Then a lanky dude in an army jacket stumbled out from behind the wheel of the van, his gait unsteady. He instantly drew my attention because, for one thing, he seemed to be drunk, and for another, he’d been driving. Listing to the side as if he might collapse onto the grass, the guy locked me in the crosshairs of a finger gun and called out, “You know it, brother! You know it!” His relationship to the proceedings was unclear. As was mine.
I found Tereza in the mix and leveled a scowl at her. “Seriously—what the hell?”
She tossed me a careless little shrug and walked away, leaving me at the epicenter of a puzzling little blowout in the land that music forgot.
* * *
Somehow I ended up sitting on the front step, nursing a Belgian blond ale that six children had competed to stuff into my hand. Around me were three members of Tereza’s posse—a boy of peach fuzz and cracking voice, and two breezily chatty girls.
“How did Tremble get acquainted with Cameron Crowe?” the boy wanted to know. For some worthless reason, he was desperate to learn the genesis of our involvement in Ballad of the Fallen, the Crowe-directed film that made a spectacular hit out of a song that had already appeared on our debut album. “Did you write ‘It Feels like a Lie’ specifically for the movie, or did Cameron Crowe just really like it on your album and ask to use it?”
“Tell me something,” I replied. “What are all you people doing here?”
“Do you still hang out with famous rock stars?” the girl to my left inquired.
“I’m a lawyer, you understand?”
“What’s going on with the rest of the band? What are Jumbo, Warren, and Mackenzie doing? For years I’ve been checking for solo albums, but I can never find any.”
“Solo albums? They’re all teachers or locksmiths or insurance brokers now.”
Until Warren had recently come cackling back into my life, I hadn’t spoken to or heard from any of those people since we split up. It was easier than I would’ve imagined to allow all that time and distance to wedge into the spaces between us. When things ended, not only was there no longer any reason for us to talk, much less travel en masse like a camp bunk, but we were all in need of some time apart. On top of all that, there was that ugly little secret I’d been shouldering, the one that was at least partially to blame for why we all ended up having to look for other work in the first place. It wasn’t just my lame songwriting that did us in; it was my clouded judgment. It was just as well I didn’t have to face them and constantly be reminded of it. Especially Mackenzie, whose sudden absence in my life made things both a little bit easier and a whole lot harder. Of all the people from those days, Mack was the one who required the most effort to forget.
None of these misguided youths had asked me the most obvious question of all: how had a god such as myself ended up in this tiny village nowhere near anywhere? Which was a shame, because that chain of events was far more entertaining than any war story I could’ve told about my life in the music business. Instead, this strange tribe simply accepted the miracle of my presence and proceeded to interrogate me on trivialities—like the inspiration for the girl described in “New Morning Azalea,” a song I’d forgotten I’d written. A song everybody had forgotten I’d written.
“If I had to pick a favorite person in the band, I’d have to say Jumbo,” one girl mused. “No offense.”
“Why would you have to pick a favorite person in the band?” I asked. “How would that ever come up?”
“That guy could really rock out,” she went on. “What was it like working with him?”
“Irksome.”
Jumbo Jett was a monstrously talented guitar player and just about the biggest mess of a human being I’d ever known. Unkempt, unpredictable, and uncouth, the ox that stinks up the dinner party. Whereas the hedonistic rock scene was never really my thing, Jumbo cannonballed himself right into that pool. Surely he was a livelier subject for a photography exhibit than I. The pictures would title themselves. Man Barfs Blue into Fake Plant at Morton’s. Inappropriately Displayed Butt Cheeks at Airport Lounge. Band Rehearsing While Guitarist Sleeps It Off on a Barge Downriver (Guitarist Not Pictured).
“So much has been written about his impact on music,” the boy gushed. “Jack White of the White Stripes, James Mercer of the Shins, the guys from the Black Keys—they’ve all cited him as a major influence.”
