Utopia Avenue
Page 65
Jasper came in, and explained that a suitcase of twelve reel-to-reels from our sessions in LA and San Francisco had surfaced at a car-boot sale in Honolulu earlier in the year. How had they escaped the fire at Turk Street? Nobody knew. Was the tapes’ preservation due to accident, theft, misfiling, or divine intervention? Anybody’s guess. How and when had the suitcase arrived in Hawaii? Another mystery.
One thing was known. A young man named Adam Murphy had acquired the tapes at a car-boot sale while honeymooning in Oahu. Adam, who blogs as “Heritage Audiophile,” possessed two items crucial to this story. One: a 1966 Grundig reel-to-reel player capable of playing the 1965 BASF and TDK tape. Two: the nous to position top-of-the-range Neumann microphones by the speakers on the very first playback, to capture the sounds onto a digital file in case the fifty-year-old tapes disintegrated. At least half did exactly that. Let the record show that without Adam Murphy’s foresight you would not be reading these lines.
Once all the music was preserved, Heritage Audiophile set about identifying the artists. Soon after, Jasper received a call from a stranger with some rather special news…
* * *
—
BACK IN MY kitchen, Jasper Bluetoothed his Mac to my speakers and clicked Play and there we were: Dean, Jasper, Griff, and me, aged twenty-three or -four, playing, singing, laying down tracks. “Temporal vertigo” doesn’t come close. Here was my New York love song, “Chelsea Hotel #939”; Jasper’s bluesy psychodrama, “Timepiece”; and chunks of Dean’s musical trilogy, “The Narrow Road.” It’s not every day you hear your younger self play with a long-dead, long-missed bandmate, and I was reduced to emotional jelly.
Afterward, Jasper, my wife, and I sat around our table. Outside, owls hooted and foxes barked. Eventually, I was able to speak again. I asked, “Incredible, but what do we do with it?”
“We make our third album,” said Jasper.
We spent that weekend in my garden studio poring through the full nine hours. The material could be subdivided into “Mostly finished,” “Needs fleshing out,” and “Sketchy.” Sound quality was variable. The LA tapes had more hiss than the Turk Street sessions. Luckily, Dean hadn’t really got to work on “Narrow Road” until San Francisco, so his irreplaceable vocals were sufficiently bright. The tracks sequenced themselves. Jasper’s and my two songs, conceived in and/or inspired by New York and the Chelsea Hotel, belonged on what vinyl lovers still think of as “side one.” Dean’s “Narrow Road” trilogy, which started life as a possible soundtrack for an Anthony Hershey film that never saw the light of day, was an uninterruptible sequence. Its only logical home was “side two.” “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” and “Eight of Cups” belonged between the “mostly finished” and “needs fleshing out” categories, while the third song—“The Narrow Road to the Far West”—was a hypnotic but skeletal eight-minute bass track. We had planned to work on it the morning Dean was shot. As Jasper and I debated what to do with “The Narrow Road,” we hit a dilemma: Was our job to make the album we would have made over the winter of 1968/9, had Dean lived? Or should we, instead, use the tapes as raw material for an album that Jasper and I wished to make now, in 2019? Were we purist restorers or postmodern creators?
Through trial and error, a guiding principle evolved. Jasper and I licensed ourselves to do whatever we wanted to do with the material, as long as we did not deploy post-1968 musical technology. Yes, then, to the mandolin on “Who Shall I Say Is Calling?” and to Old Elf’s harmonies with Young Elf on “What’s Inside What’s Inside.” But no to sampling, auto-tune and rap (as if), and loops. I cheated only by programming my Fairlight to reproduce the sound of my old Hammond organ. Griff joined us for a few days to overlay percussion or replace his original drum tracks where the sound was unsatisfactory. Arthur—old enough now to be his father’s father—filled in bass runs on Dean’s old Fender and laid down some blood-harmonies on “Eight of Cups.” Levon joined us to fill a Levon-shaped hole in proceedings, and the photographer Mecca Rohmer, who shot our very first publicity snaps in March 1967, documented the brief resurrection of Utopia Avenue for posterity.
