by Hari Kunzru
Of course there was some truth in his accusation, otherwise I wouldn’t have lost control of myself so catastrophically. I have always respected material objects. Not as status symbols or anything like that. I don’t have any particular need to be envied. Carter had never had to yearn for anything, a tool or toy or an instrument, something that would enlarge his possibilities or make his life easier. If he wanted it, he clicked and it came. I’d spent hours of my life, days, weeks at a time, fantasizing about musical equipment that I could not afford to buy. That mandolin was beautiful because it was useful. The sound of it breaking took all the heat out of my attack.
Carter broke my grip and straddled me, pinning my arms with his knees. Then he began to punch me in the face. People always look aroused when they’re acting violently. They’re abandoned, their guard is down. I tasted blood in my mouth and in my jolted, jumbled state it occurred to me that if I let him beat me unconscious, to death even, all my problems would be solved. It would be easy to fall into darkness, watching the wild expression on his face.
But it didn’t work out like that. No beautiful death for Seth. I let my body go limp and closed my eyes but my surrender must have bored Carter because he stopped hitting me and sat back against the couch, breathing heavily and rubbing his throat. I rolled over, coughing. The mandolin was in two pieces, the neck snapped clean through, just below the headstock.
—What the fuck? he croaked. What the actual fuck?
—You shouldn’t make everything about money.
—Get away from me.
—You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t do that to people.
—If you care so much about that stupid box, I’ll get you another.
—Do what you like, I don’t care what you do.
I woke up the next morning to find him gone. I supposed our friendship must be over. I thought he’d come home and tell me to move out. But he never did. Days went by, a couple of weeks. I served customers at the deli and wrote job applications in a state of numb depression. I didn’t think about making music. There is a place I sometimes go to where no value attaches to anything. The world is flat. One sensation is exactly equal to the next. Putting your hand on someone’s skin or in the flame of a candle. When it’s particularly bad, it becomes a visual condition. I can look out the window and see only churn, shapes and colors that don’t add up to anything. Visible light of various wavelengths. I can spend hours playing computer games or watching internet porn. Food, when I remember to eat, tastes like ashes on my tongue.
As I waited for Carter to come back and end it, I ran through mazes with a machine gun, masturbated, bombed alien cities flat, and all I really thought about was how I’d burned out my palate and couldn’t taste my food. One afternoon, I returned from work to find, among the pizza boxes and dirty underwear on my bed, a brand-new digital delay. Seeing it, pristine in its shrink-wrapped box, I underwent an ecstatic convulsion. I’d been forgiven. Pacing the apartment at night, I had called Carter terrible names, spiteful names designed to push him away. But now he was home and I was forgiven and I danced a fucked-up celebration dance, one hand in the air, the other clutching the waistband of my sweat pants, which were about to slip off. When I got myself together I scooted through the apartment, cleaning up around the sofa where I spent most of my time, picking up soda cans and tipping the contents of several makeshift ashtrays—plates, cans, a small plastic bottle—into a grocery bag. I took a shower and examined myself in the mirror. When I sucked in my stomach, my jutting hipbones framed a concavity. I could count my ribs. I wondered if Carter would notice.
I’d done the dishes and was mopping the floor when he breezed in, a joint drooping from the corner of his mouth. He had been staying with friends in California and was sporting—I think that’s the word—a porkpie hat and an army jacket and vintage Nike sneakers and two fistfuls of silver rings. I hadn’t seen any of it before. He must have spent all his time in California buying hats and jackets and sneakers and rings.
—Hey brother, he said, all Superfly.
I resisted the impulse to hug him and modulated my voice to match.
—What’s up?
—Expressing with my full capabilities. I got you another box.
—I saw. Thanks, bro. About the mandolin—
—Don’t sweat it. I ordered another.
