by Lewis Shiner
Summer herself is wearing jeans, a Faulkner-caricature T-shirt, a thrift-shop plaid sport coat, and running shoes. She is medium height, full-figured, with black hair cut straight at the bangs and shoulders. She is relaxed and comfortable on stage, and I sense her taking satisfaction in this long, respectful silence.
With the first chords come whistles and applause. She smiles and nods and starts the first verse. There is nothing in the words or the music or the singing to tell you what year it is outside. It could be 1962. Brad the Manager’s comparisons to Joan Baez are appropriate: Summer has a strong, clear voice, crisp diction, a big range, perfect pitch, vibrato, all the tools. If this were in fact 1962, she might have a great career ahead of her. But from my outsider’s viewpoint it seems obvious why she hasn’t been signed now, in 1996. Her passion is implied and not obsessively delineated. She has no edge.
Toward the end of the set she introduces “Tried and True” by saying, “I guess this is my ‘hit.’ Some of you may have heard it by another singer…” She pauses for effect and the crowd responds with some laughter and also, to my surprise, some hisses.
“Hey, now,” she says. “It was nice to collect some royalties.” She makes an ironic grimace and launches into the song.
Afterward, in the office that Brad has loaned us for the occasion, we talk about her past. “Born in Iowa—like most people in LA, I’m from someplace else. My mom teaches math at the university in Iowa City. My dad split when I was six, so I never really knew him. He claimed to be a poet, but he never had anything published that I’ve ever seen. The last anyone heard he was in Mexico somewhere. That was ten years ago.
“I went through a phase in high school where I tried to find out about him. The truth is I didn’t find a lot to like. I still blame him for deserting us, and I think there’s something to be said for holding a good grudge.”
She went to UCLA on scholarship and hung on as an English undergraduate as long as she could, reluctantly and eventually moving on to grad school and teaching assistantships. She’d been writing songs since her teens and she started playing professionally when she moved to the city. She met Fernando in a coffee house in Westwood and he convinced her to drop out, take a low-paying job at a bookstore in Long Beach, and pursue her destiny.
“I’m not kidding myself,” she said. “I know I’ll never be Madonna, or even Joni Mitchell. I don’t have the looks, I don’t have a gimmick. Live performance is not that big a deal to me anyhow, it’s just a way to get the songs out there. I keep thinking I ought to be in Nashville, where there’s a real community of people who make their living writing music.”
“Are you serious about that?”
“Why not? It’s something I think about a lot these days. Tennessee is beautiful, with real seasons and big pine trees. And they don’t bulldoze everything every ten years whether it needs it or not.”
“You say you’re good at holding grudges. Does that apply to Laurie?”
“Most of the time I’m fine about Laurie. I mean, she never meant to hurt me, and she put my song on her record and all. It’s just that every once in a while I look out at the audience and wonder if I’m going to be playing at the Sly Duck to the same hundred, hundred and fifty people until I die.
“It’s not something you can reasonably blame somebody for. Why did some guy sleep with you and not fall in love with you, even though you fell for him? Laurie wanted a rock and roll band, she wanted that band, and I knew from the start that I was her second choice.”
“So she’d already played with Skip and the others before you two did that first night as a duet?”
Summer nods. “Twice.” She is sprawled back in the wooden desk chair, playing with a letter opener from the desk. Brad is nearly invisible, standing in a dark corner with his arms folded over his chest, as if ready to swoop down and defend Summer if necessary. “The first time was apparently pretty spectacular. She called me the next day and was all a-twitter over it. She’d played with Skip Shaw, they’d worked on one of her songs, it was like they were reading her mind, they all played these perfect parts, and every blind person within a five mile radius could see again after they were done. I remember trying to talk her down a little about Skip Shaw.”
“Talk her down?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m as big a fan of his songs as anybody alive. But he’s been in LA forever, and you hear a lot of stories. Like, that song ‘Tender Hours.’ You’ve probably heard this. Supposedly he wrote it in fifteen minutes to win a twenty-dollar bet with his producer. Then he turned around and spent the twenty bucks to get high. I didn’t want her to think Skip Shaw was God or anything, is all. Which she found out herself a couple of days later when she went back for another practice.
