by Lewis Shiner
“I could have saved my breath, of course. She was convinced it was all going to be different for her, even if she had the decency not to say so. We all want to think that, don’t we?” Bobbi grinds out her cigarette. “Then, a year or so later, there she is on VH-1. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”
Over the hills and far away
On Tuesday afternoon I take 101 north, over the Hollywood Hills to Ventura Boulevard, then make my way back uphill to Sunshine Terrace. I park across the street from 11163, a wood-sided bungalow nestled in front of a row of apartments. The air is vastly sweeter here than on Ventura, and magnolias and fruit trees and cedars arch over the street. I get out and stretch my legs, hearing the ticking of the rent car’s engine, the low murmur of a TV, and distant, childish laughter.
I take a few pictures of the front of the house. Someone is obviously living there; they’ve put out a blue patio umbrella, a single lawn chair, pink mums in a bed along the front wall. I walk down the driveway a few feet, hoping for a glimpse of something beyond the louvered wooden shutters that line the windows. The high-pitched, snorting laugh comes again, and then a woman’s voice says, “If you’re looking for Laurie, she doesn’t live here anymore.”
I turn to see a woman in her late twenties, bending over to pick up a puckered beach ball. She has long red hair, gray jeans and a pink sweater. From behind the house a girl of about four, dressed in brand-new overalls, runs out saying, “Who you talking to, Mommy?” Seeing me, she is instantly paralyzed by self-consciousness.
I wiggle my fingers at the girl, explaining to her mother that I know Laurie is gone, that I am writing about her. I go back to the car for a paperback of my latest book to provide credentials.
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, turning it over in her hands. “I’m afraid I never heard of you.” A light breeze animates her fine red-gold hair, trailing a wisp of it across her face.
“Don’t worry. Millions haven’t.” I convince her to keep the book, which I autograph, and that earns me a proper introduction. Her name is Catherine Conner, originally and intermittently of Salem, Oregon. Shannon, age four, is by this point hiding behind her mother and unwilling to shake hands, even when asked in a very nice Donald Duck voice.
Eventually Catherine invites me in. Over a glass of herbal iced tea, with Shannon watching The Rescuers Down Under in the next room, Catherine talks about meeting Laurie. “I used to see her come home from work in like her uniform thing, with her hair up and the black pants and the white shirt, and then a few minutes later there would be this electric guitar playing. Not loud or anything, but I always knew it was there. I thought it was so cool, and so one morning when I heard her I went over and I was just like, ‘Hi, I’m your neighbor.’
“I mean, my own life is such a mess. I spent four years at Oregon State without ever fully getting a handle, you know? Came to LA to see the bright lights, got pregnant by this underemployed actor, and now I’m living from day to day on temp work and child support. And here’s Laurie, so full of ambition and working so hard for it, day and night, you know?”
As I listen I can tell that Laurie’s life has became more real to Catherine than her own. It’s a feeling I can relate to.
“I would go see her sometimes when she played,” Catherine says, “and sometimes we would stay up late afterwards, just talking all night long.” The memories light up her face, and she’s happy to go into Laurie’s background. Some of it I’ve read or heard about elsewhere, but many of the details are new.
“Her family is basically her mom, who’s divorced, and her younger brother Corky, who is this kind of slacker screw-up. That’s me talking—Laurie always went the long way around not to criticize anybody. She was also real close to her mom’s father, who she always called Grandpa Bill. They used to go listen to jazz and stuff when she was growing up.
“It was some friend of her brother’s who used to live in that apartment. He ran out of money and was looking for somebody to take over the lease. And Laurie was living in San Antonio with this creepy guy, and her brother was like, ‘You have to do this. It’s a sign or something.’ ”
Laurie had been going over the bank statements and mentally loading up her Datsun for a couple of weeks. She was living in a rented apartment with rented furniture, and at that moment her relationship didn’t seem very substantial either. “Jack is like this insurance adjuster,” Catherine says, “good-looking from the picture I saw, but not Mr. Sensitive. The kind of guy who takes you to a sports bar on a first date, if you know what I mean?”
