The Riffmaster General by Ben Fitts

The Riffmaster General

by Ben Fitts

Lilith trembled as she plugged her Gibson Explorer into the massive Orange stack on the stage. Of course, her guitar wasn’t really made by Gibson and the amplifier wasn’t really made by Orange. They were just clones of the original brands.

It was possible that those companies still existed back on Earth, but Lilith thought it was unlikely. Ever since the United Nations Of Earth ordered the exile of all metalheads from the planet, citing their presence as a danger to religious freedom and Christian values, the gear manufacturers must have been hit pretty hard. Lilith thought Fender was probably fine, though. The decision had no impact on indie rock bands or country singers.

Everyone from the village was there watching her, sitting solemnly in their ceremonial patch jackets and bullet belts. She was able to make out her parents in the dim blue light shining on the audience. They sat front and center by the stage, as was customary for a riffening. They were trying hard to appear calm and detached as they were supposed to during this event, but she knew they were probably almost as terrified as she was. She could spot other familiar faces gathered near them as well. Friends, neighbors, classmates.

Her attention was snapped away from the audience as a neon green light burst to life across from her. The light shone upon a big black throne with a large brass lever jutting out of its side. It rested upon a towering platform and was the only point of elevation in the entire ceremonial theatre higher than the stage Lilith was on. On the throne sat The Riffmaster General.

He was an ancient man. Riffmaster Generals were all typically advanced in age, but he was especially so. He had been the village’s longest reigning Riffmaster General in any living resident’s memory.

The Riffmaster General rose as the light bathed him, his ragged white beard bobbing against his chest and obscuring some of his ceremonial jacket. His was black leather and littered with patches both from old Earth bands such as Electric Wizard, Crypt Sermon and Skeletonwitch as well as many bands formed since The Exile, including such modern luminaries as Demonic Dentistry and Wizard Shit.

A pair of his assistants, known as underriffs, lifted a guitar from a stand near the throne, a black Les Paul clone set to the neck pickup. They plugged it into a giant amplifier and placed it upon his chest, where it dangled on a leather strap. They then stomped on a textbook-sized fuzz pedal on the ground. The amplifier roared with earthy feedback as The Riffmaster General worked his gnarled fingers across the fretboard and demonstrated his new riff, a tradition that preceded every riffening.

It was great, of course.

Every riff that The Riffmaster General presented was, or he wouldn't have been appointed Riffmaster General in the first place. Lilith had always secretly suspected the only reason every riffening began with a new riff from The Riffmaster General was to introduce an unreasonably high standard for the almost-adult on the stage to follow.

It was a smoky, elephantine riff straight out of the stoner-doom playbook. Riffmaster Generals were by law not allowed to be in bands as the riffs they wrote were considered community property by their village, but before assuming the office he had been in a stoner band called Dank Sinatra for whom riffs like that had been their bread and butter.

The riff slithered at a cosmically slow pace and made Lilith think about Satan. The current Riffmaster General was an especially devout Satanist and worked hard to invoke the feeling of Satan in every riff he had presented since assuming office. He always succeeded.

The final down-tuned note hung in the air, decaying in the tubes of the amplifier until it eventually faded into oblivion. It was greeted with nothing but silence from the audience. Riffenings were not concerts and were not the place for applause. They were somber affairs.

The underriffs snapped off the giant amplifier stack, unplugged the Les Paul copy and removed the guitar from his chest as he hobbled back to his seat on the throne. The underriffs scurried off the fetch a microphone and a stand. They adjusted the microphone so that The Riffmaster General could speak into it without having to stand on his old knees.

“Tonight, the village is gathered to celebrate the riffening of our own Lilith Von Cryptopsy on the day of her eighteenth birthday,” he rasped into the microphone. “She will present us with a riff on her own composing on her chosen instrument and I, as The Riffmaster General, shall deem if the riff is of enough quality to serve the glory of Satan and accept her into adulthood. Lilith Von Cryptopsy, will you present the village with your riff?”

The entire room’s attention shifted to Lilith. Her whole life up to this point had been leading up to this moment.

She had been fortunate enough to avoid of life of physical labor on the bleak planet with paltry natural resources by being born into the musician caste. While those born as laborers would spend their lives mining and farming and building in a world where all three were incredibly difficult, Lilith would be able to lead a leisurely life in an assigned band playing music for the rest of her village. Perhaps  for even more people, if her band was good enough to become authorized to tour.

If she passed her riffening, that was.

Lilith was as prepared as she ever would be. She had been assigned the guitar at birth.

Instruments were carefully assigned to newborn musicians in order to keep the ratio balanced for bands. Of every twenty-one infant musicians born, ten would be made guitarists, five would be drummers, five would be bassists and one would be a keyboardist. This allowed for every band to have two guitars, one bass, one drummer and every fifth band would have keys. This allowed for the prog and symphonic metal bands to have keyboards, but their presence would not be a creative burden to the thrash and death bands.

Child musicians began attending band school at age three where they would be broken off into classes by instrument and thought how to play their assignment. Diodays (which on Earth had been called Fridays) would instead be band days, where the children would be broken into small ensembles with the students in other classes to try and play songs together. The elementary school curriculum for band days consisted of learning easy covers such as the simpler Black Sabbath songs and Black Album-era Metallica. In middle school the students would be taught more complex covers and in high school the curriculum focused primarily on original compositions.

Children between the ages of eight and twelve who showed an aptitude towards vocals were encouraged to add vocal training on top of their instrumental studies. In some rare cases where a student truly excelled at vocals, their vocal training was even allowed to replace their instrumental duties entirely.

