We didn’t even try to get to the bar and have a drink, the place was so packed. Holding hands so we wouldn’t lose each other in the crowd, we wormed our way as close as we could get to the front, thirty or so feet away from the stage along the left wall. Christine started talking to a couple of girls standing beside us and I watched the three musicians who’d come out on stage tinker around with their instruments. When the blond one with rimless glasses in a suit jacket and tie lit several coloured candles on top of his Vox organ I prepared myself for the worse. Maybe it wasn’t so hard to be the biggest deal in Los Angeles after all, I thought. As they inched their way into the blues number “Back Door Man” I was relieved but also surprised, having a hard time imagining how any one of these three dweebs was going to pull off a Willie Dixon tune about being, well, just what the song says.
In spite of the thumping, building rhythm, Christine tugged on my shirt and introduced me to Lee and Emily. By the time I shouted hello and turned around, a pale figure in tight black leather pants and a loose white Mexican shirt with a face out of a book of Greek mythology was slumped over the mike as if he’d been crucified. He looked up once long enough to open his eyes as if he was about to sing or say something, then shut them again and clutched the microphone stand to his body even tighter. The entire bar strained to get closer, even the girls in the front row with their faces already practically pushed into his leather crotch, everyone waiting for him to rise from the dead.
When he did, the entire Strip knew it. Strip, shit. The entire city. The entire country. The world.
At first, I thought he’d been shot, then that he’d blown his load right there on stage. A scream, a screech, a certified back-of-your-neck-and-down-your-arms, goosebump-raising wail of suffering or deliverance, I couldn’t tell which. He ground his cock into the microphone stand and repeatedly slammed the heel of one of his black boots into the wooden stage to the pulse of the pounding beat.
The music itself was ancient and electric, wicked and sacred. The organist kept his face pressed low to the keys and nodded his head from side to side as he played, as if he couldn’t quite believe the noises he was raising from his instrument. The guitarist stared off into space and carved burning lines of fluid guitar into the air. And the sideburned drummer, so different from my pedestrian plodding, snapped and popped jazzy beats every time he struck stick to skin, making sure the band never once sounded rock-and-roll predictable. But Morrison was the one. He was the one everyone in the audience watched and listened to and waited to see what would happen next.
Somehow I ended up with my head pressed right next to the large speaker just off stage left. I knew I’d pay for it the next day with throbbing eardrums but I didn’t care. Once, I turned around to share with Christine my stare of disbelief over the blind swan dive Morrison took into the audience during the long organ solo on “Light My Fire,” but she wasn’t there. I searched the sea of bodies until I saw her still standing exactly where we’d docked when the show had begun. Even more incredibly, she wasn’t even watching the band, was blabbing away with her two new girlfriends over top of the blaring music.
Except for a couple of blues covers, I didn’t know any of the songs. It seemed like everybody else in the place did, though, especially Vito’s girls hurling their nearly naked bodies around the dance floor like insane ballerinas while lip-synching along with Morrison’s every bark, grunt, and shout. An hour, two hours, ten hours later—I’d lost all track of time—the first tentative tingle of “The End” fluttered through the room. Everyone stopped moving, and I mean everyone.
The music was everything what had come before hadn’t been: sorrowful, meditative, with a mildly Eastern-tinged note of lilting menace. Vito and his harem just stood there in the middle of the room with their hands at their sides and their mouths hanging open like a broken circle of lost children. Nobody moved. It was group hypnosis time. The bartender stopped serving drinks.
When the song was over the organ player blew out his candles and the guitarist set down his guitar and the drummer his drumsticks and Morrison his microphone and they all walked off stage one after the other. The audience’s stunned silence was the loudest applause it could have delivered.