“Well, I can’t stop people from saying stupid shit.”
“Come on. Even with his wild reputation, he couldn’t have made the music he did without being a true professional, right?”
The man was the very opposite of professional. The moron lacked even the faintest wisp of a work ethic, which, frankly, was understandable since he’d never held a real job. There was a brief stint at a small medical supply company after college, but he was quickly fired for tickling a coworker. There’s no tickling at work; most people understand that without even having to sit through the training seminar.
“Maybe you’re right,” I allowed. “He’s an accomplished guy. During the time I knew him, he gave up drinking alcohol at breakfast and having sex with strangers at truck stops. You can’t not call that progress.”
“How about Mackenzie?” the boy asked through a puppy-dog grin. “What is she doing now?”
The mere mention of her name could still release a tide of overwhelming thoughts. Thoughts that, even after all this time, tiptoed on the edges of my understanding.
“No idea,” I said. “Go look for her yourself.”
Around back, guests stood in clusters and slurped from longneck bottles or sat in chatty huddles at wooden picnic tables. Someone had brought out a portable stereo—a “boom box” to some of us—and, to pour salt on an already dangling scab, began blaring our second album, Atomic Somersault. I shook my head. The industry publications that had bothered to review it were at best dismissive, at worst cruel: “Dismal disappointment from a once promising band, the biggest miscalculation of producer Sonny Rivers’s career.” “I would sooner spend my hard-earned cash on their debut—which I already own—than on this waste of a follow-up.” “A horn section? Really? Is this Teddy Tremble and the News? Teddy Tremble and the Range?”
And yet, as those forgotten songs echoed across the darkening yard, the memories were not all bad. I was transported back to those high-octane days and euphoric weeks when we were holed up in the studio, cruising on the thunderclap of our Oscar-winning hit. We knew what the expectations were, and we had every confidence that we’d exceed them. I could still visualize Mackenzie standing in the recording booth in a baby-blue tank top, her fingers gliding over her bass, hair tucked behind her ears to make way for the Princess Leia headphones. I heard a subtle drum fill and immediately saw Warren twirling his sticks, tossing them high in the air, goofing off between songs. All of it was just as vivid as yesterday, and just as gone.
I remembered a time when I actually felt protective of these songs, when I believed our follow-up to have been unfairly dismissed and derided. The critics piled on because they were sick of our faces, I used to argue, sick of the ubiquitous nuisance that was “It Feels like a Lie.” So maybe it wasn’t Highway 61 Revisited. It wasn’t Milli Vanilli’s Remix Album either.
Suddenly, a flashbulb exploded in my face. Once the blinding white fuzz dissipated, the big troll himself was standing before us, clutching his favorite weapon and pointing it at his guests.
“Teddy!” Heinz-Peter cried, throwing an arm around my neck. We were lost brothers now. “You are happy? Having good time, yes?” He waved a grand arm at the crowd of kids. “Tereza make party for you!”
“I’ll have to find some way to thank her.”
“All of these nice peoples at my home,” he called out, hammering away at the darkness with his flashbulb. “Must to take pictures, Teddy. But this time I tell you I taking pictures, yes? No secret! Ha!” He beamed at his own cleverness, the Scooby-Doo smile
too big even for that moon face of his.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Everyone else around here speaks perfect English. Why does yours suck so bad?”
He let out an exuberant laugh, which I interpreted as incomprehension, and patting me hard on the back, started for the house. Then he froze, pivoted, and pointed to the sky in a stroke of excitement.
“Look!” he bellowed, presumably meaning listen.
The song wafting from the boom box was “Troubleshooter,” a slushy puddle of a ballad I’d written in a fever of melodrama after the death of my English lit professor. I heard my double-tracked voice whining through the verse—“The old school walls fall down like rain / With ghosts of Shakespeare, Poe, and Twain.” Why couldn’t I have just rhymed rain with pain like a normal person?