And with that, the fight was over. Often it was like that with Carter. By mutual agreement, we would close the trapdoor on a thing and never speak of it again. That same night he asked me if I wanted to move to New York with him. I couldn’t believe it. Reality had inverted itself. I had been so full of despair, and now I was going to live in New York with Carter. I was one of the Lord’s anointed.
A CIRCUIT OF SHOWS AND CLUBS AND PARTIES. Parties in basement bars, on midtown rooftops, in Bushwick warehouses with water streaming down the walls. Me at the very center of it all, beckoned past the velvet rope, given the nod, the wristband, the drink tickets, the bump of coke. We cycled to Coney Island. We tripped on Chinese lab chemicals in Prospect Park. It seems absurd now that we had so much time to waste. I could make a coffee run and a round of record stores last all day.
Rich young people have usually been taught, either by their parents or bitter life experience, that certain things can be a barrier to forming relationships. Certain things being a euphemism for money. Carter hated to have it mentioned. One stray remark could end a conversation; he’d just turn his back and walk away. By the time we made the move to New York, I’d adopted a religious attitude towards the many benefits that came to me: bow your head, open your hands, silently give thanks. Money was Carter’s invisible helper, a friendly ghost making things happen in the background. Cars arrived, restaurant tabs got picked up. When it was time to change scenery, money dissolved the city into a beach or a ski lodge. The thing was never to point out that this was happening. Since I couldn’t work out how I came to be there, why I was Carter’s faithful squire instead of some other studio engineer, none of it seemed real. It was all illusion, red dust, shit turning up in FedEx boxes.
When Carter decided we were going to set up a recording studio, it just sprang into existence. He came into my room one day with the keys to a building by the water in Williamsburg. We cycled over and there it was. Contractors were already at work, installing soundproofing, building partition walls. The gear was magnificent, none of it new, always with a history, everything at least forty years old, tube amps and sixties fuzzboxes and a desk certified to have once been installed at Fame studios in Muscle Shoals. Vocals went through a pair of nineteen-fifties AKG C12’s that cost fifteen thousand dollars. When the remodeling was finished, we plugged in and started looking for business. Six months out of college and I was in New York, running a fucking studio. Carter had a very particular idea about what he wanted to do. We were billing ourselves as audio craftsmen, artisans of analog. We would even offer to record to quarter-inch tape, if that’s what the client wanted. He knew a place that could press from it, so we could make vinyl records of new music that hadn’t been digitized at any stage of production. Ye olde stereophonicke sounde. Step right up.
Carter cut off his dreads and began to dress as if the year was 1849 and he was heading west to pan for gold. He wasn’t alone. At that time Bedford Avenue was full of hobos and mountain men and Pony Express riders. They were our first clients, pioneers and gunfighters hunched over drum kits, tweaking guitar pedals. I gradually realized they weren’t nineteenth-century revivalists at all. They were sixties revivalists, revivalists of the western revival of the nineteen sixties. Their girlfriends wore ponchos and wide floppy hats and everyone photographed each other with olde-timey filters, sepia and bleached out yellow.
In his personal music taste Carter was hovering around 1950, in some Houston basement with Lightnin’ Hopkins singing through a guitar amp. That’s how he wanted everything to sound just then. Hollow, buzzing and raw. There was a song called “Black Cat Bone” that he’d play over and over. It sounded terrible, a
s if it had been recorded in a coffin. To him, it was the apogee of audio perfection. His record collecting had taken on a new level of seriousness. If he was beaten at an auction, he would scream at the screen. We spent evenings throwing down shots and doing lines on the coffee table while he told me how he needed such and such a record. How I would never understand (being Spock, the tin man, etcetera) the emotional gravity of his loss.
