Authors Note: This story came to mind from a story I read online many many years ago in the dark ages of Furry Fandom online. You may have even seen it. Basically the author talks about transformations (for pay) and how only his character was the only one 'fitting' to be a morph. Yeah it was a self centered piece of drivel (though it was well written drivel I'll admit) that I wouldn't be at all surprised if the author now older and (hopefully) wiser is embarrassed to have put out there. Be that as it may, I always wanted to write a little piece about one of the other's who paid to have the change made. I don't remember the author, or any of the characters names, and I won't be using them anyways, so this shouldn't infringe on anyone's copyright. This is also a Parody of that other story.

Confessions of a (former) Rock Star

"So David, I may call you David right?"

"Sure, David, Dave, any of those are fine. You can even use my old stage name if you want, just don't expect an answer to it." He chuckled. "Alright if I call you Nigel?"

"Sure, Nigel's fine. Now do I detect a hint of bitterness there?"

"Not really. Those years were some of the happiest of my life. But it's all in the past now and I've moved on to bigger and better things."

Nigel nodded, "So tell me and my readers about it. First of all, how did it all start? The Band, you, the whole transformation thing."

"Ahh yes, the beginning. Well we were just five guys with another heavy metal band. We called ourselves 'Magnificent Desolation' back in those days. We were pretty good too, but hey there were probably a hundred other Metal bands back then trying to make it big, get the gold ring."

"So the band was formed before you underwent the transformation then?"

"Oh yeah, I know the publicists tried to spin it off differently, but we'd all known each other for a while, and had been working the LA bar scene for almost a year."

"So why did you do the change?"

"Well it was simple. We knew we needed a gimmick, something to push us over the top, get us noticed, get the airplay and that all important contract. But we didn't know what to do. I mean we were stumpin' pretty hard on that one. We thought about a makeup gig, like Kiss or Twisted Sister, but that had been done to death. So had just about everything else we could think of. Then Robert, that's Robert the Bass player, not the Rob Reed the other guitar player, he tells us about this thing his dad's working on and how they need some advance subjects, for their marketing plan and all."

"So you went for it?"

"Hell no! I mean we all talked about it some and I thought that was that. Now as a side note I've always had a thing for cats, especially leopards. My uncle was a trainer down at Universal Studios and when I was growing up I used to help him with the cats. So that's how I got that nickname Panth that they later made me use as a stage name. Anyway, I come into practice the next day and damn if Reed hasn't talked the whole band into it..."

"So then why were you the only one who underwent the procedure?"

"Let me finish. He's talked the whole band into the fact that one of us should change. After all we knew it wasn't cheap, they were giving a discount for it then, but it was still a lot of cash. So he said with one of us changed, and working as the front man, we'd have our gimmick and get our shot."

"So how did you end up being the one?"

"Well isn't it obvious? I was the lead singer, so of course it should be me who changed!"

"I take it you didn't like the idea much then?

"Hell no! I didn't want to be some kind of freak, who knew how well this thing worked, or how I'd turn out?"

"Well obviously it turned out well, I mean look at you..."

"Well yeah, now we know how well it works, but remember I was one of the first, so I had no idea. Plus I suspected Rob wanted me to stop playing guitar. He was jealous of my abilities there, so he didn't care if I wouldn't be able to play anymore after the change."

"But you did go through with it."

"Yeah, it took them about a week of constantly working on me to get me to go down there and check into it. Robert's dad brought me in and the marketing guys loved the idea of me getting changed. They figured a rock star would be a lot of good press, they were right too, I was responsible for something like ten thousand customers they told me years later."

"So what sold you on the change?"

"Three things. The first was they told me they could change me back, that was a plus. The second was that they showed me what I'd look like and I fell in love with my new body immediately. Like I said before, I have a thing for cats, and well, being a panthermorph was just too cool to walk away from.

"And the third?"

"Pipes. They said they'd give me a set of pipes better then Hodgsen or Yorke. More then three octaves! What lead singer wouldn't go for that? Especially when I'd always felt my original voice sucked. Secretly I'd always wondered if that was one of the things that had held us back."

"So you went for it."

"Yeah, sure did. I think there was eight of us in that initial group. Most were fairly low profile folks, though there was that one guy who became a porno star."

