by Don Lee
Yadin was too shy ever to take a turn with one of his songs. It was only after Mallory began showing up to the sessions that he collected the courage to perform one. He had seen her around, and desperately wanted to impress her. She was a double major in music and drama with a minor in English at NC State, and worked as a clerk at Schoolkids, the record store on Hillsborough across the street from the campus Bell Tower. A frequent browser at the store (he could never afford to buy much there), Yadin had overheard her talking to customers, and her knowledge of music, all kinds of music, her references and technical insights, had staggered him. She had learned the viola through the Suzuki method and had taken up country fiddle for fun. A multi-instrumentalist, she was better at guitar than Yadin at that age. Yet it was her fiddle that made the Siesta Club sessions soar. She had a wonderful voice, too, a sweet, ethereal keening.
Yadin waited for a night with a smaller turnout. At last, one rainy evening at a house in Five Points, just six of them in attendance, he took out a crumpled napkin and, sitting on an ottoman, laid it on his denimed right knee. “Key of G?” he said to the others. “It’s 1-6-5-4.” He was a bit chagrined. I-vi-V-IV was one of the most banal, hackneyed chord progressions in music. “Chorus is 5-4-1.”
He started strumming his guitar. He was trembling, and the napkin on his knee—the ink of the lyrics bled felt-blue—fell to the floor. He left it there, toeing it with his boot so it was readable. He sang the first verse, playing G, Em, D, C:
We weep for lost youth
And we weep for lost love
We weep for old memories and
Fallen stars
Tediously, every line in the song contained the phrase “we weep,” even the chorus, with slightly harder strums for D, C, G:
Oh we weep
All we can do is weep
It was verse-chorus, verse-chorus, verse-chorus. No bridge. Not long enough. Dull and unimaginative. He did a quick outro, picked up the napkin, and stuffed it into his back pocket. He never looked up once during the song. He still didn’t. The others in the room clapped politely. “That was nice,” he heard someone say. A girl. Mallory.
They didn’t speak that night. Not for several days, until he walked into Schoolkids. He had been coming to the record store every afternoon, waiting for her to be behind the counter again.
“Hey, there he is—Mr. Forlorn,” she said. “I hope you’re not still weeping.”
He felt his face warm. “I know, it was a piece of shit, that song.”
“Not a piece of shit. The lyrics could use a little variation, maybe. But I liked it. A lot. You have something.”
“What do I have?” Yadin asked.
“I’m not going to tell you yet,” Mallory said. “Maybe I never will. It’d give you a big head. Anyway, it’s intangible and ineffable.”
“Oh.” He made a mental note to look up ineffable in the dictionary.
“Two-line chorus,” she said. “Ever heard of Blaze Foley? ‘Picture Cards Can’t Picture You’?”
Blaze Foley—a good friend of Townes Van Zandt’s—was one of the singer-songwriters he revered the most. Like Yadin’s song, “Picture Cards” had a two-line chorus, but it was actually the same line, repeated.
“I saw daylight in your eyes,” Yadin sang quietly, and Mallory joined him for the second utterance, going high to his low. Without trying, they had melded in beautiful harmony.
“What’re you doing later?” she asked. “Want to get a Big Mike at Sadlack’s?”
He sat next door in Sadlack’s until she got off her shift. They ordered cans of Miller High Life and two Big Mikes, pastrami sandwiches with sweet peppers and provolone, melted in the steamer—a heavenly, welcome departure from his tomato sandwiches.
Tentatively, they talked about where they grew up, their families. Her mother had been a waitress, her father a juvenile corrections officer who’d had a gambling problem. She was an only child, as Yadin was, or as he had ended up to be. She said she’d been introverted and unpopular in high school. No one had ever asked her out on a date, she told him, which he could not believe. She might have been a little overweight, without many curves or angles, but she was cute, and her shapelessness made her more appealing, less intimidating, to him. Indeed, he’d discover later that he wasn’t the only one who thought this way: she’d had a handful of boyfriends since arriving at NC State, and was hardly inexperienced.
