Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  I opened my eyes. The needles on the mixing board VU meters were moving. Hudson stared at them but didn’t touch any of the controls. He never looked at me. The song played through to the end and there was a bit more I hadn’t heard before. Ringo stamping on the bass drum, a woman’s voice that must have been Yoko’s. Then nothing. “That’s all,” I said.

  Hudson rewound it in silence, except for the faint hum of the transport mechanism. He stopped it in the middle and listened. I could hear the space between the musicians, hear each note decay separately. I wasn’t as tired as I had been before. Finding it, I guess, is the really hard part.

  Hudson stopped the tape in the middle of a verse.

  “Well?” I said.

  He still wouldn’t look at me.

  “Give me a minute,” he said. “I don’t think I can talk right now.”

  He rewound the tape then took his time about writing my name and the date on the label. We took it to the room next door, a fireproof vault the size of a small closet. It had a lock on the door and steel shelves inside. He locked the tape inside and said, “How about a beer?”

  “I would deeply appreciate that.”

  We went out to the parking lot and he said, “We can take my car.” He wheeled himself up to a maroon Volvo and opened the door.

  “Uh, listen, can I help?”

  “It’s no problem,” he said. “You get used to it.”

  He parked the chair parallel to the open door and lifted his right leg into the car with both hands. Then he put one hand on the seat and the other on the door and hoisted himself inside. He folded the chair and then scooted to his right until he could pull the driver’s seat forward and stash the chair behind it. Then he unlocked the passenger door and I got in. “Are you hungry at all?” he said.

  “I could eat.”

  “We’re going to have to talk about this. We can talk about it in some noisy bar, or we can go to my house. Don’t worry, I’m not gay or anything. It’s just I’ve got a case of Raffo in the icebox, and…you ever had Raffo?”

  “Yeah. It’s good beer.”

  We headed down Lincoln toward Venice.

  “You know there’s nothing we can legally do with a tape like that,” Hudson said. I felt myself sink a little. “I believe what I saw today. Capitol Records would never believe it. They would tie you up in lawsuits until you couldn’t take a leak without a court order.”

  “But the music…”

  “We’re talking record executives here. If they cared about music, they wouldn’t be in that end of the business. You know what they used to call the Capitol Executives? The Coors Club. Because at five P.M. sharp, they had a little icebox there in the office, at five o’clock everything stops and whoosh, it’s pop-top time. No matter who’s there to see them, no matter what band is hung up somewhere needing help.”

  We turned uphill into a neighborhood of one-story stucco houses and small lawns. “So what are you saying?”

  He pulled into one of the driveways and turned the car off. “I’m saying we can’t do anything legally. But this still needs to get out there.”

  “You’re talking bootleg?”

  “I’m just talking, you understand. It could be done. If you had forty-five minutes to an hour’s worth of material, high-quality CD, full-color booklet, distributed through a network of collectors with the right connections. If it was something people really wanted, you could name your own price. A hundred dollars a unit wouldn’t be out of line.”

  We sat there a minute or two in silence. It was late afternoon, warm enough that I could feel the sunlight on my right arm. The wind rustled palm trees next door and I could smell cut grass and flowers.

  “Something to think about,” Hudson said, and opened his door.

  The inside of his house is open and low, flagstone floors, rough plaster walls, lots of plants. There are skylights in the roof and shelves full of stacked-up magazines. There’s a wicker couch and one other chair, a coffee table, and lots of space to maneuver around them.

  Hudson pointed me toward the couch and wheeled off into the kitchen. He brought back two bottles of beer and drank his off in one long swallow. Then he sighed, eyes closed, head back. It looked like he and I would get along.

  “What sort of thing would be worth a hundred dollars a shot?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? There’s Beatle boots out there now, those Ultra Rare Trax? So the Beatles might not be the best place to start. There’s a million lost albums that collectors have talked about for years. The second Derek and the Dominoes, Smile, the Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash album. There’s Buffalo Springfield’s Stampede. Lee Perry was supposed to do a Wailers album for Island in the mid-seventies…I need to think about this.”

