Gimme More

by Liza Cody

  I shrug my shoulders and say wistfully, ‘Nothing lasts.’ Poor Birdie – she’s had the best and now nothing less can ever match up. She’s softened by nostalgia.

  Sasson leans across the table and takes my hand. He says, ‘We have a history, don’t we? Not an easy one, admittedly. But wasn’t I always pretty straight with you?’

  Yeah, you were, Sasson. You resented me in a pretty straight way. It’s true, I always knew where I was with young Sasson.

  ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘You were pretty straight. But Dog wasn’t.’

  ‘That’s contractual, Birdie. That’s to do with accounting periods and lawyers. Besides, back then, it wasn’t even Dog.’

  ‘Copyrights and title,’ I say. ‘I was cut out every which way.’ I don’t withdraw my hand and nor does Sasson. It’s a warm clasp. Forgiving. He will forgive me for being a greedy bitch if I’ll play nicely now.

  ‘Maybe it’s time we looked at all that again,’ he says. He strokes my knuckles with his thumb. It’s a nice hand, warm and smooth. Yes, he has a good hand. All the cards, where contracts, royalties and deductions are concerned, are in his hand. All the lawyers are in the palm of that hand too.

  I say, ‘I’m tired of fighting. I just want to know that, if I supply any new materials to you, they belong to me. I want to be accepted as the owner of my own image for a change. I want to be paid for my own work.’

  ‘If there are any new materials, we’ll sort it out,’ Sasson says, dismissing the crux of the matter with a reassuring squeeze. Does he have any idea how many reassuring squeezes this old hand of mine’s endured? How quickly the reassuring squeeze turns into a stranglehold?

  He goes on, ‘It all depends on what you have. What’s on the film, Birdie?’

  ‘Music and memories,’ I say. ‘A lot of beach stuff, as far as I can recall. But the bit Barry wants is the recording work. I don’t know – it was a long time ago.’

  Sasson has his reactions well in hand now. He shows no particular interest. He says, ‘We’ll have to show it to the lawyers. But I promise you that if you give it to Dog you’ll be fairly compensated.’

  Now’s the time to withdraw my hand.

  I say, ‘It’s not just the film. It’s the music rights, the publishing, copyrights, authorship … That whole can of worms.’

  ‘We’ll look at all that again,’ Sasson says. ‘Just show us what you’ve got.’

  ‘Oh Sasson,’ I sigh. ‘Give me a break, man. I don’t even know where next month’s rent’s coming from. If you cut my baby band I’ll be out of work again.’

  ‘Your baby what?’

  ‘Inner Versions. The band I’m working with.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ says Dog’s Managing Director. ‘We’ve got much more important things to think about. What we’re talking about is nothing short of a multimedia event.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But I don’t want to rake up the past. What concerns me is making a living in the here and now. Making music, working with a young band which needs a commitment from you.’

  ‘But compared with Jack they’re nothing,’ he says, looking puzzled. ‘What was it you said? Not good enough musically to make up for … what was it … shaggability?’

  ‘They need help,’ I admit. ‘I was trying to find out how committed Dog was to its could-do-a-lot-better-with-a-little-help bands. And you wouldn’t answer. I did not say they were “nothing”. It’s not up to me to dismiss them or sign them. That’s up to you. And you’ll probably never hear them.’

  ‘I’ll come and listen to them if you like.’ He lets a little of his irritation show. He nearly had me, and now, for some whimsical reason, I’ve changed the subject.

  ‘They aren’t ready,’ I say. ‘If you want to show some interest, give them a few months’ more development – enough to polish up a tight set list. Let them record it. And then send them out to open for one of your name bands. Let the punters choose. That’s the fair way. That gives them a chance to make something slowly and test it against a live audience.’

  ‘That seems fair.’ Sasson pretends to think about it. ‘But I don’t know what the bean-counters’ll say.’

  ‘Just give them something to sell – could be two or three numbers on a single. Count units sold at live performances. Also, and this is important, ask a producer to persuade the frontman into voice coaching. He’s okay, nice natural voice, but imprecise. And there’s a nasty gap between his head and chest voices which exercises could fill in fine.’

