11
For over an hour, Al Miller had been sitting in Mr. Knights small, modern waiting room. He wore his best suit, his best tie and shirt, his best shiny black shoes. So far there had been no sign of Mr. Knight; his office door remained shut, although now and then sounds could be heard.
My mind knows what my body doesn’t, Al thought. My mind knows that this is all a plot, a hoax. But my body is geared along another line; it thinks this is a grand climax. This is success. All its hormones were released—on purpose, by those who know how to do it. They have control of my body, he realized. Only this one tiny part of my mind looks down and sees. Sees the lies and the mechanism.
Even this long wait. It’s to make you more and more helpless. More dependent. Praying they’ll see you. When the girl says that Mr. Knight will see me, I’ll be glad to go in. And I’ll be so glad to take the job; I really will be. It won’t be simulated. Because by now there is an even worse possibility. That I’ll have done all this in vain, for nothing.
“Mr. Knight will see you now,” the girl said, from her desk.
At once, like a machine, he was on his feet. He wheeled smartly and strode through the open door, into Knight’s office.
There sat a man only slightly older than himself, but with a round, smooth, pink, shaved, double-chinned face. A man with plenty of flesh on him, well-dressed, with beautifully manicured nails; a good-looking man in an easy-going mood. A relaxed man who had nothing to worry about or be gloomy about.
“Sit down,” Knight said, indicating a chair.
Al sat down.
“How are you today?” Knight said.
“Fine, thanks,” Al said.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Knight said.
“That’s okay,” Al said.
“You’ve never had any experience with the record business,” Knight said, tapping his pencil reflectively.
“No,” Al said.
Knight pondered. All at once he raised his eyes and scrutinized Al with silent ferocity. The man’s light-colored eyes took on such power that Al felt paralyzed; he could only gaze helplessly back.
“Okay,” Knight said. “We’ll go along with you, boy.” He rose from his chair. “It’s a deal. We’re not looking for experience. We’re looking for the right man.” It all came out in a rush now. “We have an idea that the next big thing in the record business— hell, in popular music on TV or whatever else you find it—is going to be barbershop.”
“I see,” Al said.
“Barbershop,” Knight said. “But not the old harmonizing; the old sentimental crooning in unison. This will be barbershop with the new sound, electronic barbershop. With plenty of presence. It’ll sweep the nation. Modern science will supply what barbershop has always lacked, a modern quality to which modern people, like teenagers, could relate. We’re starting a new line. It’ll be called Harman-E. It’ll be barbershop, and it’ll carry everything else inside six months.” Seating himself on his desk, Knight scrutinized Al again. “Do you know,” he said, “where the great artists in this medium are going to come from?”
“No,” Al said.
“From small towns,” Knight said. “Right here in California. From towns like Modesto, Tracy, Vallejo. Not quite the country and not quite the city. The real backbone of America, where we all came from and where we all want to go back.”
“I was born in St. Helena,” Al said.
“I know,” Knight said. “That’s why you were picked. Do you sing?”
“No,” Al said.
“I do,” Knight said. “I sing barbershop. In fact I just got back from a barbershop balladeers’ convention in El Paso, Texas. Here.” He reached into his desk and brought out a glossy print, which he handed to Al.
The print showed Knight wearing a striped old-fashioned vest, along with three other men, all dressed exactly the same way. Each man held a derby hat in his hand.
“My group,” Knight said. “We sing three nights a week, for veterans’ organizations, hospitals, private parties, kids’ groups. And my wife—” Again he held out a print for Al to see. This one showed four young women wearing taffeta gowns, holding tiny parasols. “The one on the end is Nora,” Knight said. “The ear is an oscilloscope. Did you know that? It can detect sounds only two cycles a second apart. Yes, that’s a fact. Our music is tempered. Bach did that. What barbershop does is go back to the untempered music of Renaissance polyphony. You read barbershop from bottom to top, you know. Not from left to right. What we strive to do is get the chords to ring. That takes about five years of practice. A chord rings when the voices blend at no more than two cycles apart. The sounds reinforce. Here, I’ll show you.” He walked over to a large console phonograph in the corner of the office. “This group,” he said, as he picked up a long playing record and put it on the turntable, “won the International Barbershop Championship in 1959. The Aristotelians.”
