Gimme More

by Liza Cody

  I say, ‘I want a taxi and I want a fair deal for Jack. I think you can provide those. I don’t know what your relationship is with Dog Records or Barry Stears but I’m very wary of them. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that malarky. I have no cause to mistrust you personally, Nash, but you did once say you always wanted Jack on your label. If Dog’s your label now, you’ve already got him, because Dog bought out both Cutz and Square Hole. If I’m reading the runes correctly, Mo’Zee is about to merge with Dog and that would give you the whole catalogue. And Jack’s list is still doing nicely. Why can’t everyone be satisfied with what they’ve got?’

  ‘I only wanted to talk to you, as a friend,’ Nash says plaintively. ‘I wanted us to get to know each other.’

  ‘We can do that,’ I say. ‘But not in a bugged house.’

  For a moment, Nash stops staring at me and looks at the moon instead.

  He says, ‘Maybe I’ve always been a secretive man. Maybe I’ve always been self-protective. Great wealth, Birdie, allows one to take natural inclinations to great extremes. But you shouldn’t mistrust me for that.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I say. ‘But men have been telling me to trust them for years. And people have been using me to get to Jack for years too. It takes time to make friends, Nash, especially when you don’t know what they’ve got on their shopping list.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says painfully. ‘Maybe I understand you better than you think I do. Wealth and power are like talent and beauty. You ask yourself: do they want me or do they want it?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Do you want me to give you something for nothing, Birdie? As proof of my sincerity?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘A taxi.’

  ‘Very well,’ he says. ‘But you must promise that we’ll meet again soon.’

  ‘A promise isn’t nothing,’ I say.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I thought you meant nothing material.’

  ‘Nothing is nothing, Nash.’

  ‘You know,’ he says, scrambling to his feet, ‘you may not have wealth but you do have power. I’ll make a call for you. Wait here.’

  He skipped out of the ballroom in his tiny soft-soled shoes, and left me with a huge dance floor to prowl alone. I was glad the lights were off. I didn’t want to see any reflection of myself. It’s too late for bright lights, I thought, and I’m too old to stand them.

  Nash comes out at sundown like Dracula, I thought, to suck the life and energy out of ageing rock chicks. Exactly the opposite to rock musicians who come out at sundown to give you all their life and energy.

  Softly, almost under my breath, I sang ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ to remind myself that I was alive. I danced flexuous steps to go with the sinuous melody line, reminding my feet that they’d soon be far away.

  As I completed the circuit I saw Nash almost hidden behind the door. A voyeur and an eavesdropper. If I ever agree to sleep in one of his beds, take me out and shoot me – I’ll have become too gullible to be allowed to live.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ he said. ‘That was a great song. Did you write it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That was pure, unadulterated Jack. And don’t read anything into the word “adulterated” – it was a slip of the tongue.’

  ‘There’s no such thing.’

  I shook my head. ‘Do you remember that other song: “Sliding Widows”?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Well, that came from Jack misreading the side of a van belonging to the Sliding Window Company. He was charmed by his mistake, Nash. Mistakes make art.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Nash said, looking as if he’d like to take notes. ‘I wish I could remember the song.’

  ‘It would never have been written except for a slip of the brain.’

  We stared at each other for a moment, and then he said, ‘I’ll walk you to the car – unless you’ve changed your mind.’

  This time, the front door opened at the merest touch of Nash’s hand and we walked out into the setting moon. The black sky was beginning to fray at its eastern edge and he screwed up his eyes as if it were the brightest glare.

  As we walked towards the car, he said, ‘I’ll need some sort of tape or show reel. I’ll need to be convinced you have something to sell.’

  ‘Did I say I had something to sell?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyway, I have no incentive. I mean, supposing I was to look through a trunk of old belongings forgotten in an attic or a cellar somewhere, and I happened to find a handful of Jack’s demos or an old movie? Why would I tell you about them? If I did, you or Sasson or some tax inspector would immediately claim them and say I should’ve given them up years ago.’

  ‘There are ways round that.’

  ‘What ways?’

  ‘Let me think about it.’

