Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

  Short Robber’s freckles are visible through his eyeholes. “I was watching the store for five minutes. No one came in. That’s why I gave you the all-clear.” He sounds young, fifteen or sixteen.

  Chief Robber snaps back, “Did you check the aisles?”

  A pause. “This is my first stakeout. It’s a—”

  “You shitferbrains! Now we got us a witness!”

  The tallest robber thrusts a bag at the shopkeeper. “Fill it.”

  “With what?”

  Chief Robber barks, “No! He’ll stuff it with small notes an’ shit an’ say, ‘That’s all I got.’ Get him to open the till, then you fill it.”

  Tall Robber tells the shopkeeper, “Step back and open the till.”

  The shopkeeper pauses. “How can I open the till after I’ve stepped back?”

  Short Robber shouts, “Play the SMART-ASS with us, I’ll shoot your FAG ASS OFF.” His voice squeaks on the ass. He sounds about fourteen, thinks Dean. “Open the till first. Then step back.” The shopkeeper sighs and does as he’s told. Tall Robber transfers its contents into the cloth bag. It doesn’t take long.

  “Now take out the cash drawer,” says Chief Robber. “The real money’ll be hidden under there.”

  Tall Robber rattles at the drawer. “It won’t budge.”

  Chief Robber waves his gun at the shopkeeper. “Do it.”

  “The cash drawer doesn’t come out of that till.”

  Short Robber shouts, or tries to: “TAKE IT OUT!” There’s a coked-up jaggedness to him, Dean notices, with concern.

  The shopkeeper looks over his glasses. “It’s a till from the forties, son. The drawer isn’t removable. There’s nothing more.”

  Chief Robber snatches the bag from Tall Robber and peers in. “There’s only twenty-five bucks? You’re shitting us.”

  “I sell liquor and groceries. Not diamonds. It’s nine A.M. on a Thursday morning. How much were you expecting?”

  Tall Robber levels his gun. “Open the office safe.”

  “What office? There’s a stockroom the size of a closet and a broke-ass john. Why would I keep money on the premises in this neighborhood? Too many robberies. That’s why I put the sign up on the way in, ‘No Money Kept on Premises.’ ”

  “He’s lying,” growls Chief Robber. “You’re lying.”

  Short Robber has gone to the door. “Wait up.” He reads, with difficulty: ‘No Money Kept on…Promises.’ He ain’t lying, Dex.”

  “No fucking names!” shouts Chief Robber.

  Now Tall Robber turns on Dex the Chief Robber. “You staked this job out. You said we’d clear two hundred bucks each, easy.”

  “Each? Six hundred dollars?” The shopkeeper is flabbergasted. “On a graveyard shift? Do you know the first thing about retail?”

  “Shut up,” snarls Chief Robber, “and give me your wallet.”

  “I never bring my wallet to work. Too many muggings.”

  “Bullshit—what if you need to buy something?”

  “I mark my purchases in the stock book. Search my pockets.”

  What a bunch o’ bloody amateurs, thinks Dean.

  Chief Robber turns to Dean. “What’re you looking at?”

  “Um…an armed robbery?”

  “Shorty, get his wallet.”

  Short Robber waggles his gun: “Wallet.”

  Dean has about ten dollars, but coked-up idiots and guns are a bad combination so he places his half-drunk bottle of milk on a pile of Pinkerton’s pretzel boxes. He reaches into his inside jacket pocket for his wallet, just as a car screeches to a halt outside the shop. Startled, Short Robber turns and biffs the tower of boxes, knocking off the milk bottle. As Dean tries to catch it, a demonic force flings him back…

  * * *

  —

  DISJOINTED SENTENCES REACH Dean, as if from radios swinging by on long ropes. “You dumbass motherfucker!”

  I’m shot…I’m actually bloody shot…

  “He was reaching for a gun, Dex.”

  “I told him to give me his wallet!”

  “Who keeps his wallet in a jacket?”

  I can’t die…I can’t die…Not now…

  “He does! Look! He’s holding it!”

  “But he moved, Dex, and…and…”

  Not like this…this is too, too stupid…

  “Don’t use my name, you dumbass motherfucker!”