He put the record on. It was “When You Wore a Tulip.”
As he listened, Al tried to tell why it sounded so bad. At first he thought that it was because it was so loud. Knight had turned the volume all the way up, and the office rattled and vibrated. But that was not the reason, because Al had often sat in bars listening to loud jukeboxes, and he had never felt this before; he had never been physically sickened by sound in this fashion. At last he realized that it was the piercing quality of the voices. It did something to the fluid of his ears; it made him dizzy and unsteady. Even after the piece ended, the disorder in his system remained; he had to sit gazing down, keeping himself immobile.
The sound had penetrated as pure vibration, as pure disturbance of the air. It was sound reduced to—as Knight had said— cycles per second, reinforced sound emanating from four vocalizing simps who had managed to tune themselves to the exact same pitch, intervals apart, and then this sound had been reinforced by all the modern electronic gadgets, sound chambers and all the rest, so that in the end it bore no relation to what the performers had done, bad as it was. The original sound could have been escaped; but this final product, he realized, would get a person through concrete and sandbags and steel. It would follow him into the bomb-shelter and even the grave. It was, as Knight said, the natural next success for the popular music media; perhaps it would prove to be the final success, the ultimate success. The tune itself had no merit to start with; the singers were amateurs, probably men like Knight himself, well-fed, optimistic, with three evenings a week to devote to barbershop singing after their dinners, after their regular jobs were over. And all, of course, lived in small towns.
“The overtones,” Knight was saying. “The harmonics. Thats what the Budapest String Quartet once in a while achieves. They’re working with fretted instruments.” Standing at the phonograph, he shut the turntable off. “Ever heard anything like it?”
“No,” Al said.
“Not like the old barbershop, is it? Not the Mills Brothers all over again.” Putting the record away, Knight turned toward Al. “What do you think of it?” He eyed Al seriously.
Al said, “It’s the worst crap I ever heard in my entire life.”
The serious expression on Knight’s face did not change in the slightest. “You’re right,” he said. “You put it exactly right. But you’re missing a point. It’s good because it’s so bad. There’s a lot of time and a lot of talent and ingenuity involved in what you heard. A lot of heartbreak and sweat went into producing that sound. It’s there in the sound, too; you can hear it. This stuff wasn’t arrived at by chance; it wasn’t just tossed out for want of something better. It’s not mediocre, Al. This sound is something you’ll remember. You won’t be able to get it out of your mind. Six, ten weeks from now that sound’ll still be there inside your head. It made an impression. A mediocre thing makes no impression; it’s forgotten as soon as it’s donei You think you can forget the Aristotelians singing ‘When You Wore a Tulip’? Don’t kid yourself. You won’t forget it. And that’s given this item something that insures it being a best seller, something wit
hout which there is no popularity on the market today. Identity. This sound has identity. When the Aristotelians sing ‘When You Wore a Tulip,’ you know what it is; you couldn’t mistake it for anything else. Yes, it’s bad. It’s so bad that it’s an achievement that ranks with—well, say, with Al Jolson or Johnny Ray or any other of the greats. With the Andrews Sisters.”
“I see,” Al said.
“Do you see?” Knight said. “You use the term ‘bad.’ You call something ‘bad’ that’s going to enter the hearts of Americans everywhere and become a part of their lives. Is that your idea of bad? Something that’ll give pleasure and a moment of relief from the worries and fears of this H-bomb age of ours? That’s a funny idea of what ‘bad’ is, Al. What do you call ‘good’? Something that adds to the fears? Something that makes our lives a little bit harder to bear?”
There was silence.
