by Richard Neer
McCarver, sensing tension in the room, said, “I’ll leave it to you gentlemen. I have meetings with the attorneys most of the afternoon. I’ll alert my IT director to be at your command should you require his expertise.”
Out of Ted’s sightline, Ginn wrinkled his nose at the ostentatious language. I thanked McCarver and we got to work, sorting through the tapes. There were hundreds scattered about randomly and most weren’t clearly marked.
Jason said, “Give me the ones with no titles. I’ll thread ‘em up on this old tape deck and listen to see if they’re what we’re looking for.”
He pointed to the old Pioneer machine, with a brushed aluminum face and walnut sides. It had to be forty-some years old and would have cost two weeks salary back then.
It triggered some memories of my youth, when I ventured into a Lafayette electronics store with cash in my pocket, determined to buy my first stereo system. There was no internet back then, only paper catalogues that were sent to my dad, who knew a lot about expensive audio systems.
I was a practical kid, looking for a great deal. I knew I couldn’t afford the top of the line stuff, but I compared the specs of the big name receivers with the store brand models and it seemed that there was little appreciable difference. My father offered to accompany me, but I insisted on going by myself. I wanted to prove to him that I was now an independent man, capable of making big purchases on my own, without his well meaning advice.
That vanished the minute I stepped into the small glassed in room reserved for the high quality products. There were racks of receivers, turntable and amps with names I’d come to know but only dreamed of. Marantz, McIntosh, Harmon-Kardon, Denon. The blue and green lights flashed as the Advent, Bowers&Wilkins and Klipsch speakers blasted out volume that would make the walls in my room tremble.
They had dancing VU meters, progressive EQ displays and some even featured gasp! --- Surround Sound. Just outside the glass doors to the listening room sat the Lafayette store brand receivers. Plain looking, utilitarian. They got the job done, but without the romance. Nothing you could impress a girl with. With the right configuration, they could sound almost as good to the unschooled ear as the elite brands, but with none of the cachet.
The salesman was crew cut pimply, dressed in an ill fitting, tan, off the rack suit. Wearing horn rimmed glasses attached to a neck lanyard, he extolled the virtues of the top brands --- RMS power, Total Harmonic Distortion, ultrafine sensitivity, Minimum Impedance, FM selectivity.
My practical side melted away. I had two hundred dollars of summer job cash in my pocket, and these machines cost many times that.
I gingerly asked about a refurbished unit? A store demo? Open box? Not now, the salesman said. These exclusive models are in high demand. Can’t keep them in stock.
Naïve kid that I was, I bought into the rap. I told him how much I came with and he said it would be no problem. Two hundred would make a nice down payment if I could qualify for their revolving credit, at double digit interest rates. We settled on a McIntosh receiver with JBL speakers and a Garrard turntable, with a price tag five times my limit. No discount, strictly MSRP.
I signed on the dotted line. He went to a back sales office and came out ten minutes later, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry, young fellow,” he said. I didn’t qualify for that much credit. However, if my dad would co-sign the account, he might be able to make it work.
Reality smacked me in the face. I didn’t want my father’s help. I also didn’t want to risk asking for it and have him turn me down. I thanked the man for his time and trudged away, defeated.
I wound up buying a Panasonic combination unit at EJ Korvettes. Turntable, small speakers and a built in AM/FM receiver. It sounded clean, not much bass, and lots of distortion at high volume. I got it on sale and even had a couple of bucks left over. It would be years before I could indulge my audiophile fantasies.
~~~~~
Back to the present, Jason said, “Whoever started sorting these had created some files. There’s one marked ‘concerts’. It’d be great if Townes’ show is in there already. Shit. No such luck. The file’s empty.”
Moses said, “It’s gonna take us the rest of the afternoon to go through all this. These tapes don’t seem to be in any kind of order. Alphabetical, time, nothing.”
