Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  He was certainly nothing to look at. There he sat on a stool on the stage, all dressed in black, skinny as a rail, always half in the shadows, lock of dark hair hanging over one eye, misshapen foot propped on a cushion, eyes on the floor, face pale with that strange, haunted consumptive look he seemed to retain all his life, yet he could have had his pick of any of the girls in the room. His voice and words took them to places where he was whole and handsome and virile and just a little bit dangerous. And at the same time, there was an aura of sadness, of innocence, and vulnerability about him that the girls seemed to find irresistible. He hurt, and they wanted to make it better.

  I went back to the club week after week and found that every set strengthened my original conviction that here was a talent to be reckoned with. I was a good ten years older than Tony, and I prided myself in already knowing a bit about the music business. I had briefly managed a couple of folk bands some years back, and I thought I could at least get this kid a start. I didn’t fool myself that I could hang on to someone with his kind of talent, and if anyone had told me then I’d be his manager right to the end, I wouldn’t have believed them.

  And if they had told me how that end would come about, I wouldn’t have believed that, either.

  NATURALLY, THE FIRST FEW YEARS were a slog. People seem to think that stars appear out of nowhere, come fully fledged off Britain’s Got Talent, for example, and some do, no doubt about it. But even with talent, you have to have luck, and with luck you have to have passion and drive. Tony had all these, but it wasn’t until he put the band together and took them on the road about three years after I first met him that things started to move ahead quickly. Word of mouth is a wonderful thing, and people were already singing the praises of this weird guy with the unbelievable voice. He mentioned the blackbird that had inspired him in an interview with Melody Maker and so the legend of The Blackbird was born.

  Tony was always a hard worker. He was willing to gig every night and spend the rest of his time in the studio. Soon there was a debut album in the works, and that opened a lot of doors. Some of his songs were obvious single material and made the charts, but it was the albums that did the most for him. The early seventies was still very much the age of the album. Then there were the live concerts. Word was getting around fast that you simply had to see this guy live. Be there, or be square, as they used to say in an earlier age.

  As for the girls, they couldn’t stay away. Tony may even have succumbed to one or two—he was only human, after all—but I noticed an odd reticence about him, a sort of deep inner reserve, as if he were waiting for someone. The right someone, I suppose, though it sounds corny to say it. Tony was saving himself for the true love, the real mate. Like the blackbird he had told me about, he was singing his song, and when it was good enough, she would come.

  And I was there when she turned up.

  IT HAPPENED AT A RARE solo acoustic gig in one of those banquet halls where you can have dinner before the act and keep on sipping your champagne or nibbling at your Black Forest gâteau during the performance. It wasn’t Tony’s normal sort of gig, but he was doing a favor for the club manager, who had given him a lot of support in the early days and had fallen on hard times. The tickets were expensive, the crowd hip and wealthy and primed for something special.

  Tony sang mostly his own songs, but he did do the occasional cover, homage to his heroes, and I remember that night he sang Dylan’s “Eternal Circle.” Perhaps the song cast a spell on the evening, but it describes almost exactly how things went. Perhaps he even performed it with her in mind, as it wasn’t exactly in regular rotation on his set list.

  She was sitting at a table with some friends, and there might as well have been a spotlight on her. Their eyes met and held. For once, Tony’s gaze wasn’t fixed on the floor. I could feel the waves of desire and attraction pulsate between them. At the end of Tony’s set, she was still there, whereas the girl in the Dylan song had left. And I have to say that I have never heard Tony sing so well, so soulful and heartfelt. He wasn’t showy at all, but actually quite subdued, and absolutely spot on. His voice soared effortlessly into places it had never been before, and he took the audience’s emotions wherever he wanted to take them.

  After the set, Tony couldn’t just walk off the stage into the audience and take her hand. They’d tear him to bits, civilized as they seemed. The applause seemed to go on forever, then there was the obligatory encore. And another. But some sort of signal must have passed between the two of them, because when Tony got back to his dressing room, she was waiting for him.