“I don’t know exactly what happened, but Skip was apparently in a territorial mood, going around pissing in all the corners in that charming, testosterone-driven way guys have—no offense.”
I incline my head for her to go on.
“She’d taken in a new song and all Skip wanted to do was play old blues crap. Just froze her out, until there was nothing left for her to do but pack up and go home.”
“Did she ever figure out what happened?”
“Just Skip’s little way of having cold feet. Being a jerk to run her off. Needless to say Laurie was pretty low. I was not in a very good place myself. You’ve met Fernando, I hear.”
“Word gets around.”
“It’s a small town. Several of them. Anyway, Fernando was going through one of his periodic this-is-going-to-hurt-me-worse-than-it-does-you phases where he went back to his wife for a while, and my opening act had just stood me up, so I suggested the duet thing. I thought it would cheer both of us up. Purely as a one-off, not with the idea of a recording contract or Letterman or—” She raises an eyebrow at me. “—tell-all biographies somewhere down the road.”
She bends her head, folds both hands behind her neck, and holds that posture for a beat or two. “Okay,” she says as she straightens. “Part of me wanted us to be a duo from the first time we sang together, really from the first time I heard her sing at the Silk and Steel. Not that she was that earth-shaking, I just had a feeling. I knew we’d be good together.”
I nod. “How long did it last?”
“Sixteen weeks, fifteen of them headlining on Saturday night. By the end we were playing to standing room crowds. It was starting to break. But by then her band was ready to come out, and—well, there really wasn’t a choice as far as she was concerned. Her heart wasn’t in what we were doing. I knew it. I could feel it. But I still wanted to hang on, you know?”
“So she was rehearsing with the band at the same time that you two were playing together.”
“Oh yeah. In fact, Skip started courting her back that very first night we did the duo. We were on stage and I looked up and saw Gabe in the audience and I thought, uh oh. He was nervous, and Laurie started to squirm and make mistakes. During the break Gabe came up to her and they talked, and then she went out by herself. I gave her a couple of minutes and…this is going to sound petty, but I followed her.
“She walked down toward Ocean Boulevard, and there was a dark blue sixties Mustang parked at the curb, and I knew it had to be Skip’s car. I never saw his face, just his arm hanging out the window with a cigarette burning in the fingers. She went up to the car and stood there, and then after a while she got in. That’s when I went back to the club.”
“Did she tell you she was back with the band?”
“Eventually. I mean, I know it was hard for her. She said there was no point in telling me about it until she’d tried it a couple of times to see if it was going to work. What does that remind you of? But she did tell me, and she said she wanted to keep working with me while they were rehearsing, and she meant it, at least at the time. But I knew I was losing her.
“I can tell you when I realized it was over. I went to their first gig, at Club Lingerie, which I had to read about in the Weekly, by the way. The veil, as t
hey say, was lifted from mine eyes. I couldn’t kid myself after that about us having a future together. The crowd was eating her up, and vice versa. She was even singing better than she did with me.
“How could I begrudge her that?”
Kitchenette
My kitchenette is small and antiseptically clean. I can smell the fresh paint on the walls, and the beige industrial carpet is as firm and new as the mattress. There is a single living room/bedroom, a bathroom with a shower stall, and a black-and-white-vinyl-tiled nod to a kitchen. I am within walking distance of both Disneyland and the Anaheim Convention Center. I have a twin bed, a sofa, and a coffee table. The TV gets 52 cable channels.
My laptop computer is set up on the breakfast bar that separates the kitchen from the rest of the room. I check my email over orange juice and a blueberry muffin. Nothing from Laurie, of course, but there is a message from my four-year-old son (with obvious help from his mother) wondering how much longer I’m going to be here. In fact I have only today and Sunday left of the week I allotted myself for on-site research, all I can spare for a book that I not only haven’t sold, but may not be able to sell. I am to fly back to San Jose at noon Monday.