"And so you got your contract?"

"Well not right away. I mean now we were a gimmick band, like so many before us. We changed the name of the band and started working like maniac's before someone else tried to copy our idea. With me up there as a Panther of course we had to write a lot of new material to play off of that. Plus my voice had changed so we had to re-key a lot of our songs, but with the increased range it let us go to some new places."

"And your guitar playing?"

"Well that suffered at first. I had to re-train all my muscles, I'd get terrible cramps early on at first. We used to keep buckets of ice behind the drums for me to stick my arms in between songs. Having claws made for some differences, but most of those weren't bad. Of course to do my whole 'prancing and charging' cat shtick and some of the other crap we came up with, I wasn't playing as much on stage as originally. But after two months one of the exec's at Morphics Inc. talked a record friend of his into coming down to one of our gig's in Long Beach, and we got signed a week later."

"Now I noticed as a Band you guys spent a lot of time on the road."

"Yeah, as a Gimmick band you have to do a lot of shows, or your gimmick isn't gonna pull in an audience. People came to see the big black cat singing and prancing on stage. But we knew once we got them in the front door, our music would keep them there."

"Well considering your success with record sales I can't really argue with you on that."

"No, except for our seventh album they all went gold. Though I know nobody expected our eighth and final album to go platinum."

"Yes that was quite the buzz back then, but then your eighth was such a total departure from what you had done before."

"Oh yeah. There were a lot of fights about that one!"

"And?"

"Well to tell you about that, I'd have to tell you about our career in general Nigel."

"Well David, that's why I'm here, and I'm sure my readers would love to hear about it all."

Dave shrugged, "Sure why not? Okay, basically the first three years we were all pretty happy. I mean we were selling out shows everywhere, women were throwing themselves at us."

"And you as well?"

"Oh hell yeah! All the girls wanted to find out what it was like, and I know the fur turned on a lot of them. Heck how many girls do you know that don't like cats? And this body has a lot more stamina then my old one and I was a fitness nut long before I changed. So anyway, we're just living the highlife riding the crazy train and being kings."

"And it changed how?"

"Well, I like heavy metal as much as the next head banger, but I wanted to start heading in another direction. But the two Rob's were opposed to that. Keith and Bill weren't too crazy about heavy metal anymore either, but didn't want to mess with success."

"But you saw the need to evolve."

"Well that and just how many times can you scream and yell and growl about teenaged angst? I mean come on now, I was over 25 and it was time to start moving on to more artistic avenues."

"So what did you do?"

"Well what could I do? I threatened to leave, but they wouldn't let me."

"Wouldn't let you?"

"No."

"How could they keep you?"

"Well, it's like this, back when I got the change, they all put up the money, and I put up my body."

"Seems fair"

"Yeah, but back then it was a lot of money for us. So they made me sign a contract that I'd give them five years unless the band failed, or they all voted to let me go."

"I see..."

"Yeah, seemed like a good idea at the time, and as we were all rich by then I figured they'd let me go. But Reed got greedy. I don't know if it was for the money, the fame or the chicks, but he didn't want to let me go. And I was chaffing."

"So dissent set in."

"With me, yeah. You see when I had gone through the op, the leadership of the band had changed. It had been me and Reed prior to it. But it shifted to Reed and Robert afterwards. With me as the 'gimmick' in our band they were all jealous of the attention I was getting, while being afraid I'd walk and they'd lose their golden goose. So I had to do something."

"And that something was?"

"I decided I'd try to take over the band. If I was going to be stuck there on a leash, then I wanted to be the one holding the damn thing at least."

"So what happened next?"

"Well I started with Bill, we'd been jamming together since high school, and I had pretty deep roots with him. We started writing some songs together and got them on the fifth album, 'Vacant Eyes'. When one of those songs became a hit, well I had him in my camp. Robert Boole wasn't too hard, I just started sending more groupies his way. Drummers never get enough appreciation, so I did what I could to change that."

"Keith and Reed?"

"Both hard cases, but for different reasons. I didn't figure out what Keith wanted until we were working on our seventh album, the one that did so poorly."

"What did Keith want?"

"It was something rather personal, and was rather surprising to me. I mean you work with someone for five years and you think you know them."

