“Do you think he’s all right?” Cass said.
Ivor put his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t know, Cassie. I hope so.”
She drew closer to him. Out on the freeway, Jonah was lost to the neon night, just another faceless driver chasing the miles towards home.
The truck was pulling onto Route 5 outside San Francisco—it was early morning, the sky a lurid, striated wash of pink and orange—when Graham first complained of feeling unwell.
“It’s just a cold,” he said, and retired to one of the bunks to sleep it off. But by the time they arrived in Los Angeles, Graham was feverish, his shoulders shuddering to the rhythm of a deep, hacking cough, and the colour leaching from his face.
Tyson and Alan drove him to hospital, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia—an impossibility, they’d have thought, under the azure skies of California. Bed-rest and a hefty dose of antibiotics were prescribed; exhaustion and excessive smoking, the young, blandly handsome doctor informed Alan with not a small hint of disapproval, had worsened Graham’s symptoms. There could be no gigs, or work of any kind, for several weeks; Graham would remain under observation until they could be sure he was well enough to fly home.
What to do? The Puritan Experience had flown home to England from Denver, but Cass and the guys had a date booked at the Troubadour in West Hollywood in two days’ time, and others scattered across southern California over the coming week.
“I’ll sort this,” Alan said, grim-faced. “Just give me a couple of hours.”
“Sure we can’t help?” Cass said, but he shook his head.
“No. Get some rest. This is what you pay me for.”
They checked into another motel: this one tall, flat-fronted, furnished in the bright, geometric style of ten years before, each room boxy and identical. Alan disappeared into his room while Ivor, Kit, and Tyson gathered by the pool in the last rays of spring sun. Two pale, ivory-skinned Englishmen, stretched out on sun-loungers in their jeans and jumpers; Tyson darker, barrel-chested, swigging Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle.
Cass stayed up in their room on the third floor, trying, unsuccessfully, to sleep. She had just picked up her acoustic guitar, begun plotting out the arc of a song, when a knock came on the door.
There, framed against the pinkish twilight, was Alan.
“I’ve found a guy,” he said. “Jake Larsen. Let’s just cross our bloody fingers this works out.”
Jake had played drums for James Taylor, Tom Arnold, and Linda Ronstadt, and he lived, Alan said, in Laurel Canyon. So that was where they drove the next day, the old Dodge lurching up narrow, winding roads to a hillside that, with its pines and palms and low, stunted bushes, looked to Cass more like the Mediterranean than America.
Along the road that, they hoped, would lead to Jake’s house, the path grew narrower, and the vegetation thickened, the slender, heavy-headed trees bending together as if engaged in whispered conversation. It soon became clear that they would have to abandon the truck and finish the journey on foot.
“Goddammit,” said Tyson. “Where the hell are you taking us?”
But the others were quiet, awed by the sudden bucolic beauty of the place, green-shadowed and rustling and heavy with some rich, resinous scent, after all those miles of concrete and tarmac and steel.
Cass, her guitar case in one hand, the other looped loosely around Ivor’s waist, looked around her, and thought that she had never seen anywhere more beautiful.
Jake’s house lay in a clearing at the path’s end, like a cottage in a storybook. It was built of wood, painted a dark forest green; there was a porch with a swing-seat, and a picnic table constructed from rough-hewn logs. Jake was out on the porch to greet them: a tall, tanned Viking with a shoulder-length mane of blond hair, and a moustache the colour and texture of dry straw. He was barefoot. “I usually play that way,” he explained as they went inside. “Helps me feel the beat, you know?”
Jake brewed a pot of tea, then rolled a fat joint, which he passed round as they sat on the floor of his living-room, with its thick Turkish rugs and Indian marquetry tables. A huge Yamaha drum-kit squatted in one corner of the room, its sleek black bodywork and shining metal incongruous among the wood and tapestries.