“I was always fat and really straight,” she said. “A weirdo. Everyone in high school hated me because I won all the academic awards every year. All I did was study and take viola lessons and practice and do recitals. I tried a little theater, just to be social, but I wouldn’t go out for any parts with dancing. Boys weren’t interested in me at all. I was too intense. I thought for sure there was something wrong with me.”
He told her about Ohio, his father abandoning them, Davey dying. He had never told anyone about Davey before.
“That’s so sad,” she said. “So that’s where it comes from.”
Thereafter, Yadin spent every available moment with her. He followed Mallory to her classes, saying he wanted to improve himself, that he was fascinated by, say, Integrative Physiology, and sat beside her in lecture halls, moonily watching her take notes.
In her off-campus apartment, which she shared with another girl, they listened to records and talked about music.
“Lucinda Williams?” Mallory asked.
“Goddess,” Yadin said.
“Emmylou Harris?”
“Goddess.”
“Leonard Cohen?”
“Supreme Being.”
Once, they spent an entire afternoon trying to figure out the opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night” on the guitar. Was it an Fadd9? A G7sus4? A G11sus4, or maybe a G7add9sus4? Yadin hadn’t known half the names to these chords until then; he’d learned everything by ear.
They sang together, just the two of them, in her bedroom, playing guitar and fiddle. They started with a trio of Blaze Foley songs: “If I Could Only Fly,” “Cold, Cold World,” and “Picture Cards Can’t Picture You.” They did traditional gospel songs like “In My Time of Dying” and ballads like “Come All You Tenderhearted,” “Long Black Veil,” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Straightaway they had a special vocal chemistry, her harmony sweetening the upper register. They never had to spell out the arrangements in advance. It was as if they were having a conversation—a conversation they’d had all their lives. They’d exchange a look or a nod, and they’d go up an octave, ascending together in perfect pitch.
She helped Yadin hone his songs, his lyrics. “You can be vague in a verse, but never in a chorus,” she told him. And: “Audiences like to anticipate rhymes, trying to guess them. There’s comfort when they do, but they also like to be surprised once in a while.” And: “It can’t be buckets of tears, down by the muddy river all the time. You need to avoid those kinds of clichés like the plague.” She laughed. “So to speak. Get it?” He didn’t. “You need some originality, some complexity.”
She taught him about music theory and song structure. She had him listen over and over to “Down by the River,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” and “Cinnamon Girl,” all three of which Neil Young wrote in a single day. “You hear that?” she said, as “Cinnamon Girl” spun on the turntable. “Alternating four-on-the-floor. How brilliant is that? Those riffs in double drop-D, the minor 7th harmony. And no chorus! Just a middle 8.”
They began performing duets at the Siesta Club jam sessions. They’d stare into each other’s eyes and sing, a blissful, swooning collusion. After one session, a guy named Ross said to Yadin, “Why don’t you guys get a room already?”
“Huh?”
“The two of you are practically having sex up there, doing those songs.”
Yadin was twenty-two, and a virgin. He’d only made out with a few girls. Once, he’d almost had intercourse, although he was fairly certain it had been an accident, that in the dark basement of a party, the girl who had thrown herself on h
im—plowed—had thought he was someone else.
Ross had access to a house on the Outer Banks. Owned by his parents’ friends, it was in the town of Avon, on Hatteras Island, a four-hour drive from Raleigh, and he invited whoever was able to come one October weekend. There ended up to be nine of them, piled into two cars: Yadin, Mallory, Ross, Thorton, Charlie, Alicia, Esmé, Paul, and Laura. The three-story soundfront house was built on stilts and nicely appointed, with a wraparound deck and a hot tub on the second floor. In all, there were four bedrooms and four bathrooms. Several sofas folded out. The couples—Charlie and Alicia, Paul and Laura—got their own rooms, and Mallory and Esmé took dibs on the master. Ross and Thorton agreed to share the room with two twin beds, which left Yadin to sleep on one of the sofa beds in the living room. He didn’t complain. Agonizingly, he felt a cyst emerging underneath his right cheek—such rotten, predictable timing—and he would likely have to do a few surgical procedures during the middle of the night.
