Wars/Whores on 7th Avenue

Going to big concerts with him was always a trip.  They had lots of comp tickets, more than they could use, often.  Especially for concerts that weren't very popular.  Sometimes they couldn't give tickets away, and they tried.

He preferred "up and coming" acts; i.e. scenes where he was adored as one of the Rock Elders.  He took such pleasure from being the most famous person in the room.  And to his credit, he liked supporting groups that needed a leg up.  When he curled up alone with a secret glass of wine on those cold nights in the Farmhouse, it was his Greenwich Village days he thought about.  Cheap red wine, apartments with the shower in the kitchen and the toilet in a closet.  And friends, always friends, just downstairs or around the corner at Washington Square Park.  When all he had was his guitar. Before the invention of electricity.

He was more interesting to watch when he was lost in the crowd.  She saw him melt into his anonymous mask.  Where nobody recognized him, but where it also didn't consume him.  Arena shows, mixing into the crowds on 7th Avenue, the escalators, touching grimy things that other mere mortals had touched.  These handrails, these ushers, where the world showed up and the arena was the belly of a ship.  The performers themselves were just priests, or captains, or the sacrificed.  The music was the ocean they all rode on.

In the dark, they were all lost on the ocean, under the stars.  She imagined the soloists were the performers who inherited the trance of the great piano players of the last century.  The front men only had lyrics, their voices and faces.  Perfect for the teenybopper girls or drunk gloryboys who wanted the vicarious experience.  But it was the backup performers, the bass player, the 10 minute guitar solo that held her in the middle of the air, that impossible space where she lived in that dream last night where she could fly.

The concert was nice, she felt herself "lost" during only a few moments. Where nothing else mattered.  Where she expected him to lean over and kiss her.  And she wouldn't have minded.  She might have even liked it.  But looking over at him, she felt completely ignored.  The music wasn't an aphrodisiac for him, it was a language that he understood better than she realized.

Most of the music brought her back to her childhood all right, just like the hippies a generation older than her.  They had high school glory days.  But she only remembered moments in the back of her parents' car, a powerless child. Or wandering around in a mall, or a grocery store.  The song "American Pie" reminded her of processed food in square containers, plastered with words like "bakery fresh" or "homemade".   The taste of processed strawberry flavor, overly sweet and syrupy.  A flavor distinct from the fruit itself.

The music was over, but the roar was still in her ears.  The jumbotron went back from the live feed to the repetition of ads and future acts, looking especially lively, next to their names and dates.  The movie was over and she felt nothing but a great disappointment.  The surrounding humanity made her feel incredibly lonely and the music was loud enough to only be noise.  She was relieved when they got up from their seats to head backstage.

At the tender age of 19, she was expecting to be literally plucked out of the crowd.  And if not her, then at least HIM.  Wasn't he the Great Unknown?  He was the one to be recognized.  And even then, it was only by a duo of balding brothers, who had inherited the same male pattern combover.  They seemed to vary in their bathing habits, but only slightly.  The younger one was carrying a supply of square files under his arm in a white battered plastic bag from The Colony.  "I Found It!" shouted the bag, and a girl from the 50's seemed to be crippled in mid leap, the plastic stretching and crumpled in ways that made her original body appear grotesque.

There was a rehearsed dance between The Brothers.  One album was selected and removed with great difficulty from the overstuffed plastic bag.  Then the cardboard album was removed from the plastic bag in which it was encased.  Unfortunately, this was one of those complicated fold out-fold over novelty covers which exploded like a map of Northeastern Suburbia.

P always considered the act of autographing as a piece of his own performance.  Instead of hugging the tunnel wall, he nudged out into the center of the space, like an actor centering himself onstage.  The remaining trickle of the crowd had to exit around them, making him feel like Moses.  Or at least someone important enough to disturb traffic.

