics were rated PG, at the raunchiest. For this evening’s show the ages of those in the audience ranged from sixteen to forty, give or take. Okay, Michelle admitted, maybe mid-forties.

She noted the Samsung in her daughter’s grip and said, “Text later. Not now.”

“Mom.”

“Who is it?”

“Cho.”

A nice girl from Trish’s music class.

“Two minutes.”

The club was filling up. Solitude Creek was a forty-year-old, single-story building featuring a small, rectangular dance floor of scuffed oak, ringed with high-top tables and stools. The stage, three feet high, was at the north end; the bar was opposite. A kitchen, east, served full menus, which eliminated the age barrier of attendance: only liquor-serving venues that offered food were permitted to seat children. Three fire exit doors were against the west wall.

On the dark wood walls were posters and during-the-show photos, complete with real and fake autographs, of many of the groups that had appeared at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967: Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, Al Kooper, Country Joe. Dozens of others. In a grimy Plexiglas case was a fragment of an electric guitar, reportedly one destroyed by Pete Townshend of The Who after the group’s performance at the event.

The tables at Solitude Creek were first come, first claimed, and all were filled—the show was only fifteen minutes away now—and presently servers circulated with last-minute orders, plates of hefty burgers and chicken wings and drinks on trays hovering atop their stable, splayed palms. From behind the stage a meow of tuning guitar strings and an arpeggio chord from a sax, a chunky A from a bass. Anticipation now. Those exciting moments before the music begins to seize and seduce.

The voices were loud, words indistinct, as the untabled patrons jockeyed for the best position in the standing-room area. Since the stage wasn’t high and the floor was flat, it was sometimes hard to get a good view of the acts. A bit of jostling but few hard words.

That was the Solitude Creek club. No hostility.

Safe…