H: So all you need to do is put something out and then get yourself murdered.
JJ: (Laughs) Yeah, that’s one strategy I’m considering.
H: But do you actually wish you’d never been famous?
JJ: No. Not exactly. It’s just that we got known for this one big thing that we bashed out in a studio before we were even twenty, and after that it seemed like people were only ever able to define our success as having another similar sort of hit. But we weren’t that interested in replicating what had been done before. So maybe it’s that when you get known for one overwhelming thing, it obscures all the other chances there might have been.
For audio version of this interview –
http://www.XXXHighSchool.ac.nz/careers/11/jedjordan
Excluded from publication
Raking the remains
It’s like a series of waves rushing into the house, pooling in exposed corners and floating all that has been preciously kept, crowding in, and you are back doing it again, sinking below.
You smoke a cigarette from the emergency packet you’ve long hidden behind a fat digest of 1970s architecture that must once have belonged to your father-in-law. It tastes stale and does nothing to stop your pulse galloping.
It’s hard to get a perspective, but you try to take your head off your own shoulders and gauge this as some other person might. In fact, you try to impersonate the role of a professional adviser.
What does he sound like to other people? A misunderstood perfectionist, or a bit of a loser who rejects the only thing he ever did that had wide appeal? If you were to offer some advice, you might say it seems unwise to peel back the layers on something as alchemic as the making of a song. Probably he’s always instinctively shied away from it, because he knows that any kind of intimacy with the process invites in an element of ordinariness. To bring the genesis of a song down to a simple bad mood tears away the sense of invention. All those people who placed their own ideas on his music, who’d related to it, now have their personal construct swept away. Appreciation and intrigue depend on a certain distance, you’d advise.
To be fair, he didn’t expect this interview to be released so generally, and you can’t tell if it is a good thing or not. The publication of it really is too much exposure – yet it’s perhaps also a necessary response to another kind of unwanted exposure. Another quick scan of Twitter on your mobile reveals that it doesn’t appear to have stopped the stupid comments – it’s now morphed into a kind of running joke: a rock star and a girl walk into the bush…
And what exactly happened, you’re wondering, after the word sex is mentioned?
‘Who was that about?’ Jed said. ‘What do you think those words are about?’
H: Sex.
In the recorded version the word is whispered so slightly, and yet so potently, then there is a long weighty pause. Exactly what happened within that pause? Did their eyes lock? Did the air around them suddenly vibrate with possibility? Was an unspoken dare taken up?
Anything could have happened within that pause. For that matter anything could’ve happened on the way down the hill. Perhaps especially after that word was uttered in that manner. Whispered. In a way the girl was saying to him When I listen to your song I think of sex. Did Jed respond to that? It’s already odd that he chose to take her to a place like that, almost scene-setting. The girl might not have been the only one who had sex on her mind. He appears to shut it all down at the end, but did he? Did he really?
You’ve avoided having to look him in the eye by staying on the big old sofa in the upstairs back bedroom all day. You aren’t sure that he even knows you are home – that’s the advantage of a big house. Perhaps he thought you’d gone to work today.
Such a shifty platform, trust.
Good luck / bad luck
A person doesn’t have to worry themselves too much if they take the view that everything that happens in life is a matter of luck. Possibly it’s the sort of loose accountability that only truly fortunate people can afford – and it was becoming clear to me that, even in this situation, Jed harboured a deep-seated conviction that luck would be on his side in the end.
Testing it out on myself, I’d discovered that if you chose to adopt good luck / bad luck as a way of placing troubling things into context, then it allowed for a certain elasticity of acceptance. The biggest, most profoundly life-changing thing in my life – definitely bad luck. But I’d nearly always thought of having Dylan as the good luck that arose out of it. And now, if I thought about how he’d turned out – good luck that he was healthy, smart, capable, artistic / bad luck …
On the morning of my son’s first market stall he hadn’t been keen for me to visit, which only made me more curious. Parking my car, and walking towards it, I imagined myself choosing a tee-shirt and handing over the full asking price as a show of support. Instead I found there was only one rack on display, with perhaps a dozen tee-shirts in total, and no reserve stock evident. Even allowing for investment in printing or materials, that lot couldn’t possibly have come close to the value of the money he’d borrowed. And as I looked through the rack I realised that the emblem he’d chosen as the basis for all of his designs was a marijuana leaf. It wasn’t much cause for speculation to figure out where the rest of the money might have gone. As if to confirm any suspicions, Dylan was munching into a burger in a deeply hungry way. He grinned when he saw my face, and this filled me with such a hot, vertiginous flush of fury that my limbs were moved to action and I started ripping the tee-shirts off the rack.
‘Hey, hey!’ Dylan’s friend Wolf came running across from the stall opposite, where he’d been talking to a girl. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Yes, I am mad, as a matter of fact,’ I said, throwing the shirts into a pile on the ground. ‘Very mad!’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘Can’t I?’ I straightened up, and glared at him. I was holding one of the shirts and tried to rip it in half, but it wouldn’t give so I ended up struggling with it uselessly.
Wolf stepped back a little, his hands up in surrender. ‘We’re just selling stuff, that’s all. Stuff people want. You probably wouldn’t understand.’
