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Nazgûl
Legendary rock band that's the focus of George R.R. Martin's 1983 fantasy/mystery novel The Armageddon Rag. Their lead singer, albino Pat Hobbins, was assassinated onstage during a concert in 1971.
There were five albums, filed between the Mothers of Invention and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. He pulled them out and sorted through them. The jackets were as familiar as the features of an old friend, and so too were the titles. The first, Hot Wind out of Mordor, had a kind of Tolkienesque cover, hobbits cringing in the pastel underbrush while volcanoes belched red fire in the distance and the dark riders wheeled above on their scaly winged steeds. Nazgûl offered a surreal landscape of red sun and scarlet mist, twisted mountains, and shapes half-living and half-machine, all vivid, fevered, hot. The big double album was shiny black, front, back, and within, without lettering, empty but for four tiny sets of hot red eyes peering from the lower left-hand corner. There was no title. It had been called the Black Album, in deliberate parody of the Beatles’ White Album. Napalm, which followed, showed children in some jungle, crouching, burning, screaming, while oddly distorted jets streaked overhead and vomited fire down on them. It wasn’t until you looked closely that you realized the scene was a restatement of the cover for Hot Wind out of Mordor, even as the songs within were answers to the group’s earlier, more innocent compositions...though they had never been entirely innocent.
Sandy looked at each album in turn, and replaced them in the cabinet, until he held only the fifth album, the last one, cut only weeks before West Mesa.
The jacket was dark and threatening, done in dim shades of black and gray and violet. It was a concert photograph, retouched to remove the audience, the hall, the props, everything. Only the band remained, the four of them standing on some endless empty plain, darkness hulking before them and below them and pressing in, the shadows slimy and acrawl with suggestive, nightmarish shapes. Behind them a vast, glowering purple sun etched their figures in relief and threw long shadows black as sin and sharp as the cutting edge of a knife.
They stood as they'd always stood when playing. In the back, among the drums done up in swirling patterns of black and red, Gopher John sat scowling. He was a big man, moon-faced, his features all but lost in his thick black beard. In his huge hands the sticks looked like tooth- picks, yet he seemed to crouch, for all his size, to hunker down among those drums like some great fierce beast surprised in its lair. In front of Gopher John’s dark nest stood Maggio and Faxon, flanking the drums on either side. Maggio hugged his guitar to his bare, scrawny chest. He was sneering, and his long dark hair and droopy mustache were moving in some unseen wind, and his nipples looked vivid and red. Faxon wore a white fringe jacket and a thin smile as he plucked at his ‘electric bass. He was clean-shaven, with long blond braids and green eyes, but you would never guess his brilliance by looking at him.
And up in front stood Hobbins, legs spread, head thrown back so his waist-long white hair cascaded down behind him, eyes blazing scarlet, one hand clutching a microphone and the other clawing the air. He wore a black denim suit with buttons made of bone, and on his crotch was sewn an American flag with the Eye of Mordor where the stars ought to have been. He looked like something supernatural, slight and small yet possessed of a vitality that shrieked at the darkness and held it at bay.
Against the great purple sun was a single word, in spiky black lettering, that looked like a lightning bolt mated to a snake. Nazgûl, it said. And down below, very faint, gray against the blackness, it whispered, Music to Wake the Dead.
Sandy slid the album out of the jacket cover and placed it carefully on his turntable, set it in motion, and turned up the amp all the way. Tonight he wanted it loud, the way it had been when he first heard it, back in ’71, the way the Nazgûl meant it to be played. If that bothered Sharon, upstairs shuffling her papers, that was her tough luck.
For a moment there was only silence, then a faint noise growing louder, something that sounded like a teakettle whistling, or maybe a missile coming down. It rose until it was a shrill scream that went knifing through your brain, and then came the heavy sound of drums as Gopher John laid down the backbeat, and then the guitars cut in, and finally there was Hobbins, laying full-force into “Blood on the Sheets.” The opening lyric gave Sandy a strange small shudder. Baby, you cut my heart out, the Nazgûl sang, Baby, you made me bleeeeed!
Referenced in New Mutants 29 (July 1985) by another fake musician, Lila Cheney.
Their name is a Lord of the Rings reference.
