Читать книгу Doxology - Nell Zink - Страница 10

Daniel had assumed that Joe’s first gigs would be open-mic nights at anti-folk clubs on Ludlow, squaring off against stoned women in fringed vests. But given the excellent publicity, he felt emboldened to try booking him into a rock club. It could happen. Most new artists had cassette demos and no press. Joe had a seven-inch forty-five and something approaching sanctification from Forced Exposure.

The first step was audition night at CBGB, as much as Pam dreaded the idea of ever seeing the place again. Her first reaction was an uncharacteristically whiny “Do I have to go?” She offered to stay home with Flora. When Daniel said he would buy her sunglasses and a floppy hat, she realized that she was being needlessly vain. No one would connect a backbencher holding a baby in Joe’s entourage with the pitiful diva of the Diaphragms.

Since CBGB bought a weekly ad in the Village Voice to list the auditioning bands, Joe’s name appeared in the paper. Dozens of people in New York City were regular readers of both the Voice and Forced Exposure.

“Dozens” doesn’t sound like a lot, but the farther you got from New York, the more attention was paid to media, which, after all, serve to “mediate” between the individual and lived experience. Indie rock fans who couldn’t afford basic cable were more likely to have heard of Slint than Nirvana.

As a result, the show wasn’t entirely empty. The girl who had made off with Joe’s singles from Tower Records—ensuring that Tower would never become his distributor—was there, accompanied by the friend on whom she’d pressed her spare single. They wore vintage flower-print housecoats over turtlenecks and thick wool tights and were drinking beer. When Joe took the stage, they yelled, “Hold the key! Hold the key!” Flora lay in Pam’s arms, earplugs deep in her ears, swaying with the beat. Joe played through two amps—his own new bass rig and Pam’s Marshall—with a Whirlwind splitter to divide the signal. The effects loop on the bass amp ran through her MXR distortion. The guitar amp, with the reverb turned way up and the treble way down, was fed through her Foxx fuzz-wah. Joe’s voice and the grinding of his valiant Hartke cabinet’s indestructible aluminum speaker cones cut through the haze of feedback echoing from the tortured Marshall, and he sang all his finest nonsense as though his soul were on fire. Instead of “American Woman,” he closed with “Roll with the Changes” by REO Speedwagon.

When he was done, the manager’s comment to Daniel was “Bookable. Get him a band.”

Meanwhile, the girl from Tower approached Pam and said, “Your baby is so cute, I can’t stand it!”

“Thanks,” Pam said.

“Do you know Joe Harris? It looked to us like maybe you know him.”

“We’re friends.”

“He’s so talented. Does he—does he—” Her friend elbowed her, and she rephrased her question. “Are you his wife?”

“I don’t think he’s ever had a girlfriend in his life,” Pam said. Seeing their disappointment, she added, “He’s not gay. Just shy.” She smiled at the absurdity of what she’d just said. Girls were shy of Joe, shying away soon after he opened his mouth to speak. Elevation onto the stage of CBGB, with well-rehearsed lyrics to sing at high volume, must have enhanced his sex appeal.

His new number one fan took the smile as reassurance. She giggled, not even trying to hide her relief, while her friend squealed at her, “I told you that wasn’t his baby!”

“I should introduce you,” Pam said. “He’s coming over now.”

The girls drew away to regroup. Joe hugged Pam, spoke with her briefly, and turned to stare at them both. They ran out of the club.

TO DANIEL’S SURPRISE, MAXWELL’S BOOKED JOE. HE WOULD HAVE BEEN LESS SURPRISED if he had seen the single up on the wall at Pier Platters, priced at twelve dollars, classed as a limited-edition rarity because he still hadn’t found a distributor.

Maxwell’s was a club at the far end of Hoboken, a full nautical mile away from the PATH train to Manhattan, specializing in new and obscure acts. Some were obscure without being new—Daniel had seen Sun Ra there not long before his death—but most were both. The club invited Joe to open for a band that was opening for a band that was opening for a band that was opening for the Honeymoon Killers.