  I WON’T DIE…I WON’T…I’M STAYING…

  “You can’t, Dean, I’m sorry.” Chayton is here.

  How can yer be here? Yer at Jerry’s house…

  “Don’t be afraid. I’ll walk you up to the ridge.”

  But I’ve still got songs I need to record.

  “You’ll have to leave them here.”

  Elf, Jasper, Griff, Ray…can’t I just tell them…

  “You know how this works, Dean.”

  The voices in Eddy Turk’s General & Liquor dwindle as the velocity increases. The Sikh shopkeeper is barely audible: “I’m calling an ambulance for my customer. Shoot me if you want. Then you’ll be looking at Death Row. Or just run and take your chances.”

  I don’t need an ambulance, Dean thinks.

  “People not yet born will play your songs,” says Chayton.

  Will Arthur play my songs?

  “I reckon so. It’s time now.”

  Dean is falling upward.

  No last words…

  LAST WORDS

  “All bands break up,” Levon Frankland writes in his memoir, “but nearly all bands get back together again. All it takes is time and a hole in the pension pot.” When Jasper, Griff, and I disbanded Utopia Avenue in 1968, we well and truly meant it. Our friend and bandmate Dean Moss had been shot and killed in a grocery-store robbery in San Francisco, and we didn’t have the heart to carry on. The very next day calamity compounded our grief when a fire broke out at Turk Street Studios and robbed us of Dean’s last work. A Utopia Avenue album without Dean’s musicianship, vocals, and songwriting would, we felt, have violated the Trade Descriptions Act. And so, for half a century, Utopia Avenue persisted as one of those exceptions that proved the validity of Frankland’s Law. So how has it come about that now, fifty-one years after our last show, I am writing these sleeve notes (as they used to be called) for a new Utopia Avenue LP featuring Dean Moss on bass, vocals, harmonica, and a twenty-three-minute trilogy of original Moss songs? An explanation is in order.

  * * *

  —

  WE FLEW TO New York in September 1968 for our first and only string of American performances. Dean’s anthem “Roll Away the Stone” was a minor hit of the summer on both sides of the Atlantic, and our second LP, Stuff of Life, was knocking on the door of the Top Twenty of the Billboard 100. Our American label arranged a short tour in the hopes of kicking that door open. After four nights at the Ghepardo club in New York and a sheep-dip of media interviews, we flew to Los Angeles for a short residency at the fabled Troubadour club and an appearance on the not-so-fabled Randy Thorn Goes Pop! TV show. Two days later we played the Golden State International Pop Festival in bucolic Knowland Park, on the back of which gigs in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and Chicago were hastily arranged. For four British kids born in the forties and raised on the forbidden fruits of American music, the trip was less the stuff of life and more the stuff of dreams.

  Transformative dreams, at that. The politics of 1968 were febrile and visionary. The future felt shapeable. This conviction wouldn’t reoccur until the revolutions of 1989, the Arab Spring and, arguably, the #MeToo and climate activism of the current era. Utopia Avenue were not a political band with a capital P, but the summer of riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the mounting body count in Vietnam, and the “police riot” at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, beamed to every TV set in the nation, filled
both public and private discourse. The antiwar movement was spilling out of its radical and hippie enclaves. In that highly charged atmosphere, indifference was rare. I remember Jerry Garcia telling us, “In 1966, whatever you wished for came true.” In 1968, whatever you didn’t wish for also came true.

  Against this volatile backdrop, the four kids we were encountered whole new ways of thinking and being. My long walk out of the closet took a major step forward during our stay at the Chelsea Hotel. Jasper was exorcizing some old demons of his own, and the lyrics Dean wrote in his last few weeks spoke of a seismic self-recalibration. Musically, all of us took a quantum leap. America presented us with an all-you-can-eat musical buffet. We met peers, masters, heroes, and villains. I recall conversations with Leonard Cohen about poetry; with Janis Joplin and Mama Cass Elliot about vocal technique and coloratura; with Frank Zappa about satire and fame; with a still-teenage Jackson Browne about finger-picking; with Janis Joplin about thriving as a woman in a business run by, and for, men; with Jerry Garcia about polyrhythm; and with the not-yet-signed Crosby, Stills & Nash about harmony. No young songwriter could emerge unchanged from such a milieu. What young songwriter would want to?