Cass closed her eyes as she inhaled, let the smoke gather in her throat, glad of something to occupy her attention as their music—her music—filled the room from Jake’s record-player. Already, she was finding it difficult to listen back to her recordings—those distillations of a time, a place, a feeling, that could inevitably only convey a fraction of the moment’s true resonance.
At the record’s end, the silence rolled out unbroken; four faces turned to Jake’s, whose eyes remained closed, his expression distant. Alan, across the floor, gave a small, impatient cough.
And then, just as Cass was about to speak, Jake opened his eyes. He clambered to his feet, unfolding his long legs in their blue jeans. Behind his drum-kit, he slipped onto his leather stool, started measuring out a beat. Still nobody spoke; they followed his lead, drew their guitars from their cases, and began to play.
Alan looked on, still curled on the rug. And the music layered itself around them, gathered pace and texture, and seeped out through the open windows, and into the whispering trees.
That Wednesday night in March 1972 was a watershed. Cass knew it then—divined it, through some indefinable instinct—and she still knows it now.
In their room in the Los Angeles motel, she had dressed with care—green lace gown, black boots, the black velvet coat she’d acquired in a Chicago thrift store. (In his write-up of the concert, the critic for the Los Angeles Times would, rather feverishly, describe her as looking “like an ethereal English wraith stepped out from the pages of Charles Dickens: blonde and pale-faced, baring her long neck at the microphone as if for Dracula’s fangs.”)
She had pinned up her hair, painted a thick layer of black kohl around her eyes. In the dressing-room, she’d refused Ivor’s proffered dose of cocaine, and drunk her customary single glass of red wine.
The nerves were circling, as they always did, but she felt strong enough to banish them. Alone in the dressing-room for a moment (the others were already making their way to the stage), she paused before the mirror, and regarded herself with a level, clear-sighted gaze.
This is it, she thought. This is the one.
From the stage, she could see vaulted wood, red lights, smoke-clouds writhing in the darkness. The technician moved among them, performing last-minute checks, and she stood still, looking out, sensing that the crowd was behind them; there was an expectant quietness, a collective stilling of breath, that they had felt only once or twice on their long journey across America.
In the audience, she knew, was Tom Arnold, whose first album, Long Time Coming, she had bought on Oxford Street in the summer of 1968. She had played it over and over in the living-room at Savernake Road, until Bob had accused her of trying to torture them by repeat listening. Even music as good as that, Cass, drives you mad when you hear it for the twentieth time. She and Ivor had spent hours studying the sleeve of Arnold’s last record, The Summer Never Ends, wondering how he had achieved such an effortless marriage of music and meaning, of poetry and sound.
And now Tom Arnold was here to see her. “Invited a few guys down tonight,” Jake had said as he’d swept in for the soundcheck, strings of fine brown beads layered around the open collar of his white shirt. “Told them about you, Cass. They can’t wait to hear you.”
And so the stage. Jake’s sure, steady beat. Ivor beside her, meeting her eye, leaning forward as they dived into the song, headfirst, drawn by its swelling, tidal pull. Kit at her other side. An energy, a quickening, that was impossible to define: a shared sense that the room was theirs, that the audience was with them. That the music they were making was the music these strangers wanted to hear.
So rare, that feeling, a
nd so intoxicating. Cass sang, she played, her feet planted firmly on the stage in her black leather boots. Blonde hair haloed by the stage lights, green dress sweeping the floor; mouth open, eyes closed, and around her the three men playing, beating string and cymbal and drum-skin in a blur of muscle and movement and sweat.
At the set’s end, the applause ran for one minute, two, three.
She looked from Ivor to Kit to Jake, her hair plastered damply to her face. “Another?”
Ivor nodded, strummed the first chords of the song she’d begun in their motel room two days ago, and finished the day before, the two of them sitting up late beside the swimming pool, wrapped in blankets. She raised an eyebrow—they’d never played it live, of course; they hadn’t yet had the chance—but he stared back at her and nodded again. And so she stretched her left hand to fit the shape of the chord, and joined him, dived back in to the crest of the wave.
