Technically, the Birmingham show went off without a hitch. Elfie listened to Tryp through her headphones for most of the show. His warm baritone filled her headphones and her ears.
Xan reached into the audience and pulled a little kid up on the stage a couple songs before intermission. The kid danced up front for a second, then ran around to see Tryp’s drum set.
Through her headphones, Elfie heard Tryp say, “Hello, there. Do you like drums?”
Mitch went nuts, dragging Tryp’s feed down so that the audience wouldn’t hear him talking to the kid, and then he had to rebalance the sound board.
Elfie listened to Tryp.
Tryp continued drumming, but he talked to the little kid. “This is the bass drum. You stomp on the pedal to hit it. Can you stomp on it? Yeah! Just like that!”
The kid sat with Tryp for another song and half, and Tryp had him smashing the crash cymbal and bonking out a steady rhythm on the snare, sending Mitch into a tizzy as he tried to keep the kid’s drumming off the speakers. When the set was over, Tryp picked him up around his waist and carried him back to his parents, the kid swimming in the air the whole way. His little-boy giggles carried over Tryp’s microphone. Tryp carefully lowered the kid into the audience and talked to his parents for a second before he jogged off the stage.
During the second set, everything seemed to be going fine. Elfie was listening to Tryp sing some more, but when everyone swiveled their heads to watch Xan, she switched her monitor over to him.
Xan’s voice cracked right where it always did, in the middle of “Standing on the Mountaintop.” Rhiannon jumped down from her riser to run to him, and Elfie delayed a couple of gerbs that shot golden sparks into the air until Rhiannon was clear. Rhiannon only had to sing one verse before Xan could take over the lead again, but Elfie and Mitch gave each other a long, sad look.
“It’s just like Frankie Beverly, Roger Waters, and Bob Dylan,” Mitch said. “Xan Valentine has maybe three years left unless he stops this ass-breaking touring.”
“He’s only twenty-five,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter. He’s going to rupture a cord. They can’t fix that.”