by Luke Geddes
14 LEE
The CHAANT meeting had concluded and everyone had gone home except for Lee, not eager to reconvene with Seymour for yet another round of argument or, more likely, silent, simmering resentment. Instead, he sat in his car looking out over the shabby little park that had seemed to him as a child boundlessly verdant, half listening to this ancient mixtape while enumerating the many ways in which his life was not so bad. For instance, he did not have any disfiguring injuries. Nor was he physically handicapped. He was not the victim of any apparent discrimination. He had not been imprisoned for crimes he did not commit. He had not been born in one of those unfortunate countries on TV populated by sad children with sallow eyes and distended bellies, his mother an AIDS-afflicted peasant, his father a savage warlord-rapist. He did not have Alzheimer’s. What did he have to be depressed about? Aside from the fact he was broke, a failed musician and business owner, in a loveless relationship, living in the crusty house his estranged mother had passive-aggressively left him in her will, sleeping each night in his childhood bedroom (it would’ve been creepy to move into his parents’ room), the forty years since he’d first left home having taken him on a circuitous path to nowhere, and he’d just spent his Friday night beating the bushes with a motley assortment of neighborhood lookie-loos and weirdos, as if the girl would be found if only they searched hard enough, like a lost contact or dropped dime.
Seymour had been right to be pessimistic, but he should have kept his mouth shut. (Had he ever in his life had a thought he chose not to express aloud?) Lee was not even pissed, just embarrassed for the both of them. As the CHAANT meeting broke up, Veronica had gone from person to person giving light hugs or placing her hand on a shoulder or arm and saying with excruciating sincerity, “Thank you for your help.” Considering what Seymour said, Lee had not expected to get his turn, but nevertheless Veronica embraced him with both arms, whispered in his ear, “Thank you for your help,” and after a moment added, just as sweetly, “Please don’t come to any CHAANT meeting ever again.”
Seymour would be glad to hear this. Lee had been naïve to get the both of them involved to begin with. Seymour was right; they were too old for new friends. Hell, Lee was too old for old friends—his few friends from childhood and high school had been smart enough to get out of Wichita and stay out. How pathetic: AARP-eligible and he remained haunted by the teenage feeling of not fitting in. But he had not volunteered their time to CHAANT to make friends. No, his true motivation was much more pathetic.
There nested in Lee’s mind something tiny and fragile, so buried under layers of guilt and shame and self-loathing that ordinarily it could only be retrieved with the greatest of effort or inebriation: hope. TV crews would be arriving at the Heart of America in two days. At first he’d not seen any reason to show up for the filming; the thought of his pallid, moist, thumb-shaped face broadcast on television, even for a second, even in the background, sickened him. But like most people, he had caught an episode of Pickin’ Fortunes now and again, and he’d noticed that besides the obviously big-ticket items, the things that got the best segments were those that were intertwined with the seller’s personal history. Even he had to admit his past as an also-ran pop idol and first-wave punk musician might make an excellent centerpiece for Mark and Grant’s show. Hell, maybe they’d even license a track or two from the Tears in the Birthday Cake album to be played during his segment. Against his will—intellectually he knew how far-fetched it all was—a fantasy had grown in his mind of a career resurgence, a much-belated fame and fortune that would, among other pleasures, allow him to leave this life and move far, far away from Wichita. (Whether Seymour came with him in this fantasy depended upon his mood.) This was why he was so intent on playing nice with everyone at Heart, including Veronica; as a brand-new and unproven dealer, the surefire way to some screen time was through ingratiation. Now, because of Seymour, he’d made enemies of Veronica and Margaret Byrd both, two of the Heart of America’s most powerful tenants.
On the bright side, as far as Lee knew, he did not currently have stomach cancer, multiple sclerosis, or a warrant out for his arrest, but in his present mood none of that offered much consolation. Striving for positivity, he reminded himself that no matter what happened, he’d always have his kick-ass record collection.