Joe asked Pam to sit in on guitar. Drums could stay optional if he made the bass loud enough, but someone had to fill the chinks in his crushing wall of sound, or so he said. The debate went back and forth until her final stern refusal. She wasn’t feeling very rock and roll—she weighed six pounds more than before she got pregnant—but her main reason was Joe’s sound. On the single it was refreshingly open and airy, more like an arbor than a wall. A million indie rock bands (or what seemed like a million to her, meaning several, all from the Pacific Northwest) featured guitars screaming high over bellowing male voices. Only Joe saved that Fender Jaguar role for himself. His vocals soared over the percussive rumbling like Grace Slick’s on “White Rabbit.” If it took some electronics to make it work live, so be it.

That was her view, and Daniel more or less agreed, though he would have liked to see her onstage with Joe. She was female and women were trendy. But he wasn’t about to force it. As she said, guitar didn’t fit with what Joe was doing. The sound of the single seemed to them an accident of fate, but it was an accident they liked. In the silence of his brain, Daniel called it “bliss-core.” He didn’t plan to put that in a press release, though. A new set of accidents could change it at any moment.

THE SOUND CHECK AT MAXWELL’S WENT FINE, WITH THE USUAL EXCEPTIONS FOR strangers being irritated by Joe. He was delighted and excited by everyone and everything. He forgot to plug in his bass and sang half a song a cappella, proving once and for all that he didn’t think the instrumentation much mattered. When Daniel yelled, “Plug in!” he found the end of the cable, shoved it into his bass, and finished the song in a storm of arpeggios. He looked ebullient about being so much louder than before. The soundman said he was meshuga, but he didn’t seem to mean it in a bad way.

The hall wasn’t full for his set, but there were people in attendance. Pam and Daniel could see that many were the proper kind—indie rock fans, as indicated by their pocket tees in dark colors, unbuttoned plaid flannel shirts worn as jackets, and vintage PF Flyers or comparable footwear. Also present were two men of a dubious sort. “Major label scouts,” Pam hissed. They were dressed in sport coats and talked to each other in loud voices throughout Joe’s opening number. She heard one of them call his music “rad,” as if “rad” were current slang.

Carrying Flora, she went to stand in front of them. Every time they moved, she moved. When they eyed the rear of the club, plainly considering sitting down on the big PA speakers stored there, she went to those same speakers to change Flora’s diaper. Seeing the diaper from the inside, the scouts decamped to the bar.

A less streetwise musician might not have chased major label scouts away from Joe. But indie rock had arisen from desperate necessity, to offer artists an alternative to exploitation. The recording industry had once paid musicians flat fees. The contemporary way to stiff them while cultivating an appearance of generosity was to charge publicity against their royalties. Every video, tour bus, and hotel room came straight out of the artist’s pocket. Long before peer-to-peer file sharing and online streaming, a star could have big hits and be broke.

As Joe was starting his last song, Pam saw the cute girl from CBGB. She was alone, rushed and hectic, still wearing her coat. She had arrived when his set was nearly done. Pam could see the disappointment in her face. She strolled over. The girl noticed her with relief. She mimed looking at her watch and turned up her hands helplessly. She knew she was late. When the song was over, and she was done clapping and whooping and yelling “Encore!” and “Hold the key!” she turned to Pam and said, “I had to find someone to cover the shift after mine. That’s why I’m late.”

“What’s your name?”

“Eloise.”

“No way.”

The girl closed her eyes in deep embarrassment and clenched her fists, and Pam realized belatedly that she was shy. Eloise fled toward the stage, where Joe was launching into his encore, “Splash 1” by the 13th Floor Elevators. He saw her and stared at her. He sang the entire song looking into her eyes.

The rock repertoire includes several songs an informed person might call romantic, such as “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, but few can compete with “Splash,” the work of a mystic at the height of his powers. Soon after its composition, those powers defeated Roky Erickson, and he turned his genius to the service of the devil and the Martian voice in his head, but in “Splash” he was as yet untainted.

It was too much for Eloise. When Joe had finished emoting, she had to be alone. She ceased from clapping and hid in the bathroom to fix her face. The ladies’ room at Maxwell’s was a single. Because the mirror occupied the same space as the toilet bowl, a person could miss an entire set waiting in line. There she stood at the mirror and found herself wanting. She looked in vain for the neon splashing from her eyes.

Pam gave up looking for her and joined the queue. When Eloise finally came out, wincing at the sight of her, Pam hesitated briefly. She wanted to introduce her to Joe. She thought it might be of significant positive import for Joe’s future. But she had to pee, so she stayed in line. By the time she emerged, Eloise was gone.

