by Tot Taylor
Everyone seemed pleased as the lights went up. Morrie announced a ‘toilet’ break while Myra congratulated John, walking over to put her arm around him as Jackie took photographs of the assembled group for a forthcoming Rave feature and passed her telephone number to Justin.
Ash hit playback on the tape-machine and Ron began to improvise around the upcoming ‘Main Title’ on the piano.
‘Don’t spoil it, man,’ John snapped. ‘Haven’t got to that bit yet – don’t spoil it.’ The over-enthusiastic pianist switched to the theme to Daktari while Ashley rolled joints and Morrie lined up the next reel. Myra visibly relaxed as she removed her knitted cap to let her hair fall down across her wide shoulders. A most unlikely film producer, John thought. He may not have liked his collaborator much, but as she sat cross-legged in front of him with her kaftan and scarves and oversized sunglasses and cue-sheets and clipboards, he certainly desired her. A married oil heiress might not be that big a deal as a conquest. But one for whom he happened to be working would be. As he considered the odds, John Nightly had to conclude that any romantic involvement with Miss Knoll was not good protocol whichever way he looked at it.
But John also suspected that his unstoppable egotism, his unaccountable need to ‘score’ and his lack of self-respect after a couple of whiskeys and some hashish would probably lead him astray. Another notch to add to his by now difficult-to-recall tally. Or maybe it was just something to do. A new diversion; literally a new body to experience. Sleeping with someone was a very good way of getting to know them, as Pondy helpfully observed.
The producer glanced back in the boy’s direction and noticed him staring. She smiled a wholly empty smile back. Maybe she shared the same feelings, neither of them being what might be described as considerate people. They may not even have considered themselves. John Nightly and Myra Knoll were both capable of walking over others to achieve a self-imposed goal. The only difference being that John was so self-obsessed and distracted he was seldom aware that he was doing it.
‘It’s sounding good, honey.’ Myra complimented the composer while she continued to study the club’s interior.
The Jack, a ‘listed building’ in Soho drinking circles, was a disgrace. Its once-shimmering velveteen walls lay heavily damp-stained with beer, mould and who-knows-what. The stench of cheap second-hand cologne hit the unsuspecting punter like a sedative. It drifted through the corridors and passageways and lingered in the common parts. No – the entire place was common. Without any attempt being made to preserve any of the listed decorative elements from the club’s authentic Regency interior, once-proud single-timber joists were now having to support polypropylene fixtures and fittings. Prefab skirting intervened between original Welsh-oak floors and Rococo recesses. K-Lord curtains adorned ornate hand-crafted window boxes while built-in pear-wood seating had been usurped by plastic garden seats and pub benches. The overall decorative style best summed up as ‘modern vulgar’.
The front and back entrances to the club were patrolled by a couple of heavies so stereotypical they might’ve been assembled from a kit. ‘Alright, darlin’? What time you on then?’ chirped Tommy, ‘the fat one’ – they were both obese – as Ms Knoll landed on the welcome mat.
‘Long after your bedtime, honey,’ came the quick-as-a-flash response. Justin cast his eye over the small ads vying for competition on the club’s noticeboard.
‘This is a good one, Ash,’ Justin chuckled. ‘Large, new chest, in beautiful condition, to view tel: FUL 603.’
‘Ya really wanna view that, Just?’
John ordered drinks all round from the Coca-Cola bar, telling the band that it would be a short break as Karmov, the film’s director, was due in to take a look at the next scene.
‘I have more projects coming up. Perhaps you’ll be interested in another movie?’ Myra inhaled from her filter-tip and checked her make-up in a tiny, bejewelled compact.
‘As long as it’s something… different to this one. I’m not entirely sure I’m, well… any good at this yet,’ replied the composer, before deciding to qualify his less-than-enthusiastic response. ‘I know I can write the music, but I don’t know if it’s really… entirely suitable… or… even proper film music, for that, uh…’
Taken aback by her collaborator not exactly leaping to the challenge, Myra raised her eyebrows in a questioning, rather deflated way.
‘Maybe that’s what’s good about it. What you’ve written. Maybe it’s not really film music. Doesn’t sound like film music usually sounds.’ The producer considered for a second. ‘Maybe film music doesn’t sound like film music anymore.’
