Rolling Stone, June 3, 2440
Matthew Johnathan Boone Marmaduke has spent most of the last month making it difficult to tell where the workday ends.
Tonight is not helping.
Rolling Stone’s exclusive stream opens on roughly forty people gathered around a beach fire beneath a battered ISLA NUBLAR sign, with blankets and low Turkish-style cushions scattered through the sand and the last light of sunset spreading across the water.
The 108-meter Marmaduke space yacht is impossible to miss in the wide pans.
Anyone who has followed the tour knows the thing by now. It is the converted V’ren shuttle that serves as flying home, transport, office, meeting space and command post for the traveling circus around the High Lord. Tonight its ramp is open, its operations spaces are lit, and people with tablets keep moving between it and the beach.
So much for taking the evening off.
Marmaduke himself is barefoot near the fire with an acoustic guitar across his lap and T’mari pressed against one side of him. He has been tuning, talking, eating and intermittently conducting business for the better part of twenty minutes.
At one point somebody comes down from the yacht, hands him a tablet, and crouches beside him while he scrolls through whatever has interrupted the evening.
He reads.
Asks two questions.
Points at something.
Hands it back.
The staffer heads straight up the ramp again.
Marmaduke reaches for another piece of grilled meat.
Nobody pauses the stream.
That is essentially the mood tonight.
This is not a concert venue transformed to look intimate. It is actually intimate.
There is no stage.
No backstage.
No barrier between performers and everyone else.
Rolling Stone’s crew has largely disappeared into the gathering, except for the cameras. A sound tech is eating from a plate balanced on one knee. Phones are being synchronized and passed around. Someone from production is arguing about bourbon with one of Marmaduke’s relatives.
The bourbon, for the record, is twenty-five-year-old Duke’s, and it is being poured into tumblers His is coming from a bottle of eighty-year old.
Nobody appears troubled by this.
Plates of skewers move around the fire continuously. V’ren and humans are mixed together without any visible seating plan. People wander out of frame, return carrying food, borrow drinks, move cushions and occasionally disappear into the yacht to deal with whatever still needs dealing with.
The whole thing feels less like a concert waiting to begin than the hour before somebody at a very good party finally picks up the guitar.
Which is appropriate, because the announced set is almost aggressively built for exactly that:
It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere
Friends in Low Places
Wagon Wheel
The Gambler
That’s it.
Four songs.
No grand composition about first contact.
No High Lord anthem.
No attempt to prove that Marmaduke has spent his honeymoon discovering prog rock.
These are campfire songs, drinking songs, sing-along songs and one song everyone believes they know well enough to join until the second verse proves otherwise.
It may be the smartest possible set.
Marmaduke has spent the last several weeks becoming almost impossible to separate from geopolitics. Every public appearance is parsed for policy. Every joke becomes an international headline. Every trip produces another argument about trade, sovereignty, V’ren integration or whatever government he has irritated before lunch.
Tonight he seems determined to make everyone deal with four familiar songs and a beach fire.
Not that the rest of his life has stopped cooperating.
A camera pan catches movement inside the yacht’s command spaces.
A pair of people come down carrying tablets.
Another goes up.
A shuttle crosses high beyond the compound.
Nobody even looks at it.
Marmaduke does.
For about three seconds.
Then he goes back to his guitar.
T’mari reaches over and plucks one of the strings.
“You’re flat.”
“I know.”
“You were flat ten minutes ago.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“That has not improved the note.”
The people nearest them laugh.
Marmaduke gives her a look, adjusts the tuning peg and tries again.
Better.
She nods.
“See?”
“Yes, dear.”
That earns him another laugh and an elbow.
A few minutes later the guitar goes down again.
Someone from the yacht catches his eye.
Marmaduke stands.
“I’ll be back.”
“How long?”
“Five minutes.”
Several people immediately object to this estimate.
He answers one of them with a raised middle finger and heads up toward the command post.
Rolling Stone stays on the fire.
There is nothing secret about where he went. The yacht has been sitting in the background of the stream from the opening shot, and everyone on the beach plainly knows that part of the operation is still running.
What operation?
Nobody here seems inclined to explain, and tonight Rolling Stone is here for the music.
Six minutes later Marmaduke comes back down the sand.
Someone calls, “That was six.”
“Your watch is wrong.”
“My watch is atomic.”
“Fake news.”
He drops back onto the cushion beside T’mari.
She takes his drink.
He looks at the empty space where it used to be, looks at his wife, and apparently decides that this particular dispute is not worth escalating.
Another cup materializes from somewhere behind him.
The light is nearly gone now.
The yacht remains bright in the background, people still moving through it while the beach settles into that peculiar quiet that happens just before music begins.
Marmaduke checks his guitar one last time.
Then he looks around the fire.
“Everybody eat?”
A chorus of answers comes back.
Someone says they need more bourbon.
“That’s a logistics failure.”
From somewhere behind the cameras:
“Fix it, High Lord.”
“Not my department.”
More laughter.
A bottle is already moving.
Marmaduke waits for it to make its way around before settling the guitar properly against himself.
This is the part Rolling Stone came for.
Not the titles.
Not the ships.
Not whatever is keeping the command post busy behind him.
Just a guy who knows four songs, surrounded by people who know most of the words.
Rolling Stone has the exclusive stream tonight.
All four performances will be released afterward on iTunes.
For now, the fire is hot, the bourbon is open, the command post is still working, and Matthew Marmaduke finally plays the first chord.
Eight songs later at least one of the staff had won their bet on the actual song count.
