Bloody hell, thinks Dean. I live with this guy.
“Why’s everyone gone quiet?” Slightly alarmed, Jasper asks the band. “Was that weird? Did I go too far?”
* * *
—
MAX USHERS THE band out and along a corridor carpeted in blood-and-coffee-colored zigzags. “The photographer’s set up in the big room at the end. I’ll quickly call Doug Weston to say we’ll be a little late.” Dean walks on ahead, following the twists and turns of the corridor, and finds himself alone. They’ll be along in a minute. He passes through swing doors into a makeshift photo studio. A slim woman stands with her back to him, taking a light meter reading as a flash bounces off a reflector. She turns and looks at Dean. Skinny, blond, thickish lips…Have we slept together? She takes a picture with the camera around her neck. “Mecca? Bloody hell!”
Click. Scrit-scrit. “How’s things, Dean?”
“But…”
“I am your photographer.”
“But…” Get a grip. “So you live here in LA?”
“Now, yes. I’ve been traveling around since London. But I started working for an agency here exactly two weeks ago.”
“Your accent’s gone all…German-American.”
“Language is a virus, like Burroughs says.”
Burroughs? A new boyfriend? “Does Jasper know?”
The doors open. Elf’s mouth gapes like a cartoon character: “Mecca!” She sails over for a long hug. Mecca looks over Elf’s shoulder at Jasper and her face says, Hello, and Dean feels envy and an unpleasant recollection of the morning’s call about photographs and blackmail. Mecca finishes the hug. “Hello, Griff. Hello, Levon.”
Levon does not look surprised. The Dark Arts, thinks Dean. Griff looks delighted. “Small world, eh?”
“It is. Hello, Mr. de Zoet.”
The ex-lovers stare at each other for a few seconds.
“You look a little bit older,” says Jasper. “Around the eyes.”
“Oh, dear God, Jasper,” groans Elf. “I despair of you…’ ”
Mecca’s laughing. “Your Troubadour show last night was very great. I thought the first album was out of this world, but Stuff of Life blows my mind.”
“Hang on,” says Elf. “You were at the Troubadour?”
“I bought a ticket when I hear you play there.”
“Why didn’t yer bloody tell us?” asks Dean.
“I did not want to be the girl who says, ‘Hey, I used to date the guitar god, so give me special treatment.’ Also…”
“Oh, Jasper’s single,” says Dean. “Since you left, none o’ the baby-sitters’ve lasted more than a week or two.”
“Are you free this evening?” asks Jasper. “Come to the show.”
“There’s a party at Cass Elliot’s house after,” says Levon.
Mecca sighs and looks uncertain. “Unfortunately, Friday night is my Black Forest Gateau and Lederhosen Club Night. So sad…”
Jasper needs a few seconds. “Irony.” Then he’s not so sure. “Or a lie? No. A joke. Dean? Was it a joke?”
Max Mulholland sails in. “Doug Weston says every last ticket sold within a quarter-hour of Elf whacking Randy Thorn on his head. There’s a line outside already. We’d best hurry…”
* * *
—
THE QUEUE IS still there an hour later. The band, Levon, and Mecca watch from across Santa Monica Boulevard. Under a roof of dark glare, warm lights illuminate the club’s frontage and a sign in a Gothic font: DOUG WESTON’S TROUBADOUR. Lower down, in block letters: UTOPIA AVENUE. Mecca’s holding Jasper’s hand, Dean notices. Looks like they’re picking up where they left off…No “Who have you slept with?” No fuss. No love child. No paternity lawsuit. A gunmetal gray Ford Zodiac cruises by. Next, an eye-blue Corvette Sting Ray. Then a ruby-red Pontiac GTO.
“Night four,” says Griff. “Anybody getting used to it yet?”
“Not me,” says Elf. “Not yet.”
“I was shitting myself the first night,” says Dean. “But now I’m like, Ah, we knocked it for six before, we will again.”
“Tuesday to Thursday,” says Levon, “you were building buzz. Tonight’s the payoff. A good run at the Troubadour unlocks Los Angeles. Los Angeles unlocks California. And California’s the key to America. Not New York. Here. Things are falling into place.”
