The Rise and Fall of Matt Litter

CHAPTER 3: You're so loved

"Hello Boston, how you doing?" Demian's voice echoes inside the venue, answered by thousands of random voices echoing back. "We are Free the Doves and we are very, very pleased to meet you all!" More shouting, more screaming, more echoing.

Demian was born to do this. He has such a natural stage presence, a natural connection to the public and the fans, it's almost unreal. He's probably one of the most introverted guys I've ever met but, when engaging with the crowd, with our fans, he becomes someone else entirely. Booze often helps, but he is not drunk that night, so it all comes naturally. "My name is Demian and I'd like you all to meet some of my best friends in the entire universe..." he turns to Martin. "Our fantastic sometimes guitar player, sometimes violinist, Mister Martin Evans!" The crowd cheers, as he points at him. Martin starts playing the first twenty seconds of one of our songs, making the crowd go crazy. After he's done, he blows a kiss to them, and they respond with even more screams. "The best drummer in the entire universe, Mister Nick Wallace!" More cheers. "Another guitar player and essential member of the band, because one isn't nearly enough, Mister Freddy Jones!" He points at him, and he starts riffing to probably the best-well-known riff in the history of music, which is, of course, Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, soon to be joined by both Martin and Nick for another fifteen or twenty seconds. Once they stop, Demian is pointing at me. "And last, but not least, my housemate, my buddy..." he smiles, still pointing at me. I know that smile.

It's a smile made for me, only for me. It's my smile. It's not theirs, it doesn't belong to any of them, to any of those waiting for him to say the following words, and for me to play some random bass riff... it's a smile that belongs to me and me only. I won't share that with them. I begin to smile as well... "Mister Matt Litter everybody!"

They scream.

They know my name.

They love my name.

We tend to play a new song for each city or state we visit, or country, someday, I hope. In New York, where we started the tour, we played The Strokes' Last Night, then Talkin Heads' Road to Nowhere, and Blondie's Heart of Glass the last one. Now, in Boston, we play Letters to Cleo's I Want You to Want Me. Martin and Demian begged the rest of us to play it, so we learned it, and agreed to it. Quite simple. The audience loves it, by the way —they love when we do this, they like to feel appreciated.

We play a few more songs.

The gig finishes about thirty minutes later.

We head straight to the tour bus that night. No one feels like partying —four nights in New York were enough.

Still, we don't go to sleep right away. We chat for a couple of hours, as we play cards and make stupid bets as some random movie plays in the background. And we drink, of course.

"She called me again last night," Martin says, as we start playing our second poker round, "she's crazy, man..."

Martin has a stalker. At first, we laughed about it, but after months, literal months, it began to become alarming.

All we know is that some random girl allegedly named Gillian found, somehow, after stalking him and basically everyone he knows on Facebook, his address. And then his phone number. So, she started calling him randomly about three months ago; at first, it wasn't something to worry about, because it could've been anyone, but then he realized it was all the same girl. He sort of talked to the police when he became fed up with her, but they couldn't do much since he didn't know who this girl was, so they told him to come back if it all kept on happening and that if he had an important amount of calls from her number, they'll track her. But the thing is she kept calling from different numbers, some of the unknown. So, it's just one hell of a problem.