The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir

by Jimmy Webb

  The convoy set off, a series of black limos a quarter of a mile long headed, flanked, and shadowed by rakish cops in cartoon blue on their old Harleys. They were everywhere and all over the road. No decorum wasted here. They rode with flagrant disregard into the crowds that lined the route, screaming and shaking their fists and coming to a full stop occasionally to shove someone out of the way. They would pull up close beside the limousines and stare insolently through their mirrored aviator specs into the car hoping to see what? A star? Some titty? They were half-shaved, disreputable-looking characters, reveling in the power and authority of their big motorcycles with their sirens and flashing lights.

  To their credit, we went at a good speed through the streets unimpeded, until we could see an incongruity becoming larger and stranger as we closed the distance. It was a modern skyscraper, grown up out of the garish hillsides of impoverished housing like a silver rocket ship standing on a tatty moonscape. With lots of sirens, Portuguese cursing, and clearing of riffraff, we penetrated underground into the garages of the colossus to be herded by Monica and her sisters into elevators with brushed chrome doors.

  A James Bond villain’s hideaway revealed itself as we exited on the roof into a scene busy with songwriters, singers, actresses, and paparazzi, with hooch dispensed from multiple bars. A great foo-foo-rah and hubbub was in progress over a sex queen who poured bottles of cold Champagne over her bare body, arousing her nipples as she stood half revealed in the shallows of the pool, the focus of a thousand lenses. We were jostled by the crowd as a dozen more half-naked felines appeared, pouring magnums of Champagne carelessly into the pool, uttering sexy oohs and ahs. Devilman grinned in unconcealed delight.

  I pulled away from the center of the Nijinskyesque revel, taken aback, and found a perch from which I could look over the edge of the building.

  The favelas hit me in the face like a physical blow. Corrugated tin sheds, cardboard boxes, sewage pipes, and shipping boxes—any detritus that could be fashioned into some semblance of shelter—spread out below our Shangri-La.

  Surprised, my eyes encompassed the brown ragged multitudes staring up at the top of the wondrous silver skyscraper, no doubt in earshot of the music and the laughter, if not of the popping of champagne corks. Open latrine ditches veined the hillsides, the smell of effluvia and rotting garbage borne aloft, high enough to reach the nostrils of the rich and powerful. Satan was there. I could feel him at my side. I tried to grasp the concept of an ancestral and eternal poverty.

  There was a friendly Brit hanging about, a blondish reporter toting a camera. He came over to us and asked if he could shoot some pictures, and I told him to go ahead. He said his name was Ritchie, and he was a freelancer who picked up local entertainment and human-interest photos for the papers back in England. He said the Brazilian people were good-hearted if you could get out of the artificial dome of military control and into the favelas. The famous Brazilian Samba School was there, and he didn’t know if we were interested, but there might even be a smoke. Freddy was all over it. Get out there with the common man and find out the haps? Local musicians? Some potent herb? Patricia’s liberal heart leaped at the opportunity to interact with an alien culture. I told the young journalist to come by the hotel and have a drink.

  That is how Ritchie became our mascot without portfolio in Rio. He took a picture that was to be a minor sensation in the Brazilian papers: a front-page shot of baby Miles Tackett standing inside his father’s open guitar case, with a big smile for the public. I was trying to decipher the caption as I waited for my elevator, which opened on a covey of American ladies from the floor above. They saw me and suddenly clammed up good with reddening faces. I nodded politely as we rode together. I could hear them breathing and smell their high-end perfume.

  This conversation would no doubt have been about Evie, who I had called the night before in order to greet her from such an exotic and novel place. I said I was proud of the song but it didn’t seem to be coming off too well. She told me, “Don’t worry, darling. It won’t win anyway. It’s too sad!”

  Patricia had asked the Red Berets if we could go out into the country and “see the real people and visit with them.” We had to wait for an answer.

  Meanwhile, the Canção Popular got ready for the first round that would decide the final ten winners. Only the first three places received the diamond- and ruby-encrusted golden rooster that we irreverently called the Chicken.

  Ritchie laughed when we asked him about our chances. “Well, this is Brazil. And Brazil always wins!”

