The Greatest Little Rolling Stones Tribute Band the Desert Has Ever Seen
The desert circuit. I’ve talked to people in the business, in LA, and they always look at me funny, like we’re crazy. It’s long drives in the middle of the night, and heat, and dive bars, I tell them, but we’re the only Rolling Stones tribute band that does San Bernardino and 29 Palms and Palmdale and Mojave and Ridgecrest. The folks appreciate us out there. They’re good desert people. We drink beers with them after sets and get free work done on our tour van.
I’ve been in the band for five years, since a year after I dropped out of College of the Canyons and moved into a shitty house in the lower Sierras, east of Bakersfield, with Saul and Ory. Ory was my old friend from high school, and Saul was this dude from Oildale, a meth head. Ory and I just smoked a lot of pot, although we once took peyote in the old pioneer graveyard at the bottom of the hill. We were renting the house for dirt cheap, but it had its downfalls, such as the enormous local population of kissing bugs. One killed Saul one night when he crashed out in the meadow behind the house after a two-day spin. Our dog Bluejay found him. It was shocking at the time, the first time I’d seen a dead person.
But the way I look at it now, Saul would have died soon anyways. Meth heads burn fast and bright, with crazy sparks and the stink of melted hair. Like the guy was twenty-five and his teeth were all rotted. It was sad and kind of gross, but it jolted Ory and I out of our rut. We left the lower Sierras—he was 22 and I was 21—and decided to move out to real desert land, out to 29 Palms. We kept having to live in shitty places in the middle of nowhere because that’s where the land is cheap in California. Ory and I did random stuff, dug ditches. I eventually got a steady job trucking. At first I was worried I’d get fat from sitting in the cab all the time, but I’ve always had this insane metabolism. I stayed thin and managed to cultivate some friendly ladies at the little diners in each city. The best was this young chick who hosted at Marie Callender’s in Bakersfield, with the nicest damn tits I’ve ever seen in my life.
I bet she’s married now.
Ory and I had been in a band together in high school called Slug Death. It never went anywhere but we were pretty good. We even won the talent show one year. Ory and I still farted around a lot; he played his Telecaster and I had my dad’s old Epiphone Dot, a cheap version of the guitar John Lennon played, and I sang. We’d listen to a lot of Stones. I had the music in my head all the damn time.
I didn’t realize I had a good voice till I accidentally sang in front of my hostess chick. I had been listening to my tape of Exile on Main Street all day on the long drive to Marie Callender’s. We were walking out of there at midnight, and I felt so happy with my arm around her and her hand on my ass that I sang a little. I think I sang part of “Tumbling Dice,” and the gal turned to me and told me I had a beautiful voice and that people might want to hear that voice. It was the nicest thing anybody had ever said to me. So I kept on singing, in my head, when we got back to her place, while we were having our fun, while she was brushing her hair after, naked, while I was looking at her.
So Ory and I formed the band with another guitarist, a bass man, and a drummer. We weren’t too careful with trying to find dudes that looked like the rest of the Stones or anything. Ory and I are a deadon Keith and Mick, and that’s about all you see on stage, but we had all the guys grow their hair out and we try to make an effort to dress kind of alike, in jeans and things. Ory wears oversized silk shirts and this big turquoise ring on his right hand and I have a crop-top purple cardigan with sequins that scrape up my nipples.
Never occurred to me that my Marie Callender’s girl wasn’t on birth control.
Well, she wasn’t, and she has a lot of brothers, and male cousins and things. Turns out she has the biggest damn hillbilly family in the greater Bakersfield area, and about half of them are in law enforcement. So when the Best Western Hill House wanted us for their New Years’ Eve hoe-down this January, we had to say no. We can’t get within fifty miles of Bakersfield without me getting my cock shot off. That was a lot of money to turn down, and the whole band made me buy them drinks for that, but we had a good time playing the 29 Palms Hotel, out by the pool, under the Christmas lights.
You’ve never seen Christmas lights till you’ve seen them draped around a cactus.
The hardest thing about playing in a tribute band is that you only exist when you’re up on a stage, but you’re not even up there being you — you’re pretending to be somebody else, someone that people know and like. But still, New Year’s Eve and the lightning, borrowed lightning, was zinging through my body. I bounced up and down like a monkey, squawking and shrieking, and Ory’s guitar was squawking and shrieking too and it’s like being possessed by the devil, if the devil were the greatest human being on earth, a real stand-up guy, not like anyone I’ve ever met or currently know. It’s like all the ugly crap inside of me was melting down and shooting out of me at four
thousand miles per second as radioactive mercury or something. But in the middle of a big long scream my voice caught and I found myself thinking, where is my child?, except what I really meant was, where am I, Father?, and I thought, I oughta hijack the tour van and drive back to Bakersfield, lay myself at the mercy of that chick’s cousins and brothers, convince her to marry me (though I bet she’s already married, like I said) and deliver myself back into something like a normal life.
I opened my eyes. The folks who were just exactly the right amount of drunk were swearing to Jesus and each other that it really is Mick Jagger up there. They were pawing their faces, shocked to find them covered in tears.
So, yeah, no Bakersfield Hill House. No Marie Callender’s. But I think we had a good time, anyway. We got really drunk from all the free beers the waitresses were giving us and I was hanging all over Ory while he tried to play. We made our Brian Jones play “Unchained Melody” so we could slow dance right there on the stage. People thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, Keith with his skinny tattooed arms around Mick’s hips and Mick with his shaggy head nodding on Keith’s shoulder like a drunken girlfriend.
Ory was half-jokingly pissed the next morning when we woke up in the same bed in one of the 29 Palms cabins. The two new waitresses we had been trying to make had apparently tossed our drunk asses in bed together. I joked about being left high and dry, but then Ory scared the shit out of me by saying, “That’s funny, I could have sworn I got laid last night,” before creeping out in the dawn light to see about those waitresses. I thought about the desert dawn in which the only living things running around were about a hundred wild rabbits and Ory in his underwear with morning wood.
I never did find out if we got laid that night. I don’t remember more than a beer-tasting kiss.
The second hardest part about forming a tribute band is coming up with a name. It’s even harder with a band like the Rolling Stones, who have maybe the best name in the history of rock and roll. You’ve got to use the original name or an album or something in a way without being too cutesy, and you have to make sure it doesn’t sound like you’re taking yourself too seriously. It took forever coming up with the right name.
The Rocking Pebbles
The Spinning Boulders
The Turning Gravel
Exiles on 29 Palms Drive
Finally, we decided on calling ourselves the Tumbling Dice.
On New Year’s Day, after packing up the van, the whole band walked out of the parking lot to the desert’s edge and sat on some rocks. The night noises stopped for a second, except for our boots crunching sand when we shifted our feet. We passed around Ory’s bottle of Jack and made jokes and talked and wasted time smoking a few cigarettes. Ory could tell I was thinking about my Marie Callender’s girl and I could tell he could tell, and at the same time all he needed to do was pass me a cigarette and whistle and I knew that was his way of not asking me for anything, not even that I be comforted.
Then we said, “Well,” and we got into the van. Ory and I got in front and then we were driving, rolling out onto the land and into our still-unknown luck, the desert wearing a red fuzz like the afterglow from the great gig in the sky. On to Palmdale and San Bernardino and Mojave and Ridgecrest, the greatest little Rolling Stones tribute band the desert has ever seen.
KP VOGELL is an author who has published fiction in PANK, Digging through the Fat, Cheat River Review, The Good Life Review, and Evocations Review.