Jason had cued up the first tape and was listening on headphones. “More bad news, boys. This tape started out as one thing, then a few seconds in, it switched to another. That means that they re-recorded over it.”
“Why would they do that?” Ginn asked.
I said, “Stone told me about that, years ago. Good tape on ten inch reels was expensive. A lot of it got used for airchecks and rather than buy fresh tape, they’d record over old stuff they didn’t have any use for. He said they lost a lot of artist interviews that they’d kill for today because in a lot of cases, the gatekeepers were interns or engineers who didn’t see any value in them.”
Jason said, “Yeah, they call them curators now. With huge these hard drives, you can keep everything and it costs next to nothing. When I started out, radio stations had huge wall units, chock full of record albums. Now those libraries can be stored on SD cards the size of a postage stamp.”
Ginn shook his head. “Needle in a haystack, you ask me. Tell me again why we doing this.”
Black had the answer. “Since we don’t have his notebook with the songs Townes was working on, this might be the only record of them. The guy from Bottoms Up said that he played too many of his new songs at the start of the show and that pissed off the fans. So much so they started a riot and they had to cut the mics. But if we can find a recording of the first part of that concert, we can prove that The Flying Machine stole those songs and Townes’ widow should be paid royalties.”
Ginn nodded. “I’ll shut up and keep looking.”
The three of us worked until dinner time. We called out for pizza and ate while we worked, taking care not to get grease on the old brittle tapes. Jason said, “Even if we do find the tape, it may not be playable. They don’t last forever like CDs are supposed to. If we find it, we may have to take it to be restored. They actually bake them in an oven. That strengthens the backing enough to get through the heads without cracking.”
“How do you know so much about that?”
“I tried to buy back some of my old masters from my first record company. I only got one, a demo that never saw the light of day. It was some of my earliest work, needed polishing. I was thinking I could jazz it up and re-release it, but it was too far gone. And the songs weren’t as good as I remembered them.”
By eight, we’d gone through all the tapes. No luck. Ted had gone home for the night but had sent up a nice bottle of Glenlivet to make the drudgery a bit more bearable. We saved it until the end.
Ginn and I sipped the scotch, just like we’d be doing at home this time of night. Jason was a bourbon man and declined the gift. He said, “Well, that was a dead end. Worth pursuing, though.”
“Welcome to detective work,” I said.
Jason wasn’t conceding anything. “But we’re not dead yet. I’m thinking you should call George Arliss, the music critic. Back in the day, kids used to record live broadcasts off the radio onto cassettes. There must be somebody out there who taped that show. Arliss could put out a plea on his podcast or a mass e-mailing to his followers. There’s a chance somebody out there has a tape. We could offer a reward.”
I expanded on the idea. “You know, that reward could be tickets to the benefit show and a chance to meet Charlene. What tape head wouldn’t go for that? Plus, it’d help get the word out.”
Everyone liked that idea. We walked down two flights of stairs, glancing through the glass at the control room on the way out, where a young man sat reading a magazine. A nationally syndicated show was playing through invisible speakers --- some nutcase explaining how godless communism was lurking around the corner because Congress was considering expanding access to health care. I und
erstood why McCarver was so eager to get out.
The bored engineer monitoring the broadcast looked up from his reading and flashed his palm in farewell. As we left the building, we shook hands with Black and agreed to touch base the next morning.
On the way to the car, Ginn said, “Well, Tomey took care of walking and feeding Bosco. After today with lunch and all, I owe her big time. Got a feeling there’s gonna be another round of Christmas shopping in my future.”
“I wear a size 42 long jacket and 34-32 pants. Did you catch that suit Ted was wearing? I’d look really sexy in that.”
“I’ll remember that for your funeral,” Ginn said. “Let’s ride.”
29
Before we parted for the night, Jason had given me a digital copy of Colton Townes’ first two albums. I didn’t like them and that was being charitable.