Kit and Jake were silent, watching. It was just the two of them then, Ivor and Cass, voices rising and falling, as it had once been in the attic room at Atterley; as it was now, though hers was the voice the crowd was straining to hear, and Ivor’s was its complement, the stem from which it grew.
Later, there was an after-party at Jake’s house in the Canyon. The State She’s In on the record-player. Drifts of cocaine littering the coffee table. A woman in a long, patterned skirt passing round a tray of home-baked brownies. “Hash brownies, man—you have to try them.”
Cass stood on the porch, beside the swing-seat, looking out into the dark forest, smoking. Beside her, Tom Arnold sipped his drink and said, “I want you to come out on my next tour. I’ll put our managers in touch, make it happen.”
“All right.” Her calmness was a surprise.
He reached out, tucked a stray slip of hair behind her ear. “You’re very beautiful, Cass. But you know that, don’t you? I’m sure your old man tells you all the time.”
Cass said nothing, neither agreed nor disagreed. The moment stretched between them, broken only by the sound of her own voice from the stereo. Ivor was somewhere inside, she thought: the last she’d seen of him, he’d been rolling up a twenty-dollar bill, bending down to the hand-mirror where the white trail of coke was waiting. She heard a woman laughing, and a man saying, “Well, Jerry, if I’d wanted to live like a square, I’d have gone and joined my father’s bank.”
Tom Arnold was watching her, voicing a silent question. She knew she ought to thank him, turn away, go back inside; but still she did nothing. She knew what was coming, and what she would do when it came.
It seemed an age, still, before he leant towards her, brought his face down to meet hers. Then and only then did she raise a hand, place it on his chin, and, ever so gently—as a mother might reprimand a child—push it away.
“No,” she said. His face was only inches from hers. “Not for that.”
Tom smiled, wise enough not to try to disguise his intentions. “Shame. But I still want you on the tour.”
He stepped back, still watching her, reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, lit two, and handed one of them to her. And then they stood for a while, smoking, staring out into the ripe, sweet-smelling Californian night.
TRACK TEN
“Brightest Star”
By Cass Wheeler
From the album Huntress
Flying through this empty night-time sky
Bridging the distance between your heart and mine
Nothing at the windows but the night
And a tiny yellow quiver looking like some fire
Sirius you are the brightest star
The wishing and the wanting, that will get you so far
So come and share the limelight, honey,
Come and shine your starlight over me
Oh, is it the darkness in your eyes?
The black hole where I fell for all your lies
But space between us only seems to grow
All you want is for the whole world to know
That yes, you are the brightest star
The highest and the brightest I have seen by far
So come share the limelight, honey,
Come and shine your starlight next to me
The brightest star
The brightest star
However far
Oh, you’re so far
The brightest star
The brightest star
Oh, you’re so far
My brightest star
* * *
RELEASED 10 January 1977
RECORDED October 1976 at Rothermere, Surrey
GENRE Folk rock / soft rock / pop
LABEL Phoenix Records
WRITER(S) Cass Wheeler
PRODUCER(S) Eli Glass
ENGINEER(S) Mike Edwards / Sean O’Malley
She remembers a still, golden Sunday in the summer of 1973, drowsy with heat and the basso profondo of bees.
Cass and Kim were stretched out on sun-loungers beside the swimming pool, its smooth surface dark blue, glassy. Behind them, the Château d’Anjou loomed black-roofed and silent. The shutters were still drawn over many of its tall, wood-framed windows, giving the house an unguarded look. It seemed, on this perfect afternoon, less forbidding than it had on other days, and other nights, with its whispers, and its silences, and the coolness of its empty rooms.
“I think it’s over,” Kim said, “between Graham and me.”
Cass shifted onto her front, lifted her sunglasses. Kim didn’t move; she was lying on her back, her acres of bare skin (they were both wearing their smallest bikinis) glistening with sunlotion. She had drawn her hair, with its dozens of tiny plaits, into a bun at the nape of her neck, and a few coils had struggled loose: they had the look, to Cass’s tired eyes, of so many tiny black lizards, creeping across the cushion towards her.
