by Lewis Shiner
*
Dave had been an engineer at Columbia Records since 1957, since he’d shown up with his two years of college credits and convinced them to give him a try. That first week, an old Jew in accounting had looked at the name on his paperwork and shaken his head. “Fischel Cohen? I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“You get credit on an album cover, that’s what people should read? We can fix this. Fischel, Fisher. Cohen, Ken. Turn it around, Ken Fisher.”
“Ken? You want me to be a Ken?”
“What else you got for me?”
“Well… my middle name is Dov.”
“Perfect. David Fisher.”
The deed was done before he had time to think, and it seemed a minor thing, until his first paycheck arrived made out to David Fisher. Accounting said it could take months to correct, and it would be simpler to open an account in the new name. Within a month, the pressure of trying to maintain two identities was driving him meshuge and he gave up and went before a judge and made it legal.
It wasn’t like he had any affection for Fischel. He’d been called “Fishbreath” in grade school and “Fishy” in the Army and it was only stubbornness that had kept him from changing it before.
Telling his parents was another thing. A month and a half went by before they let him in their house again, and even then they barely spoke to him.
Rachel had been even worse. Though she had watched the process unfold and nodded along with each step, she managed to hold it against him in the end. Then again, Rachel had held most everything against him.
*
In February of 1962, Dave told Mitch Miller, his boss at Columbia, that he wanted to record some of the new folk music. He had by that point worked his way up from second tier easy listening dates to full orchestra sessions with Tony Bennett and the latest Sing Along with Mitch album, even as the tv show was burning up the ratings. Miller had sneered. “You mean they actually use engineers on that garbage? Why?”
Dave had always had a grudging respect for Miller, though many considered him a schlockmeister for stunts like pairing Sinatra with a howling dog and letting a 13-year-old sing “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Miller had invented the idea of the record producer, along with the idea that a record could be an art form in itself and not just a souvenir of a live performance. He was the absolute monarch of “the Church,” Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, generally considered the best sounding room in the world, 100 feet long, wide, and high, with an echo chamber in the basement that was the envy of the industry.
Miller’s shovel-blade beard, two-armed conducting style, and tight smile were national icons. The public never saw his self-confidence cross the line into arrogance, or heard his contemptuous dismissal of contrary opinions. Dave’s penalty for his disloyalty was exile to Studio A, uptown on 7th Avenue. Miller never spoke to him again, even when they passed in the hall.
Once free of his influence, Dave began to see that Miller had helped turn the musical culture of the 1950s into a sterile wasteland of artifice and made-to-order sentiment, had created the very famine of authenticity that the kids in Washington Square were rebelling against. The contrast between Miller’s world and the future that was barreling toward them became more obvious every day. In February of 1964 on the Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles served notice of that future to every pop musician in the US.
The following May, Tim Hardin showed up at Columbia to record a set of demos. Dave had fought to get assigned to the session, only to have it explode into chaos before it started. The schedule listed it as a solo recording, and Hardin arrived with an entourage that included musicians, hangers-on, and his own producer, a six-foot-six baritone blond named Erik Jacobsen who was the banjo player in some folk group with a kooky name. John Sebastian was there, the harmonica player that Dave had seen playing with Fred Neil. So was Gary Burton, the jazz vibraphonist, and Sticks Evans, with his left-handed drum set and his dapper three-piece suit and pocket handkerchief. So was a huge, loud woman named Cass, a wild man named Zalman, a kleptomaniac named Pompa, and various other musicians and women of little or no virtue.
It quickly became apparent that Hardin was completely loaded on heroin. Cass, Zalman, Jacobsen, and Sebastian began smoking reefer in the hall. Every time Dave turned around, Pompa was gone and something else was missing: a typewriter, a chair, pictures off the walls. As soon as Hardin got a few bars into a song, he would nod out and the other musicians sat and waited until he drifted back in and picked up, in perfect time, exactly where he’d left off.