Dean smells car fumes and his own aftershave. “Bet it’s raining in England now. Here we are in short sleeves. They’ll never know. Our families, I mean. We can describe it, but unless they’ve been here, unless they’ve lived it…”
“I’ve had that thought too,” says Elf. “It’s melancholic.”
“Turn around, everyone,” instructs Mecca.
They obey—Click ’n’ FLASH! Scrit-scrit…
“Yer don’t tend to ask, do yer?” remarks Dean.
“No, she does not,” says Jasper.
“Either you ask politely,” replies Mecca, “or you get good photographs.” Click ’n’ FLASH! Scrit-scrit…
“Let’s go tell Doug we’re here,” says Levon.
* * *
—
DOUG WESTON’S UPSTAIRS office vibrates in time to the support act’s bass. 101 Damn Nations, a local band, are good enough to “warm the seat” but not so good as to threaten Utopia Avenue. Doug Weston, a giant in green velvet with anarchic blond hair, is the most affable club owner Dean has ever met, and when the rest of the band go downstairs, he stays to chat a while longer. Doug discusses the Randy Thorn episode and takes out a Sucrets throat-lozenge tin. “It was the most compelling live TV since…well, I’d propose Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination, but that would be tasteless. People were phoning in on KDAY-FM, KCRW. They’ve been playing ‘Roll Away the Stone.’ You’re the conversation in LA today. If Levon wasn’t so Canadian, I’d be thinking, Shit, did he set the whole thing up?”
“That’s Randy Thorn’s theory, I’m told,” says Dean. “ ’Cept in his version, I set the whole thing up.”
“Randy Thorn’s days of being taken seriously by anyone except his mother and his dog are over.” Doug clears space on his desk, pushing aside bills, papers, letters, acetates, ashtrays, shotglasses, a Pirelli calendar, and a framed photograph of Doug and Jimi Hendrix. Doug opens the small tin and takes out a loaded spatula’s worth of cocaine, deposits it on the cover of Newsweek, and makes a white line running between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. He hands Dean a rolled-up dollar bill and tells him, “Rocket fuel.”
Dean snorts the cocaine up his nostril and flips his head back. It burns, freezes, and exhilarates. Ten espressos at once. “Liftoff.”
“Ain’t that just the smoothest shit?”
“The stuff at home just butchers my nose.”
“Keith Richards preaches two cardinal rules: know your dealer and buy the best. If you don’t, your shit’ll be cut with cornstarch, baby milk, or worse.”
Dean glows. “What’s worse than cornstarch?”
“Rat poison’s worse than cornstarch.”
“Why would a dealer poison his customers?”
“Profit. Indifference. Homicidal urges.” Doug tips out a second heaped spatula onto Newsweek. “I’ve twice your body mass,” he explains. He snorts—“Aaahhhhhh…”—and smiles like an ugly horse attaining Nirvana.
I wrote a few songs, thinks Dean, they got recorded, and look at me now. I’ve bloody won, Gravesend. See? I won…
Doug Weston locks his cocaine stash away. “Let’s get you back now. Mustn’t let Levon think I’m leading you down the starry path of rock ’n’ roll depravity…”
* * *
—
THE BAND, LEVON, and Mecca wait on the stairs leading down to the stage. The Troubadour is packed, twice over. The smoke is thick. Dean’s coming down from his cocaine bump but still feeling semi-indestructible. “Here at
the Troubadour,” says Doug Weston onstage, “we’ve always taken pride in introducing the hottest talent from England to our City of the Fallen Angels. Utopia Avenue is playing their last night of an un-for-gettable stay here. Randy Thorn sure as hell ain’t going to forget anytime soon, anyhow.” Laughter and cheers surge up the stairs. Dean squeezes Elf’s hand and Elf squeezes his back. “But I know the band’ll be playing again at the Troubadour very soon because—”
“You made ’em sign a blood oath to come back and do shows for the next twenty years?” calls a heckler.