Catherine said that Jack was stressed out at work, drinking too much, and staying out late at clubs, “with Laurie or without her.” When Laurie mentioned the merest idea of a trip to LA, “Jack totally lost it. He took her guitar out on the back patio and smashed it. She was laughing about it when she told me, this kind of nervous laugh, but you could see that it scared her to even remember it.”
Laurie ordered Jack out of the apartment, packed up, and hit the road for Dallas, where her father lived. “She talked about her father a lot. He was the reason she started playing guitar in the first place.” Laurie’s father, Michael Moss, played with a band called the Chevelles at Richardson High School in the mid-sixties. He gave up the guitar when he married Laurie’s mother and moved to San Antonio. One Saturday when Laurie was in sixth grade, her father came in from raking leaves, got the guitar out of the closet, and started to play. Until that afternoon she had never known what was in that odd-shaped tweed suitcase; when the guitar came out, Catherine said, “it was like the sun coming up in the middle of the night.”
The guitar transformed her father into a creature of glamour and mystery and Laurie wanted that change for herself. She begged and pleaded until her father showed her a couple of chords. Years of piano lessons had never spoken to her as persuasively as her first five minutes of guitar, and “she would have kept playing all day except her mother came in and gave her father a look. She said it was the kind of look you would give your car as it was slowly rolling over a cliff.”
It was apparently a defining moment for her father as well. He moved to Dallas and filed for divorce shortly thereafter.
“You know that’s her father’s guitar she plays on the record?” Catherine asks. “She talked him out of it on her way to LA. He didn’t want to give it up, even though he never played it. But he had to have seen how determined she was, how bad she needed it.”
She sighs and looks into her tea. “She really loved that guitar.”
Folkies
The Sly Duck Pub has been a fixture in Santa Monica since the forties, though it didn’t come into its own until 1962, when it began to feature live music on its Tuesday hootenanny nights. By 1963 it was serving espresso and music seven nights a week, with big names like the Limeliters or Jim Kweskin on the weekends.
These days it’s reverted to its English roots, serving draft ale in tapered glasses and sporting a menu of some 150 imports. The manager is a young, earnest man named Brad Mueck (pronounced “Mick”) who wears wire rims and blue oxford cloth shirts and whose light brown hair is at least a third gone.
“If I’d had my way,” he says, “Laurie and Summer would still be headlining here as a duo every Saturday.” From his second-floor office above the bar, Brad can look out on 4th Street, which runs parallel to the ocean four blocks away. “This is not the way that history shall remember them. But together they were far more than the sum of the parts—like Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña, or the Weavers. Summer has a fabulous voice and sincerity and an instinct for harmony. Combined with Laurie’s wit and energy and guitar playing, it was magic. Magic, pure and simple.”
Brad had heard about Laurie from Summer long before he ever saw her. “Then one night Summer called to tell me she’s going to get Laurie up to sing with her. Laurie had apparently just written a song on the back of a ticket at some pizza place where she was working and Summer was enthralled with it. Laurie was calling it ‘Teen Angel’ at the time, tho
ugh eventually she changed the title to…”
“ ‘Angel Dust,’ ” I say.
“Naturally. So at the end of her first set Summer handed over the guitar and Laurie played ‘Angel Dust.’ If she was nervous I saw no sign of it. She connected with the audience the way a candle connects with oxygen, and you could see the light she gave off on all their faces. Summer kept her on stage and they did her song, ‘Tried and True,’ and dedicated it to Fernando, the married man that Summer was seeing.”
I can’t stop myself. “Fernando is married?” I ask.
“He was then. Still is as far as I know.”
“I’m a little stunned,” I admit. “Summer seems smarter than that.”
Brad leans back in his oak swivel chair and takes a deep breath. “It’s not a matter of intelligence. You know that. You’ve interviewed other musicians. How many of them act in their own best interests even a fraction of the time?”
