Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  Then we nearly did.

  Without the band knowing about it, not even Tony, not even hearing about it in their conjugal bed, Debbie Canova tracked down a record producer by the name of ‘Iron’ John Tempest. Over more than twenty years this man had broken a half-dozen acts in a variety of music forms, including country, rockabilly, be-bop and Mersey-soundalike pop. His main claim to fame, however, was that he’d produced one rock album that for the first part of the Seventies was the prototype for all that followed, at least till punk and disco came along and kicked everyone in the teeth.

  She went to see Iron John with a cassette tape of four songs she’d composed and that we played on. How she’d bluffed her way through his door and persuaded him to listen to this music, I don’t know, but he hadn’t had a hit in years and was probably always on the lookout for that magic new sound. Her smile and cheesecloth shirt probably hadn’t hurt. The first we knew about Debbie Canova’s doings was when she organised us to be ready in my home practice room on Christmas Eve.

  Sweating like hogs and waiting for who knew what, this man with iron grey hair and an iron grey beard and iron grey bushy eyebrows swept up in a swirl of terror walked in. He wordlessly sat himself in a corner beside our electric jug and coffee cups. Debbie said, ‘John’s going to listen to one or two songs.’ All of us, including Tony, assumed he must be either a newly discovered uncle or maybe the proprietor of some venue Debbie hoped for us to play in.

  Our tunes, or should I say Debbie Canova’s, had no titles. Few had lyrics, giving Tony not very much to do. We learned the songs and gave them their names in the order she’d presented them. There was DC#1, DC#2, DC#3 and so on, all the way now to DC#11. Admittedly, everything over the number seven was pretty haphazard and only part-formed, but we’d created a lot of music in a very short space of time, and some of it was good.

  Our audience sat in the corner and didn’t move except to occasionally rub a hairy brow.

  Tony sang when required and when not required tried to look involved. A tambourine shake, a go at a pair of marakas, even a few strikes of a cowbell. Debbie’s violin leavened the thunder-wall of the band behind her. It was a sort of light and shade. She called it her chiaroscuro and was always doing this, quietening us down no matter how dark her melody, and we came to see that her instincts were good. The more quietly we played the more menacing it sounded and the songs became music.

  After several numbers I saw that Debbie meant us to finish our small performance, or audition, or whatever it was, with our longest piece. We thought it our finest. When it hammered to its conclusion, she looked toward this still-life of a man. We all did. He lifted his chin; that meant he wanted more.

  Tony said, ‘Okay, great. Let’s do a couple of our old ones,’ meaning his own compositions.

  Debbie stepped forward and pivoted the violin into its place, tucked in hard under her chin. ‘This one isn’t finished yet, so I’ll just get Max to accompany me, but I’d like you to hear the melody.’

  Debbie Canova gave me a nod and I understood what she wanted me to do: I was to follow her cues. What’s the beat? With three fingers on my shoulder she gives it to me. She raises her bow and an arpeggio becomes a melody line. It’s a simple twelve bars, and at the end of the twelve comes another twelve then another. Then she starts varying things dramatically, playing with the mathematics of her music’s structure. Debbie’s quick glance holds me back; she doesn’t want me to come in yet. What is she, crazy? My palms are itchy. I want to start, but no, her melody is spreading out. It has tributaries that move away from the main theme, then wash back in again. She’s like a woman bringing herself to a sexual peak and not letting her man thrust inside her until she’s good and ready. My heart actually thumps with anticipation. This music is deeper and more resonant than anything she’s played before, and the rest of our DC-numbered compositions sound like nursery rhymes by comparison.

  Yet nothing is written down and it sounds note-perfect exactly the way it is. To my ears there are no glitches she has to cover up with clever playing. This is pouring out of her like the radiant heat of a fever, then I get it, the fever is a flame and soon it will be a fire, and Bang! there’s her glance.

