Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  Marilyn sat down at the other end of the table from me. “You have to understand. Brian is like a little kid. He’s a wonderful musician and singer but he’s not exactly Mr. Capable. We have to watch out for him. We have to be very careful that people don’t…take advantage of him.”

  “Believe me, I don’t care about his money. I just want to see this record get made.”

  “You and everybody else,” Danny said.

  Diane said, “Is Ray Shackleford your real name?”

  I nodded. “I’m from Austin, Texas. I…fix stereos. Right now I don’t really have a fixed address.” Jesus, in a couple of years Charlie Manson would walk in from the desert and ask Brian’s brother Dennis to trust him in pretty much the same way. Manson came complete with his harem of hippie chicks who would fuck anyone he told them to, which Dennis couldn’t resist. I didn’t have anything to offer Marilyn except empty assurances.

  “I’m not crazy about this,” Marilyn said.

  “Why don’t you let Brian decide?” I said. “If Brian wants me to go, then I’m gone.”

  “Yeah, Mare,” said Brian from the doorway. “Why’ncha let Brian decide?” He said it in a goofy kind of gangster voice. He was wearing white shorts and nothing else, scratching the pale expanse of his stomach.

  Marilyn got up. She look resigned. “Morning, Brian,” she said. She moved skillets and dishes around. “I’ll fix you some breakfast.”

  That was all for the moment. Brian and Danny talked about Danny’s career. Brian told Danny how much he liked his voice, that he wanted a chance to produce him. Eventually Brian would, a prototype version of Three Dog Night that he would christen Redwood, but Mike Love would refuse to let Brian sign them to Brother Records.

  Marilyn brought Brian’s breakfast, which consisted of bacon, scrambled eggs, and an entire avocado. I ate a couple of pieces of toast. When Brian was done he stifled a theatrical belch and said, “It’s a gray day. I hate gray days. What can we do to save it?” Everybody ignored him, like they knew what was coming. “I know!” Brian said, holding up a finger. The gesture looked false and well-worn. “What about a trip to…Pacific Ocean Park!”

  “Oh, Brian,” Marilyn said.

  He looked around the table for support. Danny and Diane were watching the tabletop again. I shrugged and looked interested, feeling like I owed it to Graham, at least.

  “Maybe me and Ray’ll go,” he said.

  Marilyn took away his empty plate. “Fine, Brian.”

  He went to change clothes and I followed him as far as the den. I stood and looked at the jukebox until he came back, dressed in wheat jeans and a football jersey.

  The Rolls sat running in the driveway, a uniformed driver behind the wheel. It was hazy and cool, around sixty degrees, with rain a real possibility. Eventually Brian took a step toward the car and the driver got out and opened the doors for us.

  The back of the Rolls was tricked out like a limo, with a small bar and an eight-track player and a radio tuned to KHJ Boss Radio. They played “Sugartown” by Nancy Sinatra and “I’m Losing You” by the Temptations and “Good Vibrations,” which was hovering at number two, then they played “Born Free” by Roger Williams to take them into the news. I’d forgotten what it’s like to hear so many different kinds of music on one station, how it used to be that the same person could like different kinds of music, pop and Motown and psychedelic too.

  We drove west on Sunset toward to the ocean. I’d taken the same trip with Graham and the difference was astonishing. There were long stretches of open countryside, followed by pockets of civilization that were more like individual country towns than segments of one monolithic city. Cars whipped around us through oncoming traffic and made me think of Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve.”

  We turned south on the coast highway. The Rolls was so smooth and quiet it was like watching it on a movie screen. Half the cars on the road seemed to be trailing smoke and I remembered that they didn’t have emission controls yet, that the air outside was worse than in the eighties.

  When the news came on it was full of a big drug bust at Santa Monica High. Nine kids had been arrested for smoking pot, and the city was in shock. A police psychologist said they were using marijuana to “overcome the insecurities of being a teenager.” That made Brian laugh. Up in Berkeley, Mario Savio was leading protests against Navy recruitment on campus. The sportscast was about the first-ever Super Bowl coming up in January at the L.A. Coliseum.