He used the unfolding as a "piece of business", as the vaudeville actors used to say.  He seemed careful not to let the actual record fall out, juggling the folds back and forth, trying to find just the right spot for his name on another band's record.
"Y'know, I've always thought their music was light, but this is ridiculous!"  He stuck his face into the envelope of the empty cover.
"Oh, we never carry the original records with us!"  The Brothers cried in discordant attempted unison.
"Too heavy or too valuable?" P asked.
They blinked as if confused.  The more normal looking brother said, "We file the records separately from the album covers.  Prevents scratches to the records and bending of the covers."
As if every household in America had a room dedicated to record storage and classification.

"Are you sure I'm adding to the value of this one?  I'm not even on it."  He asked as he attempted to read the back cover without his glasses.

"Well, Chip produced you guys and he worked with the Bass Player on cut number 7,"  the Ugly Brother continued on a long rant about the "all too obvious connection".  Her new shoes were cutting into her ankles and her polite attention was losing all sense of propriety.  She tried to pay attention to the conversation, but it was more of an exchange of obscure details.  Maybe a surreal tennis match, between cartoon Russian spies.

"For the Sun Record sessions, they had to ...."
"Of course, Paul plays upside down,"

The more they talked about Ginger Baker, the more she had a craving for crisp cookies shaped like men.

Even the More Normal Brother wasn't paying attention to her.  Usually, she'd follow her policy of flirting with the underdogs, but she had no interest in the resulting gossip.  She was the assumed girlfriend or sex slave, and if she as much as spoke to the More Normal Brother, they'd have masturbatory fantasies about secondhand sex.

She tried to imagine taking off his horn-rimmed glasses and running her finger through his greasy hair.  When he caught her looking at him, it was clear that even as a potential sex object she didn't register.  He looked away, into the crowd, his attention excited by the security guard that seemed to be approaching.

He had his Smile-Mask turned up to 5.  Modest Former Rock Star, blending with the Plebians, glad to sign something for the few who found his star amid the crowds.  It would have mattered more if The Brothers weren't at every single show.  She knew he was disappointed that not a single other person even gave him a second glance.  Not even when he was signing.  She wondered how much of this performance was for her.  Or for The Brothers.  Or for his own ego. Or just because he couldn't help himself.

Finally, the security guard caught P's eye and with a few clever hand motions, indicated that they were to be led into the inner sanctum.  His fame worked again.  She was always afraid that it wouldn't.

He introduced her as his  . . . "friend", but she quickly jumped in.  "We work together at the radio station,"  careful to introduce herself professionally, and not as an ambiguous lover or groupie, and to replace the dreaded euphemism of "friend".  Careful to say she worked "with" and not "for" him, for all the innuendo that would inspire.  She wanted to make it clear that she got backstage on official professional business, and not as a female sacrifice to the rock gods.  The musicians blew scented smoke in her direction and talked only to him.  The women just rolled their eyes at her, one led her to the snack table.  There was a cooler of soda and beer, some fruit and an elaborate round tray which started the evening shaped vaguely like a wagon wheel.  Chocolates wrapped in silver paper in concentric circles with rolled joints acting as spokes.  It was a mastery of Busby Berkeley precision.  Except for the empty areas which had already been raided.

Her strategy was always to underplay her awe.  If everyone backstage was a groupie of one form or another, so she was going to be the one who never gave compliments.  After 10,000 screaming fans, she was not so worried about their egos.

(This backfired in the world of comedy.  Her opening line to a very famous comedian who had clearly killed onstage, "You were terrible," was received with less enthusiasm than she had predicted.  She tried to turn it into a joke.  But she had also killed his sense of humor.)

When they emerged 3 hours later, The Brothers were still there, talking to an exhausted looking overweight mother and daughter in matching outfits.  She urged the Bass Player to sign the album, but he just kept walking.

Boxer-Simon & Garfunkle

Taller Than the Tallest Tree Is

"Poor Van Gogh. During his life, he only ever sold one painting"
"And I think that was to his brother"
"Claude Monet was more successful. He figured out how to sell his stuff. In fact he was so good at it, they named selling stuff after him."
"Named it after him??"
"To this day! They call it Monetizing!"