The lights came on and people started moving again and talking. But gingerly, softly, like they were slowly waking up from a trance. Everybody except Christine and her pals. She saw me standing by the speaker and came skipping over with the other two in tow.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she said, “but Lee and Emily know a place close by called Tiny Naylors where you can get vegetarian burritos and hummus sandwiches and pecan burgers and all kinds of good stuff that we can actually eat. They’re vegetarians, too, can you believe it?” Lee and Emily grinned and nodded together in testimony. “I’m starving just thinking about it. It’s on La Brea, wherever that is, but Lee’s got a car. And guess what? They’re both helping organize a protest against the closing of some club called Pandora’s Box that the city wants to tear down to make room for a bigger road and a three-way turn signal. I’m going to help them make signs tomorrow after our show so we can get every hippie in California down here. Isn’t that great? God, I’m starving. Are you ready to go?”
I wanted to hit her. Not hard, but hard enough that I could knock some sense into her, enough so that she’d quit talking about food for a minute and pay the proper amount of respect to what we’d just witnessed. No, I didn’t want a fucking pecan burger, I wanted to shout. What I want is to inhale a mountain of coke and round up Thomas and Slippery and Heather and tell them all about what they’d missed and for the five of us to break into the recording studio tonight and try to make Moody Food so perfectly perfect that one day someone will catch our act and hear our music and want to shout out loud themselves.
“Great, sure,” I said. “Just let me take a leak first. I’ll meet you outside.”
I shut the stall door and snorted what was left in my plastic baggie; wet my finger and stuck it inside and rubbed the remaining coke dust across my gums like I’d seen Thomas do.
I hit the street and there was Christine waving me over from the back seat of a brand new ’66 red Mustang convertible with AM/FM radio, power windows, and full leather interior. I knew it, I thought, waving back and climbing in beside her. Rich-kid revolutionaries trying to be cool slumming it.
Lee turned on the radio and she and Emily kept gently bumping each other shoulder to shoulder and slapping each other’s hands play-fighting over who got to pick the station. I looked at Christine leaning forward and grinning at their goofy touchy-feely game. I rubbed my nose and wrapped an arm around her and pulled her back and as close to me as I could.
71.
MOODY FOOD WAS STILL the thing. Even after Colin showed up unannounced at the studio one day and heard us working on “A Quality of Loss” and wondered aloud over the talkback about the weird way we were warming up and Thomas fast-tracked us into our first afternoon’s worth of automatic-pilot old stuff. Colin said he loved the raw sound we were putting down and was soon insisting that we do all our vocals live to match.
But that day and every day after, before Colin got to the studio and long after he left, Thomas held up the burning hoops of Moody Food and we all jumped and leapt as best we could. The couple of hours Colin sat in the booth in the producer’s seat working with us on what he wanted to call Dream of Pines were, to Thomas, just a necessary distraction. But there was no way I was going to let him take a two-set-a-night holiday at the Whisky. Not after what I’d seen the Doors do.
My excitement about getting Thomas and Morrison in the same room together and then standing back and watching the sparks fly fizzled out to pretty much nothing. They met all right—once—but it was the big snowstorm the weather forecasts have been predicting for days that never manages to show up. Because of our Whisky commitment we were strictly afternoon visitors to the studio, while the Doors didn’t start rolling in until after dark. But one day, just as we were pulling into t
he parking lot, Paul and the entire band were filing out the front door, having been up all night recording and only now packing it in. Paul introduced us and everybody said hey and Morrison mumbled that he dug our hearse and kept checking out Christine over the top of his shades. I kept trying to get Thomas and Morrison talking about music, but they only exchanged pleasant banalities about the tight fit in the vocal booth and what a great engineer Paul was like a couple of friendly but naturally wary dogs, tails definitely wagging but ready with a raised leg to leave his mark if he had to.
I was disappointed but not about to forget the impression Morrison had left from the Whisky A Go Go stage. My plan was to get Thomas to do a couple of lines of coke right before we hit the boards to get him up and into it, and even during break if necessary. I didn’t expect much of a fight and I was right. With enough blow at the Marmont beforehand I even convinced him to dig his Nudie jacket out of mothballs and wash his hair. Christine and everybody else were just relieved there wasn’t any talk of playing any of the new songs.