  ‘If there are “ways” you can ensure that I benefit from what I own – that I own what I own – then I might be encouraged to look.’

  ‘Perhaps, sometime in the future, we could arrange an exchange of proofs.’

  ‘But Nash, I have no incentive to look for anything. Proof would only become an issue if I found something.’

  ‘What sort of incentive?’

  ‘Cold cash,’ I say. ‘Something I don’t have to declare.’

  ‘I see.’ He walks on a few paces. The car is in sight. It isn’t a taxi – in fact it looks like the same Bentley that made the outward journey. I wonder what happened to Sasson.

  ‘Here’s my problem, Birdie,’ Nash says. ‘I think you’re being disingenuous when you say you need an incentive to look. Why should I pay you to look for something you’ve already found?’

  ‘No reason,’ I say. ‘In any case, as you said, this was only a meeting between friends. So, thank you for supper, it was truly delicious. I’m delighted to have met you again.’

  We are beside the car. The driver gets out and opens a door for me. Nash takes my hand. He turns it palm up and kisses the inside of my wrist. I lean into him and kiss his withered cheek. His grip tightens in a spasm around my hand, as if an electric current has passed through him.

  ‘À bientôt,’ I say airily as I wrench my hand out of his grasp and slide on to the car seat. I’m losing my mind: I can’t tell if his reaction is desire or disgust.

  I wave goodbye. That is one seriously fucked-up little man, I think, and I rub my wrist clean on the blond suede of the upholstery. Will he go back to the house now and furiously shower in boiling water the way I want to? Or will he search fruitlessly through Jack’s catalogue trying to find a song called ‘Sliding Widows’?

  Good luck, Nash, and good night.

  VI

  Rolling Stone Magazine

  ‘Hit The Road, Jack’

  By David Palmer

  27 Years Ago – Brighton, England

  As the car draws up to the curb, two girls in silver hotpants leap into action. They come together, pubic bones grinding, knees between thighs. They strike a faux lesbian pose. The big one massages the small one’s breast. The uniformed doorman looks on, expressionless. He’s seen it all before.

  Wearily, Jack climbs out on to the sidewalk.

  ‘Wotcha doin’, girls?’ he drawls in that casual flat delivery only the British can muster at five o’clock in the morning.

  ‘You,’ choruses the teen duo. The big one says, ‘We’ll do you – any time, any place, anywhere.’

  Jack turns his back on them to help his companion out of the car. She is wearing a sunshine-coloured silk maxi coat and little else under it. She’s beautiful enough to be a slap in the face to Jack’s teenage fans. They groan with disappointment.

  The couple sweeps past and out of sight.

  ‘Sorry, girls,’ the doorman says. ‘As you can see, Jack’s got his hands full.’

  But the girls turn up again next morning at breakfast. Still in their silver hotpants and wobbling platform shoes, they teeter across the lobby to the cordoned-off area of the hotel restaurant where Jack’s Pack, in varying states of h
angover, are eating bacon and eggs.

  ‘Who let them in?’ Jack mutters to Connie McKenzie, tour publicist.

  ‘I think they spent the night in Wills’s room.’

  ‘Get ’em outta here. We got the bleedin’ BBC coming. I don’t want them around.’ Jack returns to his coffee and a copy of the London Times.

  On the road with one of the great killer bands of all time, I discovered that the two would-be groupies weren’t the only ones finding it difficult to gain access to the tour’s inner circle. It was a raw March evening ten days into his punishing schedule of British venues before I found myself in the presence of kick-ass Jack.

  In the two years since he last toured England, he has made so much of a reputation through album sales and concert tours in Europe and America that he finds himself somewhat in exile in his own country. Venues like the Lyceum Ballroom in Brighton (two matinees and an evening thrash, all sold out in three hours) are no longer big enough to contain him, and the security arm of this traveling circus is stretched to its limit. Isolated behind bouncers, photographers, managers, drivers and business advisers, Jack has become inaccessible even to the members of his own band. Tempers fray. In the hiatus between soundcheck and performance there is nothing to do but bitch.

  All this will change in May when the tour hits the United States, and you feel that Jack’s private army can’t wait to stretch their wings and fly to open spaces where they’ll have room to breathe.