“These guys,” Knight said, “the Aristotelians—I know them personally; they’re all good friends of mine—got a lot of pleasure out of making this record. They’re not intellectuals. They didn’t go to school; they didn’t read Kant. They’re just good, simple, nice guys who love to get together in the evenings and sing. And we’re going to pass their pleasure around and share it, by pressing their harmonizing. That’s our business. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what you’ll be here for, if you see fit to join us. We’re not trying to change the world. We’re not educators or reformers. We’re supplying pleasure, not instruction. Is that bad?”
Al said, “No. That’s good.”
“Yes, that’s good,” Knight said. “What these boys have done is good, good for people. That’s the only good we know. When professional musicians hear this, they flip. They do. You should see their expressions. It’s worth watching. They know they’re hearing sounds that disappeared hundreds of years ago. Sounds they thought they’d never live to hear. Now, here’s what we’re going to do with you, Al, here at Teach. We’re going to send you up into the small towns that you know so well, and you’re going to sit in on the different barbershop groups until you find us the ones who amount. Then you’re going to get in touch with our A. and R. man, and we’ll get a team up there with an Ampex tape-recorder and some kind of a piece of paper, and we’ll get them down on tape.”
Al said, “You think I have the background for that?”
“For something new,” Knight said, “really new, there’s no such thing as background.”
“I’m no musician,” Al said. “Why don’t you hire a musician?”
“This has nothing to do with musicianship. We’re recording sound. Like sports-car exhausts, which has been one of our bestselling items, incidentally. Sounds Out of Sebring. You know, it’s been proved that beans grow fastest when a record of sports-car exhaust sound is played as a background.”
“What comes next?”
“Symphonic,” Knight said. “They grow well to that, too.”
“I think you’ve got the wrong person,” Al said. “All I know is the used-car business.”
“The job pays five-fifty a month,” Knight said. “Plus gas and oil for the car, naturally. After ninety days, if all works out, the base pay goes up to six, then after six months up to six-fifty. Do you want it, or do you not want it? If not, I’ve got a lot to do.” Knight returned to his desk and reseated himself; he at once placed papers in front of him and began to go over them.
“I’ll take it,” Al said.
It was a better job than he had expected. And at better pay. It was not a salesman’s job after all.
And then he realized that he had been lowballed. Another autodealer’s trick had been worked on him; they had made him think it would be worse than it was, so that when they had broken the actual news to him he had been so happily surprised that he had taken their offer.
Nor was that all. Why had they hired him? Why did they want him? Because he had come from St. Helena. That was the extent of it. He had nothing else to offer that interested them, no talent or experience; only his rural background.
“Suppose it turns out I lied,” he said suddenly. “Suppose I wasn’t born in St. Helena; suppose I was actually born in Chicago.”
Knight said, “We checked up.”
“Is that all you see in me?” Al said. “Isn’t there anything else?” It seemed terribly important.
“You know those little towns,” Knight said. “Point Reyes, Tracy, Los Gatos, Soledad. That’s your element.” He riffled through papers. “And you know those back roads. You won’t get lost. Those county roads are murder. Nothing but gravel and potholes. That’s the kind of roads you grew up on.” He fixed his intent gaze on Al. “Tracking down these barbershop groups in these little towns means a lot of driving. Days of nothing but driving.” Returning to his papers he added, half to himself, “And if your car gets stuck or breaks down you can fix it yourself. You know how to do that.”
After a time, Al said. “When should I start?”
“Monday,” Knight murmured. “We’ll see you then. Check in here at nine in the morning. Ask for Bob Ross. He’ll be in charge of the project. Ross is Harman’s son-in-law. This is Harman’s great project, the one he’s giving his entire backing to.”
“I thought he was backing the early-classical project,” Al said.
“The Antiqua label? The public isn’t ready for it. Maybe next year.” It was obvious that Knight was through talking to him; he had become involved with his paperwork. There was nothing to do but leave, and so presently Al shut the office door after himself.
* * *
Although it seemed to Al a calamity that he had been given a job because he had been born in St. Helena, his wife took a different attitude. She considered it a stroke of luck.