IN THE TAXI GOING HOME, SHE SAID TO JOE, “THAT CUTE GIRL INTRODUCED HERSELF TO me. Her name is Eloise. I think she likes you.”

“I’m the original bitch magnet,” Joe said.

“What cute girl?” Daniel asked.

“The Joe Harris fan club. She came in for the last two songs and stared at him in a trance, like she’s from that tract Hippies, Hindus and Rock & Roll. Short brown hair, flowered dress?”

“Earth to Pam,” Daniel said. “‘Cute’ means sexy, not frumpy.”

“Frumpy and dumpy,” Joe said. “When a guy says ‘cute,’ he means a model. Like you.”

“I am not a model!”

“You’re skinny and you have clothes like a model.”

“Joe, I swear to you, man, she’s Trixie and you’re Speed Racer. She’s your one true love.”

“I wouldn’t fuck her for practice!”

“Who taught you to talk like that?”

“He’s quoting me,” Daniel said. “I was being ironic.”

“What the fuck, Daniel! Why pick on Eloise?”

“She’s the scenester babe I always thought I would end up with. She’s my bête noire, man.”

“I want to be your bête noire man,” Joe sang, to the tune of “Whole Lotta Love.”

THE FAMILY WENT TO RACINE FOR CHRISTMAS. PAM GAINED WEIGHT AND UNDERSTOOD why Daniel was so tall. They stayed at a motel because there wasn’t room in the house for five families of giants, but they ate with his parents. Every meal was like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Pie pans were in constant rotation. Meat from the deep freeze in the basement was thawing continuously on every countertop.

At first there was no conflict or even especial curiosity about her. No one had time to listen to anything she said. They sized her up and decided that she required a succession of big, bland meals. They lauded the chubbiness of Flora. Daniel talked with his relatives about people and places she had never heard of. It was hard to keep track, even after he explained. Only one topic addressed her directly. At the midday meal on Christmas Eve, Daniel’s much older sister Debra advanced the theory that Princess Stéphanie of Monaco had a haircut similar to hers.

That evening, she begged to be excused from going to church.

“Are you sick?” Daniel’s mother asked.

Stupidly, she didn’t say yes. She said instead that she wasn’t a Christian, and technically neither was Flora, because she hadn’t been christened, so if nobody minded they would just go on back to the motel and rest up.

A doctrinal dispute erupted that shocked even Daniel. He had managed to put out of his mind how seriously his family took religion. They thought Pam’s notion of infant baptism was sacrilege and that her ungrateful soul was bound for hell. Soon nine adults were tag-teaming her to yell about Jesus, drunk on Baileys and a blueberry dessert wine they pretended was festive rather than alcoholic. Flora was crying and they didn’t care, because all the children were crying.

No non-Christian person had ever been invited to their home before. Even Daniel had originally appeared uninvited, so to speak. Nobody ever asked him what he believed, and he usually knew better than to talk about it. On this occasion, the role model provided by Pam herself—a person whose openness with her parents had produced a rupture she clearly felt was preferable to living a lie, or at least preferable to going to church—prompted him to come to her defense with solidarity. He said, “I don’t believe in God or Jesus either, but it doesn’t matter!”

FOR PRESENTS, HE HAD BOUGHT EVERYONE IN HIS FAMILY SOME INDIVIDUALIZED ITEM of exotic Asian strangeness from Chinatown, a figurine or odd snack. He and Pam were due to receive many socks and fruitcakes, and Flora was getting hand-knit baby booties.

On Christmas morning, he took the Asian presents to his parents’ front porch and tried to negotiate. It became clear that alone, without Pam and Flora—without evidence that he had his disobedient wife well in hand—he would not be welcomed, and that they would credit no personal profession of his faith. He would have to attend church with them and set an example by coming forward to be saved.

His heart sank because he knew he would never do it. Seeing that he was expected to be a patriarch, to rule over Pam, alienated him as nothing ever had before.

Flora didn’t care about missing Christmas. She wasn’t even two yet, nor entirely clear on which of those strangers had been Grandma and Grandpa.

