by Lewis Shiner
“Trying to,” Kindred said, with an ambiguous smile.
“The book explains the way capitalism makes us passive consumers and turns everything into commodities. Here, I write it down for you.” He took a matchbook from the ashtray and wrote the name inside.
The talk drifted to contemporary art, where Kindred was more comfortable than in the realms of Marxism and revolution. Madelyn found herself wrenched by sudden sorrow, and it took her a minute to figure out the reason. She had missed this kind of talk. The intellectual world of the moment was a conflagration in a firecracker factory, and every new idea that exploded set off another dozen around it. The frenetic pace couldn’t last forever, and she longed to be in the thick of it now.
Cole, she knew, was close to admitting defeat. He hadn’t said as much out loud, and she was afraid to bring it up. Still, for all her pleasure in doing her job well, for all her anticipation of the Pistoletto show, the thing that got her out of bed every morning was the hope that today would be the day that Cole put his arms around her and said, “Let’s go home.”
And so, when Cole woke her up that night brimming over with excitement about his party, her first, selfish reaction was disappointment. Her second was to keep the details of her own evening to herself, to hold inside her a while longer the memory of Pistoletto’s attention and approval.
On Tuesday they put up the descriptions and the prices for the paintings. Wednesday was an exclusive preview with a lecture by Pistoletto, and Thursday was the opening. Madelyn was not sure that Cole had registered her absence, being fully occupied as he was with the bulky stranger now sleeping on her couch, whom she understood to be a bass player of heretofore unrecognized genius. Every night Pistoletto offered to drive her home in his rented Cadillac, and every night she refused, less from fear that Pistoletto might harbor ulterior motives than from shame. Every night the streetcar ride meant leaving Oz for the pigsty on a black-and-white Kansas farm.
Friday afternoon was Pistoletto’s flight to New York and from there back to Turin. He stopped off at the gallery to say goodbye. For Kindred he had a firm, US-style handshake; Madelyn he hugged and kissed on both cheeks, then, before she realized what was happening, he kissed her lightly on the lips. He gave her his business card and said, “Next time you’re in Europe, call me.”
She watched in a daze as he got in the Cadillac and drove away.
“You made quite a hit,” Kindred said.
“I liked him,” Madelyn said. “Can I have tomorrow off?”
“My charms are not enough to bring you in, now that Michelangelo’s gone?”
“My husband’s playing his first local show. He just found out.”
“Sure, what the hell. You’ve earned it.”
Cole seemed truly pleased that she was going to be there. After dinner she went to bed and slept for 12 hours straight.
*
Madelyn waited in the park as the band set up, impressed by the near military precision. One of the octopi stopped traffic while Tommy ran across the street with his bass drum, the other octopi unrolled extension cords, and the rest of the band rolled their amps across. Everything else came in a second wave. Five minutes later Cole stood at a microphone saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are The Quirq.”
Lenny, laughing at Cole, stepped up to his own mike and said, “Maybe.”
Tommy counted them off and they started into “Born Under a Bad Sign,” from the Albert King album that Cole had played a million times.
For once the sky was an endless blue, the temperature warm enough for short sleeves. The park was full of kids and dogs and Madelyn thought that if she squinted hard enough she could see the ghost of the Summer of Love hovering overhead in star-shaped sunglasses and buckskin fringe, touching smiles onto lips with glitter-painted fingernails.
Good as the band had been in Austin, she saw that something had been missing, and Gordo was the magic ingredient. Just as Cole had told her. Fifteen minutes into the show, a girl at the front of the crowd peeled off her sweatshirt, revealing titanic breasts that wobbled crazily as she danced with her arms over her head. Most of the audience was dancing, and the few that weren’t watched Cole and Lenny with rapt fascination.
The premonition Madelyn had felt in Austin returned, stronger than ever, Cole on the road, topless women offering themselves to him, money, drugs, adulation. And now, instead of her being left behind in Austin to finish her degree, she would be left behind in San Francisco with a slum apartment and a job with no future.