“That’s true of most of us,” I say carefully.
“But entertainers are the worst. And the more damaged they are, the more we love them. Kurt Cobain, Judy Garland, James Dean.”
“Laurie Moss?”
“Oh yes. I can’t tell you the details of her particular history, but she was absolutely the type. To flog my favorite hobby horse again, if all she truly cared about was a great setting for her material, she had that in abundance with Summer. But the maximum seating capacity here is one hundred and eighty. She needed more love than this place can hold.”
Laurie’s guest shot impressed Brad enough for him to offer her work. “I would say I used her every week or ten days. She would do the opening sets at 9:30 and 11:30.” Summer at that point headlined every Tuesday, but it turned out to be almost three months before the two of them wound up sharing a bill.
“I’m embarrassed to say they came up with it on their own, with no prompting from me. Summer would only tell me she had a surprise for me. The surprise was that they’d gotten together over the weekend and rehearsed, and that Tuesday—I’m going to guess this was about late January of ‘95—they played all four sets together. Summer was on acoustic, Laurie played electric through a little practice amp under her stool.”
For all his criticism of entertainers, Brad’s own emotions run very near the surface. He seems close to tears as he describes their debut as a duo: “It was not polished. There were songs of Summer’s where Laurie just played guitar, and songs of Laurie’s where Summer just improvised a harmony part. Mistakes were made. But my god. What I wouldn’t give for a tape of that night.”
After a moment he pulls himself together. “Well. I may be slow, but I’m not stupid. I offered them the headline spot on the next Saturday I had open. The irony, of course, is that by that time Laurie had already met Gabriel Wong.”
The session
“I’m a session player,” Gabriel Wong says on Thursday afternoon. “My heroes were always session players, even as a kid. Sly Dunbar. Tony Levin. Session players sleep in their own beds, they make top money, they don’t get in a rut of the same set every night.”
Gabe’s apartment is small, clean as an operating theater, and organized for maximum efficiency. He is sprawled at one end of a tasteful oak-and-taupe-cotton couch that is not much larger than an armchair. He’s wearing black jeans and running shoes, and a black collarless linen shirt. He has a rangy build, cocoa skin, three-inch dreadlocks, and lively eyes.
The night he met Laurie he was backing a local favorite named Dick O’Brien, an irregular gig always advertised as “Dick at the Duck.” “Let me paint you a quick portrait,” Gabe says. “Short, thin-skinned, hairy. Knows a minute or so of every song ever written. Buys a drink for any woman who’ll come up to the stage and show him her bare chest. Thinks it’s the height of humor to put a condom on a beer bottle.
“O’Brien doesn’t like me, but he needs me. His bass players have a tendency to quit on him. And since part of his thing is doing instant requests from the audience, and since it so happens that I myself also know a minute or so of every song ever written, every now and again he finds himself paying me more money than he wants to.”
Laurie was O’Brien’s opening act. “O’Brien’s reputation had preceded him, and Laurie was headed for the door before we even started, so that she wouldn’t have to listen to us. Somehow she got hung up talking to friends and heard the first song. It turned out she really liked my playing.”
In fact she liked it so much that she made a poor first impression. “She came up after the set and she was totally nervous,” Gabe remembers. “She kept saying one wrong thing after another. Like, she couldn’t seem to process my name. I’m adopted, see, and my dad was Chinese and my mother was Korean, so I’ve gotten a lot of shit about my name all my life. And Laurie, you could see that she just couldn’t understand how a black man could be named Wong, but she was raised too nice to come out and say it.
“My girlfriend L’Shondra was there, and she thought Laurie was some groupie or something and kept trying to pull me away. But I had a feeling, and I waited her out until she could get it together to say what she wanted.”
What she wanted was Gabe’s signature style, which is heavily influenced by reggae and ska. “The timekeeping is solid, but you leave out notes and move the accents around. It makes the audience hear the music instead of the singer, which gives Dick O’Brien apoplexy. I do it to him whenever I can.”
