by Steve Low
The summer of 71 is one I remember well. Isobel had completed her first year at university and was coming home for the vacation. I stood beside Julia at the bus terminal, a gangly, loose limbed sixteen year old. I’d had quite a growth spurt through adolescence. Now I could look right down on top of Julia’s head. And Isobel’s as well. Of course, strait-jacketed by self consciousness, I didn’t show the exuberance of former times. There was no 100 metre dash to the main-street corner to gain an early sighting. Yet, within my prickly skin, I yearned for such an action. I had high hopes for Isobel’s return.
As soon as I saw her, I knew that she had changed. In appearance she was now well left of centre. Her hair was waist length, with peroxide streaking amongst the original hazelnut. Fine braided plaits dangled in amongst the tumbled tresses. She was wearing an ankle length wrap-around sari and Roman sandals. I was delighted with the transition. To me, such a metamorphosis was highly desirable, given the messages of our sixties musical heroes, and the intransigence of Graham’s generation.
I moved into line behind Julia for the welcome home kiss. I was excited by the prospect of receiving her again, to feel her warm breath on my face, and to re-experience the former comfort of her enclosing arms. But her manner of greeting Julia, foreshadowed the looming truth – that it wasn’t only her appearance that had changed. Her tone was faintly dismissive. It was as if she had returned home only because she felt she ought to – an adherence to some old fashioned obligation. Julia stepped aside as I received my greeting. My sister smelt of musk and beeswax.
“God you’re tall,” she said, standing back to look at me.
Later in the evening, after Graham and Julia had retired to bed, I knocked diffidently on her door and went in. Although the room was dark, I could see her over by the open window. The glowing embers of her cigarette gave her away. “You smoke now!” I said.
“I only smoke dope,” she said. She tapped the cigarette against the edge of the windowsill. “Here, have a puff.”
I took the thing between index and middle fingers, adhering to the observed custom of my college peers. It was narrower and firmer than a normal cigarette. Unused to any type of inhalation, I was quickly overwhelmed by a raucous coughing fit.
“What are you doing?” Isobel reprimanded. “You’ll have Graham here next.”
Doubled over, my eyes smarting and unable to speak, I held the cigarette out for her to take back. We hung out the window, absorbing the scene of the empty street. There was a line of streetlamps, each surrounded by a flight of ducking and diving moths. From a few streets away came the sound of a car changing gear as it began to ascend a hill.
“I don’t know how I’m going to stand these summer holidays,” she said, without turning to look at me. “I mean, Graham is so square, and Mum . . . she’s too tolerant.”
I felt a bit miffed by this statement. Didn’t she want to see me? But I didn’t want to appear too soft. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “I can’t wait to leave.”
“You’ve still got two years to go,” she said in a derisory tone. “Two years of that,” She gestured towards Graham and Julia’s room with her cigarette hand.
“You haven’t run into Margo again?” I asked
She shook her head. “Mum should have left Graham years ago – when they were caught. Why she stayed with him – it’s beyond comprehension.
“I wouldn’t have been born if that had happened,” I said.
She smiled and threw the expiring butt out onto the pavement below. “So how’s your year been?”
The truth was that my year hadn’t been great. Amongst my peers I was confined to the fringes. My guitar was my companion. My latest one, a German Framus purchased from an emigrating guitar teacher had a lovely curvature in the back and a fine wood grain running through the narrow varnished neck. I hauled it along with me into the depth of my Byrd’s obsession. Of course by 1971, the Byrds heyday was well over. There had been a brief moment of glory in 1966 with the charting of Eight miles high, but after that radio airplay was minimal. I hadn’t even been aware of subsequent seminal works such as Notorious Byrd Brothers and Sweetheart of the rodeo. Out of the blue there had been a tantalising exposure to the song Wasn’t born to follow. It was on Isobel’s copy of the Easyrider soundtrack, and I was intrigued by its marriage of the earlier sound with a country feel, but as far as I knew, it was a one off. I was too young to buy Rolling Stone – I didn’t know what was going on. Thus I had almost been cut loose from the Byrds. I could have easily followed a different musical pathway . . .
With the Beatles demise in 1971, the hunt was on for a new source of inspiration. The crowd was moving ahead to indulge Led Zeppelin and other burgeoning heavyweights. Not I however. Instead, I did a U-turn back to the past, back again to the forgotten sound of the electric twelve string, back to the layers of haunting vocal harmony. The catalyst for this retrograde manoeuvre was the discovery of a battered copy of The Byrds Greatest Hits in the second-hand bin of Lord Mutch. For the subsequent months I remained cloistered in my room, accompanied only by the unfashionable spinning disc. Exposure to songs such as Fifth Dimension and My Back Pages had me thirsting for more. What other gems were hidden on the unheard and unattainable albums Fifth Dimension and Younger than yesterday? My head was firmly lodged in the past. I bemoaned the demise of the Beatle fringe and winkle pickers. I detested the advent of keyboards, fuzz-boxes and power chords. I longed to be a seventeen year old of 1966, a drop-out in Los Angeles, a swinger in London, a heavy in New York. A musician of course, and a revered one at that – someone to take up the jingle-jangle batten and carry on the dream. In my mind, I was already an icon.