She tried to remind herself that she was only 19, young yet. She didn’t feel young at all.
*
On the night of August 28, Dave sat in front of his tv and watched his country come apart at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Fighting on the convention floor, blue-helmeted Chicago police dragging delegates into the chaos outside. Searchlights, screams, teargas exploding, wave after wave of police chasing kids and beating them with nightsticks, bodies bleeding in the streets while the whole world watched.
It was the climax to the strangest year of Dave’s life.
Columbia had beaten out Capitol and Atlantic to sign Skip Shaw, and in late March Dave had taken him into Golden State Recorders to finish the lp. They completed work on Wednesday, April 3, and Dave sent the master tapes to New York by messenger that afternoon. The next day he got two phone calls within an hour of each other.
The first was from Tom Dowd, saying that Martin Luther King had been shot. Dave, like Dowd, lived in a secluded corner of the world that was, if not free from racism, freer than most. He worked alongside black artists every day, to the point that he’d begun to take it for granted that the change Sam Cooke sang about had already come. To have his face pushed into the reality of the anger and hatred on the streets made him despair.
He was reeling when the second call came, from a lawyer at Columbia Records. He informed Dave that Warner Brothers had filed suit against Columbia, claiming that Skip Shaw owed them an album under a contract signed the year before.
In the days that followed, Columbia sued Shaw, including Dave in the suit, and Dave, on his lawyer’s advice, sued Wes, Shaw’s manager. Shaw used his signing advance to countersue everyone, including, with epic ingratitude, Dave. Eventually the lawyers all got together and hammered out a deal where Columbia got its money back, Warners scheduled the Tender Hours lp for mid-summer, and Dave lost every penny he’d earned in producer’s fees, plus his out-of-pocket expenses for the demos, to lawyers and settlements.
Billboard deemed Sallie Rachel’s second album a “sophomore slump” due to “lack of electricity,” though label mates the Meteors hit the top ten with their cover of “Breaking the Ice.”
Dave, who had never paid attention to politics when he lived in New York, suddenly found himself engrossed in the Presidential race. He understood that he was doing it to distract himself from his career. Even so, the campaign was unlike any other in history. As the Tet Offensive in January had turned the Vietnam War into a bloodbath, so the war for the soul of the US had escalated in violence. George Wallace had entered the race in February, threatening to “get rid” of all anarchists, while his running mate, Curtis LeMay, promised to use nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. Then the King assassination, then Bobby Kennedy’s murder in Los Angeles in June, and now rioting police in Chicago.
Sickened, Dave turned off the tv and stood at the window, looking out at San Francisco. He’d moved into a nice apartment on Nob Hill when Columbia signed Shaw. If something didn’t shake loose soon, he wouldn’t be able to stay.
He put Sallie’s new album on the stereo. Maybe it did lack electricity, but that voice… it took all the lonely nights he’d ever spent and refined them into a pure essence that he inhaled and held in his chest until it burned.
*
On September 12, a Thursday afternoon, Cole went to make his pitch to Bill Graham. He was perfectly calm right up to the minute he arrived in the hall outside Graham’s office. When he heard Graham ye
lling, his nerve failed. The voice had a relentless quality, the volume slowly and steadily rising, the words rhythmic as a drumbeat, no pauses, no opening for anyone else.
“… asking that when the fucking phone rings that somebody pick it up, this is supposed to be business, when the phone rings at a business, somebody is supposed to fucking answer it so the person on the other end knows that yes, this is in fact a business—”
Cole was about to hightail it when a thin woman with short brown hair hurried out of Graham’s office, glanced at Cole and shook her head, and went into another office down the hall. Now Graham was standing in the doorway, still going strong. “—one that manages to give a shit about the people who call—” He had seen Cole, and without a pause was yelling at him. “—and what the fuck do you want?”
Graham had a coarse look about him, Cole thought. Dark eyes, big nose, thick lips. Like a second-string henchman in a gangster movie. “Uh, maybe I should come back another day,” Cole said.