Late last night he lay in bed, Seymour snoring next to him, in that uncomfortable liminal state between sleep and wakefulness, until a niggling thought agitated him into full, panicked consciousness: What were his top five desert island LPs? It had been a recurring topic of conversation over the course of his and Seymour’s relationship, but besides earlier that day when he was trying to show off to that teenage hipster, Lee could not presently remember the last time Seymour had asked. In that lonely midnight moment, nothing seemed more urgent, so Lee crawled out of bed, sneaked upstairs to the record room that once served as his mother’s “sewing room,” and surveyed the collection.
He started by flipping through the stack of recently played albums leaning against the right-side speaker. He’d been working through the grip he’d picked up from his last big trade with one of the oldest dealers in New England just before the move to Wichita. Plenty of quality stuff, rare and much-sought-after among Lee’s community of collectors—early Jandek, the Legendary Pink Dots, Moondog, etc.—but none of it top five material. On the arm of the beat-up pea-green easy chair Seymour insisted was worth the effort of hauling cross-country “for sentimental reasons” lay the leather-bound daily planner in which Lee scheduled his listening sessions. On page after page he’d noted everything he listened to and intended to listen to, cold hard proof of both his refined taste and enviable collection. But again, none of it felt top-five-worthy, and, worse, it struck him how joyless something as elemental to his identity as listening to music had become. He might as well have kept a diary of his bowel movements.
Lee then found himself scanning the IKEA Kallax shelving units that lined the walls for the still-familiar spines of albums he couldn’t remember the last time he’d listened to—none of the weird stuff, the avant-garde, or obscure, but rather simple pop music. This was what he’d grown up on, and deep in his soul, this was what he really liked: repetitive, earwormy, likable, obvious. What was wrong with that? Like so many others, his interest in music had begun with the Beatles. As a teenager in the seventies, when his friends were listening to Yes and Rush and ELP, he hunted for the hard-to-find variant mixes, the B-sides, the fan club exclusive Christmas singles, the bootlegs and foreign releases with alternate takes. So he tossed aside his planner, removed the Throbbing Gristle LP from the turntable, and put on one of his all-time favorites, a strong contender for the number one slot on his desert island list: not the Beatles but the Kinks, their 1968 LP The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, a concept album with songs linked by themes of nostalgia, memory, and pastoralism, as tuneful as their better-known early hits but with a gentle melodicism unmatched, in Lee’s opinion, even by the Fab Four themselves. As the first notes of the title song swelled, he began to cry—not a few sentimental tears; he bawled so fiercely he had to turn the volume up. It’d been so long since he’d allowed himself to listen to any pop music at all, it was as if he were hearing the album for the first time—no, not the first time but more like the fourth or fifth or eighth. The best listen was the first only in the tidy narrative of memory; in reality, that sweet zone was between the second and twentieth spin when you had just enough of the melodies committed to mind that the listening was effortless; you fell into the music as seamlessly as warm bathwater, forgetting yourself for those few transcendent songs before the A-side ended. In subsequent listens, it would all become so familiar, so known-by-heart, so burdened by past experience that it was no longer the music itself but rather an accumulation of all the play-throughs of the past. It was when an album crossed this threshold that Lee would begin obsessing over the disc’s flaws: pops, skips, crackles, and scratches he hadn’t noticed while still in the early thrall. He
’d obsessively clean his disc on his expensive vacuum-powered record washer, scour the crates of other dealers at shows and on the internet with the aim of upgrading to the mintest condition available, accruing many different editions in the process. He would still enjoy albums after exiting the sweet zone but never in the same way.
But now if Village Green could sound fresh to him after all these years, who knew? It was possible he could reenter the sweet zone of anything, maybe even as foundational a song as “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Lee was not young. The best days of his life were far behind him. If his only ambition was to avoid major tragedies such as disfiguring injuries and debilitating destitution while taking solace in his record collection, he supposed he could live with that. He would listen only to pop music from now on, he decided, whether as sophisticated as Pet Sounds or as vapid as Ohio Express—or, hell, even the Sodashoppe Teens.