She noticed that he started stealing the joke from her, at first when he was mad or wanted to get a rise out of her.  She knew he first loved her when he used it onstage.

For the first few weeks, and for much longer than she suspected it would last, her heart would jump whenever he walked into the room.  2 months in, angry, annoyed and fed up with him, she'd still react like the 8 year old who fell in love with him on TV.  No matter how awful he was, he could be incredible in new ways. He'd make a joke, a small kindness, in lieu of apology. And she'd feel blessed to be his sole audience.  Inside those moments, she began to love him as a human. And it was this Love that surprised her the most.  The residual glory day stuff, the second hand glamour, that was superficially easy.

But he was letting her IN. And for that, she'd always be grateful. To peer into spmeone's soul, a true gift. The Persona melted away, and he became Himself.  And soon, that was the larger part of who she knew him to be.  After that summer, her heart leap for the man who was playing the role, burdened with The Persona.  Like living with the Grand Canyon. Soon you stop taking in the vastness, and focus on the crevices and path directly in front of you.  But early on, that vastness took her breath away. And all he had to do was laugh at himself.

Later, during his "difficulties", she'd try to get back to this place.

He was delicate about how he reciprocated this worship, especially looking at her in later years. Her loyalty, his only sense of having made a lasting impact on the world. Not just an audience, not selling one album at a time. But someone who shared and stored his memories. She took his breath away by taking care of him.

That last Fall, that Lost Weekend, that Lost Year(s). She cooked for him. Went out of her way to find Tab, even after they stopped making it.  When nobody else would.  She was always kind to him, especially when he didn't deserve it.  He took her for granted like the forest behind The Farmhouse. The oaks were Old Growth, and always seemed to tower over him. Unpredictably large, like a surreal dream. Strangely tall, he was surprised every time. She was there. Like the trees.

Frank Sinatra's All The Way

If She Asks You Why, You Can Tell Her That I Told You

Onstage, it was a few cabaret songs, everything inspired by him, directly or indirectly. This was getting to be a regular thing for her; a gathering of the tribes.  Not that she could tell the difference between friends and the people she had met out on the road and in the city, maybe some of them considered themselves her fans. If you perform often enough, everyone will come around. As if of you had never left the piazza in Rome, or Washington Square, and just let the world come to you.  And the world was in the audience that night.  She'd walk away with some money, a few good reviews, and a sense that there were more strangers in the audience than family.  And there he was, sitting right out in front, where she could see him.

But she wasn't sure until the break that it even WAS him.  He'd disappeared for years.  And he looked different, lost weight off his already skinny frame.  She couldn't tell if it was better or worse.

"Meet my fiancée,"

Her heart dropped into the bottom of the earth, but she didn't miss a beat.

"Congratulations!! When's the lucky day??"

"Well, we haven't set it yet. All his god kids seem to be getting married .... And every time we pick a date, it ends up being too.."

"Yeah, we're just amazingly lucky to be surrounded by so many happy couples!!"

"Um, yeah,"

She recognized the humiliation in the poor fiancée 's eyes and immediately decided to be on her side. The wedding had often been close to not happening many times, his lack of commitment and fear of changing anything. The poor woman was so close to being free, to being lucky, but was completely blind. And too heartbroken to fall out of love now.

Heartache gets to be a feeling that one grows to know well. And when you tell yourself that it is equal to love, to HIS love, then it is hard to break away. One smile from complete and utter happiness. And he smiles less and less often. Well, not at you.

If she had been hooked up to a lie detector, or heart monitor, her body would have easily betrayed her.
It was only as she walked away that she realized that her body had been in PANIC mode.  Eyes dilated, sweat sprang up suddenly, like driving through a Stop light, and then awaiting impact from the phantom autos headed her way.  But when she took a breath, she had to remind herself how lucky she was.  To get away.

Even he could tell she wasn't buying the story about postponing wedding dates.  And neither was his fiancee.  He wasn't in love with this woman, she wasn't The One.  She was just the one to be taking care of him right now.  If he were smarter, he'd grab her.  Make her commit to him legally, the solid gold handcuffs in the shape of a single wedding ring.