The first night was nice. Vito and his Freaks weren’t there, of course, and the place was maybe only half full, but Electric had commandeered several tables right up front and lured out as many of L.A.’s hip set as possible with the promise of free drinks. Besides Lee and Emily, I even recognized a few faces from the Doors show. Regulars, I guessed.
Between the drugs I fed him and the fact that he had to get some kind of kick over landing back in his old L.A. stomping grounds feet first and front and centre stage at the Whisky, Thomas dusted off “Dundas West” and “Lilies by the Side of the Highway” and all the rest of yesterday’s musical news and helped us deliver them in fine fashion. Colin and his friends applauded longest and loudest, but by the end of the first set I could tell by the nodding heads that a few people had started to get it, Slippery’s alternately wailing and weeping steel guitar—undoubtedly the first to ever grace the Whisky A Go Go’s stage—included.
We closed up the first half of the night with a smoking medley of the Chuck Berry rocker “30 Days,” Buck Owens’ country hit “Act Naturally,” and the old blues tune “Love in Vain” and definitely got people wondering what we were up to, not to mention dancing. It was a good place to stop. Thomas told the crowd not to go anywhere because there was a whole lot more where that came from, and we crowded around Colin’s table and said hello to everybody from the label. Christine gave me a quick peck and skipped off to where Lee and Emily were sitting.
“Thomas, Slippery, guys,” Colin said, “I want you to meet Rod Crawley of Open Wound. Rod writes a music column for the paper.”
Open Wound, it turned out, was the alternative bible in town, and the kid did look a lot like a music writer for an underground newspaper—all the hippie accoutrements were firmly in place—but with what looked to be the same black plastic-framed glasses and string-bean arms and sunken chest that probably stopped him from getting laid back in high school and kept him locked up in his room on Saturday nights listening to his treasured collection of 45s.
Everybody shook hands and Colin stood up. “Hey, what can I get you guys?” he said. Heather and I settled on beers, Slippery a Coke, and Thomas nothing.
“Not even a soda?” Colin said. “C’mon, you’ve earned it.”
“Especially not a soda,” Thomas answered. He looked at Rod across the table. “Thanks to publications like yours, sir, we now know exactly to what extent the government has been lying to us over the years about just how poisonous that stuff is. Right from your lips to your brain cells and—” He cocked his head sideways, rolled his eyes back in their sockets, stuck out his tongue.
All of a sudden Colin didn’t look so sure about abandoning the table. But then he saw the amused smile on Rod’s face and decided to risk it. He leaned over and whispered something into the ear of the guy who’d greeted us at the Electric office that I could only imagine was of the keep your eye on this guy variety and split for the drinks.
Rod pushed his glasses up his nose. “Chuck Berry, Buck Owens, Robert Johnson—that’s quite a mix you guys threw together there at the end. What do you call that kind of eclecticism?”
Thomas leaned forward across the table. “We call it goosebump music,” he said. “If it’s good, it’s all goosebump music.”
The kid’s glasses kept sliding down his face but he kept pushing them right back up.
“You really think country music and the blues are the same thing?”
“The spades have had their way of getting through and the white man has had his. But we’re all singing about the same pain. It’s about time we got together and did a little inbreeding.”
“Inbreeding,” Rod repeated. “As in ...”
“As in plucking out our eyes and opening up our ears and getting down to what really matters.”
Rod pulled a pad and pen out of his back pocket. “Do you mind if I write some of this down?”
Thomas leaned back in his seat and absently ran his hand through Heather’s hair, eyes scanning the dark room.
“Somebody’s going to have to eventually,” he said.
And Rod wrote that one down, too.
72.
UNTIL L.A. I was pretty sure God didn’t exist.
But sometimes it seems like there just has to be some kind of Supreme Master of Irony working away behind the scenes and laughing His almighty ass off while pulling all the strings. How else was I supposed to make sense of never once getting asked to the Sadie Hawkins dance during high school and now being encouraged by the soft smiles and long stares and lusty what-not of this or that California girl to take what I wanted from the carnal candy store although, since I’d met Christine, my sweet-sampling days were officially over? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And ain’t that a bitch.
