The Illegal Leopards Story

The drums are thudding, the bass is pounding, the guitar is moaning, and I am screaming your names. This is what I live for, The euphoria of preformance, the natural high I get, straddling the audience between my legs and belting out my lyrical heart. The microphone is my chalice, the vocalist is my avatar.
Its a connection you cant possibly understand if you havent done it; Its something enchancted, something that rabbles, rouses and rebels. You didnt have to like me, but I did it, and I fought for every preformance in a sea of much better vocalists and more popular setlists. That was us, though. Pure, roots Rock. We waved one finger salutes to our conformist collegues and played sweet originals and catchy 70's songs that no one needed to know.
I remember how we reached the pinnacle, We jammed on our mountaintop in a steady stream of good ideas and better music. It was powerful stuff, we all loved it fiercly, no matter what anyone says in retrospect. It fed on the vibes, the chemistry, and it was electric, it made us feel like we were changing things, like real rock and rollers. We made music that the audience wasent supposed to like. But they seemed to like it, and if they didnt, we genuinly liked it enough not to give a flying fuck. We thought the odds were on our side. We were all so different, but we had that good old rock and roll, thats all it took, right? But maybe we werent all naive, the bassist played our swan song from day one. He's all I have left today. He sealed our fate between tobacco stained fingers with a first day prophecy, "This is as good as it gets, Its all down hill from here."
We were just so heady from the rush of descension that we didnt know we were loosing altitude. It was popular acclaim, Then it was bad shows, and suddenly, it was the descent into social pariah, and then we were dead. The drums and guitar fled while they could, but the rest of us had no escape hatch. We didnt know it yet, but starting to care had been what did us in. It was the weakness that made us susceptible to breakage, and it was the flaw that shattered us.
Whats left of us still pluck the chords from dead songs in the ditch of lost dream; they are beautiful things that you'll never get to hear, private things that are only ours. They could have been much more. I know we were falling, but we were happy, and when I crashed, I fixed my eyes on the sky, waiting for everyone else to meet me at the bottom.
But they didnt; they were picked up by musical vultures who picked off the peices they wanted
and left the rest of us for dead, manipulating the factors that caused us to hurdle to our demise.
I lay here now, in a puddle of caked dissapointment and dead songs, bruised from head to toe, and I dont know If I want to recover. Im not sure if this is Monte Christo, this just might be Rockeo and Rolliet.

But I was singing.

And If I had to do it over again,

I would.

P.S. I dont think Illegal Leopards deserved anything longer.