Why The Third Planet? The project’s working title was The California Sessions, but when Arthur visited, he brought the notebook found in Dean’s pocket on the morning of his death. The final words, on a page of their own, read “The Third Planet.” We can only guess what caught Dean’s eye about this phrase, but they struck us all as an apt title for Utopia Avenue’s third and final LP.
Dean, the last words are yours.
Elf,
Kilcrannóg, 2020
In memory of Susan Kamil
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my family.
Thank you to Sam Amidon, Tom Barbash, Avideh Bashirrad, Nick Barley, Sally Beamish, Manuel Berri, Ray Blackwell of De Barras Bar & Folk Club in Clonakilty, Jess Bonet, Chris Brand, Craig Burgess, Kate Brunt, Evan Camfield, Gina Centrello, Louise Court, Harm Damsma, Louise Dennys, Walter Donohue, Benjamin Dreyer, Lorraine Dufficey, Barbara Fillon, Helen Flood, Jonny Geller, Evelyn Glennie, Ted Goossen, Roy Harper, Paul Harris, Viola Hayden, Stephen Housden, Kazuo Ishiguro and family, Hellen Jo (“criminal/subliminal”), John Kelly, Trish Kerr and team at Kerr’s Bookshop in Clonakilty, Martin Kingston, Hari Kunzru, Tonya Ley, Dixie Linder, Nick Marston, Katie McGowan, Mrs. McIntosh, Niek Miedema, Callum Mollison, Carrie Neill, Lawrence Norfolk and family, Alasdair Oliver, Hazel Orme, Marie Pantojan, Lidewijde Paris, Bridget Piekarz, Stan Rijven, Susan Spratt, Simon Sullivan, The Unthanks, Amanda Waters, Andy Ward, Charles Williams, John Wilson.
Thank you to the Pit.
Numerous details were extracted from many sources, but particularly helpful were Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles (Serpent’s Tail, 2007) and Simon Napier-Bell’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (Ebury Press, 2005) for the Lennon encounter.
Finally, thanks to my editor Carole Welch for superhuman patience in the face of multiple busted deadlines.
Lyrics quoted briefly in the novel are from the following songs:
“Art for Art’s Sake” written by Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman; “House of the Rising Sun” by Alan Price; “A Day in the Life” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney; “Life’s Greatest Fool” by Gene Clark; “It Ain’t Necessarily So” by Dorothy Heyward, Du Bose Heyward, George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin; “Just Like a Woman” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” by Bob Dylan; “Chelsea Hotel #2” and “Who by Fire” by Leonard Cohen; “I’ve Changed My Plea to Guilty” by Steven Morrissey and Mark Edward Cascian Nevin; “Chelsea Morning” by Joni Mitchell; “These Days” by Jackson Browne; “The Partisan” by Hy Zaret and Anna Marly; “Guinevere” by David Crosby; and “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel.
“For Free” by Joni Mitchell is overheard as a work in progress, so does not quite match the recorded version.
“Have You Got It Yet?” is an unfinished, unreleased Syd Barrett song/practical joke from 1967.
Music enthusiasts will spot the lyrical anachronisms but agree, I trust, that music is timeless.
BY DAVID MITCHELL
Utopia Avenue
Slade House
The Bone Clocks
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Black Swan Green
Cloud Atlas
Number9Dream
Ghostwritten
The Reason I Jump (TRANSLATOR, WITH KA YOSHIDA)
Fall Down 7 Times, Get Up 8 (TRANSLATOR, WITH KA YOSHIDA)
About the Author
DAVID MITCHELL is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, and Slade House. He has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize and has won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial, and South Bank Show literature prizes, as well as the World Fantasy Award. In 2018, he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in rec
ognition of a writer’s entire body of work.
In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from the Japanese two books by Naoki Higashida: The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism.
Born in 1969, Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire and, after graduating from university, spent several years teaching English in Japan. He now lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.
davidmitchellbooks.com
Facebook.com/davidmitchellbooks
Twitter: @david_mitchell
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