I just wanted to draw Thrawn and his Pocahontas hair, and Eli eating his hair all the time. Hence, Metal Band AU?
I would read the hell out of that AU. Professor of Art History by day, metal front man by night? Thrawn’s voice is addictive, think of how good it would be SINGING.
Eli plays bass pass it on.
“Arihnda, it was amazing. You have got to see these guys.” Juahir is flushed, buzzed, ecstatic — practically bouncing up and down in the middle of Arihnda’s living room. “Their front man is — whooo!” She says in a great, joyful rush. Juahir always picks out the lookers. Rarely do they have the talent to match, but Arihnda’s never undermined her friend’s enthusiasm.
Juahir’s friend Driller unfurls himself across Arihnda’s couch languorously and says, with slow relish: “He’s fucking blue.”
“Like, depressed?” asks Arihnda.
“No,” says Driller. “His skin. Is fucking. Blue. I heard it was a full-body tattoo.”
“Who cares what it is?” crows Juahir. “It’s sexy!”
“He’s certainly eye-catching,” says Driller. “And so is their base player.”
“I liked the girl on drums,” says Juahir, softening a little.
“Color me shocked,” Driller drawls.
“Oh, fuck you. But really, Arihnda,” says Juahir, turning in a glorious arc to look at her, eyes shining, face earnest with enthusiasm, “you need to hear these guys. They’re incredible.”
There’s a way people act, when something touches them. When the art they’ve seen is real, when it has the ineffable quality that touches the soul. Even people without any training, without the technical vocabulary to analyze and explain their experience, respond to art when it’s real. There’s a magic to it — and Arihnda, who grew up watching her father scout talent for Pryce Music, knows what it looks like when someone is under its spell. She can smell it like a scavenger can smell a corpse.
And Juahir absolutely reeks.
“Where are they playing next?” Arihnda asks.
—
They’re playing next in an abandoned industrial space in Gowanus. A little too on-point for Arihnda’s tastes, maybe, but that’s life. There are five bands in the lineup, and Chimaera is the last. The first four are… fine, Arihnda thinks. The opening act is genuinely interesting, an all-female group led by a girl with short orange-and-purple hair. She could go places, Arihnda decides, but the the other three acts are nothing Arihnda hasn’t heard a hundred times before. They’ll play a few gigs and disappear; so goes the business.
Driller and Juahir share a frisson of glee that tells Arihnda she better pay attention just before Chimaera comes on stage.
The woman on drums is exactly Juahir’s type: tomboyishly pretty with a demeanor that implies a great deal of energy and vigor. The bassist has a sweet, retiring air — Arihnda doesn’t think his stage presence amounts to much.
The front man is, as promised, fucking blue — which is much fucking weirder in person than she expected. But, she decides, it’s not bad. He’s not unattractive.
It’s not just his looks that are striking. He moves with a calm reserve, an elegance and grace that — but Arihnda is here to listen to his music, she reminds herself.
He adjusts the entire stage set up himself, fixing the wires left askew by the prior group, waving away the stagehands gently, checking with his band mates that they have what they need — and does all it as if the audience weren’t present. Arihnda can’t decide if that’s exceptionally grounded or sort of pretentious.
When he finally takes his instrument out of its case, she sees that it isn’t even a guitar, but an elecric sitar, which she thinks is certainly pretentious. And when he stands at the microphone, he still seems unaware of his audience. His entire presence is… meditative, maybe. Turned inward somehow. It’s as if he’s saying: you are permitted to watch, but I am doing this only for myself. And that sort of bothers Arihnda. Performers should connect, she thinks. A show is about the audience, about people and how they feel, not about some self-absorbed personal journey. She’s ready to write this bizarre man and his little crew off as utterly not worth her time —
And then they start to play.
—
“I fucking told you,” Juahir hisses in her ear. “I told you.”
“Yes,” says Arihnda, staring. They’re packing up. Rather, he’s packing up. Again, as if no one else existed. It’s not pretentious at all, she’s decided. It’s… generous. Attending to the small things. Doing his own work.
“Fucking something, isn’t he?” says Driller.
“Yes,” says Arihnda again, scanning the room to gauge the reactions — or just to make herself stop staring at him.
Then she jolts.
She’s not the only A&R in the room.
Slinking through the crowd on the right side of the venue is Domus Renking, CEO of Ranking Records, a seedy business that could still buy Pryce Music three times over. And moving purposefully through the crowd to her left is Wullf Yularen, Vice President of Imperial Arts, a company that can write a check so hefty it sounds like an entire pallet of bricks when it hits a table.
Arihnda feels a rush of adrenaline. They probably haven’t noticed her, and they probably wouldn’t care if they did. They’re big fish, real sharks, and they’re likely to think she’s just a minnow.
But that’s going to be their mistake.
Approaching the strange, apparently deeply introverted front man directly doesn’t seem like a smart play. She scans the room one more time, and finds her target.
“Excuse me, Juahir,” she says, shaking her arm loose from her friend’s grasp. “I’ll be right back.”
The drummer — Karyn Faro, per the program — is at the bar.
“Excuse me,” says Arihnda, putting on a friendly smile, “could I interrupt you for a minute? I have a friend who’d just die to meet you — I’m trying to be a good wing woman for her, if you know what I mean.”
There’s a split second where the drummer is take aback by the directness of it, but only a second. Then she smiles, herself. “I think I know what you mean. What if she’s not my type?”
Arihnda points, not too obviously. “She’s the blonde over there. Her name’s Juahir. She teaches martial arts, loves whisky sours, and is absolutely mad about your band.”
Faro looks. And looks. And looks a little more. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah she’s my type.”
Arihnda laughs; out of the corner of her eye, she’s tracking Renking and Yularen. “Excellent,” she says happily. “Let me buy you both your first round.”
“Well, that’s generous. You sure you’re not trying to pick me up yourself?”
“I’m not — but I am hoping you’ll do me a favor.”
Faro hesitates a little. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing bad, just — your front man seems a little unapproachable, but I wanted to ask about the music. I thought I heard a little George Antheil in some of your songs and I wanted to know if I was anywhere near the mark.”
Faro stares. Blinks. Snorts. Laughs. “Oh man,” she says. “Man. He is gonna fucking love you.” Then she turns her body away from the bar and bellows: “Thrawn! Hey, Thrawn! Get over here!”
Arihnda sees Yularen and Renking pause, shift their attention. Notice her. She ignores them. If they ever thought she was a minnow and not a barracuda, they can start paying for it now.
On stage, the front man stops, stands, pauses. His body language conveys pique, but only barely. Then he acquiesces.
When he’s close enough that she doesn’t need to shout, Faro says: “This lady wants to know about your musical goddamn influences.”
“Oh?” he says. His voice is — Arihnda refocuses herself with a little exertion of will.
“Yes. I thought your third number sounded like it might be an interpretation of Antheil’s Valentine Waltzes. Was it?”
He stops: the sense of stopping that an already stationary person conveys when they’ve been surprised. He raises his eyebrows a little. “It was indeed.”
“And am I right in thinking that I heard a bit of Reich’s Triple Quartet in your opening number?”
Those brows climb a little higher. “Indeed you are.”
Beside them, picking up her drinks, Faro snorts, laughs again. “Okay, you kids have fun.” She starts to leave, says “Buy the lady a drink,” to her front man as she does. And then, spinning on her heel from a few steps away, she shouts at them: “And ask her her goddamn name!”
OMG this is PERFECT and WONDERFUL. Go Arihnda and get a contrast with
Chimaera!!!
A Force Sensitive Phasesixer 