  Sasson stares at me. He says, ‘You never used to be this analytical, Birdie.’

  Did I not, Sasson, babe? I used to wear a T-shirt which said, ‘Speak slowly, I’m a blonde.’ Nobody but me saw the joke. I used to be very young, very pretty and very fanciable. Everyone looked. My God, how they looked. But no one listened.

  Sasson says, ‘This front man – this singer – is there something going on that I should know about?’ He’s smiling, intimate, sharing what he thinks is a pleasantry.

  Abruptly, I rise to my feet. I walk.

  Head high, long easy strides, velvet swinging, I walk out on Sasson Freel – every inch of me a wounded queen. An immaculate exit. Eye-catching too. Several heads turn to watch my passing.

  Outside, moving as fast as I can without actually sprinting, I turn east and disappear down the underpass. Not bad for an old broad.

  Sasson would try to make a dignified departure from the Pizza Express. He would reason that when he got outside I would be somewhere in sight. He would think that I wanted to be caught, mollified, petted and stroked because, otherwise, why did I walk? Women want to be caught. Women want to kiss and make up, be reassured. Women always give you a second chance, don’t they, Sasson?

  Not this one. And anyway, it was time to go. Time to let him think or stew a little. He just gave me a good excuse.

  I walked along Piccadilly, mingling with the tourists, thinking, yes, it is time to go. I was tired of juggling two jobs and sorting out other people’s lives for them. I’d been reliable for weeks, and being reliable is boring and exhausting.

  I stopped at a public phone and called the office. The sweet old man answered the phone. I tell him that my niece has been involved in a motor accident in Paris.

  ‘Of course you must go,’ he says. ‘How very worrying.’

  I say, ‘I’m the only one in the family who speaks halfway decent French.’

  ‘Don’t bother about us,’ says Mr Adler. ‘Just tell us if there’s anything we can do.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ I say. And it’s true. The lie was especially chosen for a kind man.

  ‘I shouldn’t be gone for more than a week,’ I say, anxious and regretful.

  I took a taxi to Maida Vale and an address nobody knows. After that, with a sizable slice of fuck-you money, I went back to Robin’s house.

  The next morning I was on a plane to the States. I even wangled myself an upgrade. Birdie flew away. Club Class.

  Stretched out, ankles crossed, sipping complimentary wine, I breathed out slowly. Yes! It was time to bask in the sun, to go fishing for real fish, to let the mud I’d stirred up in that cold English pool settle. I get restless and claustrophobic in England. It’s all too tight for me, and reliability just isn’t my thing. When I got back, one way or another, things would be clearer. Sometimes success depends on knowing when to take yourself out of the game.

  I wanted to empty my mind, to feel loose, but images of Sasson leaked in. In the old days, I wouldn’t have given him a second thought. But somewhere, in the intervening years, he had muscled up. He now had power, status and money. I’m almost Darwinian about that. A man or woman with power and status is far more useful to me than one without.

  But along with the benefits comes the danger. A man or woman with power and status should be manipulated with caution. They are strong, often at the expense of people like me.

  V

  Victim of Comfort

  When Junior Moline’s career stalled there was no one to blame bu
t Junior, and he was too laidback even to do that. On his business card, if he could find one, it said: ‘Producer/Engineer’, and it’s true that he’d had his moments. Years ago he’d worked with some very big names. Years ago he’d been going places. He’d travelled all over the world, on tour with bands, in studios with bands. And then, one day, he found himself in New Orleans.

  What he always said was, ‘They don’t call New Orleans the Big Easy for nothing. Well, I’m big and easy myself, where else should I go? My feet got stuck in the Mississippi mud.’

  It could be said too that his mouth got stuck to the business end of a chillum, and his arse got stuck to the cane chair on his lady’s balcony, and his ears and heart got stuck to the throb of Delta blues.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t work. He did work. Regularly. Seven days a year. On the last weekend of April and the first weekend of May during the Jazz Festival anyone could find him out at the Fairground wearing a sweat-stained Stage Krewe T-shirt decked with backstage passes. Happy as Larry, balancing instruments, monitors and microphones.

