Therapeutic Window

by Steve Low

I searched the horizons for land but it remained elusive. Around me there was focused activity as passengers began to ready themselves for arrival. I allowed my mind to drift back. There was this triumphant recent past. It had all happened in Vancouver. Rembrandt and Gunn were the catalysts. This duo, perennial middle of the road specialists, had propelled my song to the top of the Canadian charts. And subsequently to number eight in the U.S. Their new album, Between the lines, was a slow starter that had grown into a colossus – a big, big earner. It had hung around the upper reaches of the charts for months, bit by bit accumulating sales and garnering me welcome royalty fees for my two contributions Take this melody and Force of nature..

  “You don’t need a regular job anymore man,” my agent had said. And when an invitation came from Rembrandt and Gunn’s producer to go to Vancouver and discuss possible song contributions to their next album, I booked to go without hesitation. And I searched for and found that bit of scrap paper with Joanna’s address on it.

  The Eastern Seaboard emerged from the haze, its appearance a jolt, even though I had been expecting to see it any minute. I shouldn‘t have been so effected - the pilot had only a few minutes earlier announced we were fifteen minutes from landing. The plane was tipped forward in sluggish descent. I conjured the image of it hanging in the sky, flaps down - an ungainly colossus gliding downward. I altered the hands of my watch, dispensing with London’s time. I twisted the knob, rotating the hands to show 9:15 a.m, the 11th of July 1987.

  In the city, each time I saw a flash of blonde hair. I startled . . . Each woman was Joanna . . . for just a few milliseconds. I entered the lobby of the Hotel Granville. The reception staff were arguing. They were young males, thin, mobile, irreverent. One was Asian, thick glasses and inscrutable – another lanky with a ponytail. They helped me find her address on the map. It was a long shot. I didn’t know if she was back from Europe yet, or whether she’d be staying with her parents if she was back, or whether she might already have a job and be at work. But at a minimum I wanted to see where she lived.

  The mid-morning air was crisp, the white sky indistinguishable from the snows of Grous Mountain across the bay. The ferry churned through the sea, the throb of its diesel motor pulsing up my legs – up the axis of my body. Throbbing into an already throbbing bowel, an organ in aggravation. Once on the other side I began the long climb into the suburbs, up a long straight avenue, house after opulent house - all designer homes - log cabins, adobe bricks or modern aluminium.

  She opened the door and we barely looked at each other. We were enclosing arms and fragrant perfume. Then I stood back and there she was, the long blonde hair, the stone washed jeans and bangles jangling on her fret-board arm. She jerked me away from my jaw dropped paralysis. She gave a firm tug on my closest arm. “Come on Gerry, you must have lots to tell me.”

  The trouble was - I didn’t have much new to tell. The last eight months . . . a myopia . . . Byrdmania! However it was easy to explain it to this woman of music. That each day had been much the same, a dream state from which I expectantly awaited release. When I had walked onto the streets, I was McGuinn, rectangular sunglasses, skin tight jeans and winkle-pickers. I was the creator of songs and a production man to boot. I produced a jingle-jangle sound, with melancholic layers of vocal harmony. Counterpoint was my thing; in the notes of the bass guitar, in the structure of the vocal harmonies and in the wandering guitar lines. I was 1966 in 1987. If only the people would come back and join me. The demo-tapes kept coming back - the same rectangular brown paper packages. Sorry sir, not this time. Not any time.

  We had to get accommodation once I quit the hospital – for both of us. Isobel got work in a bar and we were able to share a tiny room in the back of the hotel’s second floor. The Governor thought we were a couple and we didn’t disabuse him. Our lair, was only slightly better than Isobel’s room in Putney. After breakfast, I ascended the stairway, and in that barren room I would sit, hunched, bent over a curvaceous polished body – my guitar, my fingers making intricate patterns between buried metal frets, the plucked strings ringing - resonating. Harmonically I was a master of the unexpected minor, carefully placed to bridle with hurt. And when the tape machine was whirring, its red light glowing upon a black aluminium facade, I rejoiced in my own expressionism, carried into a trance of rapture by my own harmonic effects.

  Joanna smiled, a happy for me sort of smile. Behind her, beyond the large double glazed window, the harbour and Vancouver peninsular looked dull and cold beneath a grey sky. “So,” she said. “You’ve made it. What a fantastic story.” She shifted on the long beige window seat. “Are you in a relationship?” she asked - “or just beholden to your sister?

  It was my turn to smile in a knowing way. I looked at the floor. “Well yes . . . but nothing of any substance. I’m going out with my guitar!”

  She laughed, showing those pearly white teeth. “Me too.” she said.

