“Do you have the flu?” he’d asked.
“No!” she’d cried, as if she hadn’t even considered the flu until then. “Do you?”
But when she finally lowered her hands to play, Theodorus was moved to distraction by both her quietly ferocious music and her hieroglyphic smile—and their brief (and reputedly chaste) love affair began that afternoon in a cloakroom at the Theological Library. After that day, they were rarely seen more than a hair’s breadth apart, and together they formed the gray, shale heart of The Uraniums—hard, gleaming and certain to splinter.
The other seven members of the band were introduced steadily over the subsequent weeks. Bass player Ernesto Valdez sent an audition tape from Italy, where he was studying abroad at the time—getting dual degrees in figurative painting and alcoholic consumption. News of The Uraniums had reached him by wire and Valdez never hesitated once he heard Theodorus was involved. Upon news of his acceptance, Valdez hopped a flight back to Boston, leaving the Tuscan Hills thundering with the echoes of 10 or 12 breaking hearts.
S.L. Miles, on keyboard, was found trolling around Boston Commons wearing an ill-fitting aviator’s cap, bragging to any who would listen that he was the greatest pianist since Thelonious Monk. Miles had quit school, and then the Army, and finally the family artichoke-bottling business. I used to see him out there, sometimes. He’d sit with his keyboard, never playing, taking quarters when they were dropped but never begging, always bragging. When anyone told him to put his money where his mouth was, he told them they just didn’t get it. But when Theodorus told him to, Miles played, and Miles was in.
Then came Nelly Finch, whose birdsong lilting was enough to overcome even the “Goldwater for President” button she’d pinned neatly to her blouse. She was all Southern brass and charm. Theodorus once remarked, “If you try to hate her, she’ll tell you nicely you’re wrong, and then suddenly you’ll see that you are.”
Her friend, the goofy, buck-toothed Penny Orbach, was the only accordion player to try out and so she was a shoo-in—despite placing whoopee cushions on Theodorus’ chair and drawing “Kilroy Was Here” doodles all over the lyric sheets while he’d been dealing with Nelly. When the two ladies left, all that could be said for sure was that one of them had poured a pound of macaroni salad into the heating duct in the bathroom.
Theodorus was content to leave it at that—six musicians seemed like plenty—but then Roger Barnacle, Jackson Press and Henry Kobayashi came in as a set. They were the remnants of a progressive rock band that had lost its lead guitarist and lyricist, Hughley Howard, to an automobile accident on the Mass Pike earlier that year. An ACME produce truck had taken out the poor boy’s motorcycle and sent him flying a hundred yards into a utility pole. Barnacle and Press each played guitar with an abandon that could be called unparalleled if there hadn’t been two of them. All either of them would say about Kobayashi, the drummer, was that he was brilliant, spoke no English and was very, very weird.
~~~~
What can be said about the show itself?
There are facts: that it was over five hours in length; that they played Seferis in the Jungle, Flying Scotsman, 705, No Newspapers and Come Down Joe Walker, along with dozens of other songs whose titles were unclear—several of which had no proper titles, since they were improvised on the spot; that they started out wearing Baptist choir robes on Theodorus’ insistence (to show solidarity with the Birmingham church bombings) but that these were soon torn off; that they covered I Fall to Pieces by the recently departed Patsy Cline; that they performed one number consisting only of Orbach reading off the names of nuclear submariners that had drowned; that S.L. Miles introduced himself as an understudy on General Hospital. These facts are verifiable, but they cannot begin to sum up the greatness of that night.
There are impressions: that Barnacle’s experimentation with echoes that night was bold and revolutionary; that Finch’s mocking tone set an unanticipated wryness to the somber lyrics of Theodorus; that Sarah Dickens’ mandolin playing was eerily prescient of what would come on later Zeppelin tracks; that S.L. Miles played with the loving fearlessness of a child—tinkering with keys that so-called “experienced” players had lost track of; that Jackson Press sang better than he ever would in his lengthy later career. These impressions are subjective, but I can assure you none are too far from the mark.