  ‘We’ll be all right in Chicago,’ says Wills, bassist and long-time associate of Jack’s. ‘They’re used to people like us.’

  ‘Yeah, Mayor Daley loves us,’ croons lighting engineer Ken Castle. ‘He’s so cool – puts us up in all the best hotels.’

  The room rocks with laughter. Last year in Chicago half the road crew were arrested for possession of controlled substances and the tour would have been aborted without the timely intervention of Capitol Studios.

  ‘Everyone wants us,’ says Wills, dragging on an untidy handrolled cigarette of dubious provenance. ‘Number-one attraction everywhere – that’s us.’

  Meanwhile Jack travels to the gig in a custom-built, heavily curtained bus. Inside, the bus is like a film set.

  ‘In the style of a Tunisian bordello,’ Jack explains when, credentials double-checked, I am ushered down the aisle and past the oriental rug that serves as a door.

  He is sprawled, pasha-like, across black satin cushions with his head resting in his lady’s lap.

  ‘How many Tunisian bordellos have you visited, Jacko?’ she asks, tapping his forehead lightly with one finger. She is dressed in cream shantung with a skirt split almost to the waist. Her legs go on for ever. Lack of access is not her problem; lack of privacy might be. In a decade when British rock stars are not in short supply, demand for this glamorous couple far outstrips their wish to meet it. Even during this short journey between hotel and hall, whenever we stop at lights or slow for an intersection, the drumming of hungry hands can be heard resonating through the reinforced panels of the bus.

  ‘It’s like Suddenly Last Summer,’ remarks Jack. ‘You wonder what they get out of it. Or rather, you sometimes wonder that they’d get out of it if they got in.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be thinking about the arrangement for “Adversarial Attitude”,’ his lady reminds him, showing an unexpectedly practical side to her nature. June’s asking which musicians to book.’

  Cleveland, Ohio. 27 Years On.

  I never did find out what musicians were required for ‘Adversarial Attitude’. Search through the most complete discography and you won’t discover a song of that title. As far as anyone knows it was never recorded. Twenty-five years ago the house that Jack built went up in flames and he with it. A three-month period of depression and spiralling drug-use ended in a blaze so hot and bright, they say it lit up the sky for most of the night. A casual remark made on a tour bus so many years ago serves only as a painful reminder of what might have been.

  Today, at the conference preceding Jack’s posthumous induction into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, a panel analysed the myths, the songs and the influence of the music that is all that remains of Jack.

  ‘We’re interested in his cultural impact,’ said Teddy Wright, gruff-voiced guitarist whose virtuoso licks adorned most of Jack’s oeuvre.

  Interest in the singer’s life and times is still avid on both sides of the Atlantic. A docu-drama is slated for production next fall. Even more intriguing is a rumor that a collection of a dozen of Jack’s previously unreleased tracks have turned up in the vaults of a London studio. They are to be cleaned up and digitally remastered for release in time for Christmas.

  ‘This could be the most exciting discovery since the release of The Beatles’ Anthology,’ said Rocky Netzdorf, author of the brilliant quasi-fictional Escape Into Fire (reissued in paperback, Plume). ‘Facts are hard to come by, and spokespersons from Jack’s record company are refusing to comment, but the vibe is there.’

  Made conspicuous by her absence is Jack’s last partner, Birdie Walker, she of the long legs and insolently beautiful face from the tour twenty-seven years ago.

  ‘Of course we invited her,’ said symposium head Richard Copeman, Rock Hall’s Director of Education. ‘We would have welcomed her input.’

  The conference closed with a concert featuring, among others, Jack’s Pack and Friends, a reunion of Jack’s sidemen with guest appearances by singers from a later generation of bands influenced by him.

  ‘We bought all the albums, growing up in Red Lodge, Montana,’ said Skip Suskin of On-Line Animals. ‘The first thing we did when we formed our own band was to cover some of Jack’s numbers. It’s a blast to be doing them again.’

