by Lewis Shiner
“I was never lucky before,” Cole said, holding her in the dark, his hands amazed all over again by the softness and contours of her skin, his nose full of her scents. “I’m making up for it now.”
“Hold that thought,” Madelyn said. But he was too exhausted and the world slipped away.
*
The next morning, as Cole helped load the Montoyas’ luggage, Alex’s mother took him aside. “I hope you won’t be mad. I told your mother you were staying with us. You don’t have to see her if you don’t want to…”
“If it was just her, it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“She understands that.” She hesitated. “I know it’s hard for you. But if you could find your way clear to letting her come over and see you… not so much for her sake as for yours. Hardening your heart can get to be a habit.”
“I’ll think about it,” Cole said.
His mother called in the early afternoon. “Steve thinks I’m at a party with my bridge club. I don’t have long. Can I come over? Or I could meet you somewhere. And I want to meet Madelyn.”
She rang the doorbell ten minutes later. When Cole hugged her, he found it hard to let go. He introduced Madelyn, and his mother took Madelyn’s hands in both of her own and started to cry.
The three of them sat in the living room, Cole and Madelyn together on the couch, as Cole had arranged it, his mother in an armchair facing them. Cole didn’t have a lot to say that they hadn’t already covered in their Sunday phone calls. The conversation was more of an excuse to make eye contact and read each other’s body language.
After half an hour, the pitch that Cole dreaded finally came. “You know how your father is. He would never admit how much he misses you. He does, though. If you could just come by the house for ten minutes, make the first move, I know it would mean so much to him.”
The warmth Cole had been feeling dissipated and his defenses locked back into place, with a sound in his head like a trunk slamming shut. He shook his head.
“You’re both so stubborn,” his mother said. “If you would only give a little.”
Madelyn, who’d been mostly silent until then, said, “Mrs. Cole, with all due respect, I don’t think this is a case of my husband being stubborn. I think, given any chance at all, kids grow up loving their fathers and wanting to be around them. I think this is a case of his having been repeatedly hurt to the point that he couldn’t take it anymore. And I don’t think blaming him is a productive avenue of conversation.”
His mother bristled at first, in spite of Madelyn’s quiet, reasonable tone, then looked down at her hands, where they lay knotted in her lap. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Cole squeezed Madelyn’s hand.
His mother stood up. “I should go. I don’t want Steve to get suspicious.”
They walked her out to her car, Cole shivering in the chill. “Thank you for seeing me,” she said. It was a terribly sad thing for her to say. Cole hugged her and he and Madelyn watched her drive away.
Cole said, “I don’t think anybody ever stood up for me like that before. Thank you.”
“Get used to it,” Madelyn said. “Nobody messes with my man. Now come inside. It’s freezing out here.”
1969
Madelyn’s first day at Stanford was January 13. She had an hour bus ride from San Francisco south to Palo Alto and another hour back, which she spent reading. With the help of a phone call from Kindred, she’d managed to get all her classes scheduled on mwf, leaving her free to work six-hour shifts at the gallery on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Cole worried that it was too much; he still failed to comprehend what it meant to be a lifelong overachiever.
She’d been to the campus for interviews, placement testing, and orientation, but on that first day of classes it dazzled her all over again with its arched and porticoed Spanish architecture and red tile roofs, its palm trees and ordered gardens and pristine lawns, where she felt completely safe for the first time since she’d fallen in love with Cole. And though she hated to admit it, a part of her was reassured by the relative conservatism of the students, the boys in button-down shirts and V-neck sweaters, the girls in pleated skirts and Mary Janes.
In each of her five classes she sat in the front row and asked questions and took careful notes. She wondered if Cole felt the same way when he took the stage, excited and confident, filled with a sense of rightness, of doing what she’d been placed on Earth to do.