  Freddy and I sounded Ritchie out about the possibility of some Mary Jane. He answered that it would be dangerous as all hell but that he would sniff around and see if some of the musicians would take a chance on getting busted and going to a fascist prison for the rest of their natural days, or worse. As that did not sound too promising, I hit on the idea of sending back to the United States for a packet of cassettes, lead sheets, and bullshit music gear under the pretense that these were needed for the performance, only these cassettes would be disassembled, carefully packed with high-grade seedless colas wrapped in tinfoil, and put back together with forensic precision.

  I did not concoct this harebrained scheme alone. The Devil collaborated. Fred looked dubious. “These are not the kind of people you want to screw around with,” he said.

  We did it anyway. Keeping the plan secret, we informed the Red Berets that a package would be arriving from the States with essential musical materials we had left behind. Then we called Garth at Campo de Encino and described the exact procedure for concealing the drugs in audiocassettes. It never occurred to me that there was a possibility the military had a tap on us.

  That night we traveled to the first performance of the Canção Popular in our government limo. As we approached the Maracanãzinho, we began to receive our education in the real internal politics of Brazil. We were hemmed in by large, almost impenetrable crowds of demonstrators. They were chanting something rhythmic, loud, and fast in Portuguese.

  “What are they saying?” I asked Monica.

  She blushed. “Oh, well, that is nothing!” She smiled brightly. I caught a glimpse of placards waving in the mob: “America Out of Indochina!” “No More War!” and such. A shower of stones splattered over the top of the bodywork, which elicited cries of alarm and surprise from our crew. Faces plastered against the outside glass distorted into grotesque masques: “Nixon is shit! Nixon is shit!”

  “Right on!” I wanted to shout out to them.

  We walked into the backstage area of the arena and out in front of 15,000 people, some of them actually music fans already rabid to get to the action. Through the tornadic roar of the crowd, one could see the flags of Brazil waving and hear the songs and chants of Brazilian football.

  Approximately twenty-two countries vied for the first ten places at the festival. Benny Borg was there with “A Wind Sang in the Trees” from Sweden. A young Phil Coulter with partner Bill Martin had brought “Poundstone River” from Ireland. America’s “Evie” wasn’t the only lady represented; there was Brazil’s “Luciana” (Tapajos/Sauto) and “Penelope” (Alguero/Senat), a lady of Spain. Well-known folkie Roger Whittaker was there for Kenya with a song of hope, “New World in the Morning.” Most are forgotten now, but the night we walked into the dome all these anthems were ringing from the walls.

  Bill and I sat in folding chairs backstage, watching the monitors through a couple of unremarkable entries that the Brazilian fans greeted with a fine display of diplomatic politeness. But then Britain’s Malcolm Roberts took the stage in a white sport coat and black bow tie, a blond god of a man. From the first notes of “Love Is All” (w. Les Reed and Barry Mason), a crafty Humperdinck-like sing-along with dramatic roller-coaster high notes, the crowd was in a frenzy. They stomped and clapped. They spontaneously erupted in tsunamis of hurrahs as Malcolm crested each high note building toward the climax. At the moment of truth he opened his arms and belted an A above A above middle C that preclud
ed forever any of American Idol’s supposed vocal triumphs.

  “We have to follow that?” I said to Bill, who smiled his gunfighter smile even as the uproar crescendoed outside, but no, Malcolm wasn’t finished. He went back into the last chorus, picked up the now familiar melody, and did it again. The Brazilians went berserk. They sang with him, they wept, they passed out. Huge hand-lettered white banners were waved by fanatics on the little monitors: “Angle- terre,” “Malcolm,” “America Out of Indochina!”

  When our turn came, Bill fastened his clear blue eyes on me and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get ours.”