“This song I love it!” H-P shouted, striding away and singing along. He couldn’t form even the most grammatically basic sentence in English, but damned if he didn’t know every last lyric.
“I’m not the only person ever to take a swing at that guy, am I?” I posed the question to a pair of boys shuffling skittishly on either side of me, bottles of local ale in their clutches.
“He’s quite entertaining, but a good man,” one said, his wire-rimmed glasses glimmering in the waning light. “And he really is a big fan of your music. A lot of people around here are.”
“You people scare me,” I said. “This place is like some kind of lost colony. You have no idea how alone in the world you are. There’s real music out there. I can show it to you. You’ve got the Internet in Switzerland, right?”
The kid with the glasses grinned up at me. “So what did Heinz-Peter do to make you so angry that you came all this way to fight him?”
I snorted; it hadn’t been much of a fight. Then a tiny itch of pride ripened inside me, and for some inexplicable reason I felt hesitant to elaborate.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he captured a moment.”
* * *
At some point, it fell to me to man the grill, to poke and prod sausages and burgers, nudge them off their charred bellies and onto their backs. The affair had quieted down from a raucous backyard party into a subdued evening picnic replete with the easy murmurs and cinder-like aromas of a campfire. Tereza, a cagey ally at best, kept me company, and together we allowed our lungs to fill with mesquite as the charcoal hissed under the gridirons.
“You’re getting more comfortable with all of this, aren’t you?” she said, smiling. “You’re once more adjusting to your fame. I can see it.”
“Why aren’t you listening to Dr. Dog? Where’s your Pernice Brothers? Your War on Drugs? There’s all this good new music out there.”
“Don’t let all of this go to your head,” Tereza teased. “We don’t only listen to Tremble.”
“You realize that some bands actually deserve to be forgotten,” I went on, sliding a spatula under a sizzling mound of beef and hoisting it onto a paper plate. “Charles Darwin is alive and well in the arts.”
“I don’t think you really believe that your music deserves to be forgotten,” she said. “If you do, then you’re not the artist everyone here thinks you are. You’re certainly not the artist that my father is.”
Of course I wasn’t the artist that all these delusional castoffs took me for. They had no idea how utterly bizarre it was to have moved on with your life, to have changed directions in everything you did, and then randomly discover a lunatic fringe on the other side of some lost mountain that was still grooving to your music years after the rest of civilization had wised up.
Maybe every band was awarded some little time-warp town that remained forever loyal, perennially committed to the notion that the group for which it pined would one day rise from the ashes. Perhaps there was a village in Tibet where everyone wore a Men Without Hats shirt and sang “The Safety Dance” all day. Maybe a town in Cameroon woke up every morning breathless with sunny hope that Katrina would round up the rest of the Waves and launch a tour.
“You seem like a nice group of mountain people, but being cut off from the rest of humanity has messed with your minds,” I said.
Tereza’s eyes bore into me, her face beset by a disturbed crinkle crawling its way across her nose. “Is this how all Americans say thank you, or just you?”
I watched her plate a sausage for a hungry guest. She delivered the food with a warm, hospitable smile and a gentle pat on his shoulder. It struck me as a nurturing gesture, maternal even, and I found myself asking where her mother was.
“She died.”
“Oh.”
“Two years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“We were boating on the river.” She jerked her chin to the side, signaling that the river in question was a neighbor, a familiar friend. “We flipped over in the rapids and she hit her head on a rock. Drowned before my father and I could pull her to shore.” I watched the light from the burning coals flickering across her face as she kept her distance from the memory. “It’s amazing how quickly things happen, you know? One minute we were a family in a boat, the next minute we were in the water, and then we were on the riverbank and she was gone forever. She still had her life vest on.”
“I’m sorry I brought that up.”
“It’s fine.”
“That must’ve been really hard on you and your dad.”
She gazed out at the lawn crackling with life, friends and relations fading into the falling night. “We’ve never been alone.” She said it as though it were a mixed blessing.