“Are you sure?”
Kim nodded. “He called Terri again last night. He said he was calling his mother, but I knew he wasn’t. He hates his mother almost as much as I do. I went and picked up the receiver in the kitchen.”
Cass replaced her glasses. She stretched out an arm, bridging the distance between them. The other woman’s skin was warm, slick to her touch. “Ah, Kim. Graham’s an idiot. Doesn’t know a good thing, clearly. And the booze doesn’t help, does it?”
“No.” Kim’s voice was taut. “Or the rest.”
It was seven weeks, now, since Cass and Kim had met for the first time; eight since Cass had packed two cases for herself and Ivor, and he’d carried them downstairs to the car that would take them to Heathrow. They’d flown with Alan and Martin to Paris by Concorde, though even that novel luxury hadn’t been enough to rid Cass of her nerves: her hatred of flying, it seemed, was unassailable, and so it would remain.
Martin had wanted her there a few days earlier than the others to settle in, and to meet the engineer, Luc. Chopin had once lived at the château, and Van Gogh had committed its fractured, lurid image to canvas. But Cass had hated the place on sight, and, from the very first night, had slept poorly: twice she’d insisted that she and Ivor move bedrooms after waking with the unsettling sense that someone—or something—was watching them from the shadows. She had, however, warmed immediately to Luc, a quick-witted Parisian whose English was laced with an impressive array of expletives.
Kim had arrived a week later with the keyboard player, a session musician named Frank Smith. She was wearing a short white shift dress, platform sandals, and a straw hat with a broad brim. Graham hadn’t been able to stop going on about Kim, this woman he’d met at a party, for weeks; but then, Graham hadn’t been able to stop going on about Terri, or Lucy, or Saskia, either, so they hadn’t paid him a great deal of attention.
Cass might easily, when she saw her, have thought Kim a model rather than a singer: she had that long-limbed looseness, that enviable sense of ease in her own skin. But there, in the châ
teau’s gloomy hallway, she had also immediately understood that Kim was not the sort of woman who was only truly comfortable in the admiring company of men.
Kim had put down her case, come forward to kiss Cass on each cheek, and said, “Thank you so much for bringing me in on the sessions. The State She’s In got me through the worst break-up I’ve ever had.”
“Welcome,” Cass said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Cass suspected that Kim had been singled out as a backing singer as much for her looks as for her musical abilities: she was not, it had to be said (and it wouldn’t be long before Kim herself would say it), the best vocalist on the circuit. But Cass had discovered, in the course of the sessions, that Kim’s voice had an easy, naive warmth that drew out the brighter colours in Cass’s own.
“God knows when they’ll stir,” Kim said now, beside the pool. “It must have been five when Graham came up to bed. Even later when I’d finished shouting at him.”
Ivor had come up a good while after Cass, too: he had woken her, stumbling around their room in the darkness, but she had kept her eyes closed and turned her face away.
“Martin and Alan were going to get up early,” Cass replied. “They wanted another listen to the mixes.”
Kim adjusted her position on the cushion, rearranged her hair under her neck. “God, the tracks sound great, Cass. Really great.”
“Do you think so?” Her doubt was unfeigned: she thought—hoped—the songs were good, that Luc and Martin had captured them, imprinted their essence on tape and metal. But always, in the listening, she had the sense that something was missing—that no recording could ever quite measure up to the music she could hear in her mind, and which seemed truest, most authentic, in those moments on stage, unmediated by the tricks and polishes of production.
Still, last night, at the party, everybody had seemed convinced that they had a sure-fire hit on their hands. Alan had opened the champagne, Luc and Frank had distributed the drugs, and the night had passed in a blur of raucous celebration, culminating—as far as Cass could remember—with Graham, Ivor, and Frank stripping off all their clothes and jumping into the swimming pool.
Greatest Hits Page 23