Now, thinking of all that awaited him in the record room, the manifold favorites he’d neglected for far too long, Lee pulled the car out of park and turned up the volume on the stereo. He sang along to “The Screw,” an unreleased Phil Spector piss-take, and was pleased with the sound of his voice. He’d only ever sung backup in any of the bands in which he’d played—he was no natural front man like Seymour—but like the heartland cliché that he was, his earliest performing experience had been in his church’s children’s choir.
Pulling into the driveway, he was relieved to find all the lights off in the house. Seymour was either still out or asleep, thank god. Lee hadn’t shared a word with him today about his dramatic break from his usual diet of “headphones music.” He would just be disappointed in him, and it would only exacerbate the tension in their relationship. Seymour could only love someone he admired, and he could only admire someone with taste even more obscure than his own.
However he felt about Seymour, Lee couldn’t deny that he made a damn good mixtape. He hit the eject button, intending to finish listening to it inside, but all of a sudden he couldn’t move. Something caught his ear and wouldn’t let go, the tail end of a song he couldn’t place. He stared at the tape in his hand—he couldn’t understand how it continued to play even after he’d removed it from the deck—before realizing the console had switched to radio output. Normally they kept it tuned to NPR (there were no good stations in Wichita), but whatever this was, it was good, really good, incredible even: chiming Big Star–esque guitars playing a progression indebted to fifties doo-wop and yet somehow new; subtle string accompaniment in the vein of Forever Changes; elaborate but not show-offy vocal arrangements; a chorus that was catchy in an unobvious way; simple but eloquent love song lyrics; and the crucial element that to Lee always signified a great song, a bridge that was even catchier than the chorus. It was all captured in analog-warm production, eschewing the antiseptic compression of most modern-day tunes, so true to that 1960s AM chamber-pop sound that Lee wondered if some previously unreleased gem had been discovered in the Buddah Records vaults.
As recently as yesterday, before the rediscovery of the Village Green sweet zone, before the leaf-turning embrace of his true musical love, he would not have allowed himself to admit how much he liked this song, but now he wanted nothing more than to hear it again and again. As the coda faded out, the dulcet voice of Terry Gross informed Lee that he was listening to Fresh Air. “My guest today is—”
The gaseous heat of misery filled Lee’s stomach, rising up his spine and simmering beneath his forehead. He held the steering wheel with a throttling grip and tried to scream, but the sound wouldn’t come.
Today’s guest was Mickey Gordy. The song was from his new album, Popular Music, a collection, according to Terry, that “explores, deconstructs, reconstructs, criticizes, and celebrates the tropes and permutations of the twentieth century pop song, a surprising project from the auteur behind works including the experimental ballet adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s Ubik, ‘Drone: a piece for forty-nine guitars and one broken washing machine,’ and the artsy jam-funk band Barthes, among many others. Many of your fans would say this was—”
“As likely as a Sodashoppe Teens reunion,” Mickey cut in. “Look, from the start I’ve been interested in exploring music in all its forms. I’ve collaborated with Glenn Branca. I’ve had a chart-topping dance-pop album. There’s nothing in my career I’m ashamed of, but that one comes close.” He and Terry shared a laugh. “I’ve never said I had so much integrity that there were things I didn’t do just for the money, especially when I was starting out. To be frank, it was miserable. The music was awful. The Osmonds rocked harder than us! And the people—delusional kids who thought they were the next Lennon/McCartney. Hell, we weren’t even the 1910 Fruitgum Company. But you know what? This might surprise you, but I like the 1910 Fruitgum Company!”
He went on to talk about the insatiable nature of his creative drive. It was a compulsion. He’d written whole albums in his head while riding the subway. He couldn’t not make music. If he stopped making music, he said, it meant only one thing—he was dead. This was the way most artists talked, like they just had to do it. But quitting had been easy for Lee. After the self-released Tears in the Birthday Cake album failed to land a record deal, he’d put away his sax and began a long stint of uninteresting day jobs that somehow accidentally culminated in a respectable career in “human resource management” that ended the ill-fated day Seymour convinced him of the money and freedom that awaited them as small business owners.
