The Time Has Come by Will Leitch

Author:Will Leitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

David

2:05 p.m.

Can I let ’er rip?” Brock said. “Can I just tear it up right now?” He was smiling as widely as David had ever seen him. He was smiling a lot wider than a rock god is supposed to smile.

David nodded. “Ten-four!” he shouted. This was the first time the Red Rocket stage had seen a real live guitar player, plugged into a real live amp, for more than a year. There was no one better to be the first guy up there than Brock Cockburn. He was an Athens music legend. He’d been part of the Vic Chesnutt crew back in the day, a guitar virtuoso who made a couple of rough but lovable solo albums in the early nineties but ultimately discovered he had more of a talent as a producer. “I know what it’s supposed to sound like,” Brock told Pitchfork a few years later. “I just can’t make it sound like that. I know how to tell other people to, though.” He’d made the career of many an Athens band, from the B-52s to Cracker to the Drive-By Truckers to Of Montreal, and was so renowned as a producer that he’d actually worked on a couple of songs on a Kanye West record, though Brock admitted that he’d mostly just turned a few random dials, watched a bunch of guys he didn’t know take naps, and collected his biggest paycheck in about fifteen years. Brock had been in New York when the pandemic hit, working on the Truckers’ new record, and had absconded upstate with his wife when it started getting real in New York City. He’d only returned to Athens the week before, and the first person he wanted to see was David. It had been Brock’s idea to have the Truckers be the reopening show for the Red Rocket, the place that had made them like it had made so many others, and with the show just a couple of weeks away, and tickets so sold out David wondered if they’d just block off the street and charge people to listen out in the parking lot, Brock wanted to return to “hear that old Red Rocket sound again.”

So David got a private show, on a Thursday afternoon, from a rock god who couldn’t stop grinning like an idiot. “How about a little hair metal?” Brock said, taking a swig of Corona and launching into Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” which morphed into Mötley Crüe’s “Kickstart My Heart” and the closing Slash solo from “Paradise City.” At the end of the medley, Brock stuck out his tongue and banged his head wildly, but just for a second; the last thrash made him pull something in his back, and he set down the guitar and grimaced. “I always forget I can’t thrash like that anymore,” he said.

“Sounded great,” David said, and he meant it.

Brock looked around the empty music hall. “So, there really hasn’t been anything here since March?”

“Nope,” David said. “Some other places, college bars mostly, opened up last fall, but the city didn’t give the green light to music venues.

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