I began composing music myself. The path ahead of me seemed absolutely clear – I was to be a successful songwriter. My early songs were basic. I recorded them onto cassettes. To get that Byrdsian sound, I used two tape recorders. I recorded guitar and vocal onto one, then played along with that first recording to provide a second guitar and vocal – all recorded on to the second tape recorder. The process could be continued to produce third and fourth layers. In this way I was able to overdub in a primitive kind of way. My recordings excited me greatly and I played them back to myself endlessly. I loved myself!
One day I played Isobel one of the songs, Brave New World. My skin prickled with unease. A sweat broke out beneath my collar. “Not bad,” she said. “Hey did I tell you? I ran into Marcy today. She’s working on the strawberry farm, the same one as me.”
I was both relieved and disappointed. I was happy the agony of self promotion was over. But I was gutted that all my efforts, my raison d’etre, was reduced to the two words, ‘not bad.’ Where was my Isobel of yesterday, her hair falling about my face as she gave me her full attention? She had left me behind I guessed. The person I craved was back in 1966.
Isobel got up early each day to catch a bus out into the country where she picked berries all day. She needed the money to help fund another year at university. By coincidence Marcy was working there as well. It was Marcy’s proper job, her actual future. She lived in a run down squat by the Appleby river with some bikers. Isobel thought this terrific. According to Isobel’s musical heroes (Jim Morrison and company), these things were something to aspire to.
Friday and Saturday nights Isobel was gone. I was surprised how Graham took no stand on this, or on any of Isobel’s dubious actions. It seemed once you left school, the heavy hand of authority was lifted. Or perhaps he was sharp enough to sense that we were privileged to share even a small part of her company. One offensive word and she might pack her things.
One weekend just prior to Christmas, Graham and Julia went away to a conference in Napier. Left in the care of Isobel, I found myself bouncing about like a sack of wheat in the back of a Mark III Zephyr. The car was driven by a swarthy dude called Andrei. He wasn’t French, although he wore a black beret in an angular fashion. He had finely manicured sideburns and one tooth that flashed at certain angles of light. As he drove he periodical
ly drank from a 750 ml beer bottle he kept wedged between his knees.
I was high as a kite. Before we had taken leave of the house, Isobel had seconded a half-empty sherry bottle and brought it to the car. Isobel and I imbibed this fiery liquid, passing it back and forth between the front and back seats.
We arrived at a party along the waterfront. I was already beginning to suffer from a debilitating vertigo as I staggered from the car. My introversion was no longer a feature. My usual intensive self monitoring was temporarily neutralised. I was a floating vacuum, devoid of care – proud to be merely an idle curiosity as I drifted and rebounded my way around the rooms of the party-house. After an hour of this low voltage animation, I gathered enough thought to go and look for my sister. After scouring the house and coming up with nothing, I went outside onto the front veranda. Glancing down at the road, I was just in time to see Isobel disappearing through the front door of the Zephyr. A girl with a colossus of jet black ringlets was climbing into the back. I dimly recognised her as Marcy. I called out, but my voice was a muffled croak, buried beneath the roar of the sea and the thunder of Led Zeppelin. I watched the car speed away as disappointment choked my throat. Isobel, she had left me behind without a thought.
I looked through a sash window into the house. There were dark silhouettes of unknown people, glowing ends of cigarettes, and a flash of electric light from an elevating beer bottle. I became acutely self-aware. I had no desire for the party and its people anymore. I descended the garden steps to the gate. Two girls were coming in as I was going out. “Hi,” I said, plunging my lips onto the nearest mouth. The assaulted girl entered into the spirit of this unannounced manoeuvre, smudging her entire mouth over my rigid lips. There was a sour wetness and some buck teeth. It was quickly over and I carried on my retreat, slipping away at a fast clip along the seaside road that led back into the town.
Isobel didn’t show up until the middle of the next day. “How did you get into the house?” she asked, placing the house-key onto its hook.
I was seething with resentment. She hadn’t given a damn about my situation, sprung upon me in the heart of the night. She’d taken off for some unknown destination with that oil-slick Andrei and the lamentable Marcy. I said nothing. The bitter taste of the buck-tooth kiss still lingered as I removed myself from the kitchen, giving a false appearance of nonchalance. I walked out through the sunroom door onto the tennis court and held my face up to the sun. I felt a certain measure of defeat. A cornerstone in my life had been removed. Or if it was still there, it was now merely a pinpoint of light, barely discernible within a fragile cosmos.
