‘Well, I think he had been intending it.’ Oh, how you would like to sound much less uninformed in front of her.
‘This might be a good time—’
Astonishing. ‘In the middle of all this?’
‘You know the saying, any publicity …’
Into the Vacuum is just one example that would prove this to be not true. Following that terrible review, the bookings dropped off so badly you were forced to pull the show before the end of its season.
‘… and it would give him a platform to defend himself,’ Genevieve continues. ‘And to ridicule these accusations, to portray himself as an innocent party to these sly and silly—’
‘That idea is almost ruthless, though. I don’t think you’d ever get Jed to …’ You envision going home and telling Jed that a PR expert has suggested he rush the release of his album in order to obscure the accusations that surround him and give himself a platform to defend his reputation. He would look at you as if you’d submitted him to the devil. He’s always had a deeply adverse reaction to the kind of people who think like Genevieve, who believe image is something that can be so easily contrived. He likes to think of his music-making as a pure part of himself. Just as he would never participate in anything that was overtly reputation-making, neither would he manipulate any situation in defence of himself either.
‘Maybe Jed just needs to grow some balls,’ Genevieve adds now, caught up in her own momentum. In these offices, in her realm, there is an undisguised reverence for ambition, the great big gleaming ocean liner sailing forth into the world, urging all the lesser craft to get out of the way.
You look into Genevieve’s face and say nothing, but you can see in her eyes that you are making her feel as though she’s badly overstepped.
‘I just meant that he’ll have to face up to some realities …’
That’s true, probably. You both will. You came here in the hope there might be a definitive solution, that you could apply a big professional decontaminant process to the problem and it would be removed from your lives forever, but you can see now that it won’t be that easy. Perhaps you should begin to contemplate instead the surrendering of control. Perhaps the only thing to do is to stop looking online. If you don’t read a tweet, does it still have the power to hurt you, or is it just a frivolous aside that dissolves into nothing?
You don’t like Genevieve implying your husband is weak. You’ve often found his tendency towards fatalism exasperating, but refusing to respond is a different thing from weakness.
‘I’ll have to give this some more thought.’
‘Yes,’ Genevieve agrees.
As you walk away from her office you begin to feel emboldened, freed by this idea of giving up some of your social power. Let them gossip, who cares. Jed’s reputation has faded anyway. What you are worrying about now is not so much his career but his iconic status, his remaindered respect. If Jed was in the middle of his career, if his future depended on reputation, then it might matter more but … is he really thinking of releasing a new album?
There must have always been something in you that believed he might be big again. He might rise to the stage once more, create that exciting whorl around him. But how likely is that?
And can you really do nothing? Live with this tarnish, this suggestion of paedophilia? Isn’t it too ugly? But then, look at what you allowed yourself to do. That’s ugly too. Perhaps the onset of all this difficulty is a kind of universal recrimination, all somehow fettered together, an earned test.
Now that you’ve introduced this line of thinking it’s hard to escape the idea that the terrible anti-marriage, anti-self, anti-good, anti-love thing you’ve done might have opened up a dirty fissure in the atmosphere around you, letting an unfavourable cast seep through. And if you have somehow done this, if you have reconsigned your luck, then perhaps your role now is just to be accepting. Even as others judge.
This thought gives you a serenity that lasts throughout the drive home, like you’ve thrown out the sandbags and are now floating freely in the sky. You can surrender to the ease of simply choosing to embrace his guilelessness. It’s the rest of the world that’s awful. You have your refuge. All you have to do is hold your own against this front and the truth will rise. It will be all right. It will be all right. Won’t it?
The serenity doesn’t last long. New developments, Genevieve texts – she must have some kind of monitoring system on Jed – and supplies a link to a Twitter feed.
HS has tweeted: I’m the girl in that photo with Jed Jordan. He was just being nice. Nothing dirty.
This only gives fuel to all the puerile imbeciles who are waiting like a row of nasty gulls on a power line for something to draw their notice:
—Yeah nice, I bet
—Are we talking lickylicky nice?
—So is he the captain of your c**t?
After much more of that, the girl is goaded back on again:
HS: Shutup. He was helping me on a school project, doing an interview. He’s a good person.
—Skool project about how to find your bush in the bush!
—Jed Jordan likes em young, eh? Bet he taught her a thing or two.
—Breathe in breathe out, here I come with my big horn.
On and on. Somebody starts a hashtag: #jedjordansux
—Surfin again will never be the same #jedjordansux
—Always thought he was an a*hole jedjordansux
—How do we even know you’re her? Cd be him faking it #jedjordansux
And then:
HS: Okay you want proof? Here it is. The interview recording plus the transcript – tinyurl.com.d592hv23.