The days were still relatively warm, in the seventies, and most of the group went swimming on the ocean side of the barrier island. Yadin and Mallory were too bashful to expose themselves in bathing suits. They sat on chaise longues on the deck of the house, fully clothed, smoking cigarettes and talking, looking out at Pamlico Sound, enjoying the sun and water and sky and each other’s company. He had never felt so relaxed.
Paul was a cook at the Rathskeller. He made chicken and sausage jambalaya and coleslaw for them the first night, a bouillabaisse with clams, mussels, shrimp, and striped bass the second night. He also baked fresh baguettes, and Yadin used piece after piece to sop up the broth.
Late into the night, they played music in various ensembles. For Yadin’s work, one lineup was particularly sharp: Ross on an acoustic bass guitar (they were unplugged that weekend); Charlie on an improvised drum—a five-gallon plastic bucket flipped upside down; and Thorton on lead guitar, running off riffs and licks on his dobro, with Yadin playing rhythm. Combined with Mallory on the fiddle, they brought Yadin’s songs to life.
Thankfully, he was able to ward off the cyst, applying ice cubes throughout the first night to his cheek. On the second night, he was dead asleep on the lumpy sofa bed when Mallory joined him under the covers.
“Wake up, Yadin. Wake up,” she whispered. “You ever hear the story about how Gram Parsons stole David Crosby’s fiancée? Her name was Nancy—a knockout, by all accounts. She was living with Crosby in L.A., engaged to be married to him in three weeks, but someone brought Gram over to Crosby’s house for a drink. He was smitten with her. He knew Crosby was leaving that afternoon to go on tour with the Byrds, so he came back to the house that very same night, knocked on the door, and when Nancy answered, he told her, ‘I’ve been looking for you my whole life, and I’m taking you with me.’ Yadin, it’s been months now. I’ve been waiting for you to take me. But I’m tired of waiting, so I am going to take you.”
She didn’t know then (and would never know) that she was taking his virginity, too.
When they returned to Raleigh, he moved in with Mal lory, although they never really discussed it. He simply never left. After two weeks, she asked him, “Don’t you need to go home and pick up some clothes or something?”
“What do you mean?” he said. Everything he owned was already in her bedroom: two guitars—one acoustic and one hollow-body electric—and a duffel bag of clothes. She didn’t understand that he didn’t have his own place at the time, that he’d been couch-surfing and squatting. She was the first and only woman he ever lived with.
They formed a band with Thorton, who was a psychology major at Duke; Ross, who was a biology student at NC State; and Charlie, who was unemployed and sometimes dealt coke. They batted around names for the band, which Yadin didn’t think was necessary—this was just for fun, they didn’t need a name, they were only playing for themselves and the Siesta Club. The others insisted. Ross suggested Willow Creek, the name of the cul-de-sac on Hatteras Island where they’d stayed, even though there hadn’t been a single willow tree in sight. Everyone thought Willow Creek was too bland, too generic, too bourgeois; there were thousands of suburban housing developments, and probably that many bands, called Willow Creek. Mallory proposed a slight tweak, Whisper Creek, and the name, though not terribly more unique, stuck.
For the next few months, they practiced in whatever space they could find—music rooms in the Price Center on campus, the basement of Ross’s fraternity, a machine shop owned by a friend of Charlie’s—and played together at the Siesta Club sessions. Yadin was writing more and more songs, bet ter songs, but he favored alternating the members’ tunes and trading off the lead vocals as equal partners. He fell in love with the process of making music with this group, in large part because he was in love with Mallory.