  “If you’re from the future,” Brian said, during a Pepsi ad, “who’s going to win the Super Bowl?”

  I shook my head. “That’s more than twenty years ago for me. I’m not that big a sports fan, anyway.”

  “You’re not convincing me, here. What about ‘Good Vibrations’? Does it ever make it to number one?”

  “Week of December tenth,” I said. “That one I know. It’s my wife’s birthday.”

  “The December tenth Billboard’ll be out this Friday. We can check up on you.” After a couple of seconds he said, “So your wife’s Sagittarius. What about you?”

  “Capricorn. December thirtieth.”

  “Uh-oh. You guys ever had your charts done? I mean they do still do charts in the future, right?”

  “It’s a little late for charts.” There was something in my throat. I cleared it out and said, “I don’t really think we’re going to make it.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud. Having the words actually out there scared me.

  “How long you guys been together?”

  “Together for eleven years. Married for ten.”

  “That seems like such a long time. I’ve only known Marilyn four years and it seems like forever sometimes.”

  It shocked me too. I’d forgotten that Marilyn was only eighteen. From the way she acted, she could have passed for a seasoned thirty. Being a full-time mother to Brian had done it.

  “It’s so intense,” Brian said. “It’s like…I don’t know. I can’t say it. I really admire guys like Van Dyke, that are so articulate. It’s like the time per se, I mean the years, they don’t really mean anything. Only the emotions. Maybe there isn’t anything else in the whole universe. Just emotions. The only thing that’s real is how we feel about something, not the thing itself.”

  We passed the pier at Santa Monica. POP was just ahead. If my feelings were the only things that were real, I was in trouble. My feelings were all over the map. They could fly out of my hands and I would wind up back in 1989. “We don’t have to do this,” I said. “We could go back to the studio and you could do some work.”

  “It’s too cloudy to work. Maybe tonight.”

  “It’s all so fragile,” I said. “The littlest thing can just…”

  “Relax,” Brian said. “Smile.”

  The DJ said, “Here’s something from last year by the Kinks.” I recognized the opening chords of “Something Better Beginning.”

  Brian turned the radio up. “Just listen,” he said.

  Ray Davies sang about dancing the last dance with some girl he’d just met, wondering what lay ahead. Heartbreak, or the start of something big. The song was about more than just a boy and a girl. Sitting there in the mist and drizzle, the dusty, comforting smell of the heater filling the back seat, it seemed to tell me everything I would ever need to know.

  Brian said, “It’s the whole world, see? It’s like we’re just waking up. New music, new ideas. It’s only the start of something, something incredible.” He looked over at me. “But you’ve seen it, right? You know where it’s all headed.”

  “It’s going to be big,” I said. “The next three or four years are going to be so intense some people will never get over them. They’ll be talking about them for the rest of their lives.” Like me, I thought.

  Brian wrote “HELP ME” in backward letters in the mist on his window. “What would you do?” he said. “If somebody could tell you the future? Would you want to know? I mean, sometimes all you have is hope, and if you knew, it would take that away.�
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  “In the first place, I don’t want to tell you. Besides, if you make your album maybe it’ll come out different.”

  How could I tell him? Even if I wanted to? The next summer would be the Summer of Love, and fifty thousand kids would descend on San Francisco in their tribal colors. I would smoke my first joint in the garden shed behind my parents’ house. All over the country, vague notions of change would clarify, as they already had in California. The problem was greed and hatred. The answer was peace and love. The way to get there was music and drugs. We knew we could change the world.

  Then came 1968. While Morrison turned into the Lizard King in L.A., one step ahead, as always, the rest of us found out it wasn’t going to be easy. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot down and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago showed us how futile and empty our dreams of political power were.

  Then came Manson and Altamont and the dream was over. Brian Jones was the first to die, then Hendrix and Joplin and Blind Owl Wilson of Canned Heat, all by the end of 1970. It was hope and promise turned to ashes, grass and LSD turned to coke and heroin, heavy music and acid rock come to mean songs that weighed you down and burned to the touch.