Transcript:
The following is a transcript of an interview with musician Jed Jordan by Haley XXX
Originally recorded for XXX School’s Annual Careers’ Journal
(This project, initiated by Mrs XXXX, aims to have the Year 11 class record interviews with a wide variety of successful people in the local community, establishing how they initially started on their chosen career path.)
Haley: So the theme of this whole thing is how you got started.
Jed Jordan: Okay. Shall I just start talking?
H: Sure. Point and shoot.
JJ: Point and shoot?
H: Sorry. It’s just I saw this interview with some band the other day and they were talking about their recording process, which they called point and shoot, meaning they’d just line up their mics and start recording whatever came out. Point and shoot.
JJ: Point and shoot. Sure. Well just started the usual way I suppose. Met some guys at boarding school. We all hated it there so spent a lot of time in the music room and then after a while started playing in front of people. Did these anarchic sort of covers at first, because we couldn’t play for shit, and then eventually started writing our own songs and much later we won this Battle of the Bands thing and the prize was some time in a recording studio.
H: What was that recording time like?
JJ: Okay.
H: Is that all?
JJ: Well weird actually.
H. Why?
JJ. See we’d been scouted by this record company, which we thought was really cool at the time, so we signed up in a hurry but they turned out to be real wankers. When we were recording they kept coming to the studio in their slick suits and saying they wanted a more commercial sound.
H: Meaning what?
JJ: We didn’t really know either. Meaning, I guess, they wanted us to sound like some other junk that was spewing out of the radio at the time. So-and-so are hot right now, they kept saying. Crap nu-metal bands mostly. In the end we got so riled up I came up with this idea about being the captains of our own stuff and we went into the recording studio in this really amped up foul mood and just spewed out this song, really going for it. It was all coming from the hate in our hearts and we were only doing it as a fuck you to them.
H: Like Eldorado.
JJ: What?
H: Eldorado. Neil Young reco
rded that whole EP as a fuck you to everybody.
JJ: Yeah. That’s us. We’re just like Neil Young (laughs).
H: And then what happened?
JJ: Well the record company totally missed any irony, and loved that shit. We’d given them what they wanted so they eased up on the rest of the record. We’d discovered Protools by then and decided we hated going into the studio, so we borrowed some gear and got this little shack in the country and holed up there to finish off the recording. That’s why a lot of the other songs have this different vibe. We only kept ‘Captain’ and ‘Surfin’ again’ and ‘Seize the Night’ from the stuff we recorded in that studio. The rest of the songs were only mastered there later. The record company didn’t like the other songs much but we’d wised up to keeping control of how we wanted to sound by then.
H: Call me captain of the way this plays / today the rules are gonna be remade / all you get is dead-set defiance / masquerading as cool head compliance. I totally get it now. I never really thought about what that meant before. So ‘Captain of the Rules’ was the first song to come out?
JJ: Um, actually no. While we were recording we kept burning these CDs, giving them to people who used to come and hang with us on the weekends. One of those ended up in the hands of one of the programmers on student radio and they played ‘Catatonic’ and ‘Breathe in, breathe out’ on high rotate for a while. Then when the record was ready to be released, the record company did this big push into the commercial radio stations and spent heaps of budget on the video for ‘Captain’ and that become a big mainstream hit.
H: When was that?
JJ: Um … well, let’s see. What year were you born? (laughs) It kind of happened twice actually. It went pretty well when it came out, and then it got picked up for this ad about two years later and was massive after that.
H: Having a big hit must have been good?
JJ: Nah, not really. We started to feel fake around that song, and that phrase ‘Captain of the Rules’ really makes me cringe now, but that was what was popular so we had to keep on playing it. ‘Surfin’ again’ was okay though.
H: Yeah … He said son think about it / it’s bigger than your skill / but that old guy under-rated my will … Is that what that’s about? Doing your own thing?
JJ: Are those the words? See you remember better than me.
H: Bet I don’t.
JJ: I don’t know. I never think about it, like, that consciously. In a way that song is really just about surfing, but if you like we can say it’s about learning to be true to yourself and not letting any wankers derail you. (Pause) Nah, actually scratch that. Too earnest.
H: And you know the words … my mind is stuck on the place you took me to / the weightless fall / the breath-held topple / into the perfect void … what’s that about?
JJ: What’s that about? What do you think those words are about?
H: Sex?
JJ: Actually I wrote that song for this guitarist that toured with us once. We did some orientation gigs and one night in Dunedin these guys asked us back to their place to party. There was a really full-on drug scene down there at the time, with a lot of stuff around. The three of us smoked some of their pot and ended up getting really out of it because they’d laced it with something. Meanwhile this guitarist, Robbie, went into the back bedroom with a couple of the guys and did … well … harder stuff. After that it was like he’d fallen in love and was prepared to do anything to keep the rotten old hag in his life. I was thinking about him when I wrote that song. Sorry to disappoint you.
