The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  As usual, he wasn’t smiling. But his presence was enough. After the gig, which he said he hadn’t completely enjoyed, he explained that he was thinking of signing us. He handed Seán a foolscap envelope containing ten thousand dollars in cash ‘for whatever little expenses you guys might be having. Nothing’s attached. Living in New York isn’t cheap. It’s a gift from my wife and me. I’d like you to meet her.’ With my share of the windfall, I went to Umanov’s and made a down-payment on that Stratocaster. It took months to pay it off, and I often went without. I’m no fetishist – I bought that guitar because I adored the sound it made when you fed it through an old Marshall amp. But the first thing you ever worked hard to buy brings a strange pleasure all its own. I’ve loved many guitars but none as tenderly as that one. How could something so gorgeous be mine?

  I cannot praise Eric Wallace enough for his gentlemanly mentorship. He’d invite us to his and Maria’s apartment on Elizabeth Street, feed us, have us stay over, play records he felt we should hear, give us books or poetry journals. He and his wife were one of those couples you want to be around, generous to one another in company, never sniping or pulling faces, each listening when the other was speaking. They collected art in a quiet way and had a great respect for the fact that Trez was studying it, on one occasion giving her a beautiful Sol LeWitt lithograph she’d happened to admire in their hall. From his grandfather, a Lithuanian immigrant, Eric inherited a certain brand of sardonically expressed stoicism and half a considerable fortune gained by the extermination of agricultural pests. He was wealthy in his own right, having been a Wall Street trader, and had set up Urban Wreckage at the age of forty-three, following a fairly serious heart attack. He was in every way the opposite of the predatory figure that appears in many young bands’ biographies.

  Eric knew his music, could quote you chapter and verse on the blues. He owned a harmonica once the property of Blind Willie McTell and to hear him name the great blues players was a jazz riff in itself: Junior Wells, Hubert Sumlin, Robert Nighthawk, James Cotton, Snooky Pryor, Hound Dog Taylor, Earl Hooker. He’d been a cantor at his synagogue and worked with a major act or two in his time, including Run DMC and Grandmaster Flash. Unusually for a person in the music business, he was privately rather religious, a fact I only learned much later. He was one of those lucky souls to whom creative ideas arrive like the birds to St Francis of Assisi. Unfortunately, in the case of the Ships, the birds crapped on him.

  The second wave of hip hop had hit by 1985, much of it emanating from New York. And Eric, bless his soul, loved rap. Any mixture of the spoken and the percussive excited him. One day he called Trez with a ‘left-field idea’. There was a young producer on his books, an aspiring rapper and MC, Stone Fever, whom Eric reckoned a talent, the next Coke La Rock or Afrika Bambaataa. That was high praise indeed. We listened to a couple of his mix-tapes. Trez was a little uncertain, feeling the territory was too far from our own, but Eric pressed us and we agreed to meet.

  He turned out to be a skinny and studious-looking French-Canadian, a youth who might have weighed 150 pounds when wet. Wikipedia tells me his given name was Antoine de Canonville Lefèvre, that he attended a shockingly expensive private boarding school in Hartford, Connecticut and was technically a count back in the old country – Le Comte de Saint-Germain – but he hated to be reminded of any of these facts. A devotee of Star Wars, he slouched into the studio on that fateful morning wearing a Darth Vader T-shirt and belted jeans so baggy they could have accommodated Mama Cass. He was a nice guy who overdid things a little.

  Eric made the introductions in customarily polite manner, Stone Fever nodding at the floor as his CV was summarised to us. He’d heard our demos, so Eric confirmed, and felt we had potential if we were willing to work. Perhaps he’d like to say something himself? A mere handful of years older than us, it must have been hard for him to assume a position of sudden leadership. But he gave it his best and we listened.

  ‘Thanks Eric. Wuzz up. Y’all some bad Irish outlaws. Hey Trez, love that cello. Beautiful playing. My man Fran. Good to meet. Let’s talk.’

  ‘Do we call you Antoine or Stone?’

  ‘Call me Tony.’

