by Lewis Shiner
The following Friday, he and Alex and Madelyn drove to Dallas. The next day, Cole’s birthday, the extended Montoya family, sans Madelyn, flew to Guanajuato.
Cole would have preferred to stay in Austin with Madelyn, or even Dallas with Madelyn, but Susan was getting married in Guanajuato on the 30th and he and Alex and Jesús—the full version of El Mariachi Montoya—were scheduled to provide the music.
On their last night together in Austin, Madelyn had said, “It’ll do us good to be apart for a few days. ‘Absence doth sharpen love,’ as the poet said.”
“Shakespeare?”
“Thomas Overbury.”
“You’re tired of me,” Cole said, “because I don’t know a fraction of what you do. That’s why you don’t want to be around me anymore.”
“Thomas Overbury never gave me an orgasm,” she said, kissing him, and then she hesitated. “He may have come close a couple of times.”
They’d heard rumors that ut was considering a change to the school calendar, starting classes in August and having finals before Christmas. Until that happened, the threat of exams still hung over the holidays, so Cole took his books to Mexico. Between Madelyn and The Other Side, his grades had slipped. He needed to ace his finals to keep his promise to Montoya.
Cole had sacrificed his birthday celebration to the greater good of Susan’s wedding. Montoya promised a belated party after finals and Jesse’s graduation. In the meantime, Susan had brought two bridesmaids and Jesse had brought his best man, and while they all went to the Hotel Santa Fe to sleep, the Montoya house was full of frantic activity and the harsh sound of English from afternoon until late at night.
By Christmas night, Cole was desperate to get away, and he let Alex talk him into taking their guitars to El Jardín de la Unión. Cole’s biggest worry was that the girls from Swarthmore or Bryn Mawr or wherever the hell they came from would show up again. Strong as it was, he preferred to not have his resolve tested by the lavender scent and generous proportions of the body that still appeared periodically in his fantasies.
Being on the streets cured his nerves. He felt at home there in a way he never had in the US—the smells of flowers and decay, of car exhaust and fried onions and mop water on warm pavement, the distant sound of fútbol on tv and laughter and music, always music somewhere.
A gang of students in black academic robes had set up at the foot of the Teatro Colón, playing guitars and singing. «They’ll move on in a minute,» Alex said, and eventually they did. He and Cole stepped up behind them and went into their act. Most of the fifty-odd tourists on the steps stayed put, and a few new ones showed up. Despite himself, Cole noticed a pair of Mexican girls in eyeliner and jeans and big hoop earrings. One of them had a ragged hairstyle in the peculiar shade of orange that Peroxide produced in naturally black hair. Catholic girls gone bad, ripe for the picking.
Alex had seen them too and he began to target them with his attention. Cole played along for Alex’s sake, leaning back to back with him on the chorus of “Copa rota,” adding wolf howls to “Bésame mucho,” improvising Motown-style dance steps to “Quizás, quizás, quizás.” The audience ate it up, and sure enough, the girls hung around awkwardly as people came up to shake their hands and congratulate them.
Alex went over to talk to them and a minute later called out, «Órale, Cole, we’re going to have a beer. Are you coming?»
«I don’t think so.»
«You sure?»
«I’m sure.»
Alex turned to the orange-haired girl and said, «I apologize. My friend had a terrible accident and now his pinga doesn’t work anymore.»
She didn’t know whether to be shocked, sympathetic, or amused. «What happened?»
«A tragedy,» Alex said. «He fell in love.»
Alex disappeared into El Jardín de la Unión with the girls and Cole walked home. He sat on the patio and played through some blues changes, missing Madelyn, feeling distant from Alex. Three and a half more years of classes and cramming and exams bordered on the unthinkable. Madelyn, on the other hand, thrived on it and would be crazy not to go for a doctorate and end up as a professor herself. He couldn’t get those two pictures into the same frame.
He smelled smoke and looked up to see Susan sitting ten feet away with a cigarette. “Don’t stop,” she said. “You have completely picked up on my mood.”