  HER NAME WAS CONNIE, AND perhaps it’s stating the obvious to say how beautiful she was, to mention the luster of her tumbling auburn hair, those large dark eyes and the full lips just crying out to be kissed. And her figure—slight, but curved in all the right places. That night she was wearing a satiny green dress, I remember, fairly low cut and ending halfway down her thighs, showing off her long slim legs to perfection. But her beauty was more than just her looks. It went deeper. I could sense that even on our first meeting. She had an inner intelligence, beauty, and calm; she had soul, and she made an immediate and electric connection with Tony.

  Connie was in her early twenties, like Tony, and in no time they were chatting away as if they had known one another all their lives. Tony later told me that after I’d left, they went back to her flat and did nothing but sit up and talk about art and books and drink wine and listen to Roy Harper, Al Stewart, and Bert Jansch until dawn. The closest they came to anything sexual was holding hands and looking into one another’s eyes. There was certainly no lack of desire between them, he said, but that night, talking and wine and music were enough.

  I liked Connie. People have said that I was jealous, among other things, that I felt she came between Tony and me, or Tony and the band, but that’s simply not true. I loved her like a sister, and she was good for Tony. She was wise beyond words. If ever he got upset about anything, all she had to do was touch him gently and he calmed down right away. She was also a very talented artist and had paintings hanging in famous collections and galleries. I liked her stuff well enough, but to me it was abstract art, and it always surprised me that her most loyal fans saw so much more in it, a reflection of their own desires and struggles and images of the enslavement of women over the ages. I never saw any of that; they were just colored shapes to me. Beautiful shapes, and expertly arranged, but only shapes and colors, nonetheless. Still, she had her loyal followers, and she had ties with a loosely knit group or movement of female artists who wanted to lift up the art world by the scruff of its neck and shake it.

  With Connie in his life, Tony’s songs got even better, his stage presence more assured, more confident. Even though The Blackbird had attracted his mate, that didn’t diminish the beauty of his song. Now Tony looked audiences in the eye, and even his game leg didn’t seem such an encumbrance any more. His skin was still pale, though, and its whiteness still burned with that consumptive fire.

  Tony and Connie got married the following April. It was a joyous occasion followed by a wonderful party, during which the bride and groom slipped away for a brief honeymoon in Paris. The band had a new album coming out in May, and he would be out on the road promoting it when they got back. For now, everything was hunky-dory.

  For now.

  DRUGS IS A SUBJECT THAT comes up a lot when people talk about rock music. It’s hardly surprising, given the number of musicians who have succumbed to excess over the years. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison had all died just a short time before Tony became famous. And the list goes on. Tony smoked a bit of dope occasionally, but that was all, as far as I knew. I was with him on that. I didn’t mind the occasional joint, but I had seen far too many talented people fall afoul of the hard stuff, or end up with their brains short-circuited by hallucinogens. Perhaps more than anything, Tony became fond of wine, especially now that he could afford the really good stuff. When he let his hair down—which wasn’t as often as the m
edia made out—you’d more than likely find him drinking Château Latour or Château Margaux. But the hard stuff, never. Not coke or smack. Not even scotch or vodka.

  Connie was a different story. Despite her inner calm and wisdom, a part of her was strongly attracted to the dark side. She read Thomas De Quincey, Coleridge, Huysmans, Gérard de Nerval, Rimbaud, Burroughs. She loved Bosch, Goya, and Dali. The whole idea of a rational derangement of all the senses fascinated her and, she believed, nurtured her art. If there is any truth in the media rumors about a conflict between Connie and me, this is where it has its origins.