Amazingly, she seemed to be in love with him, too. Whenever she saw him, she’d wrap her arms around his head, hang off his neck. She didn’t care who witnessed them. In her apartment, he’d be lying on his back on her bed, and she’d walk in the room and see him, and her face would illumine. She’d sit on top of him and kiss him, and then, her legs still straddled over his hips, she’d rest her head on his shoulder and stay like that while they napped. And the sex. He had thought about sex since he was thirteen, speculating what it’d entail, wondering if he’d ever have it, but sex with Mallory was entirely different from what he had imagined. The act wasn’t about sex at all. It was about sealing their intimacy, burrowing inside each other, trying to merge into one.
She went to her classes and studied, and he took on more demo and landscaping jobs so he could contribute to the rent (her roommate moved out after numerous tantrums about how noisy and messy the couple was). They made dinners together, although neither of them knew how to cook. They settled for canned spaghetti and ravioli, mac and cheese, and pork and beans, often in combination, mixed with slices of hot dog and ketchup and topped with sour cream and shredded cheddar. These meals were augmented with take-out pizzas and fast-food burgers and fries during binges—long, late nights of drinking and drugging. They were both getting fat, and neither cared. Mostly, the two of them played music in the now-empty second bedroom of her apartment and performed at the Siesta Club with the band, which was sounding tighter with every session. Yadin practiced every moment he could, and eventually surpassed Mallory’s guitar skills. He had never been happier. He wished it could last forever.
It didn’t, of course.
One afternoon, when they were jamming in a garage in Boylan Heights, Thorton said, “We ought to try playing some clubs.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “We could start with an open mic, work out the kinks, then move up from there.”
“No way,” Yadin said.
“Why not?” Ross asked.
“Why do we need to play in front of other people, in front of strangers?”
“That makes no sense,” Thorton said. “We’re a band. The point is to be heard.”
“This is enough, what we’ve been doing,” Yadin said. “Why can’t we just enjoy it for what it is?”
“Mallory,” Thorton said, “where are you on this?”
She deliberated, clamping her bottom lip over her upper lip, then said to Yadin, “We have something good. We could make something happen.”
“What?” he asked.
“Who knows. Maybe something big. We need to get out there and find out.”
Yadin was terrified by the idea. He had participated in a lot of jams and practices by that point, yet had never performed on an actual stage with an audience. It was the last thing he wanted to do, but everyone else kept on him about it, and eventually he agreed to try it once, as long as he could just play rhythm and sing background.
They signed up for the open mic at the Aquarium Lounge, a subterranean rat hole downtown, beneath West Street. They were almost last on the list, and they waited for hours, Yadin getting drunker and more baked, slipping outside with Charlie to toke up and do a few lines. When it was finally close to their turn
, one act to finish before them, he locked himself in the bathroom and threw up. He wouldn’t come out. Mallory knocked on the bathroom door.
“You guys go on without me,” Yadin said.
“Honey, it’ll be all right,” Mallory said. “There’s nothing to be scared about. No one’s left in the audience, just a few guys from the Siesta Club.”
Onstage, he was certain he would faint. He sat down in a chair, and as the first song progressed, he kept shifting the chair clockwise, inch by inch, until he was facing Charlie’s drum kit. He was barely able to make it through the three-song set.
“I am never doing that again,” he told Mallory.
But Mallory and the others were enthralled, playing live on a stage. They wanted to do more open mics and try to get booked for some bona fide gigs. The problem was, Whisper Creek’s best songs were undeniably Yadin’s, and they didn’t sound right unless he sang them himself. He had, by far, the best voice among them. They wanted him to be the frontman once in a while during the sets.
“Why can’t we do your songs?” he asked the others. “Why do we have to do mine? Or one of you can sing them—I don’t care. No one wants to see me sing. Look at me, man.”
“You didn’t think you’d survive the Aquarium,” Mallory said, “but you got through it. I used to be petrified doing recitals, but trust me: the more you perform, the easier it gets.”