*
That same Monday, Cole and the band went into Pacific Recorders in San Mateo with Dave Fisher. Though it was halfway to Palo Alto and had only been open for four months, Pacific had already become the studio of choice for local bands. The owner had cut a deal with somebody at the nearby Ampex headquarters and had scored only the third mm1000 16-track recorder in any studio in the world.
Studio 1 was 50 feet long and half that wide, with a 20-foot ceiling. Everything had a fresh-out-of-the-box smell of paint and camphor and rosin and plastic. The mike stands all worked without gaffer’s tape or pieces of coat hangers, and the carpet was free of stains. Dave expressed some concern about the room being small, the ceiling being too low and acoustically dead. Cole only knew that it was twice the size of the room where he’d recorded “Laura Lee.”
Cole and Lenny had taken their guitars to Dave’s apartment a couple of times to pick the songs for the demo. Dave was 15 years older than Cole. He’d listened to big band radio broadcasts as a child, been in grade school during World War II. He was very much a New Yorker, from his accent to a hint of aggression in his manner. He told great, self-deprecating stories, had been at ground zero for Dylan, had recorded the Spoonful and Tim Hardin. Cole was smitten.
In the studio, Dave spread them out, isolated them with waist-high rolling partitions, and put microphones right up on the speakers of their amps. He put mikes on each of Tommy’s drums, plus one for the hi-hat and two overhead to catch the cymbals in stereo, painstakingly mixing them down to four separate tracks in the control room. He’d warned them that he’d never worked with 16 tracks before, but then hardly anyone had, and it looked to Cole like he knew what he was doing.
As they said goodnight outside the studio, Dave intoned, “And the placing of the mikes and the setting of the levels were the morning and the evening of the first day.” Cole was too tired to be appropriately amused.
In the late morning and early afternoon of the second day they did four full takes and twice that many broken ones of “Mariner.” Dave ordered in some tacos and they sat in a circle on the studio floor. “It’s like an operating room or something in here,” Cole said. “I’m not feeling the mood.”
“What this place gives us,” Dave said, “is the freedom to make mistakes. You can get your fingers stuck in the strings, and we can still come away with good tracks from the rest of the band. So I want all of you guys to loosen up. If you screw up, keep playing. Or wait a couple of seconds and get your head right before you come in again. Have fun with it. Fool around a little if that’s what you have to do. What I need is a performance that feels good. We can fix the technical stuff later.”
After lunch they found a compromise on the lighting between too harsh and too dark to see. The next take was a complete fiasco, yet they played it all the way through as ordered, goofing on it, all of them laughing by the end. Over the squeal of the rewinding tape, Dave said, “That’s the stuff. That sounded like real human beings out there. From the top now, don’t think about it. Take fourteen.”
Take fourteen was a keeper, and they moved immediately to “Doesn’t Anybody Know Your Name,” one of Cole’s early numbers whose storyline he and Lenny had updated from a teenage crush to an identity crisis, with a mild guitar freakout in the middle. They had a good basic take in two hours, broke for dinner, and came back to nail the last of the demo songs, their cover of “Wang Dang Doodle,” on the first try.
On the third day they started overdubs. Listening to “Mariner,” Lenny said, “I’m not crazy about my part on the double lead.�
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“What’s wrong with it?” Cole asked. During one of their road trips supporting the Airplane, Jorma had explained recoupment. Which meant that you didn’t collect any royalties until the record company had been reimbursed for all your recording costs. Even though they hadn’t signed with anyone yet, Cole knew that every hour in the studio would eventually cost them money.
“I can’t explain it. I’ve just got a better idea. Can I try it?” Lenny was asking Dave, not Cole.
“Sure,” Dave said.
“I like the one he did yesterday,” Cole said. Gordo and Tommy ignored the opportunity to back him up.
“We’ll keep that one too, for now,” Dave said. “Don’t worry.”
An hour and three tries later, Lenny had laid down a new harmony lead. “Nice,” Dave said when they played it back.
Lenny looked at Cole. “Well?”
“It’s a better part, I agree.”