Little fucker. ‘Well, I paid for these, so they’re technically mine.’
I turned my force on Dylan. ‘How could you? You bloody shit. Where do you think all this is going to get you?’
His eyes, his reddened eyes, registered mild surprise, but he glanced sideways at his friend and then smirked.
‘Chillax, old girl,’ he said.
As I stomped back towards her car, my arms full of their entire stock, I didn’t look back, but I thought I might’ve heard them laughing.
When I spilled out this whole story to Jed, he laughed as I imitated Wolf saying, ‘Are you mad?’ and laughed again as I exaggerated my own furious face as I mimed trying to rip the tee-shirt in half.
‘Really?’ Jed said, when I told him how it ended. ‘He said that to you? Chillax, old girl?’
‘Yep. See, the thing I hate the most is that he put me into that situation. He forced me into the role of being the hysterical parent just by behaving in such an imbecilic way. But if he shows me no respect, my options for response are so limited.’ I was weak. I knew I was weak.
Jed didn’t say anything.
‘You don’t think it was imbecilic?’
‘No, it was. But, well, at least it was sort of enterprising – the tee-shirt selling part of it.’
‘So you think I overreacted?’
‘God, no. I think it’s great you did that. You realise that he’s probably quite pleased in a way. You showed him how much you care, at least. That’s a good mother.’
‘Good luck I have a son, bad luck that …’
Jed looked off into the distance, and I regretted it as soon as it was out of my mouth. He didn’t want his words from that post repeated back to him. I could imagine it made him feel marked, like an endangered creature wearing a tracking tag and drawing chattering observer
s along in his wake. He didn’t need to be reminded that it’s out there and available to everybody in the world.
A light breeze picked up a dry, brown leaf and scuttled it across the lawn in front of us, and Jed asked, ‘So were his designs any good?’
‘Well, not so much the subject matter, but the execution wasn’t bad. That’s the thing. Despite everything, he does have a pretty strong artistic streak.’
‘Maybe after this he’ll learn how to use it better.’
So was it all less awful than I thought? Just some kind of conventional rite of disobedience? Dylan was not irreversibly lost to drugs, or lost to me, but was more simply in a fairly normal phase of stupidity? Only refusing for the moment to summon up his true gifts?
‘Once when I was pretty young a policeman caught me buying some pot outside a gig,’ Jed said. ‘He was going to arrest me, but I said that I still had another set to do. The policeman said, “Oh, you’re Jed Jordan?” and he pulled me round the corner away from the others and said he’d let me off with a warning. “Just this once, and only because I really like that song ‘Surfin’ again’. But be careful in future.” For the rest of the tour the other guys in the band teased me about playing a lucky card.’
Lucky card! It goes way back. It was possible to take the telling of this particular story as Jed’s way of alluding to their similarity, as if he sensed something, or had an inadvertent feeling about Dylan and him, but I knew that really he was just trying to offer some relief from the catalogue of his own experience – that all young men had their phases, their close brushes, and yet somehow came out of it okay. And yet …
It was hard to tell where Jed’s reputation was after the girl put that interview online. Roma thought he came across as a bit of a Peter Pan, and said, ‘At least he spared her the ugly version of why they split up – the who fucked who in the band.’ And then she added, ‘I wonder if he’s thinking about this whole thing in terms of good luck / bad luck? Like good luck he got a pretty young girl to go in the bush with him, bad luck somebody took a picture.’
‘See, I hate what you’re seeming to imply there, Roma,’ I’d said. ‘There is nothing in that conversation that suggests it was anything other than what they’ve said, yet when you look at all those comments online, even after the interview appeared, it’s like people really want to believe something dodgy happened. Why is that?’
‘I dunno, because it’s more fun? Because most people can’t be bothered looking into stuff like that too hard? They can only really grasp two facts. Rock star. Young girl. Fill in the gaps.’ She paused. ‘Also it’s not all people. Just the kind of people who like to put up comments like that, and I’d hate to believe they’re representative.’
‘So when you said that just now …’
‘Oh, come on,’ Roma said, smiling ruefully. ‘I only said that to give you something to leap to his defence for. You know you want to.’
And now the shed was propping up his back and he was leaning there waiting for the world to catch up to him, resigned a little, it seemed, to the possibility that it wouldn’t. Nobody really got it, and he’s half-convinced himself he doesn’t care. Sitting next to him sometimes gave me the sensation of being in a vehicle that was rolling backwards down a ramp, inevitable disaster rearing up and nobody doing anything. I couldn’t quite work out if it was powerfully robust or the opposite. There did seem to be a certain intense purity about spending time crafting songs in the shed with a level of indifference about whether they would ever be heard. And it took strength not to respond to a provocative accusation, to have faith in the ultimate effect of the truth. But it was also so … well, after too long it could start to look dangerously like being too laid back for your own good.
And what about me? Spending my life skittering towards interesting eddies on the pond surface, only to skitter away again when risk was encountered.
‘I better let you get on with your work,’ I said, reaching for the lid of the cake tin. But just then he glimpsed something over my shoulder and went still, alert, wary.