  “While you’re thinking, is there a phone I could use?”

  He pointed. “In the hall there. Just dial one for long distance.”

  “I’ve got a card…”

  “Hey. You’re in the music business now. You’re tax deductible. Get used to it.”

  Elizabeth was home. She sounded tired. “I’m okay,” she said. “I miss you. The house is all empty and echoing. Dude keeps walking around crying. Hey, Dude, c’mere, it’s your dad on the phone.”

  “It looks like I’m going to be out here another day or two.”

  “Oh.”

  “I played the tape for this record guy and it really shook him up.”

  “The one you played for me?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a long silence. I could hear her think about asking again where the tape came from, hear her decide she didn’t want to know. “Where are you staying?” she finally said.

  I gave her the number of the motel.

  “Is it nice?”

  “It’s seedy, but seedy in a nice kind of way.”

  “I love you,” Elizabeth said. “I wish you were here.”

  “I love you too. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  After I put the phone down I stood in the hallway for a minute. When I’m actually in Austin she can’t say the things she does on the phone, the simple intimacies, the unforced affection. It leaves me hung up in this neverland, wanting to be home in a place that doesn’t really exist.

  I went back into the living room. Graham Hudson had a big smile all over his face. “The Doors,” he said. “Celebration of the Lizard.”

  c h a p t e r 2

  THE CELEBRATION OF THE LIZARD

  The first two Doors albums end with long, complex theater pieces: “The End” and “When the Music’s Over.” For the third album Jim Morrison had saved the longest, most complicated yet, “The Celebration of the Lizard.” Like the other two, it had evolved over the long months onstage at L.A.’s London Fog Club, and, eventually, at the Whiskey a Go Go, the top club on the strip. The album was supposed to be called Celebration of the Lizard too, and the song would have filled most, if not all, the second side. It was in the punchline of this song that Morrison announced himself as the Lizard King.

  It’s fashionable now to blame drugs for everything. In fact the Doors recorded two brilliant albums with Morrison completely twisted on LSD. It was the booze that did him in. The recording sessions for Celebration were drunken orgies, with Morrison so out of control that the vocal tracks had to be done over and over again. Some nights he ran amuck in the studio, punching the walls, and they had to drag him out onto the street. Other nights he simply passed out in the corner.

  Paul Rothchild, their young, hip producer, patched together a version of “Celebration” from various takes. He hated the result, and so did the rest of the band. They thought it was dull, lifeless, meandering. Morrison was outvoted when he wanted to keep it. Only one short section, “Not to Touch the Earth,” made it onto the finished album, now retitled Waiting for the Sun. They filled up the rest of the record with sentimental junk like “Hello, I Love You,” resurrected from the band’s early days, and “Love Street,” a simplistic piano bar ballad.

  I still remembe
r how disappointed I was when I first heard it. It came out in the summer of 1968, still early on for Alex and me. My parents spent a lot of weekends out of town and my friends would bring dates over and there would be beer and maybe a joint or two. The main thing I remember is the cold. Nobody thought about an energy crisis then and I kept the air conditioner down to the low sixties. Late at night, in the cold, we would listen to the first two Doors albums back-to-back and dare ourselves to go crazy from the sheer intensity of it.

  Then Waiting for the Sun came out and Morrison looked less like a crazed visionary than a sad alcoholic. Alex and I saw him that June, just before the album was released. He seemed oddly restrained, despite what looked like an Italian sausage that hung down the leg of his black leather jeans. Now I realize he was simply drunk. It was pretty much the end of the Doors. The intellectual, mystical lyrics from Morrison’s first white heat of inspiration were all used up. The band had to put songs together in the studio and Morrison was reduced to simpleminded dog-without-a-bone nursery rhymes. They’d hit some kind of wall.

  Graham picked me up at my motel around noon and took me for a tour of the city. I’d told him the night before that I needed details, had to be able to see everything in my head.