I create a new category folder labeled “Guilt” and file the message. I don’t need anyone else to ask me what the hell I’m doing here when I ask it of myself every day. Sometimes it feels like pure self-indulgence: scoring a copy of Laurie’s demo, getting to hear Jim’s garage tape, and later today my biggest coup yet, an interview with Skip Shaw.
I have almost everything I came for, and it isn’t nearly enough.
Eye contact
“This would all be easier if I’d died when I was supposed to,” Skip says with an easy smile. He’s wearing a Wild Bill Hickok shirt in red satin, with a flap that buttons up one side. He stands with his left cowboy boot planted against the wall, brushing a hank of long brown hair back with one hand while the other holds a burning Lucky Strike up close to the knuckles.
The most recent picture I’ve seen of him is twenty years out of date. He’s always been good-looking, in a dissipated sort of way, and age has given him the weather-beaten authority to back it up. His voice goes with the rest of the package, lazy in a way that is not quite Southern, part rural Californian and part world-weary, seasoned with two-pack-a-day huskiness.
We’re in a cinderblock jingle factory in Van Nuys, far and away the least glamorous part of LA I’ve yet seen, on a side street crowded with repair shops, warehouses, and sheet metal plants. Eighteen-wheelers parked along the curbs force traffic into the middle of the crumbling pavement, and the air is purplish with exhaust fumes.
Inside there are window air conditioners mounted in the brown veneer paneling, mismatched furniture, and bulletin boards layered with fourth-generation Xeroxed notices from unions, tax authorities, and pest-control companies.
“If you’d died?” I ask. “What do you mean?”
“It’s hard to keep up that mythic pace year after year. What if James Dean had lived to be in The Towering Inferno?” He shakes his head. “I was in a car wreck in 1972. That was right after I made One More Lie for Columbia, which was the best work I ever did, and they dropped my contract and didn’t even want to release it. I came to in the hospital and I looked around and I thought, ‘Man, this was not in the script.’ ”
“That was when your daughter was killed.”
He looks startled, but doesn’t lose the smile. “You do your research, don’t you?”
“I like research. Good research is like armor.”
He nods, slowly. “Armor’s okay. Makes it tough to change directions sometimes.”
“Let’s try anyway. If you were dead you would never have played on Laurie Moss’s album. Or was that your Towering Inferno?”
“No. No. That was a good record. Jim Pearson produced that record, him and Laurie. No, this is my Towering Inferno, right here. Cheese puff commercials. The love theme from the eleven o’clock news.”
“Don’t you get royalty checks?”
“If you’re talking about my illustrious solo career, my royalties wouldn’t feed a cat. Hell, nobody had lawyers in those days. None of us expected to see forty, let alone have to make a living when we got here.” When he says “us” I think of the LA scene he was part of at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies: Neil Young, Tim Hardin, Gram Parsons, some of whom did not, in fact, see forty. He shrugs. “Studio work is easy. There when I want it, easy to walk away from.”
“You almost walked away from Laurie, the week you met her.”
“I ran her off, is what happened, out of sheer contrariness.”
“Why?”
“I listen to the radio, you know, still, and she sounded to me like that was where she was headed. The big time. I had to ask myself if I wanted to go through that again. Fame is the crazy guy on the subway in New York. You don’t want to make eye contact with it, because then it’s all over you, breathing in your face, haranguing you, wanting things from you.”
“But you changed your mind.”
“It wasn’t about me. Gabe and Jim wanted her back.”
“But you were the one that went out to Santa Monica to talk her into it.”
He’s shaking his head. “That’s not why I went out there. I went out there to tell her that if she wanted to keep playing with Gabe and Jim and Dennis, she shouldn’t let me get in her way. I told her that night that she should count me out. I’d already been to the mountaintop, I’d swallowed all the tablets, I’d fucked the fatted calf, I didn’t have it in me to do it all again.”
“And she said?”
Skip shrugs. “She said she didn’t want to do the band unless I was in it.”