I turned to see a girl, a young pretty girl with long blond hair, walking crablike and unsure in our direction.
‘Sorry about this,’ the girl said to Jed. ‘I didn’t know how to see you anymore. You don’t go to the park … and then I remembered somebody once told me where you lived. Is this okay?’
She looked vulnerable and nervous. Terrified, in fact.
I looked at Jed, who was sitting fairly rigidly. ‘Do you want me to stay or go?’ I asked.
‘No, stay,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a good idea to have someone else here.’
‘Okay,’ I replied. So this was definitely that girl.
I explained that I was the next-door neighbour, just to make everything clear.
‘Can I sit here?’ the girl asked, indicating a small plastic bucket in front of us.
Jed nodded, and she bent and turned it upside down and lowered herself onto it, all awkward angles and sticking-out limbs like a small, shy, half-grown calf that was trying out posterior sitting for the first time. ‘I just wanted to say I was sorry.’
‘Okay,’ Jed replied.
‘It was my mother and her stupid friends. They got together and jumped to the wrong conclusion.’
‘Did they?’ he said impassively.
She took in a raggedy breath, seemed breakable and close to tears. ‘See, my mother was mad at me because … because …’ She looked up into the air as if trying to find some courage. She opened her mouth, closed it, started again. Different angle. ‘Do you remember that frizzy-haired woman that asked you to sign her CD that day? Well, she took that photo of us together with her mobile and it turns out she was a friend of my mother’s and then she came to our house and it happened to be a really, really bad day and … well, I didn’t know she had a photo or anything, or that those women were such a bunch of horrible cows, but anyway that’s more or less how it happened, and I hate that it happened, and …’
She ran out of words. We all sat there like we were a little bit stuck. Eventually Jed filled the silence by saying, ‘I knew there was a reason why I’ve always hated frizzy hair.’
A miserable smile appeared on the girl’s face, relief at his tone. ‘Anyway, I’ve fixed it all now …’
‘Fixed it?’
‘… well, I put that interview up so people could see that we’d really just talked.’
‘And did you go back online and see the crap people are loading on me now,’ Jed said, speaking without malice. Almost as if he could hardly care.
The girl went pale. She saw, perhaps for the first time, how beyond controlling this had become. ‘I didn’t know … there’d be … anyway, I told my mother to tell them all, all those mad friends of hers, that it wasn’t you, that she’d gone nuts and you hadn’t touched me. Is there … what else should I do? Tell me and I’ll do it. Anything to try and make it right.’
Was she even sixteen? She was at that age when she wasn’t quite adult, not quite child. Not quite qualified to run her own life but not quite able to claim innocence as a defence. She looked so alone, sitting there in front of us, like her place in the world was totally fragile. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘I think so. I mean, I will be.’ The stricken girl looked into Jed’s face. ‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry for causing so much havoc in your life. I didn’t mean to.’
‘It’s okay. It’s good of you to front up like this.’
He was right. It was brave of her to come.
The girl looked around the yard, as if now that she had finally got all that out she could take in more of the world. There was an end-of-summer aridness to the day, giving the garden the feeling of a parched haven. Bees were drowsily working flowerheads that were drooping low after too much of the season. Some sparrows were having a dust-bath in a patch of topsoil that had dried to powder. Everything seemed to have a jaded loveliness, and to be thirsty. I was thirsty too. Then all of a sudden a tornado emerged from the house and came
barrelling towards us. Lauren’s jaw was hard-set and her gait rushed and intense.
‘Is this her?’ she said in a voice that was almost a shout, on the edge of control.
‘Wait!’ Jed stood as if he was expecting to have to intercede in a physical altercation. ‘Haley just came here to apologise.’
‘Apologise? Oh, that’s all fine then.’ She leaned against the shed, steadying her breath for a moment, then she said to Jed in a tone of false calm, ‘Did you hear the phone ringing out here? Well, guess who it was?’
It seemed like any kind of guess might be hazardous and Jed didn’t make an attempt. Lauren turned her eyes from Jed to Haley and said in a stiff, dire manner, ‘Take a guess, Haley.’
Haley sat rigid with terror.
‘Grenville Beckett. You probably don’t know who he is, do you? Well, he’s the editor-in-chief of the local paper. He says one of his journalists has taken a call from a woman claiming to be your mother. She says Jed got you pregnant. Are you? Are you pregnant?’
Haley looked as if she was trying to shrink out of existence.
‘That would be yes then?’ Lauren said.
Haley nodded. A very small, almost imperceptible nod. ‘But it’s not his,’ she said without looking up.
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s not his. We didn’t do anything.’ She spoke with a very plain earnestness.
The smallest flicker of relief passed over Lauren’s face and I recognised the feeling. She’d run out of the house not really knowing what to believe, all bent out of shape, ready to confront Jed about the baby, maybe find herself at the edge of tolerance and leave the marriage. I couldn’t say that I hadn’t had some tiny moments of doubt too, but I felt sure that I believed in him much more than Lauren did. What I saw instantly made me want to take a strong position – to be Jed’s stalwart. Where his wife would doubt him, I would stand steadfastly at his side.
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 18