“You hurt her feelings.”
“Hurt her feelings? I spent five effing days in jail because of her. Now she won’t let me out of marriage jail because no offer ever satisfies her.”
“You can make this be good for both of you. I can get her to cooperate in the studio. Do the production and make this a good album.”
“Is this blackmail, Ephraim?”
“No, I’m considering every possible way to stop you from sabotaging your own career.”
“It’s not sabotage to want my music played the way I conceived it and performed by people I trust.”
“It’s definitely sabotage if you don’t also figure out how to make money doing what you do. It’s not possible for everyone, but it is possible for you, Jason. Work with me.”
“We must be living in parallel universes, Ephraim. What does ‘no’ mean in your universe?”
“That I will have to get up tomorrow and work on yet another way to convince you.”
~
Karl met me at Lowell’s in the Pike Market, where you can see the ferry coming in; best food with a view downtown. We’d met there at seven in the morning since high school, when we had to pony up enough cash to split a plate of eggs. That morning I pointed to that irony in comparison to our current lives, but Karl was too ready to change the subject back to how fucked up my life is.
“You know what’s comical?” Karl said. “You’re a rock star who doesn’t do drugs, hasn’t had sex in a year, and his old fans hate him because the last album doesn’t sound like rock-and-roll. Now that’s damn funny. Maybe you can sell the options to your life’s story as a situation comedy. Then you’d have to stop acting like your life is as much a tragedy as Hamlet’s.”
“Hamlet was sane until he foreswore doing the sweet thing with Ophelia. That’s when he turned into a comic figure.”
“Dang, Jason, trust you to have a uniquely contrarian viewpoint, even on Shakespeare.”
“Think about it, Karl. One could posit that it wasn’t his father’s ghost but deprivation that put our buddy Hamlet over the edge.” His father’s ghost. That was worth a laugh a minute. I changed the subject. “It reminds me of when Arlo thought there wouldn’t be laugh tracks on TV anymore when we read in the paper that the inventor died.”
“So is Arlo your stalker?”
“I can’t prove it, and he’s so disorganized, I don’t know how he could pull it off. Maybe he gets Quentin Henderson to ghost-write his blog posts. Can you find a job for Arlo this summer? He needs to be employed, and I won’t let him come with us as guitar tech or roadie or anything else.”
“Perhaps Arlo can help Cynthia do your booking and publicity.” Karl help up his cup to the waitperson, seeking a refill. “How much has she lined up for you so far that doesn’t include Dominique? I mean besides the benefit you’re playing this weekend. Oh, don’t sulk. I’m married. Pouty looks mean nothing to me. Just more Seattle rain running down my neck.”
“Maybe that’s how I look every morning.”
“Ephraim is right. You need a real manager planning ahead for you instead of a part-time attorney sweeping up behind you.”
“I have come this far doing business myself.”
“No, you haven’t. Beau did every lick of your business work, until he was too sick to go on. Ephraim picked up half of it until you—”
“Does Ephraim pay you too, Karl? Every time I turn around, he has my balls in a nutcracker over yet another demand.”
“Ian and I are your oldest friends, right? We both think—sit still and listen, OK? Separate out Ephraim and business from whatever the hell is going on in Dominique’s mind. He knows the business, and he has your best interests at heart. What he proposes is not a different direction for your music. It’s just business science, so that there’s an actual direction to your decisions. You can’t call your winter of discontent in Europe a career move. It was more like you put yourself in a corner for a timeout.”
“I created a lot of new material with Ian last winter. We’re giving it strength and body in rehearsal now. We’ll make money from my timeout.”
“You need to do exactly that. You want to sink money into your girlfriend’s nonprofit rat-hole, which as your attorney I do not recommend. You need to pay for the next few years of timeouts and new directions. Ian needs an income-producing partner, not a petulant gambler.”
“Petulant? Karl, what the hell?”
“Look, Ian has big bills to pay for years to come. Cynthia’s brother’s new care is not cheap. Keeping four grandparents on assisted living—how does he pay those bills for God-alone-knows how many years? He set a half-dozen cousins up in business. Yet he won’t do studio work for others, because he’s so loyal to you. Meanwhile you want to walk away from a record label that’s begging to re-sign you. Everyone else is supposed to go diddle themselves while you reinvent your own private reality?”
“OK, I’m an effing asshole. You made your case. Where the hell do I find a business manager? I’m not getting an agent who’ll talk me into living a life I don’t want, just so he can take a huge percent of the money I make.”
“I wish I could do it myself.” Karl seemed wistful.
“Why can’t you?”
“I’m married. I have a law practice. I have to be an adult.”
“This grownup stuff bites a big one.”
“Is it true you haven’t had sex for a year?”
“I made love with a goddess a couple of weeks ago.” I seemed wistful.
“But that girl won’t sleep with you again?”
“She’s a woman, not a girl, and she’s still getting used to me being someone else. Why are you asking me?”
“I was wondering if I gave up law and became your manager, would I get more sex? Because if I quit law, my wife is bound to quit me. If she doesn’t quit anyway, which she probably will.”