  In I come. Her face is pink with exertion and something that looks like the start of a tremendous orgasm. The sheer satisfaction of joining her makes fresh perspiration break out on my already sweaty brow. I haven’t felt this connected to music since the first time I was able to hold a beat beside a scratchy piece of vinyl that Concetto San Filippo played for me. The good thing too is that I’m barely there. I’m inside of this and outside of it as well. Debbie Canova is the same. The music is making itself. She looks at me straight now, no more sharp glances, just a strong and steady stare as she stands right in front of the kit. It’s like the gaze between Tony and me in the best of our times, singer to drummer and the world in between, but this is even better, even more intense. We lock eyes, lock music, we shoot straight and true and then there is the heart and the final note pierces it like an arrow.

  The room hums into silence. I stop the ringing of my crash cymbals with my hands. I’m bathed in sweat and full of awe. So is Debbie Canova. Things like this don’t happen every day. I can see the way her bow trembles in her hand. For what’s just happened, this is why we try to make music.

  Our audience gets up and straightens a sore back. He goes outside and smokes a cigarette. Tony goes and puts the kettle on. Breathing deep, Debbie Canova takes a wooden chair and sits almost facing the wall. Tony gives her a glance as if to say, What’s this all about? He gets nothing in return.

  I take off my t-shirt and wipe my face, under my arms, the back of my neck. No one looks at me, except Debbie, who gives a quick look and a small smile. Something makes me feel like I’ve betrayed my compadres. I have to make my own cup of instant coffee. As I’m adding sugar, our audience re-enters. He makes nothing of this unhappy silence. He speaks as if continuing a conversation, his voice growly as a talking dog’s.

  ‘So we’ll do this one fast. We’ve got no background and no profile, but the material’s good. I say we hit it running. Let the record do the talking. You—’ he says to Tony, ‘you I’d replace if I had time, but I don’t. You—’ he says to Pete, ‘we’ll have to mix down. One day you’ll learn there’s more to life than distortion. What’s the electric guitar bought to music? Amplification. And that’s all you’ve got. You—’ he says to me, ‘you’re good, you’re okay. Christmas tomorrow, so we’re lucky, we can get in straight away. Next studio booking I’ve got starts New Year’s Eve so that’s all we get to make you guys right.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Tony says. ‘Right for what? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Who’s the clown?’ this grey stranger asks Debbie, then before she can answer he tells Tony: ‘To record the album. I’ll do the mix. I’ll add some instrumental bits and pieces if none of you guys is a multi-instrumentalist. That gives us three days to get the tracks down and three days for me to do the engineering.’

  Only Debbie was clear about what he was saying. The rest of us must have been thinking we were imagining it. Someone is actually going to let us make a record, a full long-player? And in three days?

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask him. ‘And what makes you think we can record all of this so fast?’

  He tells us his name. That shuts us up. ‘As for speed, ten years ago Black Sabbath did their debut in three days and how long do you think it took Led Zeppelin to record their first album? Thirty hours. Thirty fucking hours. What, you can’t keep up with that?’ ‘But Christmas Day?’ Pete asks.

  ‘Unless you’re too sentimental,’ Iron John replies, and with that he strides out of the airless fug of the practice room.

  ‘What time tomorrow?’ Debbie calls after him.

  His disembodied voice: ‘What time do you fucking think?’

  XXIII

  Sparrow-fart, dawn. Christmas Day dawn, that’s what time. Dumbfounded to find ourselves in a recording studio, we bashed
around in those unfamiliar surroundings and conditions for three days and three nights, emerging bleary-eyed into some other dawn. For all our labours, time seemed to have frozen, except that Christmas was over and a new year was nearly here.

