“Smile.”
Blue turned toward the voice and a flash exploded like a grenade in his face, giving Blue some idea of just how much a fake grenade would be appreciated.
“Have to have pictures, you know,” Peter? said, holding a camera in his hands. “Just make yourself at home,” he added, entering a room to get rid of the camera.
Blue wandered around, reading the walls, trying to distinguish in the subdued lighting whether he was nodding to a girl or a guy. The party, he realized, presented the first possibilities since Colorado. He wanted to remind Tinker of that.
Tinker was into the van engine before he was into the apartment, the latter only to find a light he could string outside. When Blue came out to check on him, he was bare-chested to protect his shirt from the oil and banging a wrench on the motor.
“How the hell can you see what you’re doing in this light?” Blue asked, watching Tinker work in a series of shadowy flashes.
“It’s got a short or something. I tried to fix it but I don’t know shit about electricity.”
“Want something to eat?” Blue said, holding out a pan to his friend. “Nothing in the place but brownies which we should be thankful are not sunflower seeds.”
They polished off the half pan of brownies while talking about things that brought them back home for a minute.
“Know what we should do some night, Tinker? Phone the Legion back home. We’ll get a bag of wine and a bag of quarters and get drunk and go to a pay phone and phone the Legion. A Saturday night, eh? We’ll talk to the guys and listen to the Seaside Cowboys in the background. I bet you ten to one they’re playing “Candy Kisses” when we call. That’s the great thing about us being together out here, Tink. When we talk about home we see the same pictures, smell the same air. We’ll tell them back home that we’re playing in a club out here. The Aquarius Club. Playing rock noise and eating acid for breakfast. I’m going in before I go blind,” Blue said, pointing to the light.
“Did anybody see the strobe light?” a hippie was asking the population in general as Blue walked into the kitchen. “It was in there before but I don’t know what happened to it.”
Blue would have asked him what a strobe was but his thoughts were drifting elsewhere so he simply shrugged and opened the fridge door, looking for food. There was nothing there but another pan of brownies and a quart of milk which he was helping himself to when Nathan came into the kitchen, holding a girl’s hand and introducing him to Sherry. Behind Sherry and Nathan, though, came a far more startling apparition.
“Blue, meet Lee. Lee, Blue,” Peter? said, introducing them.
Peter? and Lee were also holding hands, but the significant difference for Blue was that Lee, effeminate or not, was definitely a guy. Lee released his hand from Peter?’s clasp to grasp Blue’s hand.
“So you’re the living proof of Peter?’s pet theory. I haven’t seen him this happy since the first night I said I would go out with him.”
Chewing on a mouthful of brownie, Blue only nodded in response, but had a mild choking reaction that escalated to strangulation when Peter? asked if Tinker and Blue were lovers.
Blue spent so much time spitting brownies into the sink in order to be able to vehemently deny the charge that he barely remembered the question when he was finished.
“Don’t be offended, Blue,” Peter? said mildly. “Just curious about the two of you living together.”
“Hell, we’re from Cape Breton,” Blue said. “There’s none of that business goes on back there. Almost everybody’s Catholic, you know.”
“Oh, dear, spare me from the Catholics,” Lee sighed. “Obsessively heterosexual males can be so close-minded,” he remarked to Peter? as the two of them walked toward the stereo room, leaving Blue, Nathan and Sherry in the kitchen.
“We’re not, you know,” Blue told the remaining two and having reasserted himself against any possible rumours about him and Blue, walked out of the apartment into the pulsating light of back yard.
“Better get that shirt back on, Tinker, old buddy, ’cause have I got a story for you,” he warned as he came down the back steps into a scene that disoriented him. Motor parts were spread around the yard and Tinker was sitting in the driver’s seat of Peter?’s van, which was on the ground several feet from the vehicle.
“What did you take the seat out for?” Blue asked.
“I’ve been sitting here for the last ... oh, infinity ... asking myself that very same question. I know I knew what I was doing when I did it, but I forget. Blue, do you think those brownies might have been poisoned? I don’t feel right. I don’t feel bad, but I don’t feel right.”