“I got enough problems in my life, I don’t need you hanging over my head like the Sword of fucking Damocles. Get in here and get it over with.” He turned his back on Cole and retreated into his office.
Cole had done his homework. Though the prevailing opinion was that Graham was simply a bad-tempered asshole, the people who’d studied him believed he didn’t take his own act seriously, that he merely used it to bully people into giving him his way. Cole hoped they were right.
He followed Graham into his office. The room was immense, windowless, covered on three walls and part of the ceiling with concert posters from the Fillmore. Graham picked up a stack of invoices and moved them to the center of his desk and stared at them intently. “Yes?” he said.
Cole couldn’t remember the speech he’d carefully prepared. “Mr. Graham, I’ve got a band—”
“Auditions are on Tuesday. Be upstairs at six with the entire band and your equipment, ready to play.”
“We’re from Austin. Uh, Texas. We used to play at the Vulcan Gas Company with the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Shiva’s Headband, the Conqueroo.”
Graham didn’t look up. “Auditions are Tuesday. Be there at six.”
“Yes, sir. I brought a photo and a business card to help you remember us.”
Still focused on the invoices, Graham said, “At this point you’d be better off if I forgot you. And nobody calls me ‘Mr. Graham.’”
“Yes, sir.” Graham looked up, glaring, and suddenly Cole was overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of the moment. He laughed and held up the publicity shot that Madelyn had taken with the gallery’s camera. “Here’s that photo, Mr. Graham.”
Graham, in spite of himself, cracked a smile. He held out his hand and Cole put the photo in it. Graham said, “The Quirq? What the hell kind of a name is that?”
“It’ll grow on you,” Cole said. “Just like me. Here’s our card.”
Graham took the card and said, “Now get the hell out of here and don’t let me see you before Tuesday.”
*
A Fillmore West banner hung above the old marquee for the Carousel Ballroom, which said, tuesday night dollar night. Graham, never one to miss an opportunity, charged admission to the auditions and got an evening’s worth of performers for free. Below the marquee was the awning for the Buick dealership that had formerly occupied the ground floor, the letters crudely painted over.
Cole got them there at five minutes to five and parked the hearse by the fire escape stairs at the back of the hall. He left the keys with Lenny and walked around to the front and up the stairs to the auditorium. A basketball game was in progress, the players in numbered Fillmore West jerseys, mostly guys with long hair in braids or ponytails or held back with headbands. Graham, at 5 foot 8, moved through them like a wolverine in a pack of sled dogs, as if everyone else was playing for fun and Graham was playing for his very life. As Cole watched, Graham pursued an opposing player all the way to the basket and fouled him in mid-air, then heckled him during his free throws. Once he got his hands on the ball, he easily faked out the man guarding him and drove in for the layup.
The woman he’d seen fleeing Graham’s office the week before was standing a few feet from Cole. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“We’re here to audition. The Quirq? I’m Cole.”
“Marushka.” She offered him a long, thin hand. “You’re early.”
“It’s part of our charm,” Cole said. “Which is the best slot to go on?”
“It shouldn’t matter if you’re good. But… you don’t want to be first, and you don’t want to go on too late, after everyone is tired. Second or third, maybe?”
“Can you help us with that?”
She smiled. “Maybe.”
She unlocked the back door for them and they brought up their gear. Other bands were arriving, some young, some with ratty equipment, all of them wearing whatever they’d happened to put on that day. Cole, on the other hand, was in his lucky polka-dot shirt and tie, Lenny in a black turtleneck, Gordo in leather pants he’d saved from his New Orleans days, Tommy in black T-shirt, chinos, and Converse All Stars.
Missing was Madelyn, who was exhausted and unwilling to stay up late. Cole had tried to convince her to come for a while and leave whenever she wanted, and she was equally unwilling to walk home alone after dark.
The Quirq were in fact third on the bill, scheduled to start at ten pm sharp. Graham, who’d been personally supervising every aspect of the show—taking tickets, visiting the dressing room, introducing the bands on stage, prowling around drinking one canned 7-Up after another—watched as Cole plugged in and checked his tuning. “Okay, hot shot,” Graham said. In the indistinct light, Cole couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not. “Impress me.”