There was one girl more than the rest. Upstairs from the recording studios, right next door to the bathroom, there was a small lounge where she and a couple of her friends would hang out making coffee for whoever wanted it or running errands if anybody needed anything or just giving somebody a neck massage if that was what was called for. Groupies, I guess, if you had to put a name to them. Not for any band in particular, but for all the different groups that passed through the studio, for anyone who sang or strummed or made soft or loud sounds. They all looked to be in their late teens and one was a blonde, one was a brunette, and one was a redhead. Paul had dubbed them the Three Graces, and that’s what we called them, too.
No one knew any of the Three Graces’ real names, and nobody ever bothered to find out. The one that was more than the rest called herself Dew, and that was good enough for me. She was summer sweetness and first morning light and smelled of patchouli sunsets and midnight walks along warm ocean sand. She was short, quiet, boyishly thin, blushed easily, and had long blonde hair. Everything, in total, that Christine wasn’t. Not everything that I’d always looked for in a woman, understand; just everything the opposite of what the woman I’d ended up with was. Which, if you’ve been with the same person long enough, begins to seem like the same thing.
One afternoon on break, while Thomas was on the phone arguing with our dealer and Christine and everybody else were outside having a smoke, I wandered into the lounge, one part of me hoping Dew would be there, another part of me wishing I would quit hoping for things I knew I had absolutely no business hoping for. She wasn’t alone—Magnolia was sitting beside her using the shirt on the table between them to make some point of sewing etiquette—but by the time I turned around from the sink with my glass of water there was just me and Dew and the cowboy shirt she was holding up in front of her. It was brown, with white swirling stitching around the collar and over the pockets and shiny silver buttons down the front and at the wrists.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“It’s great,” I answered. She kept looking at the floor, and I wouldn’t take my eyes off the shirt.
“You really like it?”
“Yeah, it’s ... it’s great.”
She nodded her lowered head a couple of times and blushed; raised her eyes and caught mine and kept them.
“Why don’t you try it on, then?” she said.
“Me? Why?”
“Because it’s for you, silly,” she said, getting up and coming over. Still leaning against the sink, I shifted the water glass from one hand to another and crossed and uncrossed and recrossed my boots. No wonder no one ever asked me to a Sadie Hawkins dance.
“You made this for me?” I said.
“Of course.”
She said the two words softly, slowly, stretching out the two syllables forever, so that by the time she was done there was only the shirt between us.
“It didn’t seem fair that Thomas gets to wear all kinds of great clothes on stage and you’re the best looking one up there and no one’s ever made you anything special to show off.”
She placed both of her small feet on top of my size-ten cowboy boots. As far back as high school I’d always gotten off on lanky girls who were at least as tall as me or even bigger, but now all I wanted to do was take Dew’s tiny blonde head in my hands and lean down and kiss her little red lips. At least until Thomas stuck his head into the room.
“Hey, Buckskin, let’s go. Early supper break. You and me have got a road trip to take over to Watts.”
Dew blushed and stepped down. She folded the shirt in four, kissed me on the cheek, and handed it to me.
“Wear it for me,” she said. “I’m going to watch and see if you do.”
I let her float out of the room, then went downstairs. I stuck the shirt inside the bass drum of my studio kit. I jammed it in just as deep as it would go.
73.
IT WAS ABOUT an hour before we usually left for the Whisky and I was lying in bed trying to decide whether, if I was a castaway like Gilligan, I’d make a play for Ginger or Mary-Ann. Long tall Ginger was definitely more my type, but Mary-Ann looked like the kind of girl who’d stand beside you no matter what, no small virtue whether you were living on a deserted island or not. There was no one else in the room to disturb my contemplation. When I’d woken up that morning, Christine had already left. Something about silk-screening anti-something T-shirts and see you later at the studio. There was a note scribbled on Marmont stationery lying around somewhere.
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