The back door of the house suddenly flew open and Heinz-Peter came lurching out. “Teddy!” he called merrily. He was carrying a long wooden object—an oar? an ax?—and slinging it in the air as he giant-stepped his way across the dark yard.
I squinted at the implement that this madman was waving over his head. The remaining pockets of light finally revealed its identity.
“Oh Jesus,” I groaned. “Is he fucking kidding me?”
* * *
“You don’t get it,” I yelled at the crowd. “You people have all lost your minds.” They didn’t seem to care that they’d lost their minds. Maybe that’s the beauty of losing your mind. “It’s out of the question. Go hassle Wang Chung.”
At the sight of the guitar being wielded by their host, everyone untangled themselves from their conversations and joined Heinz-Peter in beseeching me to do an impromptu gig right there on the lawn. And no matter how forcefully I rejected their ludicrous invitation, no matter how much disdain and hostility I showered upon these hill-town hicks, still they egged me on. An intimate backyard concert, they argued, would be an ideal coda to an evening they would cherish for the remainder of their lives. I told them to get a grip. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d picked up a guitar, and I’d long forgotten the chords and the words to all the Tremble songs. And anyway my mouth hurt like hell.
“I’d rather lick a train station toilet than play for you people,” I declared.
“You are with friends, yes? Play for us!” H-P cried out, holding the instrument out to me with the rallying charisma of a medieval ogre.
“You are not my friends,” I insisted.
“Play for us, Teddy Tremble!” he boomed.
“Listen to me carefully. You all need therapy. You’re embarrassing yourselves.”
The fucked-up chanting and screaming was growing louder and more fanatical. A real musician would’ve soaked up all this ego stroking, riled the crowd up louder like a shirtless stadium god, or bowed his head in a slushy sigh of false modesty. I, however, wanted only to take off down the driveway and never look back.
Tereza was now standing next to me, having managed to navigate her way through the crowd. Cupping one side of her mouth, she leaned into my ear and shouted above the fray. “Teddy, maybe you’re not the same person you used to be.”
“You
’re finally realizing that?” I yelled back.
“It’s okay with me,” she said. “But if it’s not okay with you”—she turned an open palm to the crowd and offered up an innocent little shrug—“it looks like you’ve got a chance to go back, even for just one night.”
Go back where? I wanted to shake her. It isn’t there anymore!
“It doesn’t work that way, Tereza,” I shouted into the air between us.
She shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand. You’re holding a guitar and there are people who want to hear a song. Are you really sure you don’t want to play?”
As we stared at each other, speakers of different languages on the Tower of Babel, something inside me suddenly began to shift. As I scanned this mad pack of misbegotten zombies, locked eyes with each and every one of them, it all became funny. They weren’t putting me on. Their hearts were in exactly the wrong place, but their hearts were there, beating up a storm. A bunch of kids clamoring with everything they had to see their favorite musician perform just for them, and they would not be refused. I remembered what that was like. Who didn’t?
A powerful silence reigned for a moment; they smelled surrender.
“Give me the goddamn guitar,” I snapped.
If these fools wanted to hear the feeble warbling of a middle-aged has-been, then tonight was their night. They would recoil in disgust and never listen to or speak of Tremble again. It was high time they were acquainted with what we in the real world called reality.
So—fuck if I didn’t find myself sitting on an aluminum folding chair, twisting the pegs until the strings were in tune. My fingers, uncallused and alien, moved sluggishly at first, without the speed or agility they once had. But then, as if from hardwired instinct, they placed themselves on the right strings, on the right frets, at the right time. The songs flooded back and I had the random sensation of being rocked on my grandmother’s shoulder like a child, back to where I started after a lifetime of being away. The music came. Chord flowed logically to chord. I didn’t need to go looking for them; they’d been there all this time.
Thank You, Goodnight Page 6