  Backstage the managers yelled: “Go! Go! Go!” We scattered to our respective positions, dozens of feet from one another on the sprawling stage, as every eye in the arena fastened on Bill Medley. There was a hush. From the crowd there was a small chorus of boos and a curse or two. I heard “Bisha! Bisha!” and wondered what that could be. The orchestra started up and I concentrated on the music in front of me. Bill’s voice, that haunting, spectral baritone from the opening verse of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” that had intoned “You never close your eyes anymore…” That unmistakable sound was superimposed over the first lyric of “Evie”:

  “There ain’t no future in it, Evie

  We never should begin it…”

  A shout of recognition and approval rang through the crowd. The women swooned and shouted. Bill flexed his tall, thin frame and smiled his thanks to the crowd, who came to renewed life at this dose of genuine Americana. My little two-verse song had a good emotional line. The chords would have been somehow familiar to the crowd as I was mimicking some of their greatest composers. It was composed of two almost identical verses except that the second verse had a second ending similar to the structure of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

  “Something in me can’t stop trying, Evie, it’s up to you.”

  As Bill nailed the high note, pandemonium arose from the aisles to the rafters of the arena. Perhaps not the hysterical reaction that Malcolm had provoked, but plenty boisterous and loud just the same. All the players met backstage beaming as the bedlam rose to a peak out front. There were some boos, and some shouts of “Bisha! Bisha!” but these were drowned out by a great rush of excitement at the rising tide of extended applause, convincing us that there really was going to be a contest.

  Upon returning to our rooms we were informed by Monica that our request to go into the country and see the people was not accepted, due to security concerns. It was clear we were only allowed to see exactly what they wanted us to see. We resolved to take Ritchie up on an adventurous proposal. He had promised he could get us away from our handlers, out of the hotel unnoticed, and into the favelas.

  Early the next morning we made a run for it. Our cadre rolled out of bed, giggling and shushing one another like a bunch of college kids preparing to occupy the administration building. Miles let out a yelp and there was a moment of panic as Patricia stuck a pacifier in his mouth. There was a soft knock at the door and Ritchie slipped inside.

  “Okay, cats and kittens,” he said under his breath in his musical London accent. “We’re going to the freight elevator, not in use right now. Watch out for staff, everybody’s a spy. If they see us pretend to be hopelessly lost.”

  He stuck his head out the door for a quick peek and beckoned us out. We rode down the freight elevator, our mood subdued by the magnitude of our crime. As we cleared out we saw a nondescript red van with its sliding door open wide in the alley. Within seconds we were inside, giggling again.

  “This is not a game, my American cousins. Put your heads down and try to behave,” Ritchie scolded good-naturedly, but there was tension in his voice and we pulled ourselves together.

  Traffic in Rio was tangled and slow, but we eventually made our way into the favelas and the poverty was laid out close-up. I suppose the most amazing thing about it was that the residents seemed to take no notice of any special circumstances. They were smiling. Feeding their kids, and laughing, one wary eye on the bandoliered, machine gun–toting guards that stood on every pedestrian island. Involuntarily, we crouched down when we passed that lot, but they took no notice of us. We were no longer celebrities or anything special except a van full of hippies.

  We were out all day. We ate Brazilian street food and clowned on the beach at Ipanema and took pictures when we could. The Devil and I rode the suspended cable cars to the top of Sugarloaf and looked down on the whole city. Up on a higher peak and inland was the famous megalithic statue of Christ of Corcovado with arms spread wide, 250 feet tall. The Devil promptly dubbed him “Corky” and called him that for the duration, which bothered me more than a little.

  After a dozen false starts, we finally got into a little alleyway that led to The Man. Ritchie got some currency from us and said, “Okay, sit here for a wink and I’ll go up and get some ganja. Try not to get arrested in the meantime. You know, fit in!” He smiled and went up a garbage-festooned path that climbed the side of a hill.

  It was lonely for a while. There was something very nearly like a crowd forming around the rusty Volkswagen and I wondered how far and quickly word had spread through the long afternoon that there were foreigners, strangers with money and cameras, in the favelas asking questions.

  The police would know by now, I decided. They could be here watching us. Then Ritchie came up with a big English smile on his face and a little packet and we drove off happily, worries banished for the moment. Ritchie said, “The best thing to do is to go through the lobby and upstairs as though you’ve been to the chemist’s. Nothing to hide! Concert’s tomorrow, remember. They won’t let anything interfere with that.” And sure enough, no one said anything as we navigated the lobby and went back upstairs. There were sharp looks from some guys we already had pinned for cops, but what were they going to do?