Doug presses his hand to his wounded heart. “Because they have a cosmic future. So with no further ado…” he turns to face the band at the top of the stairs, “…Utopia Avenue!”
The applause has grown from a low boil on Tuesday to a roar spiked with catcalls tonight. Dean and Doug pat shoulders as they pass and Doug speaks in his ear: “Slay ’em.” The band take their positions. Dean looks into the dim, brick-walled venue, full of glinting eyes, and thinks, They’re here to see yer ’cause yer the best thing on in LA tonight. He gets a nod back from Elf, Griff, and Jasper, comes in close to his mic, and fills his lungs:
I-i-i-i-i-f life has shot yer full of holes—
His voice detonates—it is scorched and tortured, like Eric Burdon’s on “House of the Rising Sun”…
a-a-a-a-nd hung yer out to dry…
A figure on the side catches his eye; Dean’s pretty sure it’s David Crosby, late of the Byrds—that hat, that cape—breathe…Dean reaches for the next line…which is…which was…Gone.
What’s the next bloody line?
How can I have forgotten?
I’ve sung it five hundred times!
Then what is it? There’s just a noisy druggy glow in his brain where the words should be. Why why why did I do the fucking cocaine? Now Dean’s panicking, all hope of finding the lyrics is gone, and they’re going to realize I’m an amateur and an impostor and I shouldn’t bloody be here, and Dean feels the eyes on him finding me out, finding me out, finding me—
and slung you in a pauper’s grave
Elf’s voice arrives, like a sonic angel, as if the long pause was deliberate. Dean turns to her. I love yer, he thinks. Not like a boyfriend: I love yer deeper than that. She nods to say, “You’re welcome,” and sings the next line:
down where the dead men lie —
On “lie,” Dean and Griff come in. Four bars later, Elf joins in and Jasper kerangggs his guitar into urgent life.
If life has shot yer full of holes
and hung yer out to dry —
and slung yer in a pauper’s grave
down where the dead men lie —
He fluffs the riff a little—if his fingers were a sports car, the brakes would need seeing to—but at least he remembers the words. Swear to God, I’ll never do cocaine before a show again, ever, ever. Here come Jasper and Elf to join in the chorus:
I’ll roll away the stone, my friend,
I’ll roll away the stone —
put my shoulder to the rock
and roll away that stone.
Verse two: the Ferlinghetti Verse. Dean plays his Fender safely and solidly, a fraction of a beat behind Griff, like a drunk sober enough to know he’s drunk and needs to let someone else lead:
If Ferlinghetti frames yer
and throws away the key —
if you were there in Grosvenor Square
where Anarchy killed Tyranny —
Dean realizes his mistake immediately: it’s “Tyranny killed Anarchy.” Anarchy killed Tyranny means the good guys won. Maybe no one will notice, he tells himself, or maybe everyone noticed. Jasper adds fills to the chorus’s second and fourth lines:
We’ll roll away the stone, my friend,
we’ll roll away the stone —
we’ll get you on yer feet again
and roll away that stone.
Jasper keeps his first solo close to the album’s. They have ninety minutes to fill and, as Eric Clapton told them, always keep your best fireworks for the second half.
The eunuchs in the harem
will twist the words yer meant,
but they can’t make yer hate yerself
without yer give consent.
Elf plays the Hammond part with her left hand and adds piano with her right:
So ro-oooll away that stone, my friend,
Ro-oooll away that stone —
grip it, heave it, kick its arse and
roll that goddamn stone.
Last is the verse Elf suggested. Dean thinks it’s the best, but finds that cocaine has boosted not his confidence but his self-doubt, and he’s afraid the verse will sound glib. Dean lets his Fender hang and grips the mic like a man throttling a chicken that refuses to die:
If death touches one yer love,
if grief grips yer in its fist,
honor those who left too soon —
Dean looks over at Elf, knowing who she’s thinking about. On one side is her nephew, an infant everybody wanted but who didn’t survive past the bluebell season. On the other side is Amanda Craddock’s boy. Dean, at least, would rather the boy didn’t exist; but there he is, in a poky flat in North London, thriving and growing and being. Life has a sick sense of humor. The band waits for four beats…
exist, exist, exist.