Cole kept playing. “What’s wrong?” He had a good idea—Jesse’s real estate job in Oklahoma City meant leaving her family and all her friends behind.
She sighed dramatically. “I suppose all brides get cold feet before the wedding. Are you still prepared to run away with me?”
Before he could respond, she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t tease you. Madelyn is wonderful and I’m truly happy for you.”
“I like Jesse too,” Cole said.
“Everybody likes Jesse. Even I like Jesse.”
“You didn’t let me finish. I like Jesse, but he’s not right for you. He’s perfect for the person you pretend to be, not the person you really are.”
After a shocked silence, Susan said, “You say the most outrageous things to me sometimes. I don’t know why I put up with it. What made you such an expert on the human heart?”
“Not all hearts.”
“You never give up.”
“I can be in love with Madelyn and still care about you. I don’t know where they come from exactly, but you’ve got some inner demons. Jesse’s got some too, and I don’t think your demons are going to get along.”
Eventually she said, “Speaking of inner demons, where’s my brother?”
“We, uh, met a couple of girls and Alex went to have a beer with them.”
“So he and Denise aren’t…”
“No. I think she likes him well enough, but she’s not, like, The One or anything.”
“He doesn’t seem to care that much about anything lately. I’m worried about him.”
“Yeah,” Cole said. “Me too.”
“This family… I know we look like some kind of sitcom perfection to you. You don’t see the pressure underneath. Daddy doesn’t mean to do it, but the weight of his expectations, the immensity of his disappointment, it can crush you, or warp your personality.”
“So the only reason you’re marrying Jesse is to please your father?” She didn’t answer, so he said, “You can call it off, you know. Better that than be unhappy for the rest of your life.”
“Just play the guitar, will you? Play ‘Cielito lindo.’”
*
The wedding took place at La Catedral de San Diego, where they’d spent Christmas Eve. Cole sat with Alex and Jesús on high stools to the side of the front pews, all of them in dark suits. Susan had stuck with the obvious for the music—the “Here Comes the Bride” processional from Wagner’s Lohengrin, Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” for the recessional. Before and after, he and Alex played a few simple chords and left Jesús to do the heavy lifting. What with his musical duties and holding various mental snapshots of Madelyn in his mind, Cole managed to keep from getting over his head emotionally.
The heat and pressure Susan had talked about on Christmas night had metamorphosed her into marble. Her face was pale and immobile with makeup, and Cole guessed she’d also taken Valium. She’d always been small-boned, and in her old-fashioned white-corseted wedding dress she was greyhound thin. Her tense smile never varied during the ceremony, which involved a good deal of praying and one hymn that Jesús handled solo. Jesse managed to look both smitten and cocky, and Montoya had to wipe away a tear as he watched Susan and Jesse walk out of the church.
Back at the house, El Mariachi Montoya did their thing, to much dancing and applause. They were less ragged than the year before, while still some distance from professional. A good deal of cerveza Cuautémoc was on hand to make up the difference. Alex had invited his girlfriends from Christmas night, who blended without incident among the fifty or so other guests—guests that did not include, Cole noted with disappointment, Susan
’s mother.
By two am Alex had disappeared with his women. Jesse and Susan had long ago departed for their hotel and were headed to Acapulco in the morning. Cole, who had played a set of US top 40 hits with Alex in addition to the mariachi material, was worn out and had retired to the patio alone, leaving Jesús to hold the fort.
The night was cold after the crush of bodies indoors, and the stars glittered like pellets of ice in a vast emptiness. A dog yelped in the distance, high-pitched, desperate. Madelyn seemed like a figment of his imagination, and the new year ahead was a math problem he couldn’t solve. He’d been drinking all night and it hadn’t helped. Maybe, he thought, one more beer would do the trick.
1968
The first day of the new year came up gray and bitter cold, and the latest snowfall lay heaped on the sides of the streets, turning black from the exhaust fumes of the eternally honking cars.