  It was the question that haunted my generation. What happened to us? Where did we go wrong? Drugs were a symptom, not a cause. Maybe we couldn’t change the American political system overnight. We could have gone outside and around it. It was more like something was wrong in the initial conditions, some built-in flaw that meant the structure would never hold.

  Morrison had understood it better than anyone. He knew that “no limits” meant sooner or later you would end up looking over the edge of a cliff. Morrison didn’t even slow down, just sailed right off. He knew we were all doomed and he didn’t want to be the last one at the party. His girlfriend, Pamela, said when she found him dead in that bathtub in Paris he was smiling off into space. Not lost, like Cream sang in “Mother’s Lament,” but gone before.

  When I was trying to find the Smile album, back in 1989, I’d started to feel the same way. Like there was some kind of curse built into it, the same curse that had ruined the sixties. That if you tried to make music with no limits it would fall apart. Even so I had to try. I had to get into the studio with Brian, add my will to his, see if together we couldn’t make it happen.

  The driver let us off in front of the park. There was a six-legged arch over the ticket booth that looked like the 1950’s idea of the future, where everything was triangular or kidney-shaped. It took me a minute to figure out it was supposed to be a starfish. A pole came out of the top with plastic bubbles all up and down it and sea horses at the top. Even the walls of the booth were curved, and it would have all been wonderfully modern-looking if the plastic hadn’t been pitted and cloudy from the salt air and the stucco hadn’t started to crack.

  “Have you been here before?” Brian asked.

  “No,” I said. “Just heard a lot about it.”

  Brian bought two tickets and we went through into a courtyard of concrete pools and fountains. At the end was an elevator with a clear tube through the middle. The doors closed behind us, the tube filled with water, and gurgling sound effects came through hidden speakers. Brian grinned like a lunatic.

  When we came out it was like one of my dreams of swimming without scuba gear, of being able to breathe underwater, like in the Hendrix song. Windows opened up on fish tanks with sharks and rays and all kinds of other fish. The walls were sea-green and white, with peeling murals of waves and fish and seaweed. Sunlight came faintly through yellow-green skylights overhead. Seedy as it was, I could see that Brian loved it. Memories, maybe. I was getting into it myself, maybe only because it was such a perfect artifact of its time, a time when the future was someplace I really wanted to go, full of sleek machines and flights to Mars.

  After that was a midway with the usual hot dog stands and skill games. There weren’t more than twenty other people on the whole length of it. Behind the popcorn and frying grease I could smell the real ocean, salt and fog and decay.

  We rode miniature cars on the Ocean Freeway and I went along with him on the cable car, despite my fear of heights. It took us out over the ocean and all the way out to Mystery Island, a pocket Adventureland with thatched huts and palm trees and a miniature train. Then I stupidly agreed to try Mr. Dolphin, a ninety-foot-high tower with enclosed cars on the end of rotating arms that spun out over the park. I knew right away it was a mistake when I felt my stomach lurch and my vision close down and my head start to pound. There was nothing to do except ride it out and when it was over I had to sit on a bench for a while.

  “Hey, man, are you okay?” Brian asked.

  “Not really. I never could handle rides like that. Christ, I used to get carsick when I was a kid, every time the road started to curve.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “I haven’t been on one since I was a kid. I didn’t know it would get to me this bad. Now I’ve screwed up your day. I really feel lousy.” I wanted to cry.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yeah it does. I feel like such a sissy.”

  Brian was quiet for a minute, and then he said. “Your dad used to yell at you for it, didn’t he? Even though you couldn’t help it.”

  “Yeah. At least twice I threw up down the back of his neck while he was driving.” Brian thought that was really funny. “I don’t know why I couldn’t just throw up on the back seat,” I said. “I would feel it coming and I would stand up and try to say something and then it was too late.”

  “Is your dad still around?”

  “He died a few months ago.”