Blue remembered why he had come out to see Tinker and told him.
“I hope you cracked him on the head,” Tinker said, snapping his right fist into his left hand for emphasis.
“Holy shit, Tinker, it didn’t even occur to me. That’s the trouble with parties with no booze. You lose your sense of reason. A few beer at a party back home and that guy’d still be spitting out teeth. Well, I think I would of punched him, but he’s with Peter?, and I liked Peter? before I knew about him. I can’t see myself punching him now. He’s practically a friend. Tinker, old buddy, there might be worst things happening to us than food poisoning. We might be turning into a couple of friggin’ pacifists.”
But Tinker had long ago disappeared, working at the far side of the van and when he came back he was carrying the front passenger seat which he put down beside the first one and offered it to Blue. The two of them sat in silence in the flashing strobe imagining the front seat of the Plymouth as it sped down the highway toward home.
“Gas,” Tinker said after an unmeasured lapse of time. “The van was out of gas. That’s all that was wrong with it. Found that out when I went to empty it so I wouldn’t wind up blowing myself up like Charlie did. But ... I needed the practice,” he said, sweeping his hand to take in the yard filled with automotive parts.
18
The Aquarius Café had never booked an act before, depending instead on the spontaneous appearance of hopeful amateurs, but the exception to the rule took place on an October night when the café filled with Berkeley professors, musicians and writers from across the city, reviewers from fringe and establishment publications and a random sampling of San Francisco’s counter culture population.
Five weeks after the party at Peter?’s, Nathan brought a copy of Rolling Stone magazine to the street corner where Blue and Tinker performed. In the magazine, Blue saw his own startled picture under the headline: “Blue Antivoice – the ultimate musical revolution?” The article, written under the byline Peter?, argued that the paradigms of music needed to be shattered and recreated before the Great Revolution could find its true spirit, its true song. No revolution could succeed without articulating through music a sense of its soul. “The only true history of a people is the history of their music,” Peter? wrote.
“The shattering of establishment music has begun with the arrival in San Francisco of Blue Antivoice, a Canadian whose musical roots reach back to the Highlands of Scotland, and whose voice at first reminds the listener of badly tuned bagpipes. But as one listens closely, the singer’s voice takes on the energy of exploding glass, the sound of a brick being thrown through the Establishment’s concept of music. It is a sound which can only be described as Pre-Primitive. Blue Antivoice’s lyrics are rich in man-as-crustacean metaphors, a soul encased in the shell of a creature that resonates to the earliest stages of evolution. One hears within that sound the agony of becoming, the genius of discord, a genius of insights, observations and wit which Blue Antivoice modestly attributed to his imaginary mentor, The Other Fellow.”
The article mentioned John the Baptist’s heralding of the Son of Man, managed to weave Peter?’s theory of Plato’s Republic throughout the piece until Blue’s presence wavered in the reader’s imagination like fire-shaped shadows on
the wall of a cave. Blue recognized his photograph as the one taken in Peter?’s apartment during the party.
“You know what would be really great?” he asked Tinker as he passed him the article to read. “If this story was in the Bulletin back home. That would be really something. Who do you know reads this rag?”
“That’s pretty good,” Tinker said, looking up from the magazine. “He calls you John the Baptist in it.”
“That’s only second best, Tinker. Why get your head cut off when you can be crucified?”
“What does that mean?”
“Haven’t the faintest idea, but I’m going to try it on Peter?. Bet he thinks it’s really deep.”
The rewards of stardom came quickly to Blue. Along with the magazine, Nathan delivered a message from the manager of the Aquarius Café offering Blue fifty bucks to play there on Friday night.
“Fifty bucks and I still get to pass the hat, tell him that.”