“Karl, you’re the great paragon of married bourgeois virtue.”
“Except I think my wife hates me. She says I love my work more than I love her.”
“Dominique used to say that to me, too. It was flat out true.”
“Alas, it’s also true for me. My wife thinks that work is just how you get money to buy things. The fact that she doesn’t understand how important my work is just leaves me feeling lonely.”
“Now that bites worse than being a grownup. Sleeping by someone and feeling lonely.”
“Don’t write any new songs about it, OK? I feel like you’re a sneak thief, stealing scenes from my life. Speaking of sneaks, have you told your girlfriend who you are?”
“She refuses to talk about the past, and I’m not hiding much. She sees all of my everyday life, except for the recent crap that got public attention. That will go away soon enough, once people forget about me.”
“What about your money, Jason?”
“She seems about as blind about money as she is about popular culture, except for funding her institute. Are you paying for this bill or am I?”
“Either way, you write the check in the end, because if I pay, it’s a business expense. Or rather, Warren writes the check when he pays your bills. Here, I’ll pay the bill. Don’t leave a separate tip. You tip too much.”
“The waitress is in a folk duo that plays house concerts and coffeehouses. She’s financing her heart’s work by pouring coffee and juggling plates of eggs and hash browns.”
“Twenty percent is sufficient. You don’t make enough coin to be the goddamn Musicians’ Aid Society of Greater Seattle. Worry about Ian and Toby and whoever else you have riding your new band wagon.”
59 ~ “Get Rhythm”
JASON
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, Ian and I took Zak to the gamelan shed and, as expected, it blew Zak’s mind. As I’d planned with Paul Harris, we recorded the three hours we spent together, working with members of the gamelan. It’s crude to say, but it felt like taping a boy while he learned to make love. As I watched Zak, ecstatic in percussive wonderland, it was as if you could see
the fusing of his adolescent bones into a grown man’s skeleton. While we’d been rehearsing all those long hours in the past few weeks, he had beaten his way out of his chrysalis and begun shaking his wings, getting ready to fly.
When Ian drove us back across town, I turned the conversation back to business.
“Zak, you should listen to Bob Wills and Hank Williams. We’re going honky-tonkin’ for the afternoon work. Now I need you in the morning sessions too.”
“What about Johnnie?”
“He’s playing in another band.”
What I didn’t say: that Johnnie and I had a long talk that morning about how it wasn’t working, though he already knew it and started the conversation himself by saying he wanted to quit. Johnnie was good—four years ago, I would have kept him—but he’s not the percussion genius Zak is, who’s spoiling me with his excitement. I’d already found Johnnie a gig in another band, having never promised anything more than a couple of weeks in the studio. He knew it himself, but it bummed me, because the band was going exciting new places and Johnnie didn’t have what it would take to be invited along. It wasn’t as bad as saying, “I found a new lover”; it was worse: you’re good, but I choose Zak.
Zak, however, said, “I don’t think I can do mornings. My afternoon teachers, like Miss Neville, have been letting me slide, but I don’t think my morning teachers will ignore when I skip. I can’t do it until mid-June.”
“We have to be done by the second of June. I expect to be back on the road soon after.”
Zak looked so glum that I realized what a total effing jerk I am.
“Oh geez, Zak. I’m sorry. I did not mean this to be an ultimatum.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll be there. It is not like I might miss anything at school. What time do you start?”
“Eight,” I said. “You’ll find me in the studio by seven-thirty.”
“OK. I have to take the bus across town. But I’ll be there.”
“I need you in the morning because I’m trying something that hasn’t been done before, so I need a virgin.”
“I’m not a virgin,” Zak said. Adamant.
“In the recording studio, dummy. Can I ask you a couple of questions?”
“Shoot.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about the piano?”
Zak shrugged as if it were an irrelevant question: why didn’t you tell me about your opposable thumb? “The piano is just another percussion instrument. I’m planning a Hammond B3 surprise for you for the reworked version of ‘White City Blues.’”
“Frickin’ hell, Zak. You could give me a heart attack with any more of your surprises.”
“Next question?”
“How much do you work each day?”
“At least twelve hours. I have to get up by five-thirty though, to get all the practice that I want. School eats too much of the day.” He was biting his thumb in agitation. “I could quit school. I turn eighteen next week. What happens if I quit school?”
“Shoot, you’re asking me? Talk it over with your folks.”
“We’ve been ‘talking it over’ all year, though the only talking is them screaming at me about ruining my life. They want me to go to college.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“No, I want to work full time in a band—or two bands, or three, if I have to. I don’t know what two more months of high school gets me.”
“I think you should ask Susi. She knows about stuff like school.”
“Then I might as well quit. She told me yesterday that you should never decide the future because of what someone else wants you to do.”
It was my job to apply caution, but I was the last person to know what that might be. Before I could come up with some lame-ass admonishment, Zak asked the hard question.
“Are you taking the band on the road with you? Or going alone?”
From his place in the driver’s seat, Ian glanced over at me for what seemed like too long while we barreled up I-5 at sixty-five miles an hour.