God watches over fools, Dave’s mother had always claimed, and somehow they got through the 12-hour session without the intervention of police, firemen, doctors, or Columbia executives, and when he replayed the tapes afterward and heard, amid the endless variations on the “Hi-Heel Sneakers” riff, the beauty and pain in Hardin’s voice on “How Time Flies,” his heart swelled up and he phoned Jacobsen and babbled incoherently until Jacobsen invited him over to his apartment on MacDougal, where he and Sebastian were listening to country and blues and jug band music on reel-to-reel, and where they told him their stories, how they’d been living in adjacent rooms in a transient hotel in the Village unbeknownst to each other until one night Sebastian came knocking at two am asking Jake to turn the music up, and how Jake had heard The Beatles on a jukebox in a White Castle while on the road with the Knob Lick Upper 10,000 and started to hear sounds in his head that he couldn’t make as a musician, but thought he could create as a producer, and how Cass had introduced Sebastian to Zally at her apartment on the night The Beatles had debuted on Sullivan, having already decided that they should be in a band together, and they’d played together for the first time then, Sebastian the technician, Zal the free spirit, dripping influences from Floyd Cramer’s slip-note piano to Louis Armstrong’s air-raid trumpet to Clifton Chenier’s blustering accordion, and now it looked like Zal was part of their conspiracy, the band they were going to form as a sort of American armed response to the British Invasion, and Dave, his judgment perhaps affected by the clouds of pot smoke floating in the room, had said, “Take me with you.”
Columbia understandably passed on the Hardin demos. Dave assumed that was the end of it, but when The Lovin’ Spoonful finally materialized, Jake remembered him. The band cut their first demos at Bell and Allegro, top-notch rooms with state of the art gear, and Dave moonlighted as engineer to be part of it. He found to his surprise that he belonged there, in the thick of the creative whirlwind, putting a pickup on an autoharp or underdubbing to create new hybrid instruments that blended guitars and pianos or guitars and tubular bells. Jake taught him how to splice tape to resurrect brilliant fictional performances from the ashes of failed takes. They created every sound they could imagine and went beyond that to create sounds even they had never imagined before.
*
And then, suddenly, September of 1965 arrived and “Do You Believe in Magic” broke nationwide and here, on this Thursday night in the Village, Dave was walking down Third Street to listen to the Spoonful for possibly the last time ever at the Night Owl, because after extended dates in LA and San Francisco they had outgrown not just the club but the Village itself.
He saw then that he had blinked and missed another cultural warm front that had blown through and changed everything, had swapped out bulging, long-necked acoustic guitar cases for flat Fender rectangles, banished jackets and ties, grown hair over collars and ears, put women into jeans and sandals and jangling jewelry.
We did this, he thought, the Beatles and the Spoonful and the bands in garages everywhere. We electrified the world.
The street around the Night Owl’s famous yellow awning seethed with kids, locals and tourists both, a testament to the success of the record. Dave knew from experience that the volume of the band made them a more pleasant auditory experience on the sidewalk than inside. Jake knew it too, and Dave found him fifty yards from the club, his blond head poking up past the crowd around him. Dave
made his way over and Jake threw one arm around him and pulled him into a hug. Jake was dapper, as always, in a double-breasted suit and no tie, while Dave, who had no instinct for clothes, wore a short-sleeved sport shirt and gray slacks.
“This guy,” Jake said to no one in particular, “this guy is going to be huge, once he flies the nest and starts producing on his own.”
Dave felt the opposite of huge, dwarfed by Jake’s physicality and outsize personality.
“You want to go inside?” Jake asked, and Dave shrugged. The crowd made way for them, and Jack the Rat, at the door of the club, gave them a gap-toothed smile and waved them in.
The interior was barely more than a hallway, 20 feet wide and long enough to disappear into darkness at the far end. The stage protruded from the middle of one wall, so small that Joe had to set up his drums on the floor at stage left, the pa speakers pointed outward from the sides of the stage so that the vocals rode high above the instruments. Zal was in full wild-man mode, dancing jerkily back and forth like he had to take a leak, tall and lean in vertically striped stovepipe pants and a top hat. He was to blame for the crippling volume, cranking his guitar until the rest of the band had no choice other than to go along or be swallowed up.
