“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, Kurt, I know. But what you don’t seem to get is that the music is only part of it. Your music is good—really good—I’ve never doubted that. But, really, music is not a very big part of this business. That sucks. But it’s true.”
“Look, since we’re all getting real here,” says EJ, “how do we know you’re not just looking to make another quick pop with another hundred K?”
“EJ, you’re too fucking smart for your own good. In this fucking business, if someone comes to you and says, ‘I brought you five hundred grand, but I’m going to take a hundred—just twenty percent,’ you say, ‘Thanks for my four hundred K, where do I sign?’ You guys want a hundred percent of nothing? Keep your hundred percent of nothing. You want eighty percent of something? Quit fucking around and sign this fucking thing.”
“Good enough for me,” the Jovi says, reaching for a pen.
Kurt puts out his hand and pushes the Jovi back in his seat. “Who will own the songs?” Kurt asks, and begins pacing between the window and Felder’s desk.
“You will, and they will. There’s a part of publishing that you can’t sell—that’s the law—you’ll always own that. The other part? They are buying that from you.”
“I heard that the Beatles did this, and now they can’t get their songs back. Fucking Michael Jackson owns their songs and puts them in commercials!”
“Kurt, that’s the Beatles.”
“I don’t want anyone to own my songs. I don’t want to be watching TV and see… hear my song on some sinful commercial for sex or drugs.”
“Kurt, you’re broke. You owe Bill Wellington twenty grand. One album! You have hundreds of songs. You’ve played them for me. They’re good songs, too.”
Kurt stops pacing, sits on the arm of the leather sofa, and presses his fingers into his jaw.
“Your wife, Kurt, she’s back at the mall, working. Your car barely runs—you can buy another one! Your jaw—what about your jaw?” Felder asks.
Kurt lifts his head. “Those are some of my best songs.”
“Kurt.” Felder pauses and tries to look sensitive. “Are you feeling okay?”
Kurt rubs his temples and stares at the floor. “Why do people keep asking me that? I’m fine.”
“Are you taking your meds?”
Kurt looks up and the veins bulge in his neck. “I’m off the meds for the band—for the fans—I’m doing it because I’m the best fucking singer, the best fucking songwriter, in the whole fucking world. This is REAL!”
“Kurt, I’m just trying to help—”
“You’re not my fucking father! You can’t tell me to—”
“Kurt, if not for yourself, do it for your wife.” Felder holds out a pen to Kurt.
“That’s it! God gave me those songs. I can’t sell them. I’m not doing it.”
“Jovi? Sven? Eric? Why are you guys so fucking quiet over there? Talk some sense into this guy.”
“I am only on for one song,” Eric says. “My vote doesn’t count for much on this.”
“Same,” Sven adds.
“I’d sign the fucking thing, but Kurt is always saying they’re his songs. I guess that’s the way he wants it,” the Jovi says.
“Kurt, don’t do this to me, don’t do this to yourself. We need a little help right now. This could be it.”
“No. They’re our songs.” Kurt lifts his arms toward the rest of the band in a strange air hug. “This is the Beatles, right here.”
Felder shakes his head. “What can I do with you guys? What can I fucking do?” Felder stands up, turns toward the window in disgust, and yanks at his hair.
The intercom beeps. “Adam, it’s Abe, Gabe, and Dave from the Ill-Bred Boyz on line one. They say it’s urgent.”
Felder wheels around and throws a brown envelope into Kurt’s lap. “Pick your fucking album cover. I don’t fucking care—tell Carol which one you like.” Then Felder puts on his headset and motions for Thunderstik to leave his office. “What’s up boy-eeez?”
The band walks out of his office, leaving him in there with his MTV Astronaut and his platinum records and the Ill-Bred Boyz. We stand in front of Carol’s desk. Kurt opens the envelope and pulls out two mock-ups of the album. One has a screaming ghostly negative of someone who looks very much like Kurt, a hideous face of rage taking over the entire canvas. The other is an all-white album with the word “Thunderstik” in a brown Western font in the middle, then an illustration of a lever-action Winchester 1873 below that.
“Dude. This is so cool,” Eric says, and holds up the white album. Everyone else agrees.
“I like this one.” Kurt holds up the screaming specter.
“Dude, that one’s kind of depressing,” Sven says.
“Look, man—this one looks like our music—that one, I don’t even know what that’s all about.”
“Thunderstik—that’s the name of the band. You made it up. That’s what the Indians called the rifle, a thunderstick, because it was a stick that made a sound like thunder,” Eric says.
Kurt looks a little confused.
“You didn’t know that?” Sven asks.
“I knew it. But I just liked the name. Our band has nothing to do with guns or the Old West. It’s this one.” Kurt hands the screaming ghost to Carol and walks away. Then he turns at the door. “THE ILL-BRED BOYZ? THAT’S NOT EVEN REAL MUSIC. THEY’RE GONNA BE HERMAN’S HERMITS. WE ARE GONNA BE THE BEATLES. PEOPLE ARE GOING TO FORGET THOSE GUYS EVER EXISTED!”
Carol is a little puzzled. Kurt tries to slam the door, but it is an office door with a regulator box on the top that makes it open or close very slowly. He struggles with it for a second, then stomps down the hall.