There is a knock at the door and a guy with sideburns and a threadbare green button-down shirt sticks his head in the office. “Skip, we’re ready for you.”
He nods and reaches for the guitar case at his feet. “Sorry,” he says. “I warned you this might happen.”
“Can I watch?”
The question seems to surprise him, as if I’d asked to look on while he washed the dinner dishes. “I guess so,” he says.
The studio is more thoroughly run down than the offices: a small, cluttered room with a bare 40-watt bulb in the ceiling, carpet patched with duct tape, ripped Naugahyde chairs, cigarette burns in wood-grain Formica tables. There’s a small drum kit in one corner and a keyboard in the middle of the floor. Skip plugs his guitar into a distortion box which is connected to an old blackfaced Fender amp. The guy in the green shirt, whose name is Jeff, hands Skip a pair of headphones. Skip adjusts them while he lights another Lucky, then puts on a pair of reading glasses to look at the handwritten charts on the music stand in front of him.
Through a pane of glass I can see the control room and Steve Weitz, who is producing the session. He’s unshaven, dressed in a leather jacket and T-shirt, and seems preoccupied as he speaks into the microphone in front of him. “This first one is your basic ‘Brown Sugar’ rip-off, just give me that Keith sound…”
Skip nods and tunes down to open G. His smile is cocky now, and once he starts to play he hams it up, imitating Keith Richards’ splay-legged squat and outthrust right arm.
The second piece calls for surf guitar. He retunes and cranks his reverb to get the signature wet-sounding echo. For the third, he plays syncopated funk, swaying to a rhythm section I can’t hear, eyes closed, cigarette smoldering in the corner of his mouth. Something is different about him, and it takes me a few seconds to realize that he’s finally stopped smiling.
“One more,” Weitz says. “We can use a couple-three minutes of lead here, go ahead and cut loose a little.” Skip closes his eyes and plays jazz chords, 7th and 9ths, interspersed with single note runs. Then he slides up to a solo and moves outside the progression, playing long, convoluted lines that are both melodic and fiercely intense. At one point, sustaining a long trill, he reaches up with his right hand to snag his cigarette and grind it into the carpet with his
boot heel.
It’s at least eight minutes from the time—well into the take—that I think to look at my watch until Skip finally stops. In that time, Weitz shuts down the tape deck and comes into the studio to stand next to Jeff and me. Weitz begins to get impatient, looking at his own watch. I can see other faces inside the control room. Skip seems oblivious to us all, despite my growing self-consciousness.
The solo finally crashes and burns in a flurry of muted strings. In almost the same motion as his final downstroke, Skip wrenches the cord out of guitar’s socket with an explosive crack. The amp is still emitting 60-cycle hum at high volume as Skip leans his guitar against it and abruptly turns and walks out of the room.
I can see the people in the control room laugh and shake their heads as they walk away. A few of them applaud. Jeff smiles at me awkwardly and shifts his feet. I can see my own discomfort in his face. “Does this happen a lot?” I ask him.
“I’ve known him twelve years. He doesn’t go off like that every time, but, yeah. I’d say more often than not.”
“Skip calls it his ‘dirty little secret,’ ” Weitz says. “He gets off on the whole verkakte scene. Playing some tune he’s never heard before, under pressure, for money. You know what limiters are, supposed to keep you from blowing out your recorder with too strong a signal? Skip hasn’t got those. He starts playing, he’s wide open.”
“How can you stand to watch him do that?” I ask them. “It’s like watching a car wreck.”
Weitz shrugs. “He likes it. Who am I to judge?”
I assume the interview is over. I stop to get my tape recorder and find Skip in the office, sitting now, glasses gone, hair freshly combed straight back from his face, leaning forward with his chin in his hands.
“That wasn’t exactly what happened,” he says as soon as I walk into the room. “That business about Laurie not wanting to be in the band if I wasn’t in it.” I realize he has resumed the conversation from exactly where we’d left off and I turn on the recorder. “I guess what I went out there for was to take another look at her. Kind of like walking in a liquor store just to look around when you’ve been sober for years and years.