“But…?”
“Something’s missing. A spark. Passion. Spontaneity. Something. I don’t know.”
“You’re jealous because my guitar part now kicks your guitar part’s ass.”
He and Lenny had always kept up a certain amount of mock-aggressive banter, but Cole missed the fun in this one. He bit back his own automatic “fuck you” because he wasn’t sure how it would come out.
“Play it again,” Lenny said to Dave. Dave did, and Lenny nodded along. “Perfect,” Lenny said at the end. “I love sixteen tracks. How often in life do you get to make perfection?”
They had moved on, Cole saw.
“Speaking of perfection,” Gordo said, “there’s a bad bass note in the bridge. Can I fix that too?”
“Be my guest,” Dave said.
Cole looked at Tommy. “Et tu, Tommy?”
“What?”
“You want to do the drums over?”
“Why, is there something wrong with them?”
“Forget it,” Cole said.
At least Gordo was quick. After he patched his bass part, Dave said, “What would you think about a single sustained feedback note behind the double lead? A ton of reverb on it. We could maybe pan it back and forth between the channels.”
While Cole tried to imagine it, Lenny said, “A harmonic, decaying into feedback. Let’s try it.”
Cole sat and watched for another half-hour while Lenny worked out the part and dubbed it in. After that Tommy chipped in the idea of a slowly rising roll with mallets on the floor tom, building with the feedback, and then everybody except Cole was having ideas. Dave vetoed most of them, keeping three or four that took another two hours to build into the track, including a few high notes on the grand piano in the far corner of the studio.
They went out for lunch before starting the vocals, and as they walked, Lenny fell into step with Cole and said, “What’s eating you, man?”
Cole thought it should have been obvious. Eventually he took a breath and said, “Feeling left out, I guess.”
“That’s by your choice if you are. Everybody else is getting into it.” When Cole didn’t answer, he said, “I think you’re pissed off because it’s not the Cole Show in there today. I think you kind of forgot there’s four people in this band, and two of us were in it a long time before you were.”
“How long have you been sitting on that little grievance?”
“A while now. Who gives a shit? That song sounds great. That’s what matters. We did that, the four of us, especially you and me, who wrote it. I’m so proud I can hardly stand it, and I wish you’d stop being a pain in the ass and be proud with me.”
What if he’s right? Cole thought. What if the song is better with the overdubs and the careful, calculated harmony guitar part?
In the five years since The Beatles had reinvented rock music, one standard after another had been washed away, from the Brill Building professional tunesmiths to the three-minute single. Now there was fm radio and the concept album, and new technologies from stereo lps to 8-track cartridges to 16-track recorders, from fuzz tones to wah-wah pedals to electric sitars. Until today, Cole had happily ridden the tidal wave that had drowned Patti Page and Perry Como and Arthur Godfrey. Now he saw that the wave had grown too big to stop, that before long it would wash away “Liar, Liar” by the Castaways and “Shout” by the Isley Brothers and even Cole himself, 19 years old and already clinging to a past that hadn’t had a proper chance to be over with yet.
*
Cole surrendered to the inevitable and joined in the sanding and detailing and shellacking of their three demo tunes. He didn’t have the gift for it that Lenny had discovered in himself, but when he looked on it as a game, he was able to play it with a modicum of grace.
At midnight on Thursday, Dave finished a rough mix and dubbed it down to audio cassettes for each of them. Cole drove the band home in the hearse and then, too keyed up to sleep, got into bed next to Madelyn and tried to hold still.
“How’d it go?” she said into her pillow.
He hadn’t had a chance to talk to her since they’d been recording. “I’ve got a cassette.”
She sat up. “Play it.”
He had a Radio Shack cassette machine the size of a fat paperback book that he used to record song ideas. He brought it into bed and put in the tape. “The quality is not going to be that great, I mean, it’s a crappy little player…”
“Hush,” she said.
When it was over, she made him play it again.