“Great,” Nathan said. “I can see next’s month’s headline already. ‘Singer holds out for thirty-two cents!’ Look, Blue, don’t fool around with this thing because of money. Not yet. Peter? is turning you into an idea which means people are going to discuss you, and to do that they have to listen to your music. That’s a dream, man. Greater composers than Bach and Beethoven have probably starved to death because nobody wrote about them in Rolling Stone, or whatever passed for it.”
“We got this guy back home, eh? Farmer, a horse trader,” Blue said to Nathan. “He says if you can’t buy it or sell it, it doesn’t exist. Well, the way we’re going to work this thing is get Tinker to be the opening act. That’ll get us a few more bucks. A few jobs like this and a little luck and we’ll be home for Christmas. Or on the Grand Ole Opry stage.”
Tinker opened the evening, chording on Blue’s guitar while Gerry contributed some violin comfort to his songs. Both singer and musician were favourably applauded and substantially rewarded when the hat was passed around the largest crowd ever to seek access to the Aquarius Café. While they warmed up the audience for the evening’s headline entertainer, Peter? introduced Blue to Dr. Herman Silver, a professor of Psychedelic Psychology at Berkeley. It was Dr. Silver, Peter? explained, who first inspired him to explore the possibility that the laws of music as practised for several thousand years were in fact not laws at all but a behavioural pattern being endlessly repeated throughout time. “Our creative expectations condition us to produce within established rules,” the professor interjected.
“And,” Peter? re-interjected, his finger punctuating the air, “the Big Clue, if you will, is the correlation between music and mathematics. How can anything that can be plotted on a graph, that can be as precise and predictable as two plus two equals four, be considered truly creative? We need to break out of this bubble of pseudo-creative behaviour patterns that mankind has mistaken as reality for four millennium and turn on to the true reality beyond it. Do you follow me?”
Tinker pulled up a chair and joined the coven of revolutionaries, watching Blue’s face while he listened to Peter?. Back in Cape Breton, they had often been in barns and houses where the conversation suddenly turned to Gaelic to convey information too sensitive for young ears. It left Tinker wondering what secrets he was never going to know because they were locked up inside a language he would never learn to speak. It left the unilingual behind to nod or smile stupidly in the flood of foreign inflections. Tinker found Blue a joy to watch during these moments because Blue didn’t pretend to understand – he thought he did understand. That conviction turned him into a furrow of brows and a concentrated squint filled with tics and knowing nods to the speaker, much as he was doing now. He appeared to hang on to every word that Peter? and Doc Silver, as Blue was already calling him, had to say about the reality of another consciousness. Once, he turned to Tinker with a wink that asked, Do you think I’m going to get away with it?
“Blue, what does he mean by this ‘another reality' business? Help me catch up to this conversation,” Tinker asked Blue while they all sat at the table, his question oozing with curiosity.
“Well, I better get up there before they start a riot here,” Blue said, sliding his chair back and reaching for his guitar and wiggling out of Tinker’s trap. “Doc there can tell you while I’m tuning up.”
“You have a wonderful voice, conventionally speaking,” Doc Silver said to Tinker. “You could probably earn a living with it singing establishment songs.”
“If I can’t find a garage to hire me soon I might have to,” Tinker replied.
“What your friend is involved in, if Peter? is right, is the cutting edge of a new reality. I teach Psychedelic Psychology which examines historical patterns of behaviour. One of our most common clichés, ‘history repeats itself,’ is a basic clue that not only do individuals adopt patterns of behaviour that inhibit their true self-expression, but that whole peoples, whole cultures, the whole species for that matter, do as well. From the Trojan War to the Vietnam War, the patterns haven’t changed one iota, nor has the music.
“There is the martial music of the oppressors and the protest music of the oppressed, but the reality is that they are one and the same. The oppressed just want to change places with the oppressor so that they can play the martial music. In between those two forms, of course, there is all the sentimental music that has been developed over the centuries – classical and popular – love and loss music that lulls us into believing that it reflects our finer selves. The truth is that even more than religion, music is the opiate of the people because we believe it is our finest expression of beauty. What I propose, and Peter? here is my most faithful disciple of the thought, is that the subliminal message that music has transmitted throughout the ages is one of violence and suppression. To prevent history from continuing to repeat itself we have to stop the music, so to speak, and take new bearings on reality and begin from that point to find our way toward a fully enlightened society. That’s what Psychedelic Psychology is about.”
