Gods Without Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

he wasn’t good for the band. As far as Nicky was concerned, pop music ought to be instinctive: You just put your head down, made a noise, then stuck some lyrics over the top. Now here they were, throwing the I Ching to find a rhyme for “baby.” Everything they came up with sounded pretentious. Nicky couldn’t even pick out a tune without second-guessing himself. Jimmy was the same. Whatever else happened, the two of them had always been able to write songs together. Now, because there weren’t any songs, they began to argue. Words were spoken. Nicky moved out of the band house into one of the hotels on Sunset. He worked in his room, Jim in the studio. For a while they only communicated by fax, but neither of them could be arsed to write stuff down so they gave up and starting talking again.
    If only Anouk was around.
    One day Nicky thought of a lyric:
    Oh go to sleep
    you’re too much
    when you’re awake
    It felt like the beginning of something. Noah was hunched over a four-track in a corner of the rehearsal room, chewing on his beard. When Nicky asked him what he thought, he just went
hmm
.
    “What do you mean,
‘hmm’
?”
    “Nothing. It’s just … Well, it kind of lacks bite.”
    Nicky had always tried to act as if he could take criticism. The lyric was about a time when he and Anouk had been up for two days, speeding and ordering room service in a hotel in Berlin. Nookie was really tweaking, and he’d been on at Terry to get them some Valium. Despite how it sounded, it was sort of a happy memory.
    There was an awkward silence. “OK,” said Noah eventually. “I’ll showyou what I mean. I think it needs something more, um,
striking
.” He walked up to the mike and sang:
    Go to sleep
    little frog
    you’re too much
    when we touch
    “She’s not a little frog. I don’t think of her as a frog.”
    “OK, man. Whatever. She could be, I don’t know, a squirrel.”
    “Or a leech,” said Lol bitchily.
    Nicky walked out. What else could he do? He stayed away for a couple of days, spent the time drinking with some lads who had a custom-car place in Venice. He reckoned he had Noah’s number. Geezer was third-generation hippie aristocracy. His grandparents ran some Hindu healing center up in Northern California, sort of like the place the Beatles went to. His dad had been a singer-songwriter who’d OD’d after one album. According to Noah, he used to live in a dome out in the desert, just jamming with his band and looking for UFOs. Once he played them the LP, which had a picture of a pyramid on the front and was called
The Guide Speaks
. It was rubbish. All the stuff which once seemed so amazing about Noah was basically just him being a chip off the old block. Nicky’s old man had given him a lot of solid information about Spurs and cavity-wall insulation. If he’d grown up doing Zen calligraphy and going on horse rides with Leonard Cohen, things might have been different.
    He should have knocked it on the head after the night of the hot tub, should have got on a plane. They were over at Noah’s, and despite himself Nicky had managed to get into the swing of things. There was this bird Willow and they were in the hot tub with the bubbles on and he was just beginning to get to a place where Anouk was totally off his mind when Noah bounded up, stark bollock naked, brandishing a pistol. Willow made a little noise in her throat, scrambled out, and ran off to find her clothes.
    “Now look what you did.”
    “Fuck her, man. You and I need to talk.”
    Noah leveled the gun, holding it with both hands like he was on a firing range. “It’s weird how it concentrates the mind. You can feel it, right? The prickly sensation on your forehead? Think: What would it be like if I actually got shot? All that mush spurting out. All my brains.”
    “I’m not being funny, mate, but if you don’t put that down I’m going to ram your teeth down your throat.”
    “I’m not being funny either,
mate
. I’m serious.