Those who underwent the vocal training were allowed to skip the nerve wracking process of a riffening if they could adequately convince The Riffmaster General of their vocal prowess. In these cases they were allowed to instantly be accepted to adulthood, at which point they would be assigned bandmates based on their stylistic preferences and be able to start their new lives.

Lilith had shown no such aptitude.

In fact, she had barely been able to keep up with her studies of the guitar as it was. She had consistently performed towards the bottom of her class in picking technique, soloing and rhythm studies. The only class in which she had excelled was riffing, where guitar students would learn how to construct their own metal riffs. It was the only subject they were tested on to gain acceptance to adulthood, so at even a young age she had successfully identified riffing as the only subject that actually mattered.

“Ms. Cryptopsy?” rasped The Riffmaster General into the microphone. “We are waiting.”

Lilith snapped back to the present and positioned a sweaty finger onto the sixth string as the light on The Riffmaster General’s throne dimmed. She felt like all the air was being sucked out of her body with a vacuum and her head swam with terror. She pushed those feelings aside and did what she had to do. Lilith played her riff.

She struck her sixth string with her tiny pick. The guitar emitted an awkward squeak. In horror, she realized that she had forgotten to press down on the fret and that her finger simply hung limply there over the rosewood.

“Ok, now I’m starting,” she mumbled as if it would excuse the mistake.    

She attacked the opening note again, this time getting it to ring clearly. She liked to tune her sixth string all the way down to B-flat, and the deep, fuzz-drenched note echoed through the room. Her fingers glided to a devilish tritone on the next string and relieved the tension a little by moving down a semitone. Then she let the bottom three strings ring out open, which in her tuning meant landing on a big B-flat power chord.

For a moment she let herself bask in the murky feedback echoing from the amplifier, then she descended into the main hook of her riff. Children born into the musician caste spend much of their final year of school working on and perfecting the single riff they present during their riffening, and Lilith knew every nuance of hers by heart.

Her riff was also out of the stoner metal tradition. People on her planet grow up hearing their village’s Riffmaster General present new riffs for community use constantly, and The Riffmaster General of one’s childhood is often an especially pertinent influence. However, her riff was a bit different than anything her Riffmaster General was likely to write. It was as sinister as any of his compositions, but thrashier with a faster tempo and more attitude.

She sailed through notes, losing herself in the euphoria of the music and the lights and the crowd and the performance and for a moment forgetting how much was at stake.

Her riff ended on a B natural note, a risky choice given her key, but one that she was sure paid off. She gave it a heavy vibrato, milking it for each bend she could until the last of the note died in the amplifier. She switched off her amplifier, unplugged her guitar and knelt on the stage before the silent audience, holding her instrument in her left hand as was the tradition. The gesture was seen as symbolically throwing herself at the mercy of the village, The Riffmaster General and of Satan.

The neon light above The Riffmaster General’s throne swelled back on. The air left the room as he came into focus. He appeared to be in great thought as he sat and scratched his massive beard. It glowed a pale green in the light.

Lilith could hear every beat of her heart as he deliberated. Eventually, he spoke.

“The beginning of your performance was unequivocally rough, but you recovered decently,” he began. “Your riff had two sections, which allowed it to grow organically. That worked well. Additionally, your riff was appropriately menacing in tone to capture the spirit of metal and to do justice to the Lord Satan.”

Lilith felt hope and excitement swell in her chest. Unless she was horribly misunderstanding his words, it seemed like she was going to pass.

“However, your riff relied heavily upon doom metal clichés and on the whole lacked originality,” The Riffmaster General continued. “It is one thing to be aware of and honoring the greats that have come before, but that can be a thin line between paying homage and being just another mediocre Sleep ripoff. Furthermore, I found the melodic content of riff to resolve unsatisfactorily in a way that would have been easy to rectify if you would venture further outside the confines of a simple blues scale.”

“But I ended on a flat second!” she shouted, panic creeping over her. Interrupting a Riffmaster General in the middle of his judgment was a minor legal offensive, but it did not seem to upset him.

“You did,” he agreed. “It is was the most creative note choice in the entire riff, which is why it was a real shame that it didn’t work at all at all.”

He paused and Lilith prayed to Satan in the moment before he gave his final decision.

“I deem your riff, and therefore you, as being unworthy of our society.”

“Nooo!!!” shrieked Lilith's mother from the darkened audience, but it did not matter.

“You may be unworthy of adulthood in our society, but do not fret,” he continued, shouting over the clamor and crying in the audience. “You will still have a purpose through sacrifice, as your life will fuel the power of our Lord Satan.”

The Riffmaster General yanked the big brass lever jutting out of the side of his throne. There was a mechanical creaking as the metal floor of the stage collapsed inwards. Bolts of green mechanical energy flickered in the space revealed beneath the stage, lighting up the entire room.

The Orange amplifier clone was the first to succumb to gravity. As the floors continued to collapse downward, the heavy amplifier slid down and tumbled onto green bolts of artificially produced energy. The amplifier disintegrated upon contact, melting into the chasm until it was nothing more than a wisp of smoke floating into the air.

A moment later Lilith lost her footing as well and tumbled into chasm beneath the stage. The energy was so hot that it burned and blistered her skin before it even touched her. Though she was terrified, in her last moments Lilith felt an odd sense of calm. There was nothing left she could do, and maybe her school teachers had been right. Maybe through her sacrifice, she would be with Satan after all.

With this serenity, Lilith plunged into the bolts of energy and was no more.

This story was originally published in Issue #6. You can get the whole print issue here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/674614280/the-rock-n-roll-horror-zine-6

See more of Ben Fitts' work here: https://doomgoat666.wixsite.com/benfitts