“Do you have to take acid then?” Tinker asked.
“While I do admit to using LSD myself for valuable research purposes, I don’t recommend it to my students beyond experimental use because it is not the answer, only a glimpse of the answer. True reality, I believe, can’t be artificially induced in a people. It has to become a universal consciousness, an awareness transmitted around the globe and throughout future generations through the only creative vehicle capably of sustaining that reality. Music!” Doc Silver said emphatically. “Music!”
“I kind of see what you’re getting at, I guess,” Tinker said. “It’s a little like this guy back home that I used to work for, Charlie. Charlie is working on an invention that he says is going to revolutionize the world. It’s still top secret, though, so don’t ask me what it is.”
“Not ‘revolutionize,’ Tinker,” Peter? said, turning to Doc Silver for approval to continue. “There is no revolution involved because to revolt is to imply violence. We try to avoid words that associate our search for true music with the conventional and violent patterns of establishment music. What we are searching for is best described as The Great Growth. We grow through the walls of the music currently confining us, crushing our best aspirations.”
“And ‘The Red Lobster’ does this?” Tinker asked doubtfully.
“Blue’s music is best considered as a signpost along the way to the new reality,” Peter? explained. “It doesn’t necessarily anticipate what the music of the future will be, but Blue, particularly his voice, brings the establishment music to a crashing conclusion. I can only describe it as a hopeful satire of the whole spectrum of music, the end of what has been and the beginning of what will be.”
19
The conversation was silenced when Blue, ready to perform, welcomed everybody to the Aquarius Café.
“Ciad mille failte, as we say in Cape Breton. That’s Gaelic for a hundred thousand welcomes. My buddy Tinker, the
guy you just heard, and me, we came out to ’Frisco because we heard about the gold rush, but we missed it by about a hundred years so we’re singing for our supper these days. I’m just going to sing a few things for you, most of which is a song called ‘The Red Lobster’ which I’ve been working on for quite a while. When it’s done it’s going to have a hundred verses and the chorus after every one of them. I wrote two verses just this week, making it sixty-three finished. So just sit back, relax and enjoy yourself while I sing it for you.”
Blue began picking the musical introduction on the guitar and looked up at the audience again.
“We got this fellow back home, eh, Farmer, a horse trader whose idea of Holy Communion is lobster. One time he told me that his dream was to wake up one morning and see a herd of lobsters pulling a flat car of beer into his yard and then committing suicide by jumping into vats of boiling water. If they were land creatures he’d probably be raising them for a living. So I’d like to dedicate this song, what there is of it so far, to my old friend, Farmer.”
Your beauty traps me
like a lobster in a pot
and I turn red
when the water gets hot
.......
Blue’s voice, filled with dangerously sharp fragments of broken notes and the shattered remains of a melody, crashed through the candle-lit café as the newly discovered singer performed for an audience whose curiosity was quickly turning to opinion. The gallery of expressions ranged from suppressed giggles to shock to fingers-in-the-ears to head-shaking disbelief to the intense, nodding approval of those who heard what Peter? told them they would hear. No one was unaffected by Blue’s work.
By the tenth verse, seduced as usual by the power of his own material, Blue had slipped into a trance out of which the volcano of sound spewed forth while his strumming arm cranked down on the guitar where two strings had already joined the spirit of his voice by snapping in two. The audience, hypnotized or paralyzed by the irrepressible onslaught, was pinned to its seats the way former San Francisco residents had been pinned to the floors of their homes by the roofs of their houses during the quake of ‘06. And with forty-four more verses to go, Blue was only a small piece of the way into “The Red Lobster,” growing louder and more confident as it progressed. Only Tinker had an inkling of what was to come if the song continued on without interruption, which it didn’t.
Tinker and Blue Page 10