Until recently, Griff tapped the four beats on the rim of his drum, but they’ve been so musically tight over the last month that he stopped. Dean is so anxious not to jump the gun—and jittery with the coke—that he jumps the gun half a beat earlier. I keep misfiring ’n’ slipping gears. The others stumble to catch up:
Let’s roll away the stone, my friends,
let’s roll away the stone —
persistence is resistance, so
roll away that stone.
The applause is solid, but not ecstatic. Dean is furious with himself. He wants to rush offstage. I want to hide for the rest of the century.
“Stay,” says Jasper, into his ear. “You’ll be fine.”
Yer mystery, de Zoet, thinks Dean. “Sorry.” Jasper clasps Dean’s shoulder. He’s never, ever touched me before…
Elf has picked up the slack. “It’s great to be here, and not in a cell in the county jail facing a charge of aggravated assault with a plywood guitar.” More laughter. “This next is a voodoo curse about art, love, and theft. It’s called ‘Prove It.’ ” She checks everyone’s ready. Still floored by Jasper’s empathy, Dean nods.
“A-one and a-two and a one-two-three—”
* * *
—
DEAN STEPS INTO the illuminated garden of Cass Elliot’s house. The pool is twice the size of Anthony Hershey’s. Lanterns glow in the trees. Revelers laugh. Lovers enter wigwams and lie in hammocks smoking weed. This is the party I’ve been looking for all my life, thinks Dean. The band’s temporary neighbor Joni Mitchell’s vodka-on-ice voice escapes through a window. The song is “Cactus Tree.” Her voice pulses, dives, aches, swivels, regrets, consoles, avows. Dean peers in through the insect screen. Joni’s hair and skin are golden under a marigold lamp. She sings with her half-closed eyes watching her fingers. Her tuning never stays still. This song is DADF#AD with the capo on the fourth fret. I should mess around with tunings more…It changes the voice o’ yer guitar. Mama Cass looks on with a face like that of a woman in prayer. Graham Nash sits cross-legged, gazing up at his candlelit girlfriend. California has worked its King Midas magic on him, too. Everybody here is 15 percent better-looking than they are elsewhere. A white moth lands on Dean’s watch. Joni finishes the final verse on a strummed discordant ka-dannngggg.
Dean heads for the lookout deck at the end of the garden. Peacocks wander aimlessly underneath the orange tree. A pockmark
ed half-moon hangs above the wooded mountain. Moonlight is sunlight, bounced. The moon is eclipsed by a black cowboy hat. “Congratulations, Dean.” The cowboy is soft-spoken and intense. “Tonight was quite something.”
“ ’Ppreciate yer saying so. It had its ups ’n’ downs.”
“Your downs are higher than most artists’ ups. If I’m any judge of these matters, you’re destined for greatness.”
“Nobody knows what’s waiting round the next bend.”
“Prophecy is a fancy name for an intelligent guess. Joint?” A silver box of reefers is produced from thin air.
“Why not?”
The cowboy lights one for Dean and slips a second into his jacket pocket. “What one thing do all bands have in common?”
“What one thing do all bands have in common?”
“One fine day, they cease to exist.”
“Yeah, but yer can say that ’bout anything.”
“Jasper and Elf are gifted, yes. But you’re the best songwriter. You also have the looks and charisma to be a solo star. I don’t deal in flattery, Dean. I deal in facts. ‘Roll Away the Stone’ should be a worldwide Top Five hit. With the right marketing, it would be.”
“What did yer say yer name was?”
“My name’s Jeb Malone. I work for Mr. Allen Klein.”
Dean knows the name. “The Stones’ new manager?”
“None other. Mr. Klein admires your songs, your voice, your spirit, and your potential. Here’s his direct line.” Jeb Malone slips a card into Dean’s shirt pocket. “If your situation changes vis-à-vis the band, Mr. Klein will be happy to discuss your options.”
Take that card out, Dean tells himself, and rip it up.
Utopia Avenue Page 58