Their return flight was postponed by thirty hours due to typical Wisconsin winter weather. The likelihood that they would return for a second holiday season in Racine diminished to a vanishing smallness.

JOE’S NEXT SHOW WAS BY INVITATION OF SIMON, WHO HAD STUMBLED INTO ENVIABLE gigs reviewing classic rock LPs for the new website Amazon and heavy metal for the magazine Thrasher. Dumb luck and connections had lent him the aura of success, and some indie rock band was trying to siphon it off by getting him to book opening acts for their CD release party at a storefront on Stanton Street called House of Candles.

The band members had their own label, the way Joe had Lion’s Den, so they had no label-mates to pack the bill with. They were from Albany, so they had no fan base in tow except their girlfriends. They were paying rent for the venue, so they wanted bands with social circles, but not party bands that would steal the show.

Being something of an asshole, Simon invited bands that would help cement his professional position as a critic. He added Joe as an afterthought, to make sure Pam knew he could have booked Marmalade Sky and didn’t. He told the indie rock band that Joe was an outsider singer-songwriter with a loyal following, which was true.

She stayed home with Flora. Joe was promised no share of the door but granted permission to sell merchandise. Simon encouraged him to skip the sound check, because he couldn’t have cared less how he sounded. Thus Joe and Daniel didn’t head over until eight o’clock, as the first band was starting. Daniel carried twenty-eight singles in a box labeled “$3.”

Daniel set it down on a table in the back and looked around for Eloise. But she never showed that night, because there had been no publicity for anyone but the headliners. He stayed near the merchandise to make sure no one stole it.

Joe sat in the front row, bass on his lap, playing along quietly with the opening act, billed as Broad Spectrum. It consisted of a woman singer, a scared-looking boy playing tenor recorder, a sequencer that wasn’t working right, and a keyboard player holding a tambourine. The keyboardist was responsible for the sequencer. She kept jabbing at it, shaking the tambourine at random, and alternating between two chords on the keyboard with her left hand. You could hear that she was right-handed. The woodwind looked frustrated, trying for low notes and getting overtones. The singer’s dance moves kept taking her away from the microphone. Her voice could be heard when she stood still for the chorus, but it remained incomprehensible, because she cupped the mic with both hands, looking very earnest and sexy while it was practically inside her mouth and kept feeding back. The group performed as though they not only hadn’t rehearsed, but had won the gig in a raffle, earlier in the day, before they founded the band.

After their first number subsided, the singer nudged the keyboardist aside and fiddled with the sequencer. The setup began to play “Sussudio” by Phil Collins. She returned to the mic, glared at Joe for singing along, and said, “It’s a borrowed keyboard. Give us a minute.” Three minutes later, the band continued its set with four-finger organ, tambourine duties devolving on the singer. The woodwind took a rest. The singer’s yawping teetered on the edge of feedback until Simon, the soundman, rendered the mic inaudible. The whole thing was pathetic, and when it was done, everybody clapped for a long time.

Daniel thought, The name kind of fits, assuming they meant “broad” as in “woman” and the autism “spectrum.” Also, in his opinion, their conceptual project didn’t stand a chance against the art of music. Joe had craft, not a concept. He could hear himself play—he could really listen—and when he wasn’t sounding good, he took steps to fix it.

He played three numbers, rocking out to his own conception of beauty, alone and weird. The applause was cursory, because there was no one in the audience but members and friends of Broad Spectrum. He sat back down in his seat in the front. An older but not repulsive man in standard-issue indie rock garb (Black Watch plaid shirt, Cubs cap) sat down next to him, introduced himself as Eric, handed over a business card, and said, “Call me if you’re interested.” Joe scampered to the rear, breathlessly waving the card, to tell Daniel he’d been scouted by Matador.

Matador was an important indie record label, Joe’s favorite in all of New York next to 4AD. It turned out that Broad Spectrum was made up of people who had office jobs there.

Daniel had come to feel gloomy about distributing the single. If Joe got a contract with Matador, his work was done. The remaining singles would sell themselves. He said, “That’s awesome!”

He knew that Matador was doing some kind of dance with Atlantic—an unequal partnership or a not quite acquisition—the idea being that collaboration would offer artists all the advantages of a major label with none of the degradation. What the reality was, he didn’t know, but the company itself was respectable: it possessed bourgeois realness; it had offices in Manhattan and fine and noble founders, and it distributed its wares to the farthest corners of the earth. As for signing with Matador, there was little Joe could have possibly done that was more likely to get him fair treatment and decent money.