So he shifted the conversation to her current charade.

"Speaking of happy couples, how long have you been with him?"  He indicated the flamboyant man in the black suit who was flirting with the young sound engineer.

From a distance, she hoped that her "date" resembled a sophisticated lounge singer who may not have been entirely gay.  Until he put his arm around the boy, he might have even passed for bisexual.  She couldn't tell if the question was as sincere as it sounded.  You'd think that even a straight man, with 70 years of experience would be suspicious of a fabulous man who could arrange Broadway show tunes into power ballads.  But she was nonplussed to see that the Rock Star seemed vaguely peeved, which was as close as he could get to admitting jealousy.

"Oh, I've known him about a year or so. And, yes, we ARE happy! Much too happy to get MARRIED!!" she was careful to overdo the emphasis so that it could all be passed off as a joke.

If this conversation were being played out on a Scrabble board, she would have gotten a triple word score. Funny, evasive and insulting all at the same time.  But they both walked away from the exchange feeling as if they were performing in a scene they had never agreed to.  She made an excuse about getting back on stage, and he graciously began to let her go.

And then he whispered the words that made her nearly cry, "Go get 'em, kid!"  A simple thing he used to say before they'd get on stage together.

"Can I invite you up?"
"It's your night.  Besides, I'm not ready.  I couldn't."
"Are you fishing?  Should I insist harder?"
"No, really, I haven't sung in a while.  My voice isn't . . ."
"Next time then,"

She shrugged, half embarrassed and half relieved.  He'd steal the spotlight, certainly.  But it was politically the right thing to do.  Not that anyone in the audience even recognized him.  And then the absence hit her. as if her body were suddenly hollow. He wouldn't be on stage with her ever again.  Maybe she'd mention that.  At least.

Thankfully, by the time she got back onstage, someone else had taken over their seats.  He had walked out on her show.  Maybe he was sick.  Or maybe just an asshole.

In between songs, she became more honest.  One mournful song was introduced in a new way.

"Once upon a time, there were two people.  They loved each other, but they could never quite get along.  He wanted to live in the country and sing around the fire.  And she wanted to be where there were people. It sounds like such a cliche, until it happens to you."

Castles in the Air by Don McLean

What Are You Doin' Hangin' Round?

She decided to team up with the bass player, who was one of those amazing talents who would never be recognized.

"Testy" was his nickname, or at least that was the polite spelling.  He was always jumpy, twitchy and nervous.  Thin as a bean pole, it looked like an impossibility of physics that his skinny arms could even hold a guitar.  He always looked down when he was doing a solo,  one of those incredible moments where you feel as if you had never heard music before.  He played guitar and wrote songs as well.  Incredible stuff, but he would never look out at the audience.  His face looked blank, his eyelids covering his eyes out of shyness and introvertedness, even when he was connecting with everyone in the room during a solo.

The mean spelling was "Teste", as in, he has testicles where his eyes should be.  Which profoundly granted him an extra set of balls.  In a deep drunk, she pondered this point with the drummer.
"It's mean that you guys call him that,"
"He's got balls enough for two guys.  It shows in his writing and his playing.  Nothing left over for the rest of his life.  That's fine by me,"

So she went to him to collaborate on her latest masterpiece.  It would be a spoof on one of The Group's most popular songs done in concert.  It was a bouncy tune, completely misogynistic, zenophobic, American arrogance glorified in country music.  During the last round of concerts, after He left the stage doing his embarrassing yet still absurdly popular novelty song, they'd all get back on and do the rousing number for an encore.  Except the very title suggested that they were asking themselves why they kept doing this thing-this music.  They were all old men by then, loyal fans and everything, but the idea of questioning themselves made the audience question them as well.  The Rolling Stones, they weren't.