  Santa Monica Boulevard, even with bumper-to-bumper traffic, felt different to me than rush hour in Dallas or Houston. Everybody seemed to be headed toward something glamorous or fun, the beach or the back lot at Universal. Half the women looked like starlets, or maybe it was just me, far from home, involved in the closest thing to an adventure I’d ever had.

  We turned off onto Wilshire in the middle of Beverly Hills. The north side of the street is all red tile roofs and green lawns and high walls, sprinklers that run all through December. The south side is business district that fades gradually into the generic high rise of downtown L.A. We turned north on La Cienega and drove past the Beverly Center, which looms over fifties-era furniture and carpet stores and the occasional eighties strip center.

  I could look straight ahead and see the Hollywood Hills less than a mile away, catch glimpses of high-dollar houses behind the trees. As La Cienega started to climb uphill, Graham reached across me to point at a tan stucco building with a red-tiled mansard roof. “That’s where Elektra Records was. There was a studio on the second floor where they did Soft Parade.”

  He turned right at the next corner, which put us back on Santa Monica Boulevard. We actually found a parking spot and I stood nervously in the street, watching cars swerve around Graham while he unloaded his chair and got settled. We crossed over to Barney’s Beanery, more of a Texas-style burger joint than something that belonged in West Hollywood. The front of the place was painted dark green and had a painted metal menu that listed over two hundred brands of beer on it. The inside was dark and smoky, and there was a sign behind the bar that said FAGOTS STAY OUT.

  “Friendly place,” I said.

  “It’s part of the history,” Graham said. “We won’t leave a tip.”

  We got a table where we could look out at the street. Graham talked about Jim Morrison while we ate. “Back in ’68 he didn’t have a car half the time, or the cops had pulled his license for drunk driving. He stayed at the Alta Cienega Motel, just on the other side of La Cienega. Back then West Hollywood wasn’t incorporated, it was a slum, with strip joints and prostitution and lots of crime. The name Sunset Strip came from County Strip, meaning it wasn’t legally part of L.A. at all. What little law enforcement there was came out of the Sheriff’s Department, which is why it drew so many hustlers and nightclubs and all that. That changed after the riots on Sunset in sixty-six, but not that much.

  “So in the late sixties you had this incredible scene here. Kids from all over the country were out on the streets in droves. The music pulled them in, and they stayed because nobody tried very hard to kick them out. So Morrison had everything he needed within walking distance.” Graham took one of the napkins and drew a cross on it. “The Alta Cienega here, on the northwest corner. Across Santa Monica was the Phone Booth, a strip joint where he used to hang out. The Doors’ offices were next door at 8512. A little farther west was the Palms Bar, where he went to drink, and across the street from that was the Duke’s Coffee Shop. Duke’s was in the Tropicana Motel, where lots of bands would stay when they were in town. Elektra right here on La Cienega, and his girlfriend Pam’s apartment, just around the corner on Norton. He would eat at the Garden District or Duke’s. And he came here to shoot pool. So did Janis, who went from here to the Troubadour and then back to the Franklin Hotel the night she died.

  “Everybody talks about the Haight, and the Fillmore, and Golden Gate Park and all that. But I’m telling you, man, there is no rock and roll town like L.A. I mean, the R & B scene on Central Avenue, Spector’s Wall of Sound, the Byrds, the whole Eagles/Ronstadt thing, Dick Dale and surf music, X and Black Flag and the Go-Go’s, right up to Guns ’n Roses and Van Halen and Tone-Lōc. This is the place. There isn’t a block in this part of town that isn’t crawling with history.”

