Will Carruthers

Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

On one occasion we were due to play at Leeds Warehouse, a rave club that on a good night at full capacity would have held around three hundred sweaty ravers. We were not expecting to play to an audience of three hundred.

At the time I was quite partial to LSD, and sometimes I was even partial to taking it before a performance. On this particular night, I had eaten a small yellow microdot shortly after soundcheck. By recounting this tale to you, I am in no way recommending that you take LSD before a show . . . or even at all. I am simply telling you what happened, and due to my unusual research in this largely uncharted field I can confirm that should you ever find yourself onstage playing the bass guitar with three left hands, it is usually the one in the middle that is the real one. The other two are probably phan­toms. Also, should you encounter any fireballs emanating from the lightshow during the concert, it is probably best to try to avoid them, even though they may not be real in the traditional sense of the word. Nobody wants to be hit by real or imaginary fireballs while trying to negotiate a tricky descent through the octaves.

The acid had just begun to warm itself through my glitter­ing receptors when I was approached by Jason. The club was pretty empty and everything was in place for the imminent performance.

‘Did you give Dave some acid?’ Jason asked me, with a searching look.

‘Why would I give Dave acid?’ I replied. Dave was our guitar tech. It would have been foolhardy to give him LSD before a show, especially as he didn’t usually take the stuff at all. He was from the Scottish Highlands and was built like a man who could pull a caber up by the roots and toss it a good distance without too much effort. He was also a thoroughly kind and good-hearted fellow, which was just as well, because if he had been a complete cunt there wasn’t much that fewer than three people could have done about it.

‘He’s acting very strangely,’ said Jason. ‘Come and have a look.’

At this point, the irony may not be lost on you that Jason was asking me, a person increasingly under the influence of LSD, to judge the behaviour of someone who was acting strangely, to see if they might have taken LSD. Funny old world, isn’t it?

I never told the rest of the band when I was tripping onstage because I didn’t want to worry them, and they never seemed any the wiser. They knew I took it sometimes, they just never knew when, or maybe I just thought they didn’t.

Anyhow, we walked across the largely empty club and looked out onto the dance floor. Usually at this point in the evening Dave would have been up onstage, carefully attend­ing to business and making sure that nobody interfered with our equipment. He would have been checking the intonation on the guitars, changing strings that weren’t broken, even polishing our beloved instruments in an effort to help us look professional. We had played more than a few shows with Dave and the man had, so far, proved himself to be a miracle of effi­ciency and unusual diligence.

On this particular evening, Dave was not up onstage making sure everything was in order, protecting the sacred space of the stage. Dave was not even having a cup of coffee and a sand­wich. Dave was performing a weird and fairly intimidating war dance around three terrified indie kids who had, perhaps unwisely, decided to sit in a twee campsite they had made in the middle of an otherwise unoccupied dance floor. They were sitting cross-legged on a little rug they had brought with them, eating some homemade sandwiches.

I felt the acid come into sharper focus. The lights bulged and a strange tendril of fear crept into my heart. ‘That is weird,’ I said. Obviously, I was not referring to the people eating sandwiches.

‘Shall we go and talk to him?’ said Jason.

‘Yes,’ I said, and then we both stood there for quite a bit longer as we wondered how to best approach Dave, who was grimacing and twirling in the depths of his strange and fright­ening Highland haka. He prowled around the three huddled audience members like a stripe-less tiger, sweating and glaring and occasionally cracking a huge and deranged smile at them, presumably to let them know they were not in any imminent danger. It was pretty impressive.

Jason and I made our way across the dance floor towards Dave, who turned and acknowledged our presence with a deep and frightening stare that contained no flicker of recognition or familiarity.

‘All right, Dave?’ I ventured hopefully, gazing into the deep abyss of his peculiar eyes. ‘Everything OK, is it?’

‘Aye!’ he said emphatically, as he returned to the dance, stamping, grunting, and shouting at things only he could see.