H: … um so … ?
JJ: So the moral of the story for your school report is probably don’t shoot up.
H: Actually I don’t think anybody at our school shoots up.
JJ: What do they do?
H: Crack cocaine …
JJ: Really?
H: Nah. They probably would if they knew where to get it. Why did you stop?
JJ: Drugs?
H: No music?
JJ: Oh. Well after a while touring around is not as much fun as you think it might be.
H: Why not? I thought it would be cool.
JJ: Did you? Well, I guess it is mostly. When you first set out spending time on tour is all new and fun, and you play games in the van, and you pull pranks on each other and stuff, wasting time in small towns, drinking and shit. But then after a few years of that you can hardly be bothered talking to each other. And as you start to get bigger, playing bigger venues, touring other countries, something else happens. You get more machinery behind you, and suddenly you’re surrounded by a whole bunch of people who are trying to make money off your music in some way. And a lot of the time there’s something a bit off about those people. And mostly you’re just living for the moment you’re performing, and that is a moment worth living for, but then one day you wake up and realise that the songs you’ve been playing night after night are starting to feel old, and all you want to do is get back to your studio and make something new.
H: So …
JJ: Jeez, I just heard myself. Sorry. Maybe not what somebody just starting out wants to hear, eh?
H: So it wasn’t because people didn’t really get your second album?
JJ: Didn’t they? Who told you that?
H: … well um …
JJ: It’s okay. I was just having you on … they didn’t really, did they? I guess that was disappointing to me. I always thought that second album was kind of my masterpiece. I still do. It’s just that if you do something that you think is really good, and most people don’t get it, then who are you really? Somebody who just happens to be out of step with the world at that moment? Or is your taste off? And if you can’t work your head around an answer to that question then it gets harder.
H: Okay. So if you had some advice for somebody just starting out now, what would that be?
JJ: I dunno really, I’ll have to think about that. See, when we were starting out it was different than it is now. I kind of like that music can find its own audience nowadays. I like that a sixteen-year-old girl can put out a lo-fi YouTube release and then find herself at the centre of a global phenomenon. And I like that she can do it without having to compromise herself. Back then it was all about getting noticed and getting signed by a big record label. That was about the only way to get your video on TV and your song on the radio and your CDs distributed to the record stores. But now it’s more about getting a following somehow, and being really good live, and finding new ways to rise above the big morass. When I hear young guys in bands talking these days it’s all about the mechanical rights – trying to get their song on a Nike ad, or a popular TV show or something.
H: But didn’t bands always try to do that?
JJ: Not so much back then. It was sort of frowned upon. When we did it, when we let our song get used on that ad, it made that one song go massive for the public, but other bands accused us of being sell-outs and betraying our music, and there was quite a bit of a backlash.
H: Really? That’s weird.
JJ: Yeah. But actually now I can see there was a sort of crassness or maybe impurity about allowing your music to be used to promote something. I’d never do it again even though it’s all changed a lot since. The Rolling Stones, for example, who were incredibly staunch about it for a while, started allowing their songs to be used on ads for Microsoft and all sorts. And I heard that when ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was first licensed for background music in the game Black Ops their own sales bounced.
H: So is that why … later … it didn’t go so well?
JJ: Maybe. I dunno. See, when you’ve been in the industry for a while you have to take a pragmatic attitude to everything otherwise you’ll drive yourself crazy. So I always put everything down to simple good luck / bad luck.
H: Like?
JJ: Well I guess like - good luck that we got discovered early, bad luck that we were so young we hadn’t quite got the industry figured out. Good luck that our first song was a hit, bad luck that pretty much the only t
hing anybody ever knows about us is that one song. Good luck that we got a big wad of cash for putting it on an ad to promote hatchbacks, bad luck that turned out to negate a lot of what we could do in the future. So, like that. Shit, we better get going. It will start to get dark soon.
H: Can I ask you one more question though?
JJ: Go on.
H: Lots of people know you because of your success with ‘Captain of the Rules’, so do you really regret that song?
JJ: Honestly. I don’t know.
H: But without it you might not have been as famous.
JJ: Fame is for dorks.
H: Really?
JJ: Nah, not really. I think I might be quoting there. But the thing is fame isn’t something you ever possess yourself. It’s only ever something that other people bestow on you and it’s a pretty fickle thing to try and keep. I heard this story a while back about the day John Lennon got shot. Afterwards his manager took Yoko Ono home from the hospital and he saw that on the wall was a big blown-up billboard chart and their latest release was only at number eight. A big circle had been drawn around it and an arrow pointing upwards. It seemed sort of amazing that even after everything he’d achieved in his lifetime he’d still been hurting that hard for another number one. Of course, after what happened it went straight to the top of the charts the next week.
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 17