Mind you, I hated Bob Dylan at first. Like a Rolling Stone was the earliest record of his I’d heard. Ugh. That whiney, nasal voice. The nasty diatribe aimed at his ex-lover. The song’s length --- over six minutes.
I was used to three minute ditties from the Beatles, Dave Clark Five or the Rolling Stones. Who was this faker from a hick town in Minnesota, pretending to be an authentic Greenwich Village folkie? Then he went electric, proving that the whole Woody Guthrie persona was an act.
As I got older, his voice stopped grating on me. I appreciated the poetry, the clever wordplay and political stances, even the melodies. I accepted the fact the man was an eccentric who did whatever struck his fancy and he didn’t care if you liked it or not. By that stage, he’d earned it, in my estimation. Sometimes I cherished his recordings and listened to them repeatedly over time. And sometimes, I just chalked up his failed experiments to Dylan being Dylan.
The former Robert Zimmerman had made an art of what his ‘friend’ Joan Baez termed keeping things vague. The songs meant whatever you wanted them to mean, and if you thought he’d enlighten you in the few interviews he gave, forget it. He’d contradict himself, renounce some of his own work. He was a Jew, a born again Christian, an agnostic. The man is either a genius or plumb out of his mind.
Like so many others, Colton Townes was heavily influenced by Dylan. As in the master’s early work, the arrangements were spare, many just him and a guitar. He often used unconventional words that were hard to rhyme, so he didn’t try, just left them dangling. The songs had little structure, they rambled from one verse to the next. Choruses and bridges were optional. One song drifted through twelve minutes of dissonance, another less than sixty seconds.
I know that consistency has been called the ‘hobgoblin of small minds’, but music for me is entertainment. I don’t want to work too hard at it. I don’t want to do research to understand what the artist was getting at. I like a repeatable melody, one I could remember the next day. Townes’ work presented a challenge, one I wasn’t up for.
Jason had steered me toward some of the more accessible tracks and that’s where I saw a gleam of potential. He said that the unrecorded third album was a total departure.
I didn’t even bother playing the record for Ginn. I was afraid he’d question why we were wasting time trying to find this untalented wannabe. His sense of justice would keep him on the case, I had no doubt of that.
I met Jason the next morning at the Dunkin’ shop in Bluffton just off 278. I told him what I thought of the music and he was not surprised by my reaction. Black was like me when it comes to music appreciation and it shows in his work, which was why he was a star all those years ago.
He said, “Townes was an acquired taste. Snobby critics like George Arliss loved him. But I don’t think either album sold more than ten thousand.”
“By the way, I texted Arliss and he agreed to do a mass emailing to see if anyone has a copy of that New Year’s show. So tell me, what changed with Townes?”
“Carla. She told us how his letter said he’d let her down. He loved her and wanted her to have nice things. If he continued recording songs with no commercial appeal, careening from style to style, he’d always be a failure.”
“I heard a little Dylan and maybe Springsteen in some of it. For me, it was too raw, sounded like one take and that was it.”
“I went through a phase like that but I never released that stuff. When I listened back to it a few days later, all I could hear were the mistakes and the room for improvement if I put some effort into it. I learned early on that no matter how clever your lyrics are, if they’re not supported by a decent melody and a hook, they won’t be accepted commercially.”
“So you sold out early.”
“Gee, thanks. I guess you could say that if it means I wanted to be popular. I wanted a nice pad, hot chicks, a cool ride. My problem was when the business started to change, I stayed put. I hated disco, I wouldn’t sample or use auto-tune. There were limits to what I’d do to stay on top and for that reason and a few others, I’m not there anymore.”
“If you could get there again, would you?”
“Sure, I think about it from time to time. How much I’ve learned over the years about composition and chord structure. I’d be starting all over again, though. Kids have no idea who I am and my old fans are dying off.”
“And you told me your guitar work is not what it was because of the injury.”