John sent a grateful smile Myra’s way.
‘I have two scripts. One British – to be shot here – from a book with a title I hope we can keep.’ Myra cleared her throat. ‘Shipwreck at Pistol Meadow.’
‘… that is a good title.’
‘Very English story,’ she explained. ‘Smugglers’ story. Set in Cornwall, where King Arthur came from. Kind of… atmospheric… That’s popular back home. Right now it is. Something dark and… English. Gothic melodrama. What my father would call “dirty-looking films”.’ Myra edged further up on her chair. ‘But I want to make a realistic… hard-hitting movie. Not one about Dick Turpin.’ She took another drag.
‘and the other one?’
‘No title yet. But I’m talking to R. D. Laing… Ronald Laing.’
‘The psychiatrist?’
‘“Anti-psychiatrist”… isn’t it?’ The barman brought a tray holding six half-size tumblers. Myra picked up her drink.
‘I actually like the title The Divided Self… his book,’ she continued. ‘I wondered whether… a kind of modern, romantic story, could be written around someone trying to help someone else… who needed their help… Both needing each other… equally – as much as each other – needing the same thing from each other.’ Myra paused. ‘Like a patient needs their psychiatrist… and vice versa. Some kind of… mental… “tempera-mental” story…’
John signalled the band go downstairs and get on with it. He picked up his guitar.
‘I’d be interested in that. I don’t know about smugglers… don’t know if what I would think of doing would be what you… want,’ he reasoned, excusing himself in a roundabout way. ‘I don’t know if I can really do anything – in that line… Music to accompany film, or “a film”, I mean… other than… what I would naturally or… normally do anyway.’ He looked round for his cigarettes. ‘Maybe not a “problem” exactly… but…’
Myra smiled politely and grabbed her editing notes. As she turned away she eavesdropped on the conversation going on behind; mindless chatter between individual band members about their billing on the film’s poster. Unsurprised but unfazed, she got up and moved through the bar towards the stairs and back to the session.
It was hard to hear yourself think in the corridor, as the bass pedals of a Wurlitzer organ thundered up through the floor of the club, dislodging ancient plaster while helping some unfortunate grind her way through her act downstairs.
The producer continued to take in the scene. A naked light-bulb caked in fly shit illuminated the entrance to the Jack creating a fine first impression to all-comers. The girls’ performance rota – ‘April: 2pm, May: 3pm, June: 4pm…’ – was pinned up above statutory notices concerning the status of the club’s on/off drinks licence, fire regulations – ‘In Case of Fire: Move Your Arse!!!’ – and the ludicrously expensive bar tariff.
What was she doing in London anyway? Myra could so easily have stayed back home, riding out with her much-mentioned husband, surveying her father’s vast estates. Helping with the daily round, as she would when she was Daddy’s girl. Mending fences, not breaking them. The lush open spread of Orange County. The finely trellised lawns of White Farm Ranch, all 37 years’ worth of Knoll ancestral home.
Myra and her brother Bill rode the open range until they reached deserts of epiphyllum, opuntia and giant barrel-cacti. Her brother’s cattle and her fath
er’s buffalo herds grazed among redwood, cypress and overgrown yew. The adolescent tomboy had enjoyed the privileged lifestyle Bill Knoll Snr had provided for her and her baby brother by means of his and his own father’s hard work. If Myra was ever going to strike oil herself, she most likely wasn’t going to find it in London’s armpit. Bill could make neither head nor tail of his daughter’s choice of career. Why his little girl wanted to leave the family quinta and hang around in musty old England with its inedible food and its fey, unmanly types he hadn’t a clue; and he was damned certain his wife wouldn’t have either.