  ‘Adversarial Attitude’ was not one of the numbers On-Line Animals would have been able to cover. But if the rumors prove true, maybe it is one of the songs that have been gathering cobwebs in a London vault. I hope so: twenty-seven years has been a long wait for the young reporter who first heard about the song in the back of Jack’s own tour bus.

  Sitting in a bar drinking a lonely toast to absent friends after the concert, I could almost hear Jack’s flat London tones: ‘Wotcher doin’, Dave?’ he might have asked.

  Waiting for you, Jack. You’re twenty-seven years late.

  VII

  Love and Other Stuff

  Someone is turning up the heat. The voice at the other end of the line is pink and perky: ‘Do you have a moment to chat?’

  We were sitting around the kitchen table, Robin, Grace, Alec and I, finishing supper, when the phone rang.

  ‘It’s for you, Lin,’ Grace said. ‘Someone called Imogen.’

  Imogen says she’s a ‘researcher’ from Median Films. She’s the third in five days. They aren’t all from Median Films: one was from the BBC and the other said he was with Mojo.

  ‘This is for the new bio on Jack,’ Imogen says. ‘I need to check a few facts.’

  ‘Who gave you this number?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s on file,’ says perky Imo. ‘I just wanted to ask you some background questions – like, how you met Jack, what he was like …’

  ‘That must be on file too,’ I say. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m not going to talk about this.’

  ‘If I’ve called at an inconvenient moment, can I leave you my number?’

  ‘No,’ I say, and I hang up.

  ‘What?’ Robin asks. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘While we’re all here,’ I say, ‘can I ask you a favour? If anyone from the media calls please would you say I’m not here and you don’t know where to find me.’

  ‘How do they get this number?’ Robin’s looking anxious, as she does so often these days.

  ‘I don’t know. And that’s another thing. Please, if anyone asks you about anything to do with Jack or me, blow them off. I know you’re already aware of this sort of thing, Grace, but Alec mightn’t have come across it before.’

  Grace blushes and Alec says, ‘I don’t understand. What’s
going on?’

  Robin says tartly, ‘They use anyone they can get their hands on to insinuate themselves into Lin’s confidence.’

  ‘But why now?’

  ‘Oh, there’s always some excuse – some anniversary or other.’

  ‘But why don’t you want to talk about it?’ Alec asks. ‘Wouldn’t it keep Jack’s …’

  Grace interrupts, ‘Lin finds it all too painful.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Alec, looking as if this has never occurred to him before. ‘But, if you talked to someone sympathetic, a friend, say, wouldn’t it get the rest of them off your back?’

  ‘No,’ Robin says. ‘It works the other way round. Talk to one and the rest think it’s open season.’

  ‘Say one word,’ I put in, ‘and it can come back to haunt you for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Can’t you put the record straight?’

  ‘No. It’s all like that question, “When did you stop beating your wife?” They start with a false assumption and you spend so much time and energy proving it false that everyone who doesn’t say, “You protest too much,” says, “There’s no smoke without fire.” Rumours and allegations stick, Alec. I’m sure you know that. You mess around on the Net. How much of what you’ve seen there would you say was true?’

  Grace is blushing furiously now, but Alec says calmly, ‘Not much, but I’m sure if people knew the truth they’d stop inventing the rubbish.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Which is the more interesting, Alec, Jack and Birdie met at a North London pub, or Jack met Birdie at a Tunisian brothel?’

  Alec pauses for a moment and then says, ‘Assuming it was neither of those, where did you and Jack actually meet?’ Oh dear. The slick little prick is catching on.

  I treat him to my saddest, most open smile and say, ‘Yes, that’s exactly my point. The truth, whether it’s mundane or exotic, is the only thing I’ve got left that hasn’t been thumbed through and fucked over by strangers. See, when you’re associated with the entertainment business everyone thinks that your whole life is there to entertain them. That’s what you are – a living breathing soap – and they have the right to include themselves in your life. You aren’t real. You’re just something to watch on telly. Every little thing is up for grabs: what actually happened, Birdie? What did it feel like? There’s always someone who thinks they have the right to know the deepest, most sensitive details. Why? Because you’re entertainment and entertainment is for everyone. It’s like you made a contract to share every last thing with anyone who wants it. But you didn’t.’