Showtime.
Elfie sat in the sound booth at mid-house center, watching the concert from the center of the boisterous crowd but insulated from them by banks of computers, monitors, and the cocoon of her fat over-ear headphones that she used to monitor the songs for her pyro effects. You never knew when one of the artistes down there was going to get all artsy-fartsy and deviate from the set list. Reprogramming the computer took longer than it should because they didn’t have the nifty-new latest stuff that the record companies provided and then charged rent for. The equipment was good enough. It just took a little more effort and time.
No one dared say that in front of Rock, though. No one wanted a lecture about the good ol’ days of technical theatre, when he had crouched behind Metallica and set off the pyrotechnics with a match, dodging the fire as they blew, and they liked it that way just fine, thank you very much.
Beside Elfie, Mitch used all ten fingers as he adjusted slider bars on the enormous soundboard, looking a little too much like the Phantom of the Opera playing his infernal pipe organ in the depths of the Paris Opera House.
Hey, Erik the Phantom slipped unseen through the shadows, practiced stagecraft, and didn’t perform, so therefore he was a technician and one of the working class, even if he did fall in love with that muso, Christine Daae.
Sucker.
Erik had been horribly burned in a fire, and he blew up and burned down the Paris Opera House, a complication that Elfie prevented for her own musos daily.
Elfie pressed the headphone against her left ear, which had been a little weaker ever since that gerb had gone off right beside her last year when she had been packing the next one, blasting her. Her eardrum had filled her head with a tinny whining for hours afterward, and she had been a hell of a lot more careful with the explosives ever since. No killing the musos or the technicians.
Past the darkness where the tumultuous crowds bounced on the main floor of the auditorium, down on the lightbox of the stage, Xan Valentine strutted centerstage, lashing out with his arms as the Act II climax approached during “Standing on the Mountaintop,” one of the big stadium-rocking anthems. He sang the first line, same as the song title.
She leaned forward. Two more lines.
Over her earphones, she heard him sing, “Shout it from the mountaintop,” in his bright tenor.
Damn, he was good.
In the studio, anyone can be pitch-perfect with Auto-Tune manipulating the vocals, to the point where now absolutely every vocalist, lead or back-up, were all sloppy singers because they assumed the sound engineer would run the vocal track through the box, though the rumor was that Nelly Furtado was the last holdout.
Hearing dead-center pitch in live concerts was something special.
Elfie detected Tryp’s smoky baritone in the back-up vocals. Far below on the stage, within his drum kit, he was leaning into his mic and singing while his body pulsed with the effort of drumming. His sticks blurred into a long roll, his hard biceps flexing and his obliques torqueing his body as he reached. She reached absently to her area on the soundboard as nudged his dimmer switch higher, amplifying his voice in her headphones. She could hear the rhythm in his voice as his body bounced with the drum beat.
Elfie listened to Tryp singing the whoa-whoas back there, enjoying his voice right in her ears, almost like she was stealing a moment with him. She swayed in the chair, listening to him sing to her.
She glanced down at the computer screen that showed the graphic for the stage. The next effect, the 1/2x10 gerbs ringing the stage that would pulse ten feet of white-hot sparks for one-half of a second, should have been red dots glowing on the monitor with about a ten-second countdown left, ready for her to hit the spacebar on the computer to send the spark to ignite them.
The gerb line was still clear.
On the stage diagram on the screen, the flame projectors for the fire arch were painted red, and when she looked over the dark audience at the stage, Xan was right between the projectors, directly in the path of the flames.
Elfie reached to the main soundboard, slapped a button, and yanked the long snake of the mic toward herself. She spoke directly into Xan Valentine’s ear. “Walk upstage at least ten feet. Now.”
She tagged two more buttons for Cadell and Grayson while she confirmed that Xan was backpedaling toward the rear of the stage while he inhaled and Tryp filled the end of the line with a roll.
She said to the guitarists, “Move at least eight feet toward the wings. Now.” They walked toward the sides of the stage, still playing the riffs and dragging their cords behind them.
Through her headphones, Xan sang, “Sing it from the mountaintop.” His voice sounded just like normal, perfectly clear, not at all like he had just been told to move his ass by the person responsible for the exploding things.
Mitch asked, “What’s up?”
She bent the mic aside. “I fucked up.”
“Michael Jackson or The Station?”
He was asking if the performers were going to get burned or whether the thousands of people in the audience were in danger from a fire. In Rhode Island, pyrotechnic effects at a rock club called The Station had caught the insulation on fire, and the inferno had swept through the club in five and a half minutes, killing hundreds.
Mitch was tapping buttons to activate all the monitors, and he pulled the mic to his mouth, getting ready to tell the musicians to run for it or to cut the music and bring up the house lights to full for the crowd.
“Jackson, but I’ve got it.”
“You sure?” His finger was on the switch. This venue had plenty of exits and adequate evacuation routes. Elfie and Rock had evaluated that before they decided which pyros to set off that night.
“Yeah. Everybody’s fine. They’re already out of the way.” She half-stood and looked over the board down to the stage, but the musos were indeed all away from the arch that was about to ignite. Xan stood on his upstage mark, well behind the flame arch.
Xan began to sing the line, “Shout it from the mountaintop,” his voice ringing near the top of his range and marching in place, readying himself for the big move. He should have been striding downstage for the gerbs to blow around him.
Elfie confirmed at Xan was at his mark one more time and that the other musicians were out of any danger zones, and she lit the electric match in the flame projectors, sending the spark.
Electric blue flames blasted from the metal tubes screwed to the stage, framing Xan with azure fire, tinted by a sprinkle of copper salts in the mix.
Xan whipped his head to the side and fell into a crouch, growling, “My life is a beacon and I will shine.”
The audience shouted the line anyway.
Elfie grabbed her walkie-talkie off her hip and clicked it on. “Stage? Is Xan hurt? Did he get hit?”
“He was on his mark, behind the pyro,” Bill whispered back to her.
When the flames died down, Xan stood and prowled downstage, ending up crouched and singing to the front row. The girls lost their minds, and the guys standing behind them settled their hands more firmly on the girls’ shoulders.
Bill whispered through the earphones, “The flames looked normal. He was out of range. Everyone else, too. Why’d you change it?”
Elfie didn’t answer but set about scrolling through the rest of the pyro cues on the computer, seeing what else she had screwed up.
The rest of them looked all right. She had just swapped the flame projector cannons and the gerb line. She flopped back in her chair, her hands over her face.
Tryp, coddled up on the drum throne, was far enough upstage that even the worst accident shouldn’t touch him, and all the effects around his kit were focused outward or up, but Elfie’s heart was still flipping hard.
“Is everything okay?” Mitch asked, still watching her.
“I could have fucking killed him.”
“You didn’t. That’s why we have fail-safes and manual cues.”
Before the next song, while Cadell played an intricate intro and Xan stood beside him like he was watching in amazement, just like for the last several hundred shows, Elfie spoke in Xan’s ear, “We’re rearranging the pyros. The downstage gerbs will go off during ‘Rock the World.’ Stick to your usual marks and you’ll be way behind them.”
Xan pumped a fist into the air and pointed at the sound booth, indicating he had heard.
Elfie sagged in her chair. She had been distracted by Tryp while she was trying to install the gerbs and too busy mooning over Tryp’s voice to keep an eye on the monitor. She couldn’t ever, ever do that again, and she would be explaining this horrific mistake to Rock and probably Xan and Jonas after the show.