Bill had not enjoyed Pitfall. Though of course he’d told his daughter that he had. It was ‘a tough picture’. With no real suspense or romance, and certainly no thrills. He found the two leads unattractive, skinny – ‘creepy’ even. And the music? He probably hadn’t even noticed it. Maybe it was the music that was creepy and not the actors. Maybe they both were – he couldn’t tell. Bill Knoll was a simple man, as he pronounced to everyone within minutes of meeting them, and wrote to his daughter that she ought to be making musicals, anyway. Like Kismet, The Sound of Music or The Music Man. Big films. With big tunes. The word ‘music’ in the title, if at all possible. So the audience knew what they were dealing with. Films that everyone liked. That the box office liked. Or maybe a Western. It didn’t have to be an old John Wayne one; it could be a modern Western… like Butch Cassidy. Bill loved Butch Cassidy. Butch Cassidy summed it up. A real film, a ‘real’ man’s ‘real’ film. The movie of the moment, with Butch and Sundance the kind of cowboys or cowmen he himself might employ at BeeKay. That kind of movie was most definitely the way to go.
But Bill didn’t know the half of it. Because while the oil executive imagined his daughter at the tennis club, or the broker’s brunch, Myra was out there at the very heart of the action. Slumming it with the real down-and-outs – the artists themselves. Hanging with ‘difficult’ actor types in damp rehearsal rooms, accompanying arrogant and seemingly dim-witted musicians to concerts, after-hours drinking clubs and dope parties, earning herself a reputation as a regular party girl, or at least when she wasn’t up at the crack of dawn on a film set – in which case her whole persona would revert and she’d be as sober and clear-headed as an executioner.
* A former superintendent in the typing pool of the Paymaster General, ‘sing-along’ pianist Mrs Mills (Gladys) was signed by Dave Clark Five and Rolling Stones manager Eric Easton after being spotted at Woodford Golf Club by EMI talent scouts. Her sing-along singles and albums, recorded at Abbey Road Studios, became million-sellers, including ‘Mrs Mills’ Party’ (PMC 1264), 1965, ‘Let’s Have Another Party’ (PMC 7035), 1967, and ‘Another Flippin’ Party’ (PCS 1753), 1972. Her seasonal offering for 1977 was ‘Glad Tidings’ (EMI OU2197).
‘It’s really okay to get out of your head – as long as you put your whole heart into it’
John Nightly, SUMHA, Los Angeles, 1972
As the new year turned once more, John Nightly chose to disregard his manager’s mostly self-inflicted problems and concentrate on making music. John threw himself into his work, ignoring his wife, his various consorts and his expensively retainered band, who wished for nothing more than to stop sitting around in London and ‘get back on the road’.
John fleshed out his orchestral sketch, now re-titled Symphony in Orange Ink, until he was satisfied with the five short movements before handing it over to Jonathan Foxley to orchestrate. The composer checked that the combination of instruments, the timbre and the various orchestral weights and colours as chosen by Jonathan were exactly as he envisaged during three day-long rehearsals at the Royal Academy of Music with the college’s second-year student orchestra.
This new piece, a strand of John’s output often regarded as being overly dark or melancholic – ‘misery tunes’ as Iona put it – suddenly appeared driven by a fresh, youthful spirit; particularly the slow, fourth movement, its ever-ascending sequence indicating a new influence or ‘spark’ in the composer’s own very geocentric world. A person or event he could not help but refer to in his music.
Again, Orange Ink received a single performance; though favourably reviewed, it lacked the much-missed input of his manager, a collaborator able to take advantage of every opportunity so that all concerned might benefit from resulting ticket and record sales. Had John Pond been engaged, the sold-out premiere at the London Dance Theatre’s temporary Covent Garden space could have been replicated many times over.
With choreography by Donna Vost, and a spirited performance coerced out of inexperienced players by Jonathan, the one thing missing (as the reviews pointed out) were those big John Nightly melodies. Those Firebird-like themes, so rich, confident and strong – and modal – that they required neither harmonic underpinning, nor the context and framework of long-form structure. Orange Ink seemed to have everything going for it except those big, life-giving tunes.
But there was a good reason for their absence. The composer was saving the absolute best of everything for his next blast, his ‘best shot’ – a piece that was to be the culmination of everything he’d written so far, as well as combining ‘all of the music I’ve ever heard in my life’. A kind of coming together, a distillation of fabric that had been sourced, absorbed and filtered, put through the John Nightly sieve, in order that he might complete this master project, this definitive account, highest of high points, before abandoning everything he’d ever committed to tape – the lot of it – to begin again, begin afresh, as he often talked of, ‘at POINT ZERO’.