‘Do you think anyone else gave him any acid?’ Jason said.

‘Maybe he’s drunk?’ I said.

‘That’s not the only thing that’s weird. Come and have a look at this,’ Jason said.

I followed him across the dance floor and we both climbed the stairs to the stage. Half of my third eye was still warily observing Dave on the dance floor.

Jason looked down at the floor of the stage. He was not gaz­ing at his shoes. ‘Look at that,’ he said.

I looked at that.

There was a lot of that to look at.

Normally, Dave would have put several neat crosses of gaf­fer tape on the stage, indicating the places that we were to stand so that the stage lights would hit us in a pleasing way.

For some inexplicable reason Dave, in the grip of his fever, had been inspired to get a bit artistic. Instead of his usual boring but useful crosses, he had gaffer-taped weird hieroglyphs and magical symbols of unknown and indecipherable origin and meaning across every blank space on the stage. They looked alien . . . or Pictish . . . or demonic, or like the gaffer-taped scribblings of a particularly determined and demented child. It was hard for me to tell at this point because the adrenaline had kicked the acid in to such a degree that I felt the need to have a little sit down somewhere less weird and quite a bit further away from Dave and his gaffer-taped art from another dimension.

‘Hmm,’ we both said.

‘What the fuck is up with him?’ asked Jason.

‘I have no idea, man,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t given him any­thing, and I am pretty sure nobody else has. Maybe we should just wait and see if it wears off? Whatever it is. He seems harmless enough.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jason, looking down at the peculiar symbols on the stage. ‘What else can we do, I suppose?’

I knew what I was gonna do. I was going to go and sit out­side under a tree, or a big tractor, or something.

‘All right man, see you in a bit,’ I said, exiting stage left and warily passing our dervish on the dance floor, who was show­ing signs of neither normality nor fatigue despite his ongoing discophonic exertions.

I needed to find a tractor fast. There were no tractors outside ‒ no trees either. Sadly, this was Leeds, so all of the posh people had stolen the trees and taken them to York. I was going to have to settle for a beer and a soothing sit down in the street instead. I would imagine my own damn tree.

‘Aum,’ I said, settling in to the great breath of the universe. ‘Aum,’ I said, centring my being and bringing my energy down from my overactive crown chakra. ‘Aum,’ I said, with placid determination, as someone poked me and a voice from the uni­verse said, ‘Why did Spacemen 3 split up, then?’

I tried to focus on the real reasons, and the reasons I was prepared to offer as an explanation. ‘Do you want to know the real reason?’ I said, seriously, earnestly, and with peculiar intensity. ‘You can never, ever, tell anybody else.’

‘OK,’ my new friend said.

‘I am trying to imagine a tree, our guitar tech has gone bananas, and I am on LSD. Please fuck off,’ I said, kindly.

He seemed to accept this as a perfectly believable reason for the demise of our previous band.

‘OK,’ he said, and fucked off.

Gradually, I managed to rein in the skittish horses of my mind and settle into some sort of vaguely stable equilibrium. I was not new to this, and even though the peculiar events from earlier had unsettled me at lift-off, I was now cruising at a reasonable altitude with serenity. Some turbulence was to be expected. So what if Dave had decided to have a dance? Why not? Let it all hang out? Peace and love? I was in a good band and everything was groovy? The audience was friendly, though sparse, and nothing was going to stop the show? I did not pay too much attention to the question marks at the ends of my own self-assurances. Sometimes you just have to kid your­self, though, right?

It was nearly showtime, so I made my way into the club. Passing the bar, various faces loomed in and out at me through the tracers and twinkling lights, like strange underwater creatures peering through the windows of a deep-sea explora­tion vehicle. The crowd was decent, the lights were pleasing, and I was feeling ready to make some music, so I mounted the stage and made sure everything was in order with my equip­ment. Everything was as I had left it after the soundcheck. The only thing missing was my bass. My trusty Gibson Thunder­bird was nowhere to be found.