"But that still doesn't tell us what it was."

"No, it doesn't, and I won't. Ask Keith sometime if you want to know."

"Ah... I see. So what did it for Rob Reed?"

"What did it was when we, the Band, crashed and burned. The Seventh album, 'Pussyfoot', did terrible. I hated most of it, especially the name. Our attendance was way down at shows, we weren't touring as much, and not only were we all burned out but the band had pretty much split into factions, mine and Rob's."

"But it sounds like you had all the rest of the band on your side by then."

"Well, yes and no. The other three bounced back and forth not really committing all the time. We'd all been at the grind hard and long by this point. We had one more album to do on our contract and my five year goal was only weeks away and I was starting to think about just walking away. But when seven died, well, we all went a little crazy."

"But you had to have seen it coming. By your own admission you were a gimmick band and they never last long."

"True, but we had outlasted most gimmick bands. We had talent, we were artists. It's just the market had grown and we hadn't grown with it. And we all had big ego's, Reed and I were the worst of the bunch too, though I didn't know it then. So when we all went into the record company meeting to find out how sales were, we couldn't believe it at first, and once we saw the numbers, well it wasn't pretty."

"So the stories about the fight are true then?"

Dave sighed, "Yeah. We had a real knock down drag out with finger pointing and the whole nine yards. The record people were smart, they got out of the room real quick and locked the door behind them. And that's when I laid my own ultimatum on them."

"You told them that if they didn't do it your way you'd leave the band when your five years were up?"

"No, I couldn't do that. I felt as bad about the album as anyone else. No, I told them they would all sign a contract like I had, for me and me only this time, giving me complete control on our next album."

"And they went for it?"

"Well.." Dave looked down at the floor, ear's flicking uncomfortably, "I stood in front of the door and told them that I had done what they wanted for almost five years and they were going to do what I wanted for once. And that no one was leaving the room until everyone signed that piece of paper."

"Or?"

"Or I'd beat them until they did."

"Ouch."

"Yeah, well like I said, my ego was pretty big, and I was pretty mad. Looking back it was probably way out of line. If I hadn't been unhappy with things up to then, maybe number 7 wouldn't have gone off so bad."

"Well, no harm no foul"

"Not exactly. Kieth and Bill signed, Kieth because he was a bit afraid of me, and Bill because he thought I might be right."

"But the two Robs?"

"I beat the living daylights out of them. Another thing my bio doesn't show is that my stint in the army wasn't just a regular one, I was in Special Forces. Anyway, it wasn't pretty like I said."

"So what happened after they signed?"

"We went back into the studio and started our last album. We all knew it was the last one, both the Rob's resented me for what I did, and I resented all of them for not letting me out 2 years earlier. Kieth had a fear/worship relationship going and Bill was just going through the motions to get it all done."

"Yet out of this you managed to record an album that many point to as possibly your finest work as a group."

"Funny how that is. I think part of that was that right from the start, we were going to drop the gimmick. No reference to my being a panthermorph at all. Next was I made everyone write at least one song on their own that would be criticized by all of us, but the one writing it decided when it would go on the album.

"All of what we wrote at first were pretty nasty songs. There was a lot of anger going around and we all wrote about it, fought about it and in general you could say we almost reveled in it. Talk about tension, the song reviews were brutal. I think I contributed almost as much to that nasty song Robert wrote about me as he did. It was carthritic. So when we had finished the disc we were no longer mad at each other or fighting and we decided at that point to make it a two disc album and try to do something special for all the fans who had stuck with us and seen pass the gimmick."

Nigel nodded. "A lot of people have commented on the whole dichotomy of the two discs. As well as the credits on the songs, especially that second disk. Again there are five songs with single credits, but the other seven list all of the band. Why is that?"

"Mostly because that's how it just happened. We pulled together as a team for one last hurrah, laid those tracks down and then split to the four corners of the earth."

"How did the record company feel about it?"

"Well they didn't want to publish it at first, it was so different from anything we had done before, and our last album had flopped, that they balked. But we stuck to our guns and made them do it, and luckily it all turned out for the best."

"So what happened next in your life? For the next year you literally disappeared from sight. What was that all about?"

"Well, you know I had this new body, and there were still a lot of things I'd never done with it. You could say I went off to find myself, and just have a vacation."