In an interview with the British magazine Q, Laurie describes Gabe’s playing as “a taste behind my tongue, a pressure in my solar plexus, a color behind my eyes. It wasn’t discovery, it was recognition. Yearning backbeat. Precise, articulate silences. I’d been waiting for it all my life and probably several other people’s.”
“I hadn’t seen any of her set,” Gabe admits, “so I was copping this real cool, superior attitude. She said something like, ‘I’ve never heard anybody play bass like you before,’ and I was like, ‘Funny, that’s what Dick kept saying all through the first set. At least that was the gist of what he said.’ And she was so sincere, it was scary. She looked like she was about to cry and she said, ‘As far as I can tell Dick is a real asshole, and you’re the greatest bass player I’ve ever heard.’ How are you supposed to respond to that? I just kind of said, ‘Well, you’re at least half right.’ So I introduced her to L’Shondra and said, ‘This is Laurie Moss. I’m the greatest bass player she ever heard.’ It’s really kind of amazing that Laurie didn’t turn around and walk away, I was being such a smartass.
“We all sat down at her table and I asked her, since she liked me so much, if she happened to have a record contract or anything. That was when she told me she was doing a four-track demo in her living room and wanted me to play on it. She was real embarrassed about it, but at the same time she had this absolute determination, like, ‘I have to ask this guy, so I’m going to do it, no matter what.’ ”
“What did you say?”
“I told her I’d listen to her second set and see what I thought.”
“And…?”
“She had something. She’s one of those people that seems too weird or intense until you see them on stage. Then it all clicks. Good songs, you know, where everything dovetails. Good with the audience. She got them to where they really liked her and were pulling for her. And that was Dick O’Brien’s crowd, total animals, not the kind of house you’d want to show fear in front of.”
After her set, Gabe told Laurie he’d do four songs for a hundred dollars. “Chicken feed, compared to what I usually get paid. But she’d made me like her too.”
Gabe kneels by his stereo, which is almost at floor level. The much narrower shelves above it are full of alphabetized CDs and neatly hand-labeled cassettes. He puts a tape in the deck and listens intently to the faint hiss before the music. A crisp electric guitar starts in the left speaker, then pans to the center as the bass and the simple but effective lead guitar come in.
It’s “Angel Dust.” Laurie’s voice, a little tentative, with no reverb or sweetening, s
tarts to sing about stepfather’s hands that make you burn with shame, the hot breath of boys in crowded halls, the bright flash of gunfire on TV, the red-orange coals of forbidden cigarettes on a window ledge in the sleepless night. Burning, burning, turning these angel’s wings to ashes.
It’s not the bravura performance on the album, but it makes up in intimacy what it lacks in raw power. “It’s all there, isn’t it?” says Gabe, enjoying my surprise. “That’s her playing both guitars. From the start she knew exactly what she wanted. Not that she acted like it when I first got there for the session.”
She had the four-track set up on the dining room table, along with headphones and lyric sheets with the chords penciled in. “She said she wanted me to play the way Dick O’Brien hated. I remember I made some feeble joke about her not having my parts written out for me, and I swear she went so pale I thought she was going to pass out. Nothing I said seemed to calm her down, so I went ahead and did a take.
“You have to understand, I was wearing the only headphones, and I was plugged straight into the recorder, so she had practically no idea what was happening. I had to turn my back to her because she was starting to make me nervous. That’s my first take you’re listening to right now.
“When it was done I handed her the headphones and she listened to the song, just staring down at that cheap veneer table—apartment furniture, you know—and this time it’s me who can’t hear what’s happening. All I know is she looks like her dog just died. Then she turns off the machine and jumps up and goes into the kitchen. So there I am, standing in the kitchen doorway going, ‘Listen, if it’s that bad, I won’t take your money.’ She’s actually crying into a dishtowel. I start to apologize again and she looks up and says, ‘No, it’s perfect. I love it.’