They were in the middle of Chuck Berry’s “Almost Grown.” Sebastian waved to Jake and smiled happily, and Zal nodded and raised his guitar neck in salute. Heads turned, and failed to recognize who the salutes were for. Dave saw Jake’s gaze move over the room, checking out the girls, winnowing out the underage, a more difficult feat every day.
Suddenly Dave felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him down toward the floor. He turned and saw Tim Hardin, feeling a surge of disappointment followed immediately by guilt. Hardin had turned Jake around at the same time and now he was smiling, arms open wide, his long brown forelock falling to his eyebrows across the wide plane of his forehead, one eye glittering with mischief and tragedy, the other squinting against the smoke from the cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth. He looked fairly straight, Dave thought hopefully.
The volume prohibited even the pretense of conversation. Jake gripped Hardin’s shoulder in greeting and Dave nodded awkwardly. Hardin pointed to his ears and led them to the street.
“I thought you were still in LA,” Jake said.
“What’s the matter, aren’t you glad to see me?” Hardin never expressed fewer than two highly volatile emotions at once. Here his petulance teetered on the edge of laughter.
“Sure, Timmy, always.” Jake was less than convincing, on the verge of losing patience while Dave was willing to cut Hardin more slack on the basis of the incredible music they were in the midst of recording. Jake had come up with the idea of buying Hardin a portable tape recorder and paying him $50 for every demo that had at least two verses and a chorus, $75 if it had a bridge.
The scheme was working. These were brand-new songs that finally did justice to that amazing, heartbroken voice and the virtuoso guitar playing that sounded like Robert Johnson dueting with Django Reinhardt, the lyrics deceptively simple and full of surprising images and naked emotion. Once Verve released the album and Hardin became a household name, bigger than Dylan, bigger than Sinatra, Dave was sure that the recognition would chase away the demons that were riding him so very hard.
“Do you want me to set up some studio time?” Dave asked.
“Tomorrow, definitely.”
“What time tomorrow?” Jake said.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll call you.”
Inside the Night Owl, the band wrapped up “Good Time Music” and Sebastian said, “You folks stay groovy for just a few minutes and we’ll be right back.”
Somewhere in that elegant pearl-gray suit, Dave knew, Jake had a couple of joints, and his attention was already in the tiny dressing room downstairs where he and Sebastian would light them up.
Hardin saw it too. “I’ve got a new song,” he said.
“You got it on tape?” Jake said.
“I can sing it for you right now. ‘Got myself a red balloon, got a blue surprise…’”
“You know the deal, Timmy. No tape, no advance.”
Dave wanted to hear the rest of the song. Such was the power of Hardin’s charisma that Dave wondered if he had fifty dollars on him, which he didn’t.
“Listen,” Jake said, “I’ve got some business to attend to, but if you’re around later, we could do some work tonight.”
“Aw, man, not tonight. I just got back.”
“All right, then. Later.” Jake nodded to both of them and ducked back in the club.
Dave felt abandoned. If Hardin noticed his discomfort, he didn’t show it. “Did I ever tell you,” Hardin said, “about the first time I saw Susan, here in the Village?” This was the actress who worked under the name Susan Yardley. Hardin had met and fallen in love with her in LA, and she had inspired the sudden outpouring of songs. “She was living in this apartment over on Christopher, this must have been sixty-three, and there was a bar there on the ground floor. And I walked in there one day and she was dancing to the jukebox, all by herself. ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ was playing. God, she was beautiful. I just stood and watched her, never said a word to her. The minute I saw her in LA, I recognized her. I knew right then it was fate, man. Destiny.”
“Sinatra, was it?” Dave asked.
“Sure, man, Sinatra, who else?”
“That record just came out last year. August of sixty-four.”
Hardin shook his head in disgust. “Maybe it was Mathis. Maybe it was last year. You’re not hearing what I’m telling you, man. You got no romance in your soul.”