  ‘One-one, two-two. One-one, tsu-tsu. One-one, chu-chu. Little more off the top there … One-one, tsu-tsu. Yeah, got it.’ Seven acts a day with only thirty minutes between them to break down one set and then soundcheck for the next lot.

  Yes, he worked hard then, his big feet slapping across the boards in open-toed sandals, and as the day wore on, his outsize jeans slipped lower and lower and his T-shirt slid higher until everyone in the crowd below could see what he called his double bass. Sometimes, friends and acquaintances, partying out there on the other side of the crush barrier, would call up rude remarks about his increasing girth. And he would call back, ‘Do you mind? I’m proud of this – I built it myself. Brick by brick.’

  Then, laughing, a friend might lob a can of Miller Lite over, and later, backstage, Junior Moline would sit back replacing fluid lost in the thirty-minute scramble. He would feel the beer vibrating in the can to the beat of bass and drums. He’d know that everyone in front of the giant stacks of speakers would be feeling something close to cardiac massage from the sound he’d helped to produce. Sound waves, punching through the hot, humid air, rattling your ribs, nudging your lungs and hammering on your heart. Exactly how live music ought to be felt out there in the sun.

  Junior Moline loved the Festival. Once a year all the talent spawned and nurtured around the Delta crawled out into the sunshine and made sweet music for New Orleans to dance to. Jazz, blues, cajun, zydeco, R&B, rock, latin, reggae, country, with a dash of hip-hop, African and Native American for seasoning. There was a gig for everyone. No matter what you played, there was always someone to dance. No matter how badly you danced there was always someone to play for you. And there would always be people like Junior EQing the sound.

  In the beginning it was the Festival that brought him to New Orleans. He first came with an American band he’d been recording with in London – out of England’s tight grey fist into the hot wet light. A climate he fell into, relaxed into, like a warm bath on a cold night.

  The band was Thieves Like Us, long ago split and divorced. But the lead singer and guitarist was Cy Fuentes whose solo career became the stuff of music fairy tales – or cautionary tales – depending on your point of view.

  Sound engineering for Thieves Like Us had been, at that time, a significant step for Junior. It was one of those steps from which his own career might have taken off, had he not been seduced by the Big Easy. But, more significant in the long run, was his meeting with Birdie Walker. Sometimes, lounging on his lady’s balcony, he remembered the first meeting. She was ushered into the sound booth, like so many celebrity girlfriends, with a mixture of indifference and curiosity – another pretty chick there to admire the talent on the studio floor. She was there, he thought, to be impressed and also because while she was there she couldn’t be with anyone else and she couldn’t be out spending the star’s money. The usual thing.

  The half-glance he gave her took in a jail-bait adolescent body, long blonde hair and coltish grace. Cy’s new babe was a baby, and Junior might have felt sorry for her except that he was too busy, and in those days even baby chicks didn’t merit any sympathy: they were part of the furniture.

  As the night wore on though he noticed something else: unlike the other chicks he’d seen come and go, she didn’t get bored or read magazines or whine. Nor did she run around rolling joints and fetching refreshment for the band. She paid attention. She didn’t chat or ask questions or in any way interrupt, but he became increasingly aware that she was watching every move he made. At one point, when a discussion between the band and the producer turned into a slanging match, she sat on the floor as if the dramatic interlude was too boring to witness. Junior’s feelings were similar. He said, too quietly to be heard by anyone else in the booth, ‘If it was me, I’d put in some silly brass.’

  ‘What?’ she asked, just as quietly.

  ‘They’re fighting about strings,’ he said. ‘Stupid idea. But they do need something, and if it was me …’

  ‘What do you mean “silly brass”?’

  ‘Well, like a bass tuba or a sousaphone – a bit of deep-down oompah for extra beat and texture.’