There are myths: that Ernesto Valdez drank six bottles of Pernod over the course of the night; that Penny Orbach smashed her accordion to pieces after the third hour and fashioned the ripped bellows into a cape; that Kobayashi completely bugged out in the middle of Volcanic Interruptions, dove off the stage, disappeared for several minutes and returned with a watermelon under each arm; that Theodorus Hamilton burned an effigy of then Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey; that the entire show only ended in the fifth hour because a paramilitary police team broke down the barricaded door, and that as a result, all 238 audience members in attendance were placed onto an FBI watch list. These myths are absurd, though perhaps none are without their charms.
~~~~
Once the show ended, around three in the morning, the nine musicians deliriously disassembled their equipment and parted ways—all apparently eager to rejoin to practice for next month’s Watertown Community Center show. Each of them knew they had accomplished something unknown and undefinable that night, and yet they were eager to get away from one another, perhaps because with the lights up and the crowd cleared, they did not quite believe it had happened themselves. And within a week they had all left Cambridge—some disappeared almost as quickly as they were able.
As near as anyone could tell this was not a coordinated exodus. In fact, the few members of the band who have spoken publicly about the incident have all said they left without a word to the others and had no idea the other eight would not go on to Watertown with some replacement.
Theodorus Hamilton took off that very night, with his flute and his tambourine and his triangle and nothing else. He marched south over the Charles River and 20 miles down Blue Hill Avenue, finding himself at Ponkapoag Pond, where he remained for several years in relative solitude, bothered only by the occasional sliced ball from the adjacent Ponkapoag Golf & Country Club.
On the subject of why he went to the pond, Theodorus Hamilton eventually wrote a lengthy account of his days there, called simply Ponkapoag, in which he spoke of the simple pleasures of fishing and bathing nude in the pond—of the thrill of hiding in the tops of a tall tree while being pursued by angry country club groundskeepers. It is a spiritual book, and he makes no mention of The Uraniums at all—but writes instead about the delicacy of birds’ eggs, the sturdiness of reeds and the wily nature of the Massachusetts fox. Of music he wrote only of the serenading of loons, the buzzing of flies in spiders’ webs and the screeching of owls that wished they had never been born into this world. When he returned to city life a few years later, he discovered Kennedy had been shot, the Army draft board had been looking for him, China had developed a hydrogen bomb, and Nixon was on his way to being elected. Theodorus turned right around, tired and tubercular, and started hitching west toward the Great Lakes, with his eye on Canada and then Alaska beyond.
Many speculate his reason for leaving was somehow linked to Sarah Dickens, and that the two must have fought at the 92 Club that night and ended their relationship just after the show. Though I have no proof besides what I saw that night between them on stage, I suspect the raw energy of that epic performance ignited something in both band members that, in the ringing silence of the post-show fallout, neither could quite release. Germ-phobic Dickens was oil to the water of Hamilton’s divine countenance. Lines of great force had been pushed through the bedrock and when the particulate bonds began to break, the result was an explosive silence. Sarah Dickens returned to Amherst via the 7:17 train that morning and went to her parents’ home. She did not emerge for 20 years, and then only because her pallbearers were carrying her out to the cemetery.
In the intervening time, she
communicated often, through letters to some of the other band members, asking if anyone knew where Theodorus was. Copies of these letters were located upon her death by Sarah’s sisters, in a chest filled with 1,132 compositions for the mandolin—though she had not played a note since the night with The Uraniums. Her dust-coated instrument, indeed, had been sitting 10 feet from her desk on a shelf in the attic room—with frayed strings—un-tuned and untouched for 20 years.
Ernesto Valdez fled to France where he fell in with a generation of lost musicians from the States, who together drank themselves to pieces under Parisian and Madridian moons. His simple, straightforward playing later spurred a hundred lesser imitators. Before long he became something of a national treasure, though he spent the better part of his career anywhere but America and reportedly fell in with socialists. He took up hunting in the hinterlands of Africa and fishing in the deep blue trenches off of Vieques. He married and divorced, married and divorced, married and divorced, married and blew his head off with an elephant gun just before his 50th birthday.