She wanted her version to be from the woman's point of view.  This gringo thought he could just take advantage of a girl because she didn't speak English.  But she wanted a baby.  She didn't want to be forced into a marriage with a man she didn't love.  Her family was rich and important in Mexico, something he had no clue about because he didn't speak any Spanish.  She'd be sent off to Spain to finish up the pregnancy, like they did with her cousin. Her cousin stayed in Spain, and so would she.  They'd raise their kids together and never have to learn English.  If he ever came looking for her, she would have disappeared with his son.  She even told him about her plan, in Spanish, he was clueless.  She kept waiting for him to get on his train, but he was a good kisser.  How cruel to make him miss his train for just another kiss, he'd be out money and he'd be a few hours late.  The one thing she did understand was that he was even poorer than anyone she knew in Mexico.  She was NOT going to let him stay with her, an albatross around her neck.

It would have been easy to flip all the lyrics, and they did in the first version.  Slowed it down into a ballad, a simple answer song.  But Testy kept adding frills to each of the lines, changing the melodies slightly.  And the story evolved and evolved, until the only recognizable lyric was the title. And that turned too.

They performed it on stage, in the middle of a set.  He just stood back, silent and (she hoped) blown away by what he heard.  Backstage, when they were packing up, he told her how much he loved it. Genuinely.  And then she screwed everything up . . .

"Aw, it weren't nuthin'.  Nuthin' t'all.  I just wanted to write an answer song to that one you guys do.  The one that The Great Texan is known for.  The song that launched country-folk-rock.  The one where you guys are up on stage asking yourselves why you are still doing this . . . "

With that, he turned his back on her and walked to the door.

"He didn't even write that song.  He gets all the credit and everything that has a country sound gets attributed to him!  I did all the arrangements on that song.  He asked me to make it sound "Country"!  He had the voice and the ego! Damn him, he just sat back and took all the credit!"

The band just sat back and took all the shouting. She had inadvertently hit a nerve, a big faux paux.

The Group never played that song publicly again.

"What Am I Doin' hangin Round?" written by Michael Martin Murphy

He Could Give Insomnia To Rip Van Winkle

Fairfield-ish-

Plink.  Plonk. rumble, rumble.  He awoke to his least favorite sound.  Her practicing piano.  Or worse, she was just plunking away.  She had no sense of rhythm.  Terrible at sight reading.  And he could never figure out how to get her to sing the right notes instead of the wrong notes.  

6:15 AM, said the clock radio by the bed.

She begged him to teach her piano.  She wanted to play Chopin, while he could barely get her to plunk out “Twinkle, Twinkle”.  Plus, she never practiced.  Except early in the mornings, like now.

Now, here she was.  One note at a time.  Then, worse, 3 in some repeated sequence.  Starting over and over again, the fourth going up or down-completely lost.  A driver who can’t make a three point turn and has to go back and forth endlessly.  A thirteen . . . 40 point turn.  Every time they woke up in each others' arms, she would be singing in her sleep. Then when she awoke, she'd tell him some rambling stories about music in her head and desperately wanting a way to transcribe it.  How it was in her brain right before she woke up. All the world needed was more terrible music, but still, he’d give as many lessons as her tolerance could take, which wasn’t much.

The empty house they were in belonged to some friends who were in process of moving.  Plenty of bare space in the house, but all the artwork was still up.  Abstract fingerpaints of their three year old and a curious pencil drawing of a mother and baby.  Head at her breast, the crucial element of nursing lost to a lack of courage.  The curve of breast and nipple he kept looking for was obscured in a eager act of shading.  The woman’s fingers were repeated, practiced in different sizes.  Floating detached, by her head, and somehow enlarged among the folds of the baby blanket.  The hand holding the actual baby was better for this practice, and looked strangely familiar to him.  Elongated and slightly rectangular, he remembered holding them and maybe them holding him.  Maybe being tickled by them.  Haunting,ghost fingers.  The face held nothing for him, a focused stare at the child, maybe even a frown.  He should try to ask about the sketch before he left, or maybe in a quick note he’d leave with the keys.  In the mailbox or under the mat, or under the first rock to the left of the walkway.  Damn, he could never remember which. He was happy to have earned enough trust to borrow friends’ empty houses, where all he had to do was to make sure they weren’t locked out.  Why were those little things so awful for him to keep track of? Why was everything getting to be too hard for him to remember?