Meanwhile we began to lock into a production sound. This organ. That handclap. Put the guitar in a cave and the vocal raw and breathy, right up front. Add surface noise, a hint of needles plowing through static, throw the whole thing back in time. Rock bands loved us. We did a record with some punk chicks from LA who were fans of the sixties Detroit girl groups. Big hair and sailor tattoos, that whole deal. We blew up their harmonies into towering melodrama, sprayed on the fuzz and pressed onto pink vinyl. It sold out in a week. After that the internet began to pay attention and we got hired to do some tracks for an album by a big British band. I hated their music and the whole Rolling Stones junkie troubadour bullshit that went along with it, but it was an opportunity and we made sure we didn’t screw up. The present is dry, but add reverb and you can hear time reverse its flow, slipping on into the past, into echo and disaster. It’s a trick, usually, just clever technique, except when it’s not. Twenty years ago. Thirty years ago…Distance can create longing. It can open up the gap into which all must fall. When they heard what we’d done to their generic three-chord songs, the Brits were overjoyed. You made me sound amazing, the singer told us, in his nasal London drawl. Timeless. You made me sound like Skip James.
There are ways you can use a studio. Things you can do that open up impossible spaces in the mind. You can put the listener in a room that doesn’t exist, that couldn’t exist. You can put them in an impossible room.
WHEN DID I LOSE TOUCH WITH THE FUTURE? I remember how imminent it used to feel, how exciting. The old world was dissolving, all the grime of the past sluicing away in digital rain. The future was reflective, metallic. Soon liquid drops of mercury would reconstitute themselves into spacecraft, weapons, women and men. Now I would say the future is behind me. It is, in any case, out of my reach. It would be easy to put the blame on Carter, on his melancholy attachment to the crackle and hiss, but I bear my share of responsibility. I let my guard down. I let myself fall. Nostalgia: from the Greek “nostos”—homecoming—and “algos” pain or ache: the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again. Now I am nostalgic for the future, which was my native land.
One weekend my dad came to town. He wanted us to bond, so he took me to “Sunday jazz brunch” at one of the clubs in the Village, the ones that trade on the fantasy that as you eat your bad burger you’ll be transported to the wild and swinging bebop era and all the city breakers and European backpackers at the tables around you will magically morph into angelheaded hipsters burning like roman candles in the night. Not that my dad even liked jazz. I don’t know what he liked. I think he thought that place was my scene.
It was an act of duty, most probably. My brother was living in Las Vegas. He hadn’t been in touch. Dad mentioned, as he sometimes did, that he had “promised to hold the family together for mom.” He was making an effort. We drank watery Bloody Marys and I tried to tell him about the studio. All he could think to say was, so he’s rich, your friend. He tried his best, hammily nodding and tapping his fingers on the table, demonstrating that he “liked something I liked,” that we had “shared interests.” Some loser took a busy, vibeless tenor solo and a leathery blonde who would never be Julie London, let alone Ella or Billie, scat-screeched oooon-a-cleeear-daaay and I prayed for release because that wasn’t music, it was the death of music, what happens when people repeat the same gestures for forty years after they lose all meaning.
When we said our goodbyes on the sidewalk outside, we knew that was it. Nothing happened. Nothing that would make a story. We were always going to lose touch.
A few days later Carter and I were asked to sit down with a major label. We found ourselves in a midtown office with a view of the Hudson, talking about a famous white hip hop artist who wanted to pay his dues to the tradition by releasing an album of classic covers. The executive running the meeting had walnut skin and a facelift that made him look like a pilot in a centrifuge, a clean-cut American hero experiencing some large multiple of earth’s gravity. He tried to impress us by telling an embarrassing story about doing coke with Sly Stone. His assistant was so beautiful, I didn’t dare meet her eye. She should have been on a yacht. The executive told her to bring us drinks and when she bent over to put the tray on the coffee table, he leaned back to check out her ass and made an insufferable I know, right? face at Carter, who looked back at him blankly. I was worried about Carter. His head wasn’t in the game.