Three days after the 92 Club show, S.L. Miles stumbled onto Advaita Vedanta, a sub-sect of Zen Buddhism that was steadily taking hold of the Harvard undergraduates who frequented the Commons at the time. Miles fancied himself every bit as easily taken-in as any Harvard student, and so he was. He continued to play the keyboard, but rarely granted interviews and did not speak about The Uraniums’ show. Instead, he kept trying to redirect fans to his newer compositions, which were more Eastern-influenced—less tightly constructed and wider sweeping. Many fans were unimpressed by this shift. In fact, several spoke scathingly of him afterwards—upset they’d ever been swayed by his music. Many swore to anyone who would listen that their interest in Miles had only been an understandable folly of youth. They saw his act now as juvenile and minor. Miles soon skipped town and headed out toward the woods, perhaps inspired by the earlier flight of Theodorus, remaining there until his recent death. Generations of listeners still wait to learn if he continued to compose in his reclusion.
Nelly Finch turned down the calls of agents and producers following the 92 Club show. Some believe she was devastated by Goldwater’s defeat to Johnson in ’64. Others said the Summer of Love was just too much for her. We do know that, for some time, she and Penny Orbach were very close and rumored to be working together on an album, but when Penny’s work emerged steadily in the later decades there was no evidence of Finch on any of the tracks. Many said Finch and Orbach were lovers; many said they were bad drunks. Whatever the case, Orbach’s seminal albums for the accordion were certainly impressive feats of musicianship: paranoidly blending epic richness with commercial jingling, and inspiring an entire generation of genius accordionists to follow. Both women live today, but neither is heard from. While Finch supposedly lives in Alabama with her older sister and refuses to give interviews, Orbach resides in Manhattan in complete anonymity. There are those in the Village who claim to have seen her—an older woman with buck teeth who no one seems to know, smoking dope at a record release party or spray-painting cartoonish accordions onto the brick walls of the tenement houses.
These figures all remained alive mainly in the gossip and imagination of the world’s musical elite. The final three members of The Uraniums—Roger Barnacle, Jackson Press and Henry Kobayashi—each became household names, though in extremely different ways, each occupying, in his own way, one of the subsequent decades of the twentieth century.
Roger Barnacle left the show that night and met some fans on the Weeks Bridge. They took some acid off some pink elephant stamps and the old Barnacle was scraped off, so to speak. Great madness gripped him in its Technicolor tentacles. He spacily unwound all the strings on his guitar and dreamily wove them into the hair of a young woman who thought she was a bird’s nest. He ate a third of his left shoe and streaked up Massachusetts Avenue, setting mailboxes on fire as they left the city. Twelve hours later, psychedelic playtime over, they stumbled to a nearby barn to rest in a hayloft. The fans awoke the next day to find Roger Barnacle, still quite berserk, singing selections from My Fair Lady to an immense, black pig.
Barnacle vanished. Fans fed rumors he was in an asylum somewhere, on a permanent bad trip after doing a whole blotter of acid in one sitting. They said he was, now, forever convinced he was a teapot—wandering about the padded rooms attempting to pour himself out for people. The perhaps sadder truth is he moved home with his mother and sister, took up vegetable gardening and bicycling, and lived a relatively quiet life before dying of cancer in his old and feeble age.
No doubt you today know at least a dozen Jackson Press songs. His first solo album, Piping Hot Off the Wall, rocketed him to instant fame. A natural pop songwriter, his R&B sensibility played well in the roiling cultural Charybdis that was the 1970s, and then evolved with the times and technologies that came after, remaining an international force to be reckoned with, well into the twenty-first century. Press recorded one platinum album after the next. He toured the world, making billions, meeting prime ministers and presidents and playing the Super Bowl. People in Myanmar and Dubai and Siberia and Tierra del Fuego knew his songs: Mirror Man and Corrupt and Jeanie G. and White Knuckle and Get Going and Dark or Light. It was a given that he would win a Grammy any year he put out an album. He got involved in international charities, trying to use his fame to combat starvation and malaria, and provide potable water to villages. The name of Jackson Press went down in Rock history alongside Elvis and Lennon, but only his most fervent fans knew he had once been a member of The Uraniums—just a brief blip in the immense, mega, titanic, interstellar career that had followed.