“I’ve never really considered myself a musician. I’m more of a music fan. I keep up with the new stuff, but what lights my fire is discovering those neglected gems. Not to be elitist, but I’m a vinylhead, a crate-digger, and as I was throwing this platter together, what inspired me the most was the classics—for instance, the three Bs: the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and Big Star—but also a lot of barely heard stuff, eighties college rock, private-press garage loners, anything with photocopied sleeves, real art brut stuff, if you know what I mean, bands even I have barely ever heard of, like…”
Crate-digger? Bullshit! The fat cat bastard probably had his assistants trawling Fee-Bay for him. It wasn’t enough that his music career had to overshadow Lee’s, now Mickey Gordy was acting like he’d out-collected him.
Before Terry could cue another selection from Popular Music, he punched the radio off, scraping his knuckle on the hard plastic edge of the knob. He could not pretend that the song he’d just heard was not excellent. It was easy with the other stuff, Mickey’s weird arty noise projects he didn’t understand. But this was different. Tears in the Birthday Cake was the only one of his post-Sodashoppe bands that ever caught any real heat, regularly selling out shows at the Rat and garnering ecstatic write-ups in the local press. This was near the sound Lee had been going for with their album, but he’d lacked both the budget and the talent to pull it off. Mickey Gordy had beaten him at his own game, and worst of all, Mickey Gordy probably didn’t even know there was a game or that Lee had ever been a player.
He went inside. The TV in the living room was still on but the room empty, Seymour out at a bar or asleep in the dim bedroom, it hardly mattered. They’d gotten into the habit of never acknowledging each other’s comings and goings. A picture of Lindy Bobo, hair curled to maximum voluminosity, shone on-screen. The local news anchor noted the picture, from last year’s Little Miss Midwestern Belle Pageant, would be posted on a billboard along Route 54 and printed in the local newspaper every day until the lost girl, age seven, was found. Then they cut to footage of Lindy’s family, her mother and grandmother, sitting on a beige couch in a beige room before a coffee table strewn with MISSING flyers, while her little brother, oblivious, pushed an empty Saltines box like a Tonka truck along the carpet around their feet. “We just want her back. We want our little Lindy back,” Mother Bobo said, her voice cracking. The camera pulled in on her pleading face and the reporter’s voice asked, “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?”
Damned if Lee knew—or would be any help finding out. He
turned off the TV and went up to the record room. The Kinks album rested on the turntable, the stylus cued to “Picture Book,” but he didn’t feel like playing it anymore. Last night he’d opened the gatefold door of Village Green and reentered its sweet zone for the first time in decades, but thanks to Terry fucking Gross it’d closed to him once again.
Scrutinizing a collection meticulously cataloged by micro-genre and date of release, he saw only a wasted life, the ruins of ambition. He turned to the shelves and began pulling every Gordy-related release he could think of. He owned pretty much everything the man had ever done, though he almost never listened to it. He’d been compiling them since the first Barthes album, released less than six months after the Sodashoppe Teens crashed and burned, as if through them he could make sense of his own failures, could pinpoint just what it was that Mickey Gordy had that he lacked. When it failed to reveal anything, he took his first steps into his weird-stuff phase. Now he could see he’d devoted all these fruitless years to the study of music he would never understand and—he could finally admit it—actively disliked.
Leaned against the wall, the stack of Gordy records stretched nearly a yard. In front was a later period Barthes album, the cover an image of Mickey and his bandmates sipping through straws from a bottle of Thunderbird fortified wine, a parody of the Sodashoppe Teens’ cover. The album even included a scathingly ironic cover of the Teens’ “Handclaps in My Heart,” which consisted of Mickey barking Iggy Pop–like over a deluge of feedback and drum-chaos. Then Lee pulled the two releases that comprised his own piddling oeuvre. Quantity was not quality, but even so, Lee’s legacy had amounted to, what, a couple millimeters, a half inch if he included his duplicate copies? And half of it was Mickey’s, too—the Sodashoppe Teens belonged to both of them, even if neither of them wanted it.