  “Wow, man, I’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t be. If I’m not, you shouldn’t be.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that about your old man. I mean, he was your father.”

  “Come on, Brian. Everybody knows your father treats you like shit.”

  Brian got up. “You think you could eat something?”

  I could see I’d gone too far. I didn’t know how to apologize. “I could try.”

  We got pizza and beer from Joseph Primavera’s stand, the guy who claimed to have single-handedly started the pizza craze in the States. We sat down at a table and Brian looked at his paper cup full of beer and said, “To this day, I can’t stand to drink out of a glass. A paper cup like this is okay, that you can’t see through, you know, but out of a bottle would be better. A clear glass, it just, it makes me want to puke. It’s because when I was a kid I went in the bedroom and saw my old man’s glass eye, he had it in a water glass next to the bed while he was sleeping. He used to terrorize me with the goddamn thing.”

  After a while he said, “Marilyn and I want to have kids. I guess you already know if we do or not, right?” I didn’t say anything. “I’m scared. I’m worried about what kind of father I would be. You know, that whole ‘When I Grow Up to Be a Man’ thing.”

  “You don’t have to be like your father,” I said, though Brian would eventually admit he had failed his kids, would go for years without talking to them. The only consolation was, I’d heard the grown-up Brian Wilson was genuinely proud of their musical careers and was able to say it in public. “Your dad didn’t like Pet Sounds, did he?”

  “Hated it. Said I still didn’t know how to write a popular song. But I didn’t write Pet Sounds to be popular, I wrote it to, you know, find a way to touch people.”

  “And if you could just get Smile completely perfect, then he’d have to see, right? He’d have to admit you know what you’re doing.”

  Brian looked down at his pizza. “Pretty stupid, huh? I guess I do feel like that.”

  “You can’t change him, Brian. You’re beating your head against a wall.”

  “That’s easy to say. He’s still my old man. He’s not going to disappear.” He suddenly stopped and turned his good ear, the left one, toward me. “You hear that?”

  “What?”

  “The sea gulls. That�
�s what I’m talking about, don’t you see? All the emotion in that sound. It sounds so lonely all by itself you don’t have to say anything else. You see what I mean? The lyrics can be about anything at all, but if you put that sound in there, everybody will know what you really mean. If I could only…” He made a fist with his right hand and rocked, almost imperceptibly, back and forth.

  I said, “I don’t know how long I can stay here. I just sort of appeared in front of your house. I could lose it any minute. I would really like, before that happens, to see you in the studio.”

  “You mean, like, put a session together? Get the Wrecking Crew in there?” The Wrecking Crew was what the top L.A. session musicians called themselves: Hal Blaine on drums, Tommy Tedesco and Glen Campbell on guitars, Carol Kaye or Ray Pohlman on bass, Leon Russell and Larry Knechtel on piano. The older session players hated them for doing rock and roll, said they were wrecking the business.

  “You’ve got basic tracks. I want to hear you finish something.” Do it for me, I wanted to say. In 1966 Brian’s father would have been forty-nine, just ten years older than me. Let me be your father just for today, let me give you the chance to hear somebody tell you how good this stuff is.

  Brian finished his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Okay, you want to see the studio, we can go by there. I’ll play you some of the tracks. But I can’t work if I don’t feel it, you understand?”

  The driver took us back to Sunset through light rain. The radio played “Ain’t Gonna Lie” by Keith and “Coming On Strong” by Brenda Lee. I’d started to feel shaky. I couldn’t tell if I’d actually heard those songs before or if they just sounded familiar, the way any good pop record is supposed to sound the first time you hear it.

  We parked in a driveway next to Western Studios. I followed Brian through the smoked-glass front doors into a reception area that was closed down. “Where is everybody?” I said.

  “There’s another studio down the street, United, same people own both of them. They’ve got a receptionist and everything there.”

  We turned right, then left down a long hallway. There was a young guy there in a white shirt and dark slacks, carrying a clipboard. “Hey, Brian,” he said nervously. “You didn’t, like, have Studio Three booked or anything did you?”