And oh, yes, there were questions—many questions—about the hair plugs and the water park he lived in and the little girls and the high-profile abuse trials and the off-kilter marriages and his oddly named children. But his fame was too deep, too wide and too vast to be drained away by any of these oddities. His was the sort of fervent, self-propelling fame that no one—least of all Press himself—could do anything to stop. When he eventually overdosed on painkillers, the world took a holiday. His name and face filled every television screen on every channel for half a week. Emperors and kings had had smaller funerals. A year earlier, Barnacle had died peacefully at home, barely remembered by anyone.
So. What of Henry Kobayashi? Of him, the last, we know the least, which perhaps is just as well. He disappeared more completely than the rest and to this day has not been seen. Some say he changed his name and went back to teaching mathematics, which he had earned his PhD in before the show, at the young age of 22. Some say he defected to North Korea and he is the (perhaps unwilling) architect of their nuclear strategies. Others say he walked off into the Nevada desert with no intentions of surviving. Still others say he is the one behind a string of pipe-bomb attacks that have spanned 30 years, directed at various university professors, military and airline targets. Bits and pieces of wood consistent with drumsticks have been found, according to the FBI, amidst the shrapnel in several of the devices.
I really can’t say one way or the other. I’m not him, you see—I’m not anybody. I was just there. I just saw it all that night and felt myself, like those nine, irrevocably altered by that performance. By a conflagration of immense talents that could not ever be reproduced. Even if the Watertown Community Center show had been held as scheduled, it could not have been the same. Perhaps it is better anyway, that those notes resonate now only in our memories. They are in there. Trapped in pulpy nets of dendritic bridges, synaptic threads that, even then, were being stripped of their sheaths by tendrils of marijuana smoke and warm beer, by innocuous tabs of LSD-25, by ghostly amphetiminic and barbitutive winds. Forty years later, those precious cells have endured fourteen hundred further days of fractured and steady dying, of triumphant and orgasmic living. Of day after day of our records being overwritten by lesser and lesser moments. It ought to be forgotten, just a bit of static and fuzz in the minds of 238 erstwhile Bostonians and the nine Uraniums—though most are
dead and the remainder are ghosts regardless. But I can tell you. I was there. I cannot forget it. What took place there that night was nuclear. We were all taken apart on a molecular level, and our unstable atoms were rearranged. We were weaponized and miniaturized. It is still in here somewhere, waiting to go off.
Forget Me Not
Stephanie Carroll
“You have to leave.”
Myrtle had me hooked by the arm, escorting me to the front door.
“But you’re my sister. They’re my nieces—my nephew. I only have three days left.”
She wrenched open the door and shoved me onto the front stoop. “No Lauraline, I only have three days left. Three days until this obsession and madness finally ends.”
I squeezed my purse with both hands. “I just—”
She pointed back into her house. “Your nieces are terrified of you. William’s crying. How could you tell them that?”
“They are older than we were.”
She clenched her teeth, balled up her hands. “Clearly you don’t recall what that was like.” She jabbed a finger into her chest. “I was older. I saw what it did to you. To all of us.”
I remembered my older sisters gasping and denying it, calling Grandmamma Silvia a monster and a witch for telling an 8-year-old such a thing, especially so soon after our parents’ deaths. “But someone had to tell them. I am old enough now to see the wisdom Grandmamma—”
“You are turning thirty, not ninety, and clearly you haven’t an ounce of wisdom.”
I looked down. “Will you still come?”
Legacy- an Anthology Page 8