  That night we had a pot party in my sitting room. I don’t know what the penalty was for smoking dope in Brazil under that regime. I just know it scared the shit out of everybody, and it was pretty much just me and Fred, His Dark Eminence, and Patricia around the piano. I played “Muskrat Ramble” loud and raucous. Ritchie stopped by but quickly left when the joints came out. Bill stuck his head through the door and wrinkled up his nose. “No thanks.” It was pretty rough street-grade weed, but since none of us had had a toke since the L.A. airport, we scarfed huge caustic lungsful and congratulated ourselves on getting into the finals of the competition. The top three were tied: England, United States, and Brazil.

  1956

  Dad moved us north and west into the badlands of the Texas Panhandle. My siblings reacted to the announcement of every new exodus with a chorus of tears. We moved like gypsies every two years, whether we needed to or not.

  We arrived in Pampa, a smaller, cheaper version of sprawling Amarillo, and into our first tract home, which was to our eyes a mansion. It had an attached double garage, a porch, a kitchen with built-ins, and a fenced backyard. In that plaster-on-chicken-wire off-yellow-colored tract house we finally became real Americans. This was commemorated when Dad brought home a television set. Janice, Tommy, and I thought we had discovered alien technology from another planet, even though the picture was grainy and snowy and some days would disappear altogether. We would stare at it even if it wasn’t on.

  When it came to television, my parents frowned on gunplay, smooching, and people having a good time. At one point my father, disgusted with the ungodliness he had brought into our home, took the precious television away. The grieving was horrendous, even for him to behold. He brought it back.

  Pampa was another faceless church house on a featureless landscape with no interior detail, like a movie set with a false front. The desert missions, half concealed by ribbons of blowing sand and possessing no architectural identity, no steeple, no stone, no stained glass except the plain yellow variety, no landscaping, no music of any quality (certainly no organ or decent piano), all of these had blended in my nine-year-old consciousness into a prototypical on
e-horse Baptist church. In my private sanctuary, the inner room hidden behind a thousand doors, I supposed life, if it continued, would be an endless series of ghostly tabernacles, rising like abandoned dreams from the white chalk of the West Texas back roads.

  On our next migration, to Eldorado, Dad’s luck changed. Eldorado was no fabled city of gold but it was back in Oklahoma, my home state, at least. Nice homes, some of them even large, surrounded a one-street business district with a proper traffic signal working at the main intersection. There was a movie theater with a neon-lighted marquee advertising first-run films and a factory that hand-manufactured polished wooden ski boats under the brand name Indian.

  The church, in my starved imagination, was a cathedral: a redbrick edifice with a flight of graceful, wide stairs climbing to the front door. A steeple, an organ, and plush carpet on the dais. I have a picture of Mother and Dad standing on those steps, her in a fittingly formal black dress and wearing heels with her faux pearls, Dad in dark suit and tie. They are in their late twenties and the look is successful. We lived in a dignified redbrick parsonage, hemmed in by a couple of maples and an elm tree that cooled the front porch in the summer. I was now reading hymns easily from the Baptist Hymnal and playing simple classical pieces, like Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” if with a decided indifference. Though my mother spoke with great confidence about my future on the piano bench at the First Baptist Church, I suffered through practice; it seemed such an unmanly thing. But she would put the kitchen egg timer on the upright in the living room, a cheeky little chicken, and until it clucked at the end of thirty minutes God help me if I was to quit.

  I was in fourth grade and from our front porch I could see across the street to a wide, grassy athletic field and the schoolhouse, an ugly multistoried affair. Schools had not been kind to me. But in a hopeful augury my fourth-grade teacher was named Mrs. Wise. She was in fact wise and kind; the first teacher I ever had who seemed to care for the children she tended. She played records in class. Records? In class? She played Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and all the kids sang “Where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain!” Well, most of them. There was a gang of toughs in the back of the room who just smirked, not seeming to relate to the music at all, launching heavy paper wads from rubber bands that would bang into the back of my head hard and wet. But the music was insinuating itself into me, making me want to cry sometimes because it was so beautiful. I would look into Mrs. Wise’s spectacled round face beaming with a smile, her silvery head nodding in time to the music, and think, She feels it, too! She’s not even in this classroom just now. Mrs. Wise was teaching music appreciation, and very well, too.