“Oh, Cole, it’s beautiful. It’s so… finished and professional. It sounds like a million dollars.” She squinted at him. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t sound quite… human.”
“Neither does Sergeant Pepper.” She kissed him on the forehead. “Stop fretting. It’s wonderful. I am so proud of you.” She glanced at the clock and shook her head. “If I didn’t have to get up in four hours, I would show you how much.” She turned her back to him and, as Cole listened, her breathing evened out and she was asleep again.
*
Cole was starstruck when Dave announced that he would send the tape to Ahmet Ertegun first. After that, he found it hard to think about anything else, and pestered Dave every few days for news. When the call came, however, it came from Bill Graham, in his Shady Management guise. “I just talked with a contract guy at Cotillion Records. They want to sign you.”
“Cotillion? Who’s that?”
“Specialty imprint at Atlantic. Mostly southern R&B acts, but they want to diversify, they tell me. Don’t sweat it, it’s the same distribution as Atlantic or Atco. They offered forty thousand advance. I talked them up to fifty, to cover my cut, and I think that’s as high as they’ll go.”
Cole had to sit down. “Fifty thousand dollars? For real?”
“For real. Dave Fisher to produce, of course.”
“They liked the demo?”
“What the fuck do you think, they pay fifty grand for a band they don’t like? Talk to the other guys, call me back, let me know you’re all good with this, so I don’t have to make you find a new manager.”
*
If it was good enough for Ahmet Ertegun, Cole thought, it was good enough. When the band went into the studio in March, he no longer fought the 16-track perfectionism, and when the time came to bring out La Pelirroja for “Gold,” his song to Madelyn, and for their cover of “Cielito lindo” that ended the album, he did the endless retakes Dave wanted until the notes shimmered like diamonds on black velvet.
*
By mid-April, with the end of the semester in sight, Madelyn wanted nothing more than to sleep. Not for a night or two, but for at least a week where she only got out of bed to eat and use the bathroom. She longed to read a book that no one had assigned her, to sit in the sand at Ocean Beach and watch the waves curl and break without reviewing a mental checklist. She wanted to see the band when they were in town, to go to the Airplane mansion and meet Grace Slick, to make love and not have one or the other of them immediately pass out from exhaustion. Lately
there had been too little time to see to her own satisfaction, or too much pressure for her to get there, despite Cole’s attempts.
The band was on the road half the time, enough that when they were around, Cole no longer fit into her routine. She talked to him more on long distance than she did when they were in the same apartment. So when she got home from class to find him waiting, failing to completely hide a cocky grin, she knew something was up.
“Let’s walk,” he said.
She’d walked the length of the campus twice already that day. “Can’t we talk in the bedroom? I’m beat.”
“We don’t have to go far,” he said. He was already on his feet, not to be denied. Madelyn dropped her books on the dining room table and let him take her hand.
“Cole, what is going on?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Can’t a guy take a walk with his wife?” Despite the grin, his voice had an edge that hadn’t been there six months ago.
She went along in silence as they descended the stairs and turned onto Oak Street. Cole suddenly stopped. “Hey, check it out,” he said.
An mgb, lavender-gray, top down, was parked between a beat-up Dodge Dart and a rusting vw microbus. “It’s gorgeous,” Madelyn said, “but whoever owns it is an idiot to leave it sitting out like that.”
Cole had dropped her hand and walked into the street to peer into the passenger side. The car was set up for the US, with left hand drive, she noted. Probably a ’66, just before the Mark ii, and in perfect shape.
“I mean,” Cole said, “this is pretty much your dream car, right?”
“I suppose. If I had time for dreams.”
“We ought to steal it.”
Cole had his hands on the passenger door. “Come on, Cole, get away from there. You’re going to get in serious trouble.”
“Don’t you want to at least sit in it? See how it feels? Who knows when you’ll get another chance like this?”
He opened the passenger door and got in.
“Cole, are you insane? Get out of that car!”