The rapper arrived with his people and the room rearranged itself around him as he perched on the edge of a lounger, cradling a chai and explaining that he essentially considered himself a curator. He was a sincere young man from Maine, who’d had a Billboard number one with a song about drug dealing and had recently (according to a magazine someone left in our bathroom) purchased a nice-looking beach house in St. Barts. Onstage he was like one of those internet videos that illustrates the whole history of something in ninety seconds. Hyperactive, encyclopedic. Between verses he did James Brown dance moves, all slides and splits and theatrical sexual fainting, snapping into more modern styles: breaking, pop and lock. In person he was surprisingly low-key. He was always giving quotes about feeling “humble” or “in awe” of one or other canonical black star. Now, he explained, in a half-whisper that forced everyone to lean forward slightly, it was time to take his humility a step further. Every track on his album was to be a tribute to a particular period and style of African American music, from ragtime through fifties RnB to eighties boogie. Nineteen ninety, the year of his birth, was the cutoff. He was not going to cover other people’s songs, but remix his own material in other styles, the styles of the great artists of history. As the executive explained:
—It’ll be like my man was born in different time periods.
—My Past Lives, said the rapper. Am I right?
I said I thought it was a good name.
—I’ve decided vinyl only, he added. The executive said they would talk about that. I thought we were pitching to do one track, but it became clear that they wanted us to produce the whole album. It was a career-making opportunity. The rap star loved our precision. He loved our patina. Our patina was on a whole other level of precision. He told us he thought of us like those Chinese oil painters who turn out perfect reproductions of Monets and Cézannes to sell on the internet.
Expressing enthusiasm wasn’t my job, Carter was the one with the social skills, but instead of complimenting the rap star and closing the deal, he was staring out the window, tapping on his knees and humming the chess player’s blues under his breath.
Put me under a man they call Captain Jack
Put me under a man they call Captain Jack
He wrote his name all down my back
He’d been humming it for days. I’d hear the track on repeat, the a cappella voice singing its threatening, melancholy lyric. A year earlier, that voice wouldn’t have had such an impact on him. It turned up just when he became receptive. All postwar music had vanished from his life. The electric guitars and thumping rhythms of the nineteen forties and fifties had faded into prewar blues recordings, lone guitarists playing strange abstract figures, scraping the strings with knives and bottlenecks and singing in cracked, elemental voices about trouble and loss. Lately, he’d set up a 78rpm turntable in his bedroom. He would sit on the floor close to the speakers. It was as if the chess player’s blues had risen up to meet him, as if he’d summoned it into his room.
A lot of people find early recordings unlistenable. I did too. The audio quality is so poor, instinctively my brain wants it cleaned up. Carter had explained that some of the rec
ords were so rare that only single copies were known. In some cases that lone copy was worn out. The pressings had been bad in the first place, companies skimping on shellac, using too much clay and cotton filler in the mix. Even in mint condition, some of them sounded as if they’d been scoured with sandpaper. I suppose it was inevitable that, sooner or later, Carter would run into those old singers. They were as far back in audio time as you could go. He’d been following their traces through downloads and vinyl compilations to a wooden box lined with green baize that he was gradually filling with expensive original 78’s. He had begun to talk about songs by referencing their catalog numbers, scouring want lists and dealer sites for work by musicians so obscure that even their real names were in doubt.
The rapper had been talking about his respect for The Last Poets, who he kept referring to as The Last Prophets. Carter cut across him and spoke directly to me.
—I can’t believe you’re not out looking for him.
—Looking for who?
—You met him at the chess tables, right? Maybe he plays there regularly.
I was thrown. It took me a moment to realize what he meant.
—Let’s talk about this later.
The executive asked if Carter needed anything. People always told me, said the rapper, with the air of a man trying to cut through bullshit to the realness within, they said pull up your pants and act white.
I said I understood.
—I spent hours with my notebook, just honing my skills. I went to parties way out in the hood.
Carter scowled. The executive tapped him on the knee and told him that his assistant would get him anything. Anything at all, double underscore. Somehow we stumbled through another fifteen minutes, but the meeting had essentially fallen apart. We left with a lot of hugs and complicated handshakes, but without a definitive agreement to do the record.