‘Has anyone seen my bass?’ I called out to the rest of the band, who were also getting ready to play.

‘Nope,’ said everyone.

I began to experience a little confusion.

I looked around for Dave. Dave was not onstage. Dave was still giving it the large and weird with his dance floor boogaloo. I approached him warily and tapped him on the shoulder. He snapped around and gave me a peculiar grin. Sweat was pour­ing off him, and light, and other stuff that doesn’t have a name yet.

‘Err, hi, Dave. Sorry to bother you, man, but, err, have you, err, maybe, by any chance, seen my bass anywhere . . . please?’

He grinned again, and a weird gleam appeared in his eyes that I could not blame entirely on my own perceptions. Keep­ing me fully in the headlights of whatever the hell it was that had gotten into his eyes, he pointed a finger at me. Then, very slowly, deliberately, and with a most unreassuring smile, he gave me the ‘follow me’ signal with his outstretched, hooking and crooked finger. Was he leading me into his eyes? Was he taking me down the rabbit hole? Was he about to chop me into pieces? I had neither earthly nor extraterrestrial idea at this point, but being bass-less and with the show rapidly approach­ing I was left with little choice but to follow him. We walked onstage and began to cross his wasteland of incomprehensible squiggles. The gaffer-taped runes began to make sense to me. He had spelled out my doom in silver symbols that I had been too naïve to understand earlier, and now I was being led to the scaffold to pay the price for my ignorance. It was my fault for taking the acid in the first place. I kept walking. It was my fate. He led me down into the dungeons in the bowels of the club, where doors creaked and lost souls wailed, as I grimly trudged behind him towards the end.

He led me into a cupboard and there, like the holy grail itself, was my bass, lying on a bit of cloth on a table. Dave walked over to it, took it gently in his hands, turned solemnly to me, and offered it to me with a tear in his eye.

I looked at it. I looked at it again. I looked at it a third time just to make sure that it looked as horrible as I thought it had looked the first time I looked at it. Wires were hanging from it. It had been largely discombobulated, dismantled and disas­sembled and, unfortunately, this was no hallucination. Bits of it were missing. Bits of me were missing.

I took the bass from him. A bit of it fell on the floor. The ech­oes of its impact echoed along the ruins of time. I wanted to cry.

Dave was smiling a beatific smile and I was due onstage in five minutes.

‘Uhhhhhhh,’ I said. I put my gutted and previously beloved bass back onto Dave’s operating table. ‘Uhhhhh,’ I said again, in an effort to verbalise my feelings and come to grips with the situation. ‘Fuck it, Dave. Nice job and everything, man, but maybe I will just use another one tonight. Don’t worry about it.’ I said this in an effort to placate him. Dave smiled and he seemed to understand even though he had clearly lost his rea­son. Even I could see that. I ran back over the stage because the trip down into the dungeons had, in fact, been a frightening and purely mental journey brought on by my quite justified intimations of impending wrongness.

I found the bassist from the support band. ‘Sean, mate, lend us your bass. Dave has taken mine to fucking pieces.’

Sean laughed, ‘What? What did he do that for?’

‘Because he is clearly deranged,’ I said. ‘We can work out the details later.’

He handed over his bass and I took my place on the stage.

I tuned the bass and tried to deal with the rip tides of adren­aline.

The first song started and my fingers did their thing. Muscle memory is a beautiful thing in these situations. I could play these songs through strobes, smoke, flying glasses, drugs and other minor complications. Or could I? ‘Just settle down, listen to the drums, and focus,’ I told myself. ‘Everything beyond music is unimportant at this point.’

The first note brought its customary relief and the music began to make sense of the situation where I could not. I had found my tree. The great branches spread over me and I was curled in the trunk with the trills and ululations of songbirds drifting down to me from its leafy heights as the pulse of the sap fired nourishment to the tips of the furthest twigs. I was the tree. I was the pulse.

We made it through the first song. The audience cheered.