Cole smiled back anyway. “Yes, sir.”
The hall had giant curtained arches across the back and a high, draped velour ceiling. A raised platform opposite the stage held the bar and the command center for the light show. Capacity was three thousand and so far fewer than a third that many people had showed up—still the largest crowd Cole had ever played for.
Lenny walked over from his usual spot at stage right. “Nervous?” he asked.
“Excited,” Cole said.
“I’m fucking petrified. Whose idea was it to come to San Francisco?”
“Yours,” Cole said. Reflexively he scanned the crowd in the hope that Madelyn had changed her mind.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Graham said into the mike, “formerly of Austin, Texas, now making their home here in the Bay Area, please give a warm welcome to… The Quirq!”
As a precaution, they’d worked out the first ten minutes in some detail. Tommy counted them into “Wang Dang Doodle,” but the energy was low and the changes felt stiff. They got through it and had begun the modulation that would take them into one of Cole’s new songs when Cole decided to take over. Lenny was staring fixedly at his picking hand, and Cole had to walk right up to him to get his attention. They were riffing on E minor and Cole started throwing in a D chord. That finally snapped Lenny to attention and Cole felt the band come to life. He held the D longer and longer, and once the others were with him, he played the riff to “Laura Lee” and went back to the mike. Halfway through the song he felt a burst of energy from the audience and looked back to see Gordo dancing. Lenny saw it too and finally broke into a smile.
Their booster rockets fired and took them into orbit. Toward the end, as they played “Sunshine of Your Love” and had the audience completely enamored, he saw Bill Graham standing at the front of the crowd, digging it. An impulse seized him and he played the melody line to “Perfidia” instead of the Clapton lead. He turned to face the band and raised his guitar neck, then, after two bars, dropped it to cut the song off short. The silence was absolute, perfect. He let it hang for an agonizing four counts, then he started playing the “Perfidia” chords so that Lenny could see them and called them out as he played, “C, E minor, D minor, G.” Gordo was on it immediately and Tommy came in with h
im, doing an improvised cha-cha-cha rhythm on the snare and toms. Lenny got it the second time through, and Cole walked to the mike and looked at Graham while he started a verse in Spanish. Graham immediately grabbed a woman and led her into cha-cha-cha footwork while the crowd around him cheered.
Cole had no way to teach the band the bridge, so after the second verse he played the melody again with a lot of sustain, and then took them into “Walk Don’t Run,” which they had rehearsed. Lenny played double lead with him and the crowd loved it all, especially when Cole and Lenny started dancing along with Gordo. They got called back for an encore, and after that, as they moved their equipment offstage, Graham beckoned Cole over. “I want to talk to you.” He looked unhappy.
Cole followed him backstage. Standing next to the fire door, a bee-bop record echoing over the pa, surrounded by coils of rope and sandbags and a couple of broken chairs, Graham turned on him. “Where did you learn to sing ‘Perfidia’ like that?”
“Guanajuato, Mexico. Me and my high school bass player, we used to do a mariachi act.”
“I fucking love Latin jazz.”
“I know. I saw you dancing last summer at the Fillmore.”
“I won a dance contest at the Palladium once. That was one of the proudest moments of my life. Do you even know what the Palladium is?”
“In New York? Yes, sir. My father has a record of Tito Rodriguez playing there.”
“I was probably in the audience when they recorded it. Have you heard Santana?”
“Heard the name. Haven’t heard the band yet.”
“You should check them out. In the meantime, what are you doing the weekend of October 24 through 26?”
Cole’s throat closed up. “Playing at the Fillmore West?”
Graham nodded. “You’re opening for the Airplane and a Haitian dance company. That all right with you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you got management?”
“No, sir.”
“You need to get some. But talk to me before you sign with anybody, because some of these guys are complete assholes and they’ll rip you off.”