Daniel sold two singles that evening and gave away five to people who said they were reviewers for magazines whose existence he doubted, strengthening his resolve to nudge Joe from the indie rock gift economy into the big time. He offered to call Eric for him the next day.

WITHIN A WEEK JOE AND SOME GUY NAMED RANDY HAD SIGNED A MEMORANDUM OF understanding drawn up in ballpoint pen on a steno pad at a beer bar on Sixth Avenue. Joe signed it in the presence of Daniel—not in an official capacity; his role as Joe’s label executive and manager was a combination hobby and joke—who saw nothing to criticize. Somebody somewhere had skipped Joe right over Matador and signed him to Atlantic, with an advance of $80,000 for a single LP. He might take home only $10,000 after taxes, recording, and publicity, yet spending even $10,000 was likely to be fun for him. On some level it was money for nothing, since he would be making music anyway. With a major label contract, he could make it in a fancy studio with professional engineers.

When the finalized contract arrived in the mail—eighteen pages of legalese—Daniel belatedly suggested getting a lawyer. Joe said no, because he trusted Eric and Randy. Daniel suggested involving Professor Harris. Again, Joe said no.

He wasn’t anybody’s ward. He was impulsive and vulnerable. His own weaknesses told him, directly, that he didn’t need protection.

It wasn’t paradoxical. It was tautological, like all the most daunting and bewildering things in life. Things are the way they are: unthinkable. Trying to understand can feel like a struggle, but the conflict is internal to each of us, ending in surrender each night when we close our eyes.

Looking through the countersigned contract months later and seeing points he maybe should have argued over, Daniel couldn’t say for sure whether Joe had gotten a raw deal. Maybe other fledgling artists were being treated better; he didn’t know. In absolute terms, it was a gift. Joe had gone straight from babysitter to rock star, while there was nothing in the contract that would oblige him to give up babysitting.

RANDY WANTED TO MAKE AN ANTI-FOLK RECORD WITH ROCK DRUMMING À LA BECK OR major-label Butthole Surfers. He claimed that Joe’s vision of bubblegum dub was an audience-free joint that wouldn’t even fly in Brazil. That’s how he phrased it, thinking Joe would get bewildered and surrender. Joe did not. It seldom impressed him that things are the way they are.

“The bass on Doggystyle makes my vision go blurry!” he insisted to an elevator full of random label employees after his third chaotic five-minute meeting with Randy. “That’s what I want! Deep music for deaf people!” He told Daniel, who was waiting for him in the lobby with Flora to go to lunch, that Atlantic was going to turn his lovely demos into crashy-bangy alternative rock.

“It worked for Suzanne Vega,” Daniel pointed out. “They add kick drum and hi-hat to some folkie vocal thing, and there you are. That’s how CBS made a number one hit out of ‘Sound of Silence.’”

“That’s the main substance of my lament!” Joe said. “With too many drums, you can’t hear the music. I don’t need drums. I have my rhythm in the music where it belongs!”

“That’s good. Try that on Randy. Say what you just said to me.”

“You do it! He doesn’t listen to me.”

DANIEL, IN HIS FUNCTION AS PRETEND MANAGER, CALLED RANDY THE NEXT DAY. IT wasn’t a productive conversation. Joe had presented an irresolvable impasse as mere friction. Randy informed him that Joe was all set to make a record that the label would never release. Subsequently he would be free to go on making records for them at his own expense forever, until he happened to make one they liked.

Daniel replied, “That’s a no-good deal, and you’re a piece of shit.”

“Am I now,” Randy said.

“If you pile roadblocks on the creativity of Joe Harris, that’s exactly what you are. An ignorant, self-defeating piece of shit.”

“I didn’t say he can’t record any album he wants,” Randy pointed out. “I just said we won’t release it.”

“Fuck you, ass-wipe,” Daniel said, marveling at his own inarticulacy.

Randy referred him to a senior executive producer, a blond surfer-snowboarder of fifty who called himself Daktari.