  Between shows, Jasper, Dean, and I worked on new material at our hotels and on planes, and at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles and Turk Street Studios in San Francisco. We egged each other on. I’d think, Well, if Jasper’s got tubular bells on “Timepiece,” then I’ll damn well get a sitar for “What’s Inside What’s Inside.” I remember Dean, during the session we recorded “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” telling me, “Okay, Holloway—I’ll meet your dulcimer and raise you a harpsichord—and in five/four time. Match that!” Of course, the results could have been disastrous, but during our American sessions an esprit de corps spurred us all on to work in unison to make our mad ideas succeed. Griff’s role cannot be overstated. He followed where the music led and kept the rhythms purring once he got there. A band is a band because it is greater than the sum of its parts. Otherwise, why bother? By the morning of October 12, 1968, Jasper and I had laid down the bones of two new songs each, while a song Dean had written for a soundtrack expanded, like fractals, into a three-part unfinished masterpiece.

  * * *

  —

  ONCE UPON A time in the sixties, masters were stored on magnetic reel-to-reels. If these were lost or damaged, the music stored on them was irretrievably gone. Less than forty-eight hours after Dean’s death, while we were still in San Francisco awaiting the coroner’s report, Turk Street Studios burned to the ground and Levon had to tell us that the tapes from our sessions had melted in the fire. There was no hard-drive backup, no memory sticks, no Cloud. We felt that Dean had been taken from us a second time. We felt Utopia Avenue was well and truly cursed.

  We flew back to London with an urn containing Dean’s ashes a few days later. The plan was to scatter them from a pier a few miles downstream from Gravesend, where Dean’s father had taught him to fish, in a low-key ceremony with just a few friends and family. As Dean used to say, however, “There are no secrets in Gravesend,” and over a thousand people turned up—including, thankfully, some off-duty coppers who kept the crowds away from the elderly wooden jetty. As Dean’s brother, father, and grandmother emptied the urn onto the water, Jasper played “Roll Away the Stone” on an amplified acoustic guitar. A thousand voices joined in. As the final note died, Jasper threw the guitar into the river. The Thames carried it and Dean’s ashes out to sea.

  * * *

  —

  IS THE SOUL a real thing? I wondered then as I wonder now. Are the unscientific majority right? Does some essence of Dean persist somehow, somewhere? Or is the notion of the soul a placebo, a comfort blanket, a blindfold we use to spare ourselves the full awfulness of the cold, hard truth that when we die we stop? Is Dean, in fact, as gone, as utterly gone, as a gusty autumn morning on the Thames estuary fifty-one years ago? All I know is, I don’t know—and so the answer is, “Maybe.” I’ll take that “Maybe,” however. I prefer it to “Definitely not.” There’s solace in “Maybe.”

  * * *

  —

  LEVON LEFT MOONWHALE and returned to Toronto to head up Atlantic’s new Canadian office. Griff returned to the jazz circuit before moving to LA in 1972, where he established himself as a go-to session and tour drummer. I released my first solo album, Driftway to Astercote, in 1970. Jasper, to the dismay of his fans, retired from music and vanished into the wild blue yonder. For a few years my only contact with him was through enigmatic postcards sent from places not known for postcards. Our next face-to-face encounter was in 1976 at a Greek restaurant in New York, where he was completing a doctorate in psychology. Thereafter, Dr. de Zoet would appear at my door once a year, stay for a day or two, swap stories, listen to my works-in-progress and leave. He still played the guitar for pleasure and his virtuosity was undimmed, but he resisted all attempts to lure him back into the studio. He used to shrug and say, “I’ve already done that. Why do it again?”

  * * *

  —

  THE MUSIC OF Utopia Avenue outlasted the band, in a curious, up-and-down way. Dean’s death brought him even more fame than his false imprisonment, and both Paradise and Stuff of Life went gold and sold solidly for three or four years. The pages of the calendar flickered by, and glam, prog rock, disco, and punk each took turns to consign all that had gone before to the bargain bins of history—including that curious psychedelic-folk-rock moment that Utopia Avenue embodied for a few months in 1967 and 1968. Moonwhale Music was bought by EMI, which filleted its small-but-perfectly-formed catalogue, and the little office at the top of the stairs in Denmark Street became a photo library. By the mid-seventies, it was increasingly rare to find Utopia Avenue nestled between James Taylor and the Who in record racks. Another new decade arrived, and to teenagers brought up on New Order, Duran Duran, and the Eurythmics, Utopia Avenue’s songs sounded like musical antiques from an earlier age.