  He finished his beer and held up the empty bottle for another. “Most of it gone, of course. They knocked the Tropicana down a few months ago. The Phone Booth, the Elektra offices, the Garden District, all gone. Sunset Sound, where the Doors cut the first two albums, is gone. They made Waiting for the Sun at TTG, down on McCadden Place, near Sunset and Highland. Hendrix recorded ‘Look Over Yonder’ there, but it’s gone too, all gone, gone the way of Western Recorders and Gold Star. Jesus, man, you think of the sounds that came out of those places. The studios themselves were integral. Phil Spector got the sound he got because of Gold Star Studios, and nobody will ever get that sound again.”

  The waiter brought Graham’s beer. He looked at it and said, “And another mini-mall slouches toward L.A. to be born.”

  I looked around, tried to take twenty years off the wood-paneled walls, the tucked-and-rolled rainbow-colored vinyl booths, the scratched Formica with the sparkles in it. I could see Jim and Janis taking turns with a bottle of Southern Comfort at the pool tables, surrounded by guys in bell-bottoms and long sideburns, industry types in Madras and penny loafers, aspiring starlets in hip-huggers and tank tops.

  “But you’re not from L.A.,” I said.

  “Pine Bluff, Arkansas.”

  “So how do you know all this stuff?”

  “The total absorption method. It’s all I do. Listen to the records and read the album covers. I subscribe to all the trades and buy all the biographies. I watch the talk shows and MTV.”

  “What got you started?”

  “You mean when I was a kid? I don’t know. I always loved music. It took me away from my real life. I didn’t get along with my parents—my dad and my stepmother, I should say. My real mother died when I was three. Liver cancer. From the time they found it to the time she died was two days. That’s what they tell me, I don’t remember her at all. Anyway, I was there in Arkansas, dirt poor, couldn’t afford to buy records new, not even singles. But you could go down to the jukebox shop and buy used jukebox records ten for a dollar. They had machines where you could listen to them, too. Pine Bluff was about fifty percent black, so I got to hear all the race records—Marv Johnson, ‘You Got What It Takes,’ that was always one of my favorites. The Coasters—another great L.A. group, they started out as the West Coasters, did you know that?—James Brown, Chuck Berry. And of course I loved Elvis and Ricky Nelson and all that. Ricky and Elvis used to play football over in De Neve Park. Ricky had a bunch of pro players and Elvis had his Memphis Mafia. Shit. Once I get started, I can’t stop until I bore everybody to death.” He pushed back from the table. “Let’s get some exercise.”

  He let me push his chair up to La Cienega. The Alta Cienega is just north of the intersection, pale yellow, two stories, with red trim and Spanish-style wrought-iron bars over the windows. The driveway that leads to the office is a kind of tunnel, with rooms on both sides and above it. “Morrison stayed in room thirty-two, on the second floor,” Graham said. �
�You can see the building Elektra was in down the street there, with the red tile roof. It was stucco originally, then Judy Collins became their big ticket. So they had it redone in natural wood, with wrought-iron stairs up the side. A look Judy would be happy with. It’s back to stucco now, and Elektra’s in a high rise downtown. When Bob Krasnow came in five years ago they turned over most of the management. So that whole era is gone.”

  I hunkered down on the sidewalk to fix everything in my mind. “If you could find any pictures of the inside of that studio—”

  “TTG?”

  “Yeah. Especially of the Doors during a session, that would really help.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  I shook my head. “I guess tomorrow I go home and start work on it.”

  “And tonight?”

  I shrugged.

  “How about we sneak a case of beer up to Griffith Park and watch the sun go down?”

  “When were you over there?” I asked Graham.

  The lights of L.A. spread out below us, and it was impossible to imagine an energy shortage, not with all that dazzling brilliance from one horizon to the other. We sat under a tree with case of Tecate, smelling the fallen juniper needles, listening to the wind. It sounded colder than it was.

  “Vietnam?” he said. “Never.”

  “You said something about being in the service, I just assumed…”

  “No, man, I was in the Navy. Never left the States.”

  “…I mean, with your legs and all…”

  “No, I didn’t get shot or anything. It’s a lot dumber than that.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Sure. But it’s a long, weird story.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Well, you know that old line about for want of a nail a shoe was lost, and so on?”