If that’s true, Dave thought, why do I think of Rachel and cry every time I hear “It’ll Never Happen Again”? And then he thought, what a tissue of lies we all make out of our pasts, pointed little narratives that prove something, the hand of God or the lack of God, how smart we were or how blind, how funny, how sad.
“I’ve got to meet somebody,” Hardin said. “Can you loan me five bucks?”
Dave knew where the money would go and still, for no reason that would hold up in daylight, gave him ten.
Hardin responded with a heart-melting smile. “Tomorrow,” he said, and Dave raised one hand in farewell as he disappeared into the crowd.
He briefly considered looking for Jake and Sebastian, then decided he’d had enough of the future for one night. The Gaslight was around the corner. Maybe Van Ronk was playing.
*
Early afternoon, the Saturday after Cole’s first dinner at the Montoya house. He sat in his parents’ living room and waited for Alex to pick him up. Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean were calling a Yankees game on tv, the monotony of their voices hypnotic, sleep-inducing. Cole’s father slumped in his recliner with drugstore reading glasses halfway down his nose, sketching some new piece of furniture that he would eventually build in the wood shop in the garage, with Cole’s grudging participation in the cleanup, sanding, staining, and all the other parts that his father didn’t have the patience for. Cole’s mother sat across the room, knitting yet another pair of slipper-socks.
Alex, being polite, rang the doorbell instead of honking from the driveway. Cole reluctantly brought him inside to run the gauntlet of his father’s disapproval. “Mom, Dad, this is Alex.”
Cole’s father looked at Alex over the top of his glasses. “Jeff says you’ve been a big help showing him the ropes at school.” It sounded like an accusation.
“It was nothing, really, sir.”
“No?” He glanced at Cole as if this confirmed his suspicions. To Alex he said, “And you play tennis?”
“I try, sir. I’m not as good as C— as Jeff.”
“I see.” He stared at Alex as if he expected further confessions.
Cole cleared his throat. “Uh, we need to get going, Dad.”
“You’re going to be home for supper?”
“No, I’m eating at Alex’s. I already cleared it with Mom. I’ll be home by ten.”
His father nodde
d brusquely and looked down at the sketchpad. Cole grabbed the paper bag full of stuff that he’d left by the door and hustled Alex outside.
“Holy shit,” Alex said. “Is he like that all the time?”
“No, most of the time he’s not in such a good mood.”
They drove to St. Mark’s, where Cole tried to normalize Alex’s strokes and get him to follow through. As soon as they started to keep score, Alex reverted. “I don’t like to lose,” Alex said. “I can’t help myself.”
“If you put discipline on top of your natural ability, you’d be really good. You could make the team.”
“Then I’d really have to get my ass in gear. Don’t worry, Cole, you’re not responsible.”
Still, Alex’s occasional efforts at good form threw him off enough for Cole to take both sets, 6–4 and 6–3.
Cole tried not to show his disappointment when the red T-Bird was not in the driveway, lest Alex give him one of his pained looks. They changed into swim trunks and Cole swam a few laps to work the kinks out. Then he did a flip turn and rolled over into an easy backstroke.
“Don’t you ever goof off?” Alex called out to him. Alex was in the deep end, both arms up on the rough concrete edge of the pool.
At his next turn, Cole hesitated, hands gripping the edge, feet planted against the tile. “What do you mean?”
“You know. Hang on the edge of the pool and look at the sky.”
“I never really thought about it.”
When he’d tired himself out, Cole made a few simple dives off the board and stayed underwater as long as he could, gliding the length of the pool. In his dreams he was able to open his mouth and breathe underwater.
Later, he showered in the guest bathroom upstairs and changed into clean clothes from his grocery sack. He’d brought the pint-sized Japanese reel-to-reel that had been his last year’s Christmas present, and he set it up to record Highway 61 and Bringing It All Back Home, The Rolling Stones’ Out of Our Heads and the Animals’ Animal Tracks.