San Francisco, Dave thought.
Why not?
Jake had moved earlier that winter. He’d been spending more and more time there and then one day he simply failed to come back. “You should come out,” he told Dave over the phone. “This is where it’s happening now. LA and New York are done.”
Dave still loved New York and always would. What he wanted to leave behind was the person he’d been here, the loser who gave up The Meteors to Tom Dowd, who’d run away from Crystal and from Sallie Rachel, who’d been bullied by Mitch Miller and Morgan Conrad and even the Columbia accountant who’d stripped him of his name.
If he moved to San Francisco he would be the Dave Fisher of the album cover credits: engineer, producer, maker of hit records.
Two things worried him. The first was the lack of career session musicians in San Francisco, which itself was due to his second concern, the lack of modern studios. Despite the fact that Ampex already had a prototype 16-track recorder, expected to be generally available by mid-year, San Francisco had only a single 8-track machine in the entire city.
For homework, Dave listened to records from the best of the San Francisco studios. From Golden State came the first Beau Brummels album and the Charlatans single that Jake had produced. From Coast, the Mojo Men and Jack Jones’s Dear Heart. From Columbia, the great We Five single and the final Kingston Trio albums. He strained to filter out the production and the performance and to hear only the quality of the equipment and the sound of the rooms.
On Sunday the 7th he flew out to listen for himself.
The three-hour time difference meant he was able to check into his hotel, change out of his suit, and make it out to the Fillmore Auditorium he’d heard so much about. A benefit was in progress for “Stop the Draft Week,” Phil Ochs headlining. The place was mobbed, and at first Dave wondered if somebody had put out a casting call for people dressed as hippies. The mad, dizzying variety of costumes he’d seen at the Longshoremen’s Hall two years ago had turned to formula: flowing hair past the shoulders, headbands and love beads, bell-bottomed jeans and sandals.
Bill Graham himself stood at the door taking tickets, and Dave took a second to introduce himself. “Dave Fisher!” Graham said. “I thought you were in New York.”
“I’m considering a change,” Dave said.
“Can you come by my office tomorrow afternoon? It’s downstairs here. We should talk.”
“Sure,” Dave said. “Absolutely.”
Inside the cavernous auditorium, Dave was assaulted by the loudest band he’d ever heard. They had only one guitar, a bass, and a drum set, yet the massive distortion, screaming feedback, and pounding double bass drums was the soundtrack to a relentless air raid. Dave retreated to a corner with his hands over his ears. He really wanted to see Phil Ochs, whom he remembered from the early days in the Village. He wasn’t sure he could hold out long enough. Before he quite made up his mind to leave, the band wrapped up their set to enthusiastic applause. Their name, they said, was Blue Cheer. Dave thought they shouldn’t spread it around.
Next up was a mediocre white R&B outfit called the Loading Zone. The competence of their horn section didn’t make up for their shortage of original material. They did get the dancers on their feet, reinforcing how different the local culture was from that of New York, down to the very way that the people moved.
Finally Ochs took the stage. He looked good, handsome and mischievous as ever. He had only his acoustic guitar for accompaniment, though his last album had featured complex arrangements that included strings and rock instruments. Ochs had ambitions as all-devouring as Dylan’s or Elvis’s, but the same lightning had never struck him. The failure was eating at him, Dave thought. He would play the opening chords to a song and then stop to talk, making with the self-deprecating humor, quoting from his bad reviews, throwing out despairing political quips. He talked about his love for John Wayne, even as he called him a “right-wing reactionary,” and Dave had sudden vision of Ochs in a cowboy outfit, his back to a dusty Utah cliff, firing pistols in both hands at the hordes of savage conformists, only to be turned away in the end from the supper table of chart success.
Dave left under a cloud of memories. Folk-rock was something that he understood, that he knew how to produce, and he wondered if, at the age of 32, he was already sliding from the cutting edge back onto the flat of the blade.