  Eric went away. Tony continued talking. Our stuff was ‘steamy and loose’, he loved the ska and reggae elements, but we could do with some ‘tightening up’. I sounded, at least to myself, weirdly upper-class British as I responded. ‘A song is a sawn-off,’ was one of his sayings. ‘Cut it short, more damage gets done.’ You’d the feeling he had never shot anything, except perhaps a brace of grouse on a relative’s estate in the Camargue, but he wanted you to think him a Man With a Past. He was fond of the loaded silence.

  It would be easy to satirise a person like Tony and I’ll try to resist cheap temptations. The fact is that he proved an assiduous and immensely talented producer, singing interesting jagged harmonies, playing volcanic licks on a wailing Hammond organ. It must be added that he was hard-working, arriving promptly every morning and remaining far later than he was paid for. He seemed touched by Fran’s wish to learn the basics of production and he explained them with care and thoroughness. But if anything Tony was a tad on the conservative side when it came to the vision thing, and the surprise of this realisation disconcerted me. I don’t know what I was expecting. But it wasn’t this stylishness, this sense that a record was finally an artefact rather than a recording of people playing music. Every track had to be brought home in three minutes thirty or less, which is obviously a good idea an awful lot of the time, but if you’d said it to Bob Dylan we wouldn’t have ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, which some might feel would be a pity. He didn’t want Trez to improvise solos or even to play electric bass, preferring to work carefully with her in early-morning rehearsal, to make her sound ‘less wild but more powerful’. Occasionally he’d permit her to ‘cut loose with the crazy’ and she’d saw at the poor cello as though trying to cut it in half, but always he followed these flights with a demand for strict arpeggios or tightly controlled pizzicati.

  ‘Si, Mama,’ he’d mutter, hands on his ear-cans.

  Local success and having a story to tell are often limiting in a male, since they can lead to unearned licence and silly remarks, imperviousness to proprieties established for a reason. He appeared to find Trez’s playing arousing in ways that were not merely aesthetic. ‘She make that cello moan.’ We grinned with obedient cowardice, Fran and I. Seán would fall strangely silent. An odd energy enters the room when a collection of young men are brought to the realisation that the young woman they have tended to construe as one of their own is desirable to the interloper. Once that genie is released, it rather flaps about, and it’s hard to get it back into the bottle.

  Over that fortnight we got through five or six tracks without too much violence being done to them and we learned a useful thing for anyone in the arts: the skill of the slightly forced smile. It was undeniable that Tony was taking our efforts and turning them into actual songs, entities you could imagine getting played on a radio, possessing verses and choruses and snazzy little bridges, and that wasn’t by any means unexciting. If your dribble could be made into a sonnet, you’d be happy to take the credit. Yet I wasn’t. Ted Hughes writes somewhere of Sylvia Plath’s artisan-like approach to a poem, that if she couldn’t make a table she’d be happy to make a chair, or even a toy, and that’s all very well, indeed an admirable resourcefulness in any poet, but I guess I’d grown fond of our tables.

  We didn’t say much. Tony did the talking. We’d cluster about him in the booth, amid the beer cans and the bunts, the Rizla papers and speed-pills and packs of Gauloises, the discarded bits of turkey-and-jalapeño sandwiches from the Korean deli on East 9th, and we’d listen to the playback, agreeing like mad on its phatness, its superiority to anything contemporaneously attempted, but I had the uneasy feeling that a dog can be trained to admire its own farts, that we were straying pretty far from the point. I didn’t know any more if the Ships possessed any point. But if we did, I wasn’t certai
n this wasn’t it. There is nothing more glorious in music than rap done by a master, and nothing worse than rap done anaemically by extra-cultural forgers, invaders who don’t know the nuance. As with everything else, it’s a matter of earning your stripes, not renting them from the fancy-dress shop for the evening. The more Tony praised a take, the more forced my smile. It came soon to the stage where if I had to smile any harder, my eyebrows would disappear into my hairline. The grammars of hip hop were exhilarating, to be sure. There was intensity and muscle and brashness in his approach, but I couldn’t help wondering if the fit was right. It was as though Emmylou Harris had announced her intention of joining Def Leppard. She’d be able to do it, no doubt about that. And you’d be interested in seeing it. Briefly.