In the new year of 1972, Junot turned up. Isobel had said ‘a friend’ might drop by for a couple of nights. Julia had said ‘that’s fine dear,’ perhaps uncertain whether Junot was male or female. The threat of the visit was kept secret from Graham – Julia probably hoping it wouldn’t happen at all. If so, her hopes were dashed.
The night of his arrival, we sat around the dinner table, the air pregnant with discomfort. Junot, with parental origins in the Dominican Republic, was a bleak, pale, emaciated individual, his long hair hanging in uncombed tufts above the steaming dinner plate. His face was skull like, fragments of the meal collecting in a patchy beard and moustache. At the head of the table, Graham’s face was a hot ember, an appearance that had existed ever since he’d come home from work to the unwelcome surprise.
Julia tried to make up for the dumbstruck horde, enquiring about Junot’s university course, which turned out to be mineral technology. Junot said it sucked. It sucked. The words lay between us on the table like a fresh dog turd. In the oppressive silence, my gut revolved about its axis with unease. And my brain seemed to be sitting in its own pressurising chamber. Julia broke the silence.
“So if you don’t like it, what do you hope to do instead?” Her voice was tinged with burgeoning laughter.
Junot reared back in his seat, his head to one side. He wasn’t going to work at all. Work sucked as well.
Julia’s response was incredulous laughter. Not going to work! How was he going to eat, she enquired.
“I live off the land,” Junot replied, his torso beginning to gently sway.
Graham’s chair scraped backwards. He picked up his dinner plate. “Well you’re living off us at the moment son,” he said. He strode from the kitchen, the dinner plate held out in front of him like a collection salver at church. He turned out the door, the short hairs on the back of his neck erect with indignation. Junot’s face had a smug grin as he slumped back into his chair, his eyes fixed on the tablecloth.
There grew an unspoken link between myself and Junot. Perhaps he recognised a fellow no-hoper. His face would soften with benevolence whenever I strayed into his company. Possibly he felt he could rescue me from the influence of my red-necked father.
A few days later it was New Year’s Eve. I spent much of the day lying on carpet, head supported by a cupped hand and braced elbow, my eardrums hurting from a constant diet of electric guitars and strident vocals. If I wasn’t spinning discs, I was composing my own Byrdsian melodies.
I’ve been in a desperate situation,
With the devil’s own
Down to earth was our association
‘Til she let me down
This mythical lover! I was beginning to feel that she wasn’t too long away. At three in the afternoon, I quit my room for the outdoors. I was wobbly on my feet, the blood exiting my head like a retreating tsunami. Outside, the glare penetrated my eyelids. There was a distinct threat of headache. I staggered into the shadows of the summer-house, gingerly easing down onto one corner of the platform seat. At that moment I heard the muffled sound of voices – Isobel and Junot had finally emerged for the day. They came across the tennis court carrying bowls of muesli and yogurt. Isobel still wore her night attire, an ankle length garment of dull violet. Junot had faded jeans with the knees out, a black tee-shirt and jean jacket. He very seldom wore anything else. A wave of days-old body odour pricked my nostrils as he came past, his bare feet scuffing the dirt floor. “How goes it?” he said. Sitting down on the platform, he set aside the muesli bowl and commenced to roll up a cigarette on the triangle of platform between his splayed legs. I could see that its contents were marijuana leaves. The smoking joint was passed along to Isobel. She inhaled before handing it on to me. I acted nonchalant as I sucked in the pungent smoke. This surely was the way to live – breakfast at three-thirty, accompanied by a most relaxing inhalation. I rested back against the leafy inner wall of the summer-house, listening to Isobel and Junot decry the fortresses of capitalism and the despicable agents of environmental destruction. In the new world of Junot, the only work done would be the tilling of fields. The cornerstones of the new culture would be liberalised – drug taking, rock music and free love.
It sounded good to me. I loved music and I had an inkling that giving and receiving love was going to come very easily to me. Junot was clearly pleased with my progress towards becoming a ‘drop-out.’ He favoured me with his munificent smile. “Why don’t you come out with us to the party tonight?” he suggested. Isobel nodded in affirmation, as if she too had given me a pass-mark.
At six o’clock we floated into the kitchen for dinner. Graham was busy at the hospital operating on some car crash victims. That left Julia as the sole barrier to me accompanying the older pair. She looked doubtful, her mouth pinching at one corner. Nevertheless, she was easily talked around by Junot and Isobel, both of whom were voluble and manipulative in the afterglow of the joint. Julia was quite interested in the new youth culture. While Graham was opposed to the whole thing – the music, the fashions, the precociousness – Julia was probably secretly pleased that the old order of things was being challenged. However, having not grown up with the new ideals, she was insecure in her response to their onslaught.
“Oh well . . . You must look after him . . . And bring him back as soon as the New Year is in.”