As he entered the third decade of his life, the ‘Jesus decade’ (again, as he himself referred to it), John Nightly wished more than anything to make his mark in the serious music world, in order that if, in his morbid sensibility, he had gotten run over by the proverbial bus, dropped dead in the proverbial street, fell out of the sky one day or fell victim to his new favourite fear – onstage assassination – he might have something of real value to leave behind. This best shot was going to be truly remarkable, something to be reckoned with, to be remembered by. ‘Progressive’, ‘groundbreaking’, ‘pioneering’; those hyperbolic adjectives applied by promoters of contemporary culture to so many new contrivances would have an undeniable, almost ‘human’ right, as a genuine pre-emptive strike superglued to whichever title John might ascribe to this new imagining. Like the ‘shuttle songs’ or ‘supernova symphonies’, blasted into space in order to represent the best of our earth to alien civilisations, John Nightly would conceive his ‘world hymns for mankind’ – music for the horses to graze by, music for the bees to buzz to, music as eternal as birdsong, as incarnate as human flesh – to be as contingent and unfailing as the human spirit itself.*
Even the format would cross boundaries, push envelopes and cut edges. Three separate LPs played on three separate turntables, each in sync with one another, delivering one piece of extremely big-sounding music. Triple-Stereo indeed. A real triple-album. A trilogy. A triumvirate. A triptych. A trinity. Or ‘Triplets!’ as Iona declared.
A trip, and hopefully a triumph, this Black Mass or Black Symphony was going to be proper and posh. A kind of ‘village cantata’. Multi-dimensional, multimedia, in its own world, on its own terms, non-concessionary and non-compromising, an all-weather Pop Music Gesamtkunstwerk, as John Pond christened it. A savenheer for the serious listener but also a ‘living work’ for all people – ‘For Everyman. Everyone Everywhere,’ Pond insisted, supergluing as many adjectives as he could summon – and, from its composer’s point of view, a work approaching sacramental status. That’s why he called it the Mink Bungalow Requiem.
* The 1965 Gemini VI space mission included ‘Hello Dolly’ as sung by Jack Jones. For the 1968 Apollo II moon mission flight director Eugene F. Krantz psyched himself up with John Philip Sousa marches. In 1972, the Apollo 17 crew shipped the Carpenters’ ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’.
note:
5.24.2011. ‘The crew of the space shuttle Endeavour will awaken today to the sound of Rush. A one-
minute clip of Rush's “Countdown”, from 1982's Signals, will be beamed from Earth to the shuttle at 6pm EST. The song was selected by mission specialist Mike Fincke and coincides with Victoria Day in Canada. Watch it live on NASA TV. This is the final flight for Endeavour and the second-to-last scheduled space-shuttle flight for NASA. Rush, in the meantime, are on their Time Machine tour, which continues Wednesday in London and will wrap up in Seattle in July.’ (www.BraveWords.com)
note:
The space probes Voyagers 1 & 2, both launched in September 1977, carried onboard a gold record containing the sounds of the Earth – surf, wind, thunder, whale calls, greetings in 55 languages – and music by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Dark was the Night’ by Blind Willie Johnson. Frank Sinatra’s 1964 recording of Bart Howard’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ was played by the astronauts of Apollo 10 on their lunar-orbital mission and again on the moon itself by the astronaut Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 landing.
‘…y’ ’ad y’straights, and y’ ’ad y’ ’eads’, y’know.
Y’ ’ad y’ ‘freaks’ and what they used to call
y’ ‘freaky beaks’ [laughs].
John was… ’e was what people mighta thought of as…
’e was like… I dunno…
like… ’e was the ’ead ’ead… if y’know
what ah mean…’
Lee Hide
‘The record I like most right now is “Classical Gas” by Mason Williams. I love it.’
John Nightly, Scene & Heard, BBC Radio 1, 17 June 1968
If Myra Knoll was full of herself then Donna Vost was full of doubt. Donna experienced many more ‘unconfident’ than confident days, while Myra, even if she was prone to the odd moment of self-doubt, was not one to let the facade drop. In terms of personality, as well as physical appearance, they could not have been more different.