The first fireball came ripping in from the glare of the stage lights. It was a big orange and yellow miniature sun and it was heading directly at me, at high speed, crackling as it came.

‘Holy FUCK!’ I swerved out of the way and heard it fizzing as it passed my left ear and continued directly through Jonny who, despite my horrified expression, smiled at me and carried on drumming. It seemed that the man was impervious to fire­balls. I dared not take that chance.

We started the next song and with its increased tempo and ferocity came more of the completely believable fireballs. It seemed the music was encouraging them somehow, so I swayed and dodged and ducked them but, naturally, I kept playing, because to do otherwise would have been unprofessional. I offered a prayer to God, or the fireballs, or the acid, or some­thing. ‘Look,’ I murmured, perhaps to myself, ‘I’m sorry, OK? I will never do it again. Just let me get through this set and I will never, ever, take LSD onstage again!’

WHOOOOOOSH . . . another big fireball ripped out of the lights trailing stars and smoke and smelling faintly of lavender.

I took this as a divine answer. I had invited the fireballs to the party and now they were going to dance for a while. Per­haps, if I danced well enough with them, the Gods would be merciful.

I glanced over to make sure my hands were still there. Some­how, by virtue of the strobes, the passing fireballs, the smoke and the general peculiarity, I found I had been blessed with two extra left hands. This made perfect sense to me at the time. Three hands are better than none, right? The only problem was, the more I became aware of the three hands the more I began to wonder which of them was actually mine. I became conscious of my general lack of unity, and with this I began to falter. Whenever I started to look at my hands and consciously try to make them do what I wanted, the less they became will­ing to do so.

I looked away and everything started to flow again. I looked back, and everything became mechanical as I wondered how the fuck to play the guitar with three hands.

The less I thought about it, the better it got, and I even started ignoring the fireballs ‒ though, to be honest, they were a welcome distraction from the three-handed conundrum that was somehow better off playing the bass without me, or at least without the part of me that couldn’t stop thinking about how to play the bass with three hands.

This continued for some unspecified time, until finally the last song of the set ended and the audience cheered. The air was thick with violet and green smoke and it was impossible to see more than three feet in any direction. Even for normal people. The strobes were flickering and the fireballs were fly­ing when I sensed a disturbance at my feet. It was Mark Refoy, the guitarist. He was crawling offstage.

‘Mark, what are you doing, man?’ I shouted.

‘I can’t see a fucking thing,’ he said, as he continued to crawl through the smoke to the dressing room. I switched the amp off and followed him in a dignified and mostly vertical silence. We all sat in the brightly lit dressing room enjoying the relief and the mixture of adrenaline and endorphins that we were all happily pouring alcohol into. Perhaps I was more relieved than my bandmates that everything had gone well.

I was massaging a little Tiger balm into my overactive third eye when the first members of the audience came back­stage. Two extremely wide-eyed young gentlemen bundled in through the dressing-room door and began shaking hands and congratulating us on the show.

‘Nice one, mate,’ one of them said to me.

‘Is that Tiger balm? Can I have a bit?’

He dug his finger into the tin I offered him, took a large blob, and stuck it directly onto his eyeball.

I looked at him disbelievingly.

‘Erm . . .’ I said, ‘You aren’t supposed to put it in your eye, you know?’

‘Oh, really?’ he said, laughing. ‘What should I do?’

‘Don’t panic. It’ll wear off eventually,’ I replied.

‘I saw you dancing onstage tonight, Willie,’ he said, excit­edly. ‘You were getting right into it. Sounded fucking brilliant!’

‘I wasn’t dancing, I was dodging fireballs. How is the Tiger balm?’ I said, as he looked at me and the first tears began streaming down his face towards his unstoppable grin.

‘FUCKING INTENSE,’ he said, and we all laughed.

I got paid fifteen quid for that show.

For more information about Will Carruthers and PLAYING THE BASS WITH THREE LEFT HANDS, please visit the Lebowski Agency website.