  In the early days of their life together, Connie would accompany Tony and the band on tour. She got to see the world that way: America, Australia, Japan, South Africa. But she didn’t like touring, the hanging about waiting, lengthy sound checks, crowds, long hours in hotel rooms, then the constant rush to a new city every day, with little or no real chance to see anything or meet anyone. And her painting was suffering, too; she wanted to get back to her studio. Even her followers and group members were complaining of neglect. She began to stay home more often, but as the lonely days dragged on, she would become restless. She and Tony had recently moved into an Elizabethan mansion on a country estate, and the large empty rooms and grounds only seemed to emphasize her isolation. She painted a lot and had her artist friends over to visit her, but it just wasn’t enough.

  Mostly, as far as any of us knew, she kept her drug use under control, and when Tony came home, everything would appear as much as normal. Certainly there were no dawn police raids, no naked women wrapped in fur rugs and rumors of obscene acts with Mars bars. But we found out later that Connie was taking uppers and downers just to maintain the semblance of normality. When Tony was away, especially for lengthy periods of time, she began to drive down to London more often and fell in with some very shady characters on the fringes of the art world, with whom she delved deeper into the darkness, into the world of coke, hallucinogens, and the drug that became her favorite of all: heroin.

  ONE DAY, TONY ARRIVED HOME late from the a long studio session and called Connie’s name. Getting no answer, he went from room to room and finally found her in their bedroom. She was lying fully clothed on the king-size bed, pale and still, a needle and spoon on the bedspread beside her.

  Tony felt frantically for a pulse on Connie’s wrist, then her neck, but he could sense no signs of life. The muscles around her throat and jaw felt stiff. He grabbed for the telephone and dialed 999, then he picked Connie up from the bed. Her skin was cool to the touch, and he felt her dead weight in his arms. First he tried to get her on her feet walking around, but she was like a heavy rag doll in his hands and her feet just dragged along the carpet. He tried to perform CPR as best he could, imitating actions he had seen on television, but he found that he couldn’t even get her mouth open to breathe air into her.

  They weren’t far from the county town, and soon he could hear the sound of an ambulance approaching. Laying Connie gently back on the bed, he dashed down and practically pushed the attendants up the stairs in front of him. They kept him well back as they got Connie on a stretcher and took her to the ambulance. He noticed one of the attendants shake his head and cover her face with the sheet before closing the doors.

  AS TONY HAD SUSPECTED, HE had been a few hours too late. There was nothing more he could have done, the doctors said. The heroin Connie had injected came from an unusually strong batch. She had hardly had time to get the needle out of her arm. The stuff had already killed two junkies in town, and warnings were out, but nobody listened. Needless to say, the police searched the house from top to bottom, took blood samples from Tony and then “interviewed” him for hours without pause—they had no Police and Criminal Evidence Act to hamper their style back then—but in the end they had to let him go. The media made much of Connie’s death, of course—from the screaming headlines in the tabloids about the sick and immoral culture of rock music to more carefully written and thought out pieces in the quality press by establishment figures educated at Eton and Oxford.

  So began a long dark period of grieving for Tony, a period he thought at times would never end. And perhaps it never really did. For over a year he wrote no songs, performed no concerts, did very little, in fact, except stay in his room or, when the mood took him, go for long walks around the estate. On one of these walks, he came across three women trespassing on his land. He said nothing, as he didn’t really care about property rights, but as he passed, one of them threw something at him, and he heard another hiss, “Murderer!” He ran back to the house, and when he got to the bathroom he saw that he was covered in red paint.

  After that, Tony hardly went out at all. He also never watched television, listened to the radio, or read the newspapers, so he could have no idea of the storm brewing, of Connie’s followers and group members desecrating her grave with anti-Blackbird graffiti and insisting that Tony was responsible for Connie’s death, that he had murdered a far more talented and important artist than he would ever be. According to them, he had introduced her to the drugs lifestyle, then abandoned her for his rock-and-roll life on the road with groupies after every gig. It wasn’t true. Tony had always shied away from groupies every bit as much as he kept clear of hard drugs, but even if he had known what they were saying about him, any attempt he made to defend himself would have only dug him deeper in the hole.