8:45AM  He rolled over and fell out of bed, into an empty house.  The cupboards were empty, but he found some yogurt and stale cereal, that he ate with a fork because the only two spoons he could find were in the sink.  He wandered over to the piano and played the three bars that were scribbled on some note paper.  The staff was hand drawn and the lines weren’t exactly parallel.  “Marching band, drums, flutes and saxophone” was the only title.  He added a chord or two and began fiddling around with it.

She walked in through the screen door in the back with a handful of wildflowers.  She wandered over and began talking.  

“Meadows,” he heard.

“A deer running,” he heard.

“Get packing before noon,” he heard.  Finally, he couldn’t deal with her interruptions anymore.

“Look, I'm working. I found this thing.  Melvin must’ve been scribbled before he left . . .”

“That’s me.  I woke up this morning with this tune stuck in my head and . . .”

“YOU did this?”  It suddenly hit him that these repeated notes had disturbed his dreams just a few hours before.  He played the first notes slowly.  Did it strike him because he had just heard it?   Or because it was the beginning of a new song that was instantly familiar to him.  The few hits he had worked on (and admittedly some other bombs) all appeared to him as something instantly recognizable.  As if his soul was listening to its future.

He believed in Buddhism, sometimes genuinely and deeply and sometimes only superficially.  Because he was always feeling some form of dejavu, he had always naturally assumed that he had been reincarnated.  As himself!  Maybe others started as animals, but he was gifted & doomed to repeat this exact life over and over again, until he got it right.  

She kept talking, and he kept not listening.  Until one word got through to him.  

“Coffee?”

“Yes. Coffee.”  He was going to be there until the song was finished.  And he was already almost done.

8:49PM

"Now, I’d like to introduce a song I just wrote.  Um, we just wrote. You don’t mind sitting this one out, do you? Nothing like an audience to test out new material!"

She was a little startled.  They didn’t rehearse this.  He didn’t rehearse this, she had no idea what to expect.  The front row was empty, as were most of the rows, so she just shrugged and sat down.  The more he described how easily the song flowed, the more she became uneasy.  It was gonna be HER song.  And then, right before she was ready to storm out (especially if it was good, and she was afraid it was going to be heartachingly beautiful) he stopped and pointed to her.  “It’s her song, I’m just here to deliver it.  It’s called ‘The Dutchess’”

He then broke into an unfamiliar intro.  She kept listening for her notes, the song that she had dreamt of. He had woven it into something else. Some romantic story which sounded too familiar to her.  A man with eyes as blue as the sky.  Or broken blue bottles held up to the light.  How he was from the Netherlands, which was wide open for a pun about both Hades and sexual nether regions.   The girl who loved him didn’t want to be a queen or have riches.  She only wanted him.  And thus, by marrying a Dutch man, would naturally be granted the title of “Dutchess”.   The song was conscious of its self-consciousness.  Childhood dreams and their funny echoes in adult life.  A story she had told them when they were crossing the plains of Iowa.

Plus it was catchy. The piece that she had dreamt was the intro came in as the refrain, which surprised her. Catchier than she had suspected. And easy on his throat; he could mostly whisper-sing the whole thing, except a few places which were still in his comfortable range.  

It absolutely made her cry.

In their regular set of songs, it gradually displaced another favorite of his, not a hit, but something he had labored over endlessly in the studio in 1973.  The one that she had tried to discourage him from.  He left both songs in their act for a while, until his voiced cracked on the old one.  He never sang it again.

Her song became their best number. The first single off their album (the only one to make any traction). Even the reviewers stopped complaining about his "ruined" voice and began using words like "mellow genius" to describe him.

Rumble by Betty Hutton (written by Frank Loesser)