“Suppose you hadn’t been born in St. Helena,” Julie said, when he discussed it with her that night. “You wouldn’t have gotten the job. Or suppose they weren’t interested in a project of recording music in small towns.” She went on, with rapture; the job appealed to her because it meant that he would be able to get out of the Bay Area. “Maybe we can settle up around Sonoma,” she said. “I always wanted to live up there. Or up around the Russian River. I like to be near the water.”
“They humiliated me,” Al said.
“No that’s all in your mind. You project your own motives onto the whole world; just because you’re in the used-car business you see everyone in terms of used-car sales tricks. They had one job for you, and then that project didn’t go through, so they were good enough to dig into your background and find another faculty that you possessed that they could make use of. I think it bodes good. It sounds as if they’re resourceful, intelligent people. I’m very anxious to meet Mr. Harman.”
Al said, “Maybe I’ll be able to strike it rich in Arroyo del Seco.” That was as small a town as he could think of, offhand.
“And you’ll be working directly with the boss’s son-in-law,” Julie said. “That means you might be able to rise right up to the top. It sounds as if the road will be open to you.”
“By killing him?” he said. “And taking his place?” It sounded like something out of Macbeth.
“By immediately making yourself indispensable,” Julie said. “That’s the key to success. I read that in an article in some women’s magazine; wait—I’ll go get it.” She began to rummage about the apartment.
There is no success, Al Miller thought, in a job that requires a man to search through one small town after another, searching for the worst possible singing groups that exist on the face of the earth. And then, when the worst possible singing groups have been turned up, they will be recorded with the worst possible modern sound techniques. He saw himself wandering farther and farther, in ever expanding circles, until at last he was not even in California; his search for the worst possible singing groups would extend into Oregon and then into Idaho and finally into Wyoming and New Mexico and Nebraska and Mississippi, and at last over the whole United States. He would uncover, at last, in a final triumph, the worst of
the worst; he would be responsible for unearthing the singing group so bad that no worse one could ever be found, no matter how long the search went on. And then he could retire. He would have done his job for his country and race.
“Poor Doctor Mudd,” he said aloud.
“What?” Julie said, pausing in her search.
“Tootie Dolittle’s dog,” Al said. “He missed out. What he does isn’t audible. It can’t be recorded.” In neither new sound nor old, he thought. A balloon-bunting dog could no longer become part of the American way of life because he could not make it with hi-fi.
If Doctor Mudd could hum spirituals while he bunts the balloon, Al thought, he might have a chance. But that’s asking the impossible. For even the electronics industry there has to be a limit.
And poor Tootie Dolittle, he thought. Imagining that the key to success lay in having a mess of glamour. No wonder Tootie had missed out. Those days were gone. The exotic, the striking, was no longer wanted. Now it was all down home. It was all just folks. Success lay in the hands of the plump, smiling amateur girl-trios, who wore first-prom gowns and who swayed back and forth as they sang “Down By the Old Mill Stream.” Tootie’s mistake had been to not be born in St. Helena or Montpellier, Idaho, or some such place. He had been doomed from the start.
And as for me, Al thought, I almost missed out. But now I’ve been shown the way.
On Monday morning Al Miller put in his appearance at the Harman organization. A receptionist sent him on in to an office on the second floor, where he found himself facing two men, one of which was a recording engineer, the other of which was Harman’s son-in-law, Bob Ross. They had between them an Ampex tape-recorder, battery powered, and aluminum fifteen-inch reels of tapes, mikes, and playback amplifiers and portable speakers.
Ross wore a woolly brown suit with a vest, a narrow tie, and massive glasses. He greeted Al in a deep voice, almost an announcer’s voice, which struck Al as quite a contrast to his chubby, almost babyish face. Certainly he was neatly dressed, but he was so badly proportioned that he looked to Al like an overgrown adolescent. He had, too, a scholarly, overserious, boyish manner.
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland Page 15