  I kept my own counsel. Well, you do when you’re flustered. I should add that there was always a lot of tequila flowing about that studio and it proved a ten-ton sedative. But the feeling grew among us that we were being a little shoehorned, hemmed in. Small things at first, but Tony could be contumacious and brusque. Also, there was occasionally a loftiness about his manner, and no young person likes uppishness, which was all this was – snobbery dressed as taste. Trez suggested we might use a concert harp to colour a track called ‘You Can’t Have Both’. He nixed the idea immediately, said ‘orchestral was over’ (Christ!), a dismissal so sweeping that it rather took us aback, and of course, like everyone avowedly rebellious, when confronted with superior force and the emission of false confidence, we trounced each other in acquiescing. I was no Sir George Martin or Daniel Lanois, and he was gentlemanly enough in pointing that out, but cross-fades I might offer got quietly forgotten, often in a verbal formula that began to annoy me: ‘That’d be one way of doing it, yeah.’ I discovered that I didn’t like him, that his repudiations disconcerted me. He could in fact be a bit of a comte.

  I was afraid of him, of course. All of us were. Having ballsed our career in England, he was the elusive second chance. Giving power to a leader you disrespect creates the Petri dish of mediocrity. In it, we bubbled and fumed and retrenched. We’d tell ourselves he was well-meaning, that he couldn’t be the control-obsessive he appeared. ‘Nobody could,’ Trez said.

  But there arose an unspoken tension between Tony and Seán. Our producer appeared to feel that a drummer was a bit surplus to requirements, that no group needed a human to supply what a drum machine could be programmed to supply more reliably. Seán was a charming boy, by far the most open-minded of us all, a youth as utterly devoid of ego as you could ever hope to encounter, but no musician likes to feel he’s being tolerated as a favour while they’re wheeling the ironmongery up the stairs to replace him. It was a question of subtlety, and Tony had little. He was one of those people who make an impressive show of listening to your every word, as a means of ultimately dismissing you. At the same time, we were all aware, Fran especially, that Eric saw providing him to us as a sign of Urban Wreckage’s commitment. Tony’s services were not cheap, as he daily found a way of reminding us. The atmosphere began to curdle.

  There was a particular track that was causing us concern, for we feared what Tony would do to it. It was called ‘Eleven City’ and had been written by Fran, with a couple of ideas from Trez. They wanted to use a Low D Irish tin whistle on the bridge, but we knew Tony wouldn’t permit it, under his sternly non-folk statutes. How, then, to manage the problem?

  Fran had stolen a book from a store on Second Avenue, about the film director Billy Wilder. He was taken by a story of how Wilder once wanted an actress to appear topless in a scene during which she would awaken in bed beside her lover. From memory it was Marilyn Monroe, but my daughter says Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Knowing that the conservative studio bosses would hit the roof and keep hitting it, Wilder contrived a plan by which he would alter the script to include a sequence of his leading lady ‘naked and sensuously embracing a tree’. The executives duly revolted and the topless shot was admitted as a compromise. It’s a time-honoured negotiation strategy, used by everyone from the Ancient Greeks to Sinn Féin. In the hands of the young, it’s dangerous.

  Having refused to outline the details of his scheme in advance, Fran announced to Tony that he wanted to record ‘an improvisation’ as the opening track on Side B. He would bang randomly on the piano keyboard with both fists for a while, this to be followed by a period of eleven seconds ‘precisely’ during which none of us would play anything at all. The result would be ‘coloured air’, a concept much explored by Stockhausen. The track would be entitled ‘Stockhausen Shuffle’. So would the album, perhaps.

  Always, the tiniest detail is the one that seals doom. The suggestion that Tony would permit any record bearing his credit to be titled in such a way turned his expression of tolerant bemusement to a scathing scowl. Stockhausen was important, Fran foolishly went on, and his ground-breaking experiments in musical spatialisation were ‘a major influence’ on the Ships. Seán didn’t actually look at me and ask what on earth Fran was talking about. I suspect he didn’t need to.