  We’d done take after take of every song we had, and by that I mean the ones by Debbie Canova. Iron John was as interested in Tony’s music as he was in gonorrhoea. He twiddled those multi-track buttons and levers in a control room that looked like it should have housed a half dozen engineers like him. Yet, even so, he’d been perfectly in control and full of energy. We did very few overdubs and even some of those were done by John himself. He knew Tony was a limited singer; he didn’t like Pete’s guitar sound at all; and as for Stavros, he simply pretended our Greek hippie didn’t exist. Whenever we stopped for toilet, drink or lunch breaks, Iron John picked up one of our instruments and recorded the part the way he wanted it. For two songs he even took it upon himself to downturn Pete’s guitar from the key of E to C#, and made the bass player follow suit. It was a trick he’d picked up from Black Sabbath records and he did it so that there would be a deeper tone to offset Debbie’s violin. Pete wouldn’t touch his Gibson that way; Iron John played it himself.

  We didn’t have time to rebel, but Pete called him a cunt anyway. Stavros told Iron John it wasn’t cool to take away a musician’s own outpourings. Iron John could have told them to disappear, but he didn’t. I knew that when he had our stuff to himself he would rearrange it, re-record it, re-anything he wanted to do with it. Pete and Stavros would cease to exist, if need be. Maybe I would too. None of us mattered in the slightest.

  So, we’d been relegated to being not a band, but a bunch of not very desirable session players. The artist was Debbie. The heart was Debbie. On our first day there he presented her with an electric violin to try to use. It was sleek black and must have cost a few thousand. I saw her legs practically go weak, but she couldn’t master such a new way of making sounds so quickly, so she had to stick with using her aunt’s old Czech stalwart and promised to learn how to play her new violin as soon as the sessions were over. Then she’d front up to his office and play it, just for him.

  Iron John nodded, that would be good, because, of course, he was in love with Debbie Canova. He didn’t give her puppy-dog eyes or follow her around or even try to talk to her all that much. His love showed itself in the exquisite care he took with everything that had to do with the sounds she made out of her violin. She’d discovered, really, that second part of her own equation – the complementary particle that would allow her work to blossom into its fullest creation. Iron John was what she’d hoped Tony Lester would be. Even more than that, because John could make her music into a product, which meant he could liberate both it and her into the world. No more suffocation. She was on the verge of absolute freedom.

  He told us he’d probably only end up using about twenty percent of what we’d recorded. Even then he’d be splicing good bits of takes together and getting rid of the rest, crafting the music ‘Like an artisan’, he said. It seemed he didn’t think very much of us as our own craftsmen.

  ‘But why so little?’

  ‘The forty-minute rule. Best vinyl fidelity is under that length. Any more and you sacrifice sound quality – and that’s what we won’t be doing. I’m aiming this album at about thirty-three to thirty-five minutes.’

  So we had no idea what he would use and what he wouldn’t; no idea of the running order of the tracks, except for this: the one we’d improvised in the practice room, just Debbie’s violin and my drums, that would be the final, epic number. A full instrumental, no Tony. The others wondered if they would end up appearing on this record at all.

  Christmas dawn we’d signed contracts over instant coffee and dry biscuits. Iron John made us do it before he allowed us to step through into the soundproof recording rooms of his studio. None of us much thought about those pieces of paper again, at least not until there was nothing we could do about what we’d given away. John Tempest, we later discovered, owned everything we made; the music; the acetates, the eventual album, and all musical copyrights in perpetuity; he was even proprietor of the Manoeuvres name. First thing he did was to change that name to Xodus. He even paid us a breadline wage in lieu of a percentage of sales, that is, he only paid us for three days’ work, no holiday penalty or overtime included. The only one who would get anything extra was Debbie Canova, because she was the listed songwriter.

  There never was anything extra. Not for us, for Debbie, or even for Iron John. He had paid for the recording and the manufacture and distribution of our ‘product’ – and saw just about no return for his investment. Not the worst washout of his career, but bad enough to signal that the Eighties would not herald a return to his glory days.

  When I think of it now, a few things did come out of this project, and they were these: it well and truly ended the band; it brought Debbie Canova to me; and twenty-five years later it gave me the chance to die at the feet of a young girl named Ash.

  Maybe there are worse things, right?