“I haven’t got any gigs wired for the new band yet,” I said. “Except the benefit that we’re playing this weekend. I’m behind with that effort. So I can’t ask you to tie up your time, waiting for me to find us work.”
As Ian turned his attention back to the road, the grinding of his jaw pulled tension lines across his whole shaved head.
Yeah, the Musicians’ Aid Society. That’s me. Launch your career with me. See if you can make enough spare change gigging for me to get your teeth cleaned and your rent paid for a month. When we run low on cash, I’ll share the extra guitar picks that have the band’s URL printed on them.
The sole solution I could see was for me to work harder.
This band was getting to be too good not to be heard.
60 ~ “All the Right Reasons”
JASON
“WHERE IS EVERYONE?”
Susi came late, so late that I thought I’d expire from dread. I’d worked myself into a racehorse lather of anxiety combined with an adrenalin rush of hope, so that I had to strip off one shirt and settle for a sleeveless t-shirt in order to pretend to be cool and calm when she arrived. My hands were as damp as Arlo’s, and I washed them a half dozen times, grateful that Ian wasn’t around to harangue me for being the obsessive jerk that I am. When she came, I could hardly look at her, knowing she’d see the fear in my eyes.
“Everyone had an excuse for taking the night off,” I said. If they didn’t have an excuse to begin with, I had assigned one to each of them. “It’s just us rehearsing new songs tonight. Do you mind?”
“No,” she said, stepping back as if I were the Big Bad Wolf instead of the patient Little Prince.
I took a breath and went ahead, as if I were brave.
“Susi, I want you to listen to something.”
“More of your music?”
“No, some female vocalists. I burned this CD for you today. I still can’t understand how you missed the whole last half of the twentieth century.”
“I was busy doing other things.”
My parents’ whole generation got the idea from rock music that you could beg for love and maybe get it, which must have bred a phalanx of stalkers incapable of believing that no means no. I was hoping I hadn’t inherited it, because I was about to beg her for even more than love.
“Never mind. Please just listen, Susi.”
I played each song without comment. We listened to Janis giving away another piece of her heart, Lucinda changing the locks on her door, Emmylou saying goodbye on Wrecking Ball. By the time Marianne Faithfull was begging to hear it said in broken English, Susi held up her hand, distressed. She started to speak a couple of times and stopped. She fidgeted and twisted her hands, then switched off the music.
“The last one is too painful to bear, Jason.”
“Do you have any patience left? I want you to hear some of my music.”
“Like what we’ve been working on? That would be a consolation after hearing this.”
“No. This is different. Ian and the others are working with me on this new piece. Here are the lyrics.”
I couldn’t be more obvious about what I was asking her. I couldn’t expose my soul in a more naked way than this, playing an unfinished piece of music for her, when I wanted her to take me for what I am.
When the music ended, and after a roar of silence for a long moment, she said, “You want me to sing this.”
“Please consider it.”
She stared at the lyrics without looking at me.
Still nervous, I spoke to fill the silence. “This feels like asking someone to try an unusual sexual practice. I’m sorry. I put you on the spot.”
“No, I’m not afraid of the challenge. I just don’t know how to listen to this music. Can I keep those songs on the other disc? I need to understand better what you want.”
“Will you try to sing this? Can we start now?” I couldn’t keep either the eagerness or the anxiety from my voice.
“Yes, but
could you put your shirt on, please? I’m not used to rehearsing with men clothed in their underwear.”
61 ~ “Flesh and Blood”
SUSI
IT TAKES ME A MOMENT each night to force myself to not look at that patch of hair he left on his chin. I’m not so divorced from the modern world that I don’t know it’s in style, but on Jason it seems such a startling declaration. Secondary sex characteristics advertising the presence of that much testosterone interfered with my ability to breathe. When I forced myself to look past that, my mind wandered through a series of speculations about what had happened to the well-groomed man I had first met, who often forgot to shave and now appeared in his undershirt. Then I mastered myself and listened to what he was saying, instead of staring at his chin, trying not to look farther down, at the hair escaping from the top of his t-shirt, trying not to remember the well-defined, taut muscles across his chest and shoulders, along his forearms.
The first voice he forced on me was too deep for me to emulate, others were too southern, and the last singer was in more pain than I could bear to be reminded of. Although I was getting some idea of what he wanted from me, I couldn’t render it by emulating any of the samples on that CD.
“Play your music again, Jason. I want to hear the other instruments.”
I followed along with the written lyrics this time, trying to hear the empty places that still remained between the different instruments, no longer so distracted as I had been by how he looked in a sleeveless t-shirt, though he hadn’t buttoned up his shirt, and he rolled back the cuffs, drawing even more attention to the hair on his arms.
“Again.”
This time I sang the words as he’d written them, in the way I thought he wanted a human voice to thread its way among the other instruments’ voices.
“Again, please.”
He hadn’t made any move to correct me, or betrayed any response in his expression, but he always critiqued or corrected when he was unsatisfied, so I believed we were making progress toward what he wanted. As the instruments died away on my third attempt, I hung onto the final A note so it died away like twilight taking forever to fade in St. Petersburg.
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