  I handled most of it by ignoring it, issuing the occasional blanket denial and keeping it from Tony, which wasn’t difficult. I didn’t take the matter seriously. I thought it would all blow over soon enough. During these months, I spent a lot of time at the mansion just keeping an eye out. Tony didn’t always know I was there, but I was. For him. We rarely spoke on those occasions when we did see one another, but I will never forget the time he came running downstairs with his hair wild and his cheeks burning, dashing from room to room shouting my name.

  I calmed him down and offered him a Mandrax. As usual, he wouldn’t take anything but a glass of wine. He put his fists to his temples and shook his head, groaning. I asked him what the matter was, and he told me he’d had a dream, the most vivid terrifying dream he had ever had. It wasn’t the first time. He’d had it about three times since Connie’s death, but it was getting worse every time, feeling more real. I asked him if he wanted to tell me about it, and he was silent for so long that I assumed he didn’t. Then he refilled his glass and mine and leaned back in his chair. His voice was a monotone, his eyes fixed on one of Connie’s abstracts hanging on the wall behind the grand piano.

  “I’M LOOKING FOR CONNIE,” HE said. ”In the dream. Looking everywhere. She’s not in the house, not under any of the beds, not in the stables or the guest house. Then I’m in a strange city at night where the buildings are all old, dark, and decaying. There are noises all around—rumblings, echoing voices, children crying—but I don’t know where they’re coming from. There’s a river nearby, and a stinking mist seems to be rising from its surface, threading its way through the gloomy cobbled streets. I arrive at a big house made of black stone with gargoyles hanging out high up on the walls, some sort of dark viscous fluid—not water—spurting out of their mouths. I’m feeling nervous, in the dream, but I go inside. There’s no furniture and very little light, just shadows, dust, dark corners and whispering voices. Every time I think I’ve got as far as I can go, there’s another room beyond. Finally, I arrive at a big ornate door, and I go through it. There are people spread about on the floor. It’s too dark to make out their features clearly, but I know that Connie is one of them. I can see the glow of opium pipes and matches heating spoons, and there’s a smell, even in the dream, acrid but sweet somehow, like pears and ammonia. I think it’s death.

  “Connie is lying next to someone who is wearing strange clothes. Edwardian, or something like that. Mostly he’s in the shadows. I have no idea who he is. Connie looks up at me, and I can see the pleading in her eyes. ‘Get me out of here!’ She wants me to save her, to rescue her, take her awa
y. When I reach out for her hand, a voice tells me I can’t leave with her.

  “There’s a guitar propped against the wall. A Fender Stratocaster. I pick it up and strum a chord. It’s out of tune and the volume is deafening. I can’t see any leads or amps but it’s definitely plugged in somewhere. I sing a song because I think that’s what they want. The first song I ever wrote for Connie. It’s all very hazy, but I get through it somehow, and then all the people lying around are clapping and saying how great I am and how Connie can go back with me now. I reach for her hands and pull her to her feet. She’s a bit unsteady, but she can walk. The voice says, ‘Remember don’t look back,’ as we set off. I’m confused. I don’t know why he’s talking about the Dylan movie, what he means by that. I’m in a hurry to get out of there, and my feet seem to remember their way back through room after room, though there’s a heaviness that slows us down, as if we’re squelching through mud. You can never run fast enough in dreams. I see ghosts of people I’ve known long ago flitting through the shadows: my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fox, a blackbird with a damaged wing. A disembodied voice whispers, ‘It is always afternoon’ and then echoes and echoes until all the words blur into one another. The journey seems to last forever. Connie is behind me now, and I can see a glimmer of light ahead. The outside world. Daylight.

  “When I get to the door, the sunshine beyond is almost blinding. I turn to look back at Connie, to make sure she’s still close behind, but when I do, it’s as if the room and Connie are moving further and further away from me and becoming smaller and smaller. The more I reach out, the further away they get. The next thing I know, I’m out in the street and the heavy door has slammed behind me. I hammer on the wood calling out for Connie, but nobody comes.”