“There’s that. But I’m happy where I’m at. I make a decent living. Have a little nest egg. Living with a great lady. At my age, going out on the road for six months at a time has very little appeal. I’d rather stay home with Kat and Jasper and watch old movies every night with a glass of wine. So sue me.”
“Actually, that life doesn’t sound half bad.”
“I do maybe ten concerts a year. Got a loose band, bunch of local dudes who jam with me. I guess you could call them talented amateurs, but they get the job done. I get my music fix that way. It’s enough.”
“Sounds like you’re happy.”
“That I am, cowboy, that I am. We gotta roll now. Carla’s expecting us around ten. Her shift at Home Depot starts at noon.”
Ginn was doing some household errands today. Food shopping, a couple of minor repairs around the house. He said to call if I needed him, but if I couldn’t persuade a seventy year old widow to accept a six figure contribution, I should hang it up now.
Again, we took Black’s pickup truck to Carla’s double wide. The exterior was just as shabby as I remembered from the other day. I hadn’t been inside that day and had no idea what to expect.
Fully half the small space was a shrine to her husband. Old guitars, sheet music, books. A dilapidated grouping of Marshall amps and creaky music stands. Everything was meticulously displayed, even the jean jackets and torn Levis that I assumed was Townes’ onstage garb. A mini-Graceland museum.
Carla was dressed for work. She looked all prim and proper, ready to greet customers with a smile. Brick and mortar retail outlets are finally getting the word that they’d better offer a pleasant shopping experience or they will be replaced by online sites offering the same merchandise at lower prices, delivered to your door the next day.
She offered us coffee and we declined. The place was clean and well preserved, but tired. Sort of like its owner. We sat at her small Formica breakfast table, that was as polished as her husband’s memorabilia.
I said, “Jason tells me you’re reluctant to accept the proceeds from the benefit he’s planning.”
“Reluctant is the wrong word, Mr. King. I’m dead set against it. I’m not into the ‘pity the poor widow trip’. I can take care of myself. I work, have my Social Security and Medicare. My needs are small. Why should I accept all that money when there are so many deserving others?”
Jason said, “Because you had so much stolen from you. When your husband left, he had some songs in his possession which are big hits now.”
“If that’s so and royalties are due, I can accept that. But not charity.”
I said, “The problem is trying to prove that they’re his songs. We’re relying on Jason�
��s memory and that won’t stand up in court. We need more. Do you have any recordings of those songs? Any demos? Even a crude one on a cassette.”
“I don’t. Don’t you two talk? That was the first thing Jason asked me. They’re super clear in my memory and now that I’ve heard that band playing them, I’m sure that they came from Colton.”
“Again, your word would get some sympathy but if this ever goes to court, it won’t be enough.”
“You told me that you were going to see that band when they got back from their tour. You said that would be in the next few days. Why don’t you think they’d be upstanding Christians and admit they stole those songs and do the right thing?”
Jason shook his head. “Carla, I know the music business. The name Milli Vanilli ring a bell? They were frauds and they got found out and banished. If The Flying Machine admit they used your husband’s songs and didn’t give him credit, their careers might be over.”
“That’s why they might settle out of court with a non-disclosure agreement,” I said. “But without proof, I wouldn’t count on it.”
Carla waved her right hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Non-disclosure? Meaning they wouldn’t admit that those were Colt’s songs? They couldn’t pay me enough to agree to that.”
Jason and I looked at each other for a reply. My turn. “Mrs. Townes, I have to be honest. We’ll talk to these people or more likely, their lawyers. The chances of you getting anything are very small.”
“What if Colt gave them those songs or sold them to them? That could prove he’s alive and that’s the important thing to me, not the money. I know he’s out there somewhere. They didn’t just happen upon his notebook after forty years.”
Jason said, “However they came by them, we can’t find any proof that they’re Colton’s. We’re trying to find a tape of that New Year’s Eve show that was on the radio where he did some of those songs. We have George Arliss helping us on that. Any idea where we could find such a thing?”