"But where? There were a lot of rumors floating around about you, until you surfaced in New York City for that benefit."

"Vermont, up in the Green Mountains. I spent a while just living off the land, and then did a little traveling around with a truck driver I met. Just hanging out and being a recluse I guess. After the Benefit gig I headed off to Europe, I wanted to see that from something other then the back of a tour bus."

"Now again there are some weird stories coming out of that time frame."

"Yeah, and most of them are true."

"The commune thing did happen then?"

"Pretty much, thought not exactly as the stories portrayed it."

"What's different then between the stories most of us read?"

"Well I wasn't acting like a god or anything and no one was worshiping me. That was a crock, after the band I sure as hell didn't want any kind of adulation or ass kissing."

"What about the part with the wives?"

"Well" Dave looked sheepish, "Partially true. I slept around quite a bit then at first, but I pretty much settle down to two."

"Two wives?"

"Yeah," Dave smiled, ears flicking embarrassed.

"And what happened to them?"

"They're still with me. We're umm, a family now. And I'd rather not go into details other then to say I now have children and am very happy about it."

"Are they changed like yourself?"

"Yes, both cats."

"What about that story with the hunter?"

"That sadly to say is true as well, if you go to Switzerland it's all public record. The guy had tagged a couple of poor souls before me, just folks who had gotten changed and didn't have the kind of skills to survive something like that."

"And you did?"

"Well again I have the army to thank for that. Also the year I had spent in Vermont helped quite a bit as well."

"So what are you working on now?"

"Well, for the last year I've mostly been doing studio work. I still had to prove to the rest of the industry that I wasn't solely a gimmick or a one trick pony. Now that I've gained some respect in that area I have a solo album coming out next week. Jazz Fusion, which I love, no more heavy metal for me I think."

"Do you talk to anyone from the band anymore?"

"I see Kieth and Bill on a fairly regular basis. I played on Bill's last album, the one that they used in the new Joe Ellis movie. Robert comes by once a year around Christmas and we go have a few drinks."

"What about Rob Reed?"

"We talk."

"That's all?"

"Sometimes."

"Okay, last question. Will you guys ever play together again? Do you see any reunion tours in your future?"

"Well, honestly I don't know. We've all been going our separate ways for a while now, and none of us are hurting for money. It's been five years now since we were all in the same room at the same time. I suppose it could happen, but I don't know if our fans are even still out there, and I know for sure my days of crawling around a stage and growling are over. I hated doing it then and I won't abide doing it now.

"A lot of people I don't think ever realized that most of what I had to do on stage was an act, an act that I really didn't care for. But that act is one of the things that made us fun to see in concert, which is why I and the rest of the band did it. So, is it really worth us doing a show if we're not going to bring that act with us? Wouldn't that disappoint our fans? Those are questions that would have to be answered before any of us considered it I'm sure.

"Very good points. Oh, one more question, even though I said I was done."

"Sure, shoot."

"Are you happy as a Cat?"

"You know, you're the first one to ask me that. And yes, I am. It's worked out very well for me, maybe because I didn't change to boost my self image, I had a pretty positive one beforehand. But I do know it put me more in tune with my self image. Plus having a tail is just cool."

Nigel laughed, "If you say so."

"I do," David grinned and shaking hands got up and headed for the door.

"Oh, off the record, and now that the interview is over, any idea of what ever happened to the others from that original group?"

"Well I heard from the porn star guy, seems he was having some mental issues and thought I would help. I told him to get a grip and get on with his life. Haven't heard really about anything with the rest other then some did switch back to their bodies after a few years. I can understand that, I suspect too many thought that switching would solve their problems, let them run away, but you can't run away from yourself because no matter where you go, there you are. Me, I did it for business reasons, and well I guess you could say the cat in me thought it would be fun. I also took the time to get comfortable with it. Still seems like the best decision I ever made."

"Thanks."

"No problem, the record company will tell you where to send my copy of the article when it's done."

Nigel nodded and watched Dave head out the door, tail swaying as he left. "I always suspected that whole act on stage was nothing more then just that." He thought to himself as he got up to leave as well. "Idiots are just never that successful!" and he grinned to himself as he left the room.