  She had only just gotten back from Europe the week before, her musical tour on hold as she took a break in her parent’s home. And her boyfriend, a consort of the last few years (when she was home), had taken umbrage when Joanna had told him the truth. Yes she had had a relationship in Europe.

  She took me on a tour of the house, more to look at the different views of the city form each room than to marvel at the architecture. In a downstairs bedroom, the haunt of some unwitting visitor, my reaching hand strayed onto her beckoning shoulder and she was turned in a flash, her face raised, her pressing hip bones enclosing my lower body - leaving no doubt that the eight months of dreaming was over. My eyes focused on the bright colours of the duvet. It was a montage of primary colours, a warm contrast to the greyness outside and an appropriate underlay to the carnal pleasure being taken above. Casting my gaze down the length of our bodies, I fixed upon Joanna’s flesh colour - the small part that was exposed between her slipped down jeans and her woolly jersey. Over the eight preceding months I couldn’t bring myself to contemplate such a moment. Its arrival lifted off layers of defensive exterior, garnered month upon month - ever since one night, many moons ago, above a French cafe.

  A while later she made me sing the song that had brought us together again. Not in the way I had envisaged – her hearing it on the radio. That would have been too much of a fairy tale. But it had brought me to Vancouver.

  ‘I once loved a girl in a French cafe

  She sang with my guitar sweet harmonies’

  I sang the words hesitantly, my voice cracking and seeming to sound absurdly nasal and adolescent. I carried on - my song to commemorate that really great moment of my life when music and love had blended into a balmy French night. I could feel her watching me, and when I chose to look up from my head down performance, her face was beatific. Some of my crippling self consciousness vanished and my voice evolved into something more potent, the origin of the words now lying deep inside my chest.

  ‘Somewhere in the night there’s a radio

  Somewhere in the night, there’s a love of mine.’

  “I love it,” she said. There were tears forming in her eyes.

  “I wanted you to hear it . . . To hear it from some crackling transistor radio . . . and for you to recognise it, to understand it . . . To know it was for you.” I was drunk in an artistic fervour. At last – recognition! The art of love!

  There was no turning back from that moment. We had found our Utopia. Ourselves! And settling back into restful bliss, our coffees aromatic on a table, I filled her in on Isobel’s struggle – the half won struggle. “She’s off everything now. But, I wouldn’t say she was happy . . . It makes me worry there’ll be a relapse.”

  “Well,” she said. “Why don’t you both come out here? To VC. This is where your music scene is now. And Isobel might get a new lease of life . . .”

  I stood up and walked to the bay window. The city, the mountains, the Canadians, Joanna . . . I could see all of those things – that they could all do something good for Isobel. It seemed all to clear to me wh
at to do.

  .

  The next morning I went and met Levi who had produced Rembrandt and Gunn’s album. I first met him at the CBS studios, deep inside a network of corridors and rooms that constituted the basement floor. He peered at me over sawn off spectacles, his long grey hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  He took out the reel to reel tape of my demo songs that had found its way to him and spliced it onto his machine. We listened as my rendition of Take this melody permeated the room. My voice sounded absurdly basic. I longed for the first overlay of harmony to come, to swamp the highly personal vocal. It came and he smiled and said, “David Crosby harmonies eh?” The track began to replay, but slower this time, my voice now a low rumble. “Great song,” he said. “But you got the genre wrong on your demo. Your production was a bit left-field man. Lucky for you I recognised in the bare bones a great adult contemporary song.”

  I smiled too. I couldn’t have cared less which genre was mooted. It was the crowning moment - an industry man had listened to my track and had said ‘great song.’

  He relaxed back, putting his feet up on the mixing consol and rolling a joint. “We got Rembrandt and Gunn recording that straight away because they were right here doing sessions for the album. I just went in ran the song past them.” A match flared and for a moment his face was coloured by a flickering orange light.

  Rembrandt and Gunn? I had never heard of them before I got the good news but North America was a huge market with lots of players.

  He blew out a decelerating plume of smoke and offered me the joint. “Course we had to change the harmony – to one-three. Your harmonies are way to clever for the average punter. I gotta think that you’re some kinda Byrd’s freak huh? With harmonies like that!”

  I nodded and grinned, wallowing in the pleasure of recognition. “So a one-five interval is left field, and a one-three interval is right field?

  “Yeah,” he said. “Right field makes the money.”

  “So REM for example? That’s left-field harmonies,” I said.

  “Left field production too,” he said.

  “Indiscernible left-field words.”

  “And left-field sales,” he said - “practically zero.” But in that example, he was proved to be wrong.

  Chapter 4