*
Late the next morning, Dave met Frank Werber at Columbia Recorders, home of the only 8-track in town. Werber had dark curly hair and a beard, a deep tan, and what Dave could only describe as a powerful life force. He wore a white turtleneck and a herringbone jacket with a flower in the lapel. The studio, as well as the entire flatiron-shaped Columbus Tower that sat above it, were only a part of the investments that Werber had made with the money that poured in from the Kingston Trio, whom he’d managed until their breakup the previous June. Another one was the Trident Restaurant across the bay in Sausalito, and he insisted on driving Dave there in his Mercedes 300sl, with the doors that lifted straight up like wings. Werber smoked a joint while he drove at reckless speed, talking Eastern philosophy and investments, race horses and pop music. He told Dave he thought Sallie Rachel’s record was “brilliant.” Then he said he was moving away from production because he was “tired of wiping musician’s asses.”
The Trident was immense and multileveled. A continuous, curving, wood-paneled interior with potted palms and ferns gradually stepped down to a dock with outdoor tables, which was where Dave and Werber ended up. The temperature had climbed into the upper sixties and a cool breeze lifted Dave’s thinning hair. A parade of stunning waitresses came by the table to say hi, one in full costume as a leftover Christmas elf, some in jeans and T-shirts, one in a sari and glitter, one in a gauzy white muslin shift. None of them, Dave noticed, were wearing bras.
“I hire them all myself,” Werber said. “We don’t have uniforms here, and we encourage the girls to go with the vibes, to be themselves. We get lots of applicants.” He smiled in a way that made Dave uncomfortable. Dave nodded and looked at the menu, whose heading read, “Positive energy projection is the trip.”
Werber also made it his duty to hire the chef, and the food turned out to be superb. Cooking was among Werber’s many skills, along with gold mining, scuba diving, commercial art, driving a cab, operating a ski lift, and untold others. He said that he’d learned to cook from his father, who’d used it to keep them alive in a concentration camp in Vichy France. Just as Dave’s credulity was feeling strained, Werber, unbidden, pushed back his sleeve to show Dave the number tattooed on his forearm.
Dave had seen his share of those numbers as a kid in Yonkers. He could never get used to the sight, and seeing it here on this clear, sunny day, in a fabulous restaurant full of sensual women, reminded him that comfort and safety and well-being were never more than provisional, subject to revocation without warning, and he decided he didn’t begrudge Werber his auditions of waitresses after all.
Werber picked up the check without ever making a sales pitch for the studio, and dropped Dave off at the Fillmore at three i
n the afternoon.
*
For Dave, sitting with Bill Graham was like being back in New York. Graham had a New York face, meaty, with a New York hard stare. Everything about him said that he was an intense, play-for-keeps kind of guy who happened, at the moment, to be on his best behavior. They talked for a few minutes about New York, about Sallie Rachel, about Phil Ochs, and then Graham got to the point.
“People are pushing me to expand the business. Start a record label, open a recording studio, get serious about artist management. I don’t know. For me, it’s always been about producing the live event. I don’t think I have the patience for the other stuff. But whether I like it or not, it’s going to happen, and soon. Top-notch recording studios, big name producers, record company offices. Only it’s going to happen with a San Francisco twist. They don’t want hit factories here, no Brill Buildings, no studio musicians. What they want is artistic freedom. They’re not interested in three-minute singles, they’re writing entire albums. The guy who can understand that, and still ride herd on them, bring a professional sensibility to bear on all this meandering self-expression, he’s going to be able to write his own ticket.”
“I don’t know if I’m that guy.”
“I think you could be. I remember you from when you were here with the Spoonful, the Sparkle Plenty show. I’ve been seeing your name. You’re a good engineer, you know how to make records sound good. And you’re a good producer. Your records all sound different, because you’re serving the artist. If I end up doing this label thing, you’re the kind of guy I’m going to hire.”
“And if you don’t do it?”
“Somebody else will. You’re thinking about moving out here? I wouldn’t hesitate.”
*