  XXIV

  Tony shifts in the pew. No wonder he came to hate that record. Would never speak about it, even when it had a minor resurgence fifteen years after its aborted first release. A low budget Australian horror film in the mid-Nineties used segments of that haunting last track over a number of sequences featuring young women being sliced and diced by a psychopathic half-man, halfbeast creature with no face. Every time No-Face’s vengeance hit the screen Debbie’s violin soared and my drums pounded. When I saw the film I felt sick. Even though Debbie was long gone by then I knew she would have felt as brutalised as those characters. Violence was the one thing she found utterly unforgivable. For his part, Iron John wouldn’t have worried about what any of us thought: in his mind it was probably all a happy miracle that the worthless music rights he owned finally brought in a dribble of cash.

  For a year or two after the film, in vinyl revival stores, people sought out copies of the album by Xodus (featuring Ms Deborah Canova). Iron John had entitled it DC and the front cover was a gauzy close-up shot of Debbie’s face and beautifully naked shoulders all the way down to the tops of her breasts. Just a little behind her was my grainy face, then the others, but the focus was so intentionally blurred there was little sense of their individual features or whether these musicians were eighteen or eighty. All of us were superimposed upon a grainier stock picture of a ragged multitude travelling an endless road through some burned out, war-ravaged countryside. Exodus. The back cover was a straight black-and-white band photograph, us standing behind the featured artist in a white peasant blouse and gypsy skirt, a violin bow in her hand. It made us look like the sort of cheesy polka outfit that plays beer-barrel singalong versions of popular songs. There was no insert. In his misdirected confidence Iron John had ten thousand copies printed. Three weeks after its release it was in every record store’s markdown bin. Within six months you could buy it for ninety-nine cents. A year, fifty cents – if you could find it. Oblivion for two decades, then film and/or music buffs were paying up to forty or fifty dollars for an old copy.

  One person who didn’t purchase a copy either new or old was Tony Lester. He’d never had the album in his collection and never would. He’d read a tiny article in some magazine where Iron John spoke about the possibility of a CD re-release with extra tracks, but it never happened. The only thing that ever did happen was that an abridged version of that tune made it onto the film’s soundtrack album; cutting it down like that leeched most of the life out of the music anyway. The No-Face soundtrack compact disc was going for ninety-nine cents last time he looked, then it disappeared. Good, Tony thought then and still does. The whole thing is better wiped out of existence.

  Once the recording sessions were over, Tony finally understood that Debbie Canova didn’t care for him. She’d found his presence stultifying, as suffocating as Phil’s and maybe even more so. He’d been sulky and angry every minute of every one of the three days; after all, h
e was finally in a recording studio, but for all the involvement he got to make he might as well have been the tea lady. Together they caught a bus home in the sweltering mid-morning of the day we were released from that studio jailcell. Her exhausted body rocked beside his, they were shoulder to shoulder, and when he took her hand it was limp. Tony turned her face to his and saw that he wasn’t inside those blue eyes. He knew who was.

  As soon as they arrived in his lounge room, both of them putrid with three days’ confinement, he stripped her half-naked, pushed her face-first over the back of his couch, and made brutal, forty-five second love to her from behind. Like the fifty dollar prostitute she originally asked to be. He ejaculated with vehemence, slapping her ass and her limp, long hair around. Then he cried. Debbie barely uttered a word, moan or sigh.

  We’d had our three days of recording. It was December 28th. She escaped from him a few nights later, New Year’s Eve.

  It was six-thirty in the evening after nearly two full days asleep. There was some kind of New Year’s party I was supposed to go to, but my head was fusty and when I heard the soft rap on my front door I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway. Since that experience with her in the practice room downstairs, when we’d played for Iron John, the gaze between Debbie Canova and me had remained constant. Those days in the studio everyone had seen it; Tony included.

  I opened the door. When I’m lucky someone will turn up with a bottle of something strong to drink or good to eat, but Debbie Canova stood half-lit under the naked porch bulb and she was carrying her violin and bow. Her eyes took me in. Her hair wasn’t white any more, but a sort of new, messy honey-blonde. She looked great. Nothing could stop the smile that spread like relief across my face; it was mirrored in hers.