  If you hang on long enough, however, antiques can accrue a value they never had when new. The early nineties brought an unexpected revival of interest in the band. The Beastie Boys sampled “The Hook” on their seminal LP Paul’s Boutique. Mark Hollis of Talk Talk cited Stuff of Life as a formative influence. Original vinyl copies of our singles and LPs were changing hands for serious sums of money—a market kept buoyant by legal issues that postponed the two albums’ CD release. Damon MacNish’s grunge version of “Smithereens” became a Top Five hit in 1994. The biggest hit of my solo career, “Be My Religion,” followed in 1996, thanks to its use in a Volkswagen advert. (What can I say? I needed the money.)

  Utopia Avenue reappeared in the record shops, piled high in the nineties megastores. Nieces and nephews told me that we were being played in the artier college dorms. Teenagers appeared at my shows in growing numbers, asking for songs I hadn’t played since decimalization. (Google it.) I remember turning down a request for “Prove It” at Cambridge Folk Festival on the grounds that I doubted I still knew the words. A kid with tattoos and a mullet yelled back, “Don’t worry, Elf, we’ll sing ’em for you!” They didn’t let me down. Then, in the early days of the Internet, my nephew typed “Utopia Avenue” into my new computer—and page after page scrolled up about the band. Views, opinions, trivia, chatrooms, fan clubs, reviews, set lists of gigs we’d played, new images I’d never seen. Some of the photos moved me to tears, especially those of Dean.

  In 2001, Levon—by this time an Oscar-nominated film producer—presented me with a high-quality bootleg of our Knowland Park show that he had obtained through, as he put it, “serendipity and the Dark Arts.” If I do say so myself, we sounded shit hot. The eight-song set included an in-progress version of Jasper’s track “Who Shall I Say Is Calling?,” lost in the Turk Street fire. Digger and I digitally remastered the entire album at Fungus Hut, and Ilex Records issued it. To everyone’s astonishment, our little vanity project—snappily titled Utopia Avenue Live at Knowland P
ark, 1968—charted at thirty-nine on the first week and hovered in the Top Thirty for three months. When YouTube got up and running, snippets of interviews and TV shows the band had done began to pop up. (I still play our exchange with Henk Teuling on Dutch TV on gloomy days. Comedy gold.) In 2004, the year I turned sixty, Glastonbury invited me to play a set. My sister took me aside and told me, “Sorry, sis, but it’s time to stop deluding yourself and face the facts: you’re just not properly obscure anymore…”

  I will not deny this was all very gratifying, but while Utopia Avenue’s music was re-oxygenated, the band itself remained moribund. What was true in 1968 was true in the twenty-first century: without Dean, there could be no band. Promoters approached Jasper, Griff, and me regularly to see if we had changed our minds. Even Dean’s son, Arthur Craddock-Moss, a film and TV composer, had offers to take the “New Utopia Avenue” on the road. Our answer was always the same: “We’ll only do it if Dean says yes.”

  * * *

  —

  FAST-FORWARD TO AUGUST 2018. I was getting ready for bed when I heard a knock on my door. It was Jasper in a long black coat, like a man in a Bob Dylan song, clutching a battered guitar case. The following dialogue is a reconstruction, but reasonably accurate:

  JASPER: I’ve got them.

  ME: Nice to see you too, Jasper.

  JASPER: Nice to see you, but I’ve got them.

  ME: Got what?

  JASPER: (Holding up a MacBook like an exorcist brandishing a Bible) Our songs. On here.

  ME: Our albums? I’ve got them too. So?

  JASPER: No, Elf, our lost songs. The California sessions. On hard drive. I’ve heard them. It’s us. Here.

  ME: (Croak.)

  MY WIFE: Evening, Jasper, come in—Elf, would you ever shut the door before every moth in the county joins the party?