DANIEL WENT WITH JOE AND FLORA THE FOLLOWING WEEK TO SEE DAKTARI, WHO TOLD them he’d be adding a rhythm track whether they liked it or not, and that from what he’d heard people saying around the office, Music for Deaf People would be an excellent working title.

Daktari was handsome and regularly spent time in France. Many years before, someone in Paris had told him it was a mark of breeding to insult people to their faces without breaking eye contact.

His skills were wasted on Joe, who replied in gratitude that he had resolved to call his opening track “Daktari.” He started writing it right there. Tapping his foot, he sang, “Daktaree-ee-ee, is Randy’s boss so maybe he can te-ell me, if we need drums on this so give the bass to me, I’ll show you drums are not the sole reason to be.”

“A percussion jam is a big crowd-pleaser,” Daktari interrupted. “Don’t you want to be bigger than Jesus?”

Switching back to normal conversation, Joe said, “Lots of Aretha Franklin songs don’t have drums!”

“Afraid of the neighbors? We can find you rehearsal space.”

“It’s not the noise,” Daniel interposed. “He has this inability.”

“You mean disability?” Daktari looked closely at Joe’s body. A flicker of horror crossed his beauteous mien at the idea that the label might have signed a disabled person.

“Inability,” Daniel said. “He can’t really listen to loud noises that sound like explosions all the time.”

“Because of what, war trauma?”

“He’s unable. It’s like when you say you’re unable to come to the phone or unable to forgive somebody. On the one hand, it’s an admission of weakness, because you’re saying you’re at the mercy of forces beyond your control, but to other people it sounds arrogant, since those forces might be you.” Flora was pushing a six-inch beanbag hippopotamus up his pants leg, and he leaned down to pet her head, the way he always did when speaking an eternal truth he hoped would accompany her on her way.

“In other words, it resembles my inability to put out a hit record with no percussion,” Daktari countered.

“I didn’t say ‘no percussion,’” Joe said. “I love congas and bongos. Can we get a studio with congas and bongos?”

“Our studios have pro arrangers and session musicians and every goddamned instrument in the book,” Daktari said. “Bring me hit tunes, and I’ll record them any way you want.”

RIDING HOME ON THE BUS, DANIEL LOUDLY MOURNED THEIR FAILURE TO SIGN WITH AN independent label. He was tortured by the illogic of their discussion with Daktari, who had bested him in negotiations without negotiating or even paying him any attention. Instead of gaining the label’s assent to songs without drums, he had committed Joe to earning congas and bongos with all-new material.

They stood for a long time talking about it at the playground. Daniel set Flora down on the ground. Indoors she was a floor baby, but outdoors she was a baby rooting for acorns in mud. Sandboxes were rare in New York, considered dangerous because of pet feces. There was never an evening when she didn’t need a bath.

“I screwed up,” Daniel said, turning over a succession of fallen leaves with his foot. He saw a shard of broken glass and picked it up so he could throw it in the trash. “We should have signed with Matador.”

“That guy likes hit songs,” Joe said. “So I’ll write hit songs. He’s going to love my new songs. Everything’s completely fine, so stop worrying.”

“My feeling was that he hated us. I mean all of us, even Flora.” He looked down. She had placed a cigarette filter in a bottle cap so that her hippo could eat it off a dish. When the hippo failed to react, she mimed eating the filter herself. “That’s a no-no!” he said. “Don’t eat litter!” She put it back. With her help, the hippo extended its prolapsed pink mouth like an amoeba over the bottle cap and its contents. “Hippos hate cigarette butts,” he said, picking it up so he could throw it away. “Even though they’re rich in minerals and fiber. They prefer grass. Why don’t you offer him some grass from your open hand?”

“Where’s any grass?” she said. “I don’t see grass.”

“I see dandelions,” Joe said. “That’s hippos’ favorite food. They call it hippo-pot.”

“I see hippo-pot!” she said. She stood and approached a solitary dandelion that was standing by a fence. With the hippo clamped under one arm, she did her best to rip it out of the ground.

“That was pedagogically questionable,” Daniel commented.

“You’re so nugatory all the time!”

“I hope you mean ‘negative all the time.’”

“Even about Daktari. He hates indie rock music because he works for a major label. It makes total sense.”

“So why the fuck did he sign an indie rock artist like you?”

“Because he’s a prescient guy. He can tell I’m going to bring him big hits!”