  She considered this for a moment, smiling dreamily. Nothing else was said.

  But the next day, late in the evening, a bewildered spotty young man with a bass tuba was shown into the studio. Cy’s explanation to the producer even recycled Junior’s description, silly brass. Junior, of course, got no credit, either for the idea or the description. Nor did Birdie. Cy took that. All Junior got was a long slow wink from Birdie.

  The real payoff came later when he was hired to produce Wild Jack’s second album and found that he’d been hyped as a sound man with imagination. And who should turn up with Jack to the first meeting? She was a little taller perhaps and more polished, but the long blonde hair and the lazy wink were the same.

  The wink, Junior thought, was absolutely something to write home about. Birdie turned her head so that no one but Junior could see the winking eye. Then, without moving any other facial muscle, she slowly dropped one eyelid. It was like an illusion: one half of her face went to sleep while the other remained sweetly attentive. Everyone else in the room saw only her perfect profile. It was the first hint Junior had that with Birdie what you saw was not what you got. What you saw, of course, was so beautiful that it was hard to respond to her as anything but a visual feast. ‘Blinded by beauty,’ Junior said, ruefully explaining why even he had been slow to take her seriously.

  ‘If she’d been a guy or a bit uglier,’ Junior said, ‘who knows what she might have achieved.’

  He once heard Jack say to her, ‘Jesus, babe, you don’t have to do anything. You just gotta be. Sit there with your mouth shut and you’re perfect. I love you.’

  With half the world, as it seemed then, aching for Jack to love them too that sounded like a compliment. You’re perfect. Jack loves you. Stay that way and shut up. What a trap, what an insult, Junior thought later. But only years later, and only after years of being looked after by a short string of independent women – the sort of women a lazy, easy-going man is attracted to. Because if a lazy, easy-going man wants the support of an independent woman he learns to listen to her. If you don’t pay the piper, you don’t call the tune. But you really should listen to it sometimes or you’ll end up a lonely, lazy man.

  What surprised Junior was the way his acquaintanceship with Birdie slowly turned into an on-again-off-again friendship. He was surprised that he still knew her, and even more surprised because it was she who kept in touch. At first he thought that her interest in his job was because he was useful to her. If she studied his working practices and his vocabulary, he thought, she would look less like the gorgeous idiot everyone thought her to be, and she could stay one step ahead of the competition. But then he noticed that what she knew was of no importance whatsoever. Because no one listened to her. Even Jack, even when he was using her as a co-writer, back-up singe
r or piano player, behaved as if he was indulging a pretty child. Jack might come in with a rough track to show the band. It would be clear that the harmony voice was hers and that she was playing the electric piano pad which underpinned his guitar riffs, and that half the lyrical ideas could only be hers. And even though that rough guide was what the whole studio used to build a polished song, the most Jack would say was, ‘Ah well, got to keep the girl amused – can’t let the girl get bored.’

  Music was man stuff – unless you had a voice like Etta James or Aretha Franklin, in which case you would be allowed to sing.

  Birdie did not have a big black voice. What she had was soft, white and, worse, English. She could not even be a respectable harmony singer. Her growing feel for melody and harmony was not something she could use herself. She could only give it away to people who would make it sound right.

  At one time Junior thought she might want to use his expertise to give herself credibility. And it was true that she did. But even now, when he hadn’t recorded with a Name for years, she still played him tapes of what her ‘baby bands’ were doing and listened to his comments and suggestions. He knew that nowadays there were other, more useful, people to use as sounding-boards. He was out of it. The big time had ticked away.

  But still she kept in touch. Even when he was flat broke and couldn’t offer her so much as a sofa to sleep on when she showed up and hung out. Then, it was her turn to offer him notions – money-making schemes to tide him over. Schemes which were actually scams: how to blag a free meal, how to con the bank into giving him more credit, how to fake references for a suspicious landlady. In other words, she taught him how to get by in an expensive place without a penny in his pocket.

  ‘Swimming under water,’ she called it. ‘Survival techniques, so’s you can hold out till the next breath.’