  Tony drew the line. Fran drew his own. These impasses are always worsened by the presence of an audience, and the room was forbiddingly small. It was clear that a grave error of judgement had been made. Tony was tiring of our disobedience.

  ‘You guys,’ he said darkly, ‘are wasting my time. I think we’re all through. See you round.’

  Well, Fran started into a peroration that even Philip Glass would find incomprehensible, full of references to ‘aesthetic breakdown’ and ‘sonic toxic shock’. On the way, he referenced the works of the noted experimental composer John Cage, an eminence he admired for writing a piece entitled ‘4'33"’ comprising four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. I am told it is popular in the Benelux nations. Tony, alas, was no Belgian.

  ‘You figure a lotta people gonna pay fifteen bucks for a record of fuckin silence?’

  ‘Music without silence is sex without tongues,’ Fran said.

  This went down like a bomb in a nursery. Tony was not a person you lectured about the many ways of love. He looked at Fran like a man who has decided to let a calculated slight go but is storing it up nonetheless.

  ‘I’m going across the street and eat me a sandwich,’ he said. ‘I come back here and you’re still talking nonsense, you need another producer. That clear? I mean it, Fran. I’m out.’

  ‘It’s just an idea,’ Fran said. ‘Don’t flounce off with a hole in your tights.’

  Again, the choice of imagery was imprudent.

  Tony wafted out in a miasma of wordless outrage, the rest of us too shocked to set upon Fran and beat him. In fairness, he looked shaken himself. His solo run had achieved nothing. Worse, it attracted fire. I feared that it had turned our producer, who should have been our staunchest ally, into an enemy who would be self-protective and cunning. I hadn’t the smallest doubt that if Eric got to hear of our antics, we would be condemned as ungrateful, indulgent gobshites, and that Tony would save his own skin by leading the prosecution.

  It was a difficult hour. We argued among ourselves. Tony arrived back from enjoying his sole meunière at the Yale Club.

  ‘I sense a disturbance in The Force,’ he said bleakly.

  We came clean and explained that we had in mind to use a tin whistle on the track.

  Seán, unwisely in retrospect, produced the said instrument from his bag and feebly blew a note, perhaps an E-flat. By now, I felt unwell. Tony turned to him.

  ‘Want me to hit you up with a leprechaun, cabrón?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The fuck is this shit? Saint Paddy’s Day? In the ghetto? Day I gotta flute on my work ain’t here, Bro.’

  ‘It isn’t a flute,’ Fran pointed out.

  ‘Gettin professor on me, now? The gay Alan Lomax? Who’s supposed to be in control of this record? Me or you?’

  ‘That’s offensive,’ Trez said gamely. ‘Don’t talk to Fran like that.’

  Now he resorted to sarcasm, the C-major scal
e of the satirist. ‘Oh no? I offend you? Please accept my apology. And there I was, thinking I’m a record producer. So sorry, Miss Sherlock. Truly am.’

  The rebuff was sharp. It resulted in silence.

  ‘I work eighteen hours a day for you. And this is what I get. Fluteboy here. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Ah, here,’ Trez said. ‘This is gotten out of hand. These are our songs, Tony, you’d want to cop yourself on. We’re not your raw material. You’re hired to be helping us.’

  He turned to her and uttered an obscene and hair-raisingly misogynist remark. The working environment of a recording studio can be a little rough and ready, and in those days, particularly, you heard language of a decidedly seafaring stamp. But the unprintable sentence spoken by Tony was many steps too far.

  ‘Say that again, mate?’ Seán said quietly.

  ‘Leave it, Seán,’ said Trez.

  Mild mournfulness in her eyes, she crossed to where Tony was standing. Gently she placed her fingertips on his shoulders and leaned in to peck him on the lips. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘For letting you down.’ And that was when she kneed him in the bollocks.

  He sank slowly and heavily, making small woodland-animal sounds. And that was when she punched him in the head. You mightn’t think that being punched in the head by a cellist would hurt very much, but believe me, they can get pretty muscular.