Up from the beach, about a half mile from Windansea on Gravila Street, there is a small house with a Spanish tile roof and stucco walls, hardwood floors, and a large, round, sunken tub. The front yard has soft sporadic grass beneath a broad shade tree. In the backyard, which gets more sun, a thicker green grows. Next to the main house, there is a little casita that once was a garage. Inside is a small mixing board, five electric guitars, a Marshall head, a Hi-Watt cabinet, and the Jovi, who is crouching down over a microphone, singing in his quiet, raspy voice with an acoustic guitar in his lap. Tape moves slowly from one turning wheel to the next. A red light blinks.
In the yard, the sound of wind, then wind chimes, then Sophie, her voice sparkling with happiness. “Bobby? Bobby? Are you out there?” The Jovi hears nothing. His eyes are closed. He’s trying to hit the high notes in a song about feelings. Sophie walks in, her legs long and toned. She pushes a blonde curl behind her ear. “There you are.”
He stops singing, takes off his headphones, pushes the stop button and smiles at her. She folds the cloth of her nightgown in her hands; the material slides along her brown skin from her knees to her thighs past a small patch of blonde hair to her navel. She looks down. “Kiss her.”
“Yes!” The Jovi puts down his acoustic. He brushes his lips against her skin, rising to her breasts, to her neck, to her jaw, to her lips, then sinking back down.
“No, silly! Our daughter. Kiss our daughter.”
“Right. Right.” He moves his lips to the center of Sophie’s stomach. He looks up at Sophie rimmed in blue. “See how much happier you are when you don’t drink – don’t do any pills.”
“Belly to belly,” she says, pulling the nightgown up to her clavicle. He yanks his white tank top up and off. His torso is wiry and tan. Sophie gets up on her toes and presses herself into him.
“It’s better, right?”
“Look what I made you.” She reaches for a drawing.
He takes it in his hand. “‘Little Wing.’ I love that song. It’s your song.”
The piece of notebook paper is decorated with watercolors—red hearts and musical notes that seem to flutter about the page. The moisture has changed the paper, creating valleys and sunken hearts. A hypnotic scroll starts in the middle and leads in a circuitous path to the distant lyrics of the Ji
mi Hendrix song.
“That’s the coolest thing anyone’s ever given me.”
“Can you play it for me?”
“Yeah, I think I know that song.”
The Jovi starts strumming his acoustic, whispering the lyrics, his voice on pitch with only occasional cracks. She puts her hands in his lap and kneels by his side. His voice becomes more confident, bolder; he’s singing about butterflies and zebras and moonbeams, and then he stops as if something has shifted.
“Did you hear that?”
“Don’t stop. Keep going.”
“I think I heard Kurt or somebody.”
He puts down the guitar, walks out of the casita, and hears nothing but the wind chimes.
“Finish the song.” Sophie has followed him, holding the acoustic, strumming the only chord she knows, an E.
He runs over to the gate, swings it open, and finds Kurt standing there in his black gig gear, poking his fingers into his jaw and staring at the ground. He looks up at the Jovi and nods.
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Hey. Just a second.”
“Where’s the ‘Stang?”
“I walked.”
“Fuck, dude, I wish you’d knock or yell or something.”
“Yeah, I was about to.”
Sophie stretches out onto her tiptoes and wraps her arms around Kurt. She lets him go, holds his arms, and looks in his evasive eyes. “Come in. Can I make you some tea or something?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Sure.”
Kurt sits at a bar stool at the kitchen counter. The Jovi pulls his long gray tweed coat off a hook and puts it on Sophie’s shoulders. She laughs and flips the weight of it off her back. It slides to the ground. The Jovi looks at her nipples, her navel, and her everything through the sheer fabric, and he quickly looks over at Kurt. Kurt’s head is cocked toward the window. He’s staring at a bird in the backyard. “This place is really nice.”
“Good energy, right?” Sophie pours some coffee in a cup and slides it to Kurt.
He looks down into the black brew and pulls at the curls in his hair. “I’m having a really hard time right now.”
“What’s going on?” the Jovi says.
“My jaw. Nobody could deal with this kind of pain. None of you even know what it’s like.”
Sophie walks behind Kurt, reaches over his shoulders, and rubs his jaw with both hands.
He exhales and sinks into his shoulders. “I’ve sinned on my wife.”
The sun’s rays beat down through the kitchen window, reflect off the water in a ceramic bowl in the sink, and dance in octagons on the ceiling like turtles crawling over each other’s backs. Sophie moves her hands to his shoulders, leans in to his ear, and whispers, “How have you sinned?”
Kurt turns his head and looks into her slightly sleepy eyes. “I’ve cheated on her with women, other women.”
Sophie leans in and presses her soft full red lips on his mouth.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” The Jovi yells.
“Now,” Sophie whispers to Kurt, “Did that mean anything?”
Kurt is puzzled. He looks at the Jovi and back at Sophie. “No?” He asks.
“No. Of course not,” she says and turns to kiss the Jovi. “This is the man I love.”
“I get the point,” the Jovi says, “but I don’t like the teaching method.”
“It’s only your heart that can be true or untrue. Your body is totally different.” Sophie looks for a reaction from the Jovi. He’s starting to perspire. “The spirit…”
“The spirit is willing,” Kurt says, “but the flesh is weak.”
“Dude. Can we all just keep our flesh to ourselves here, okay?” The Jovi asks.
“You know she left me first. She left me when I had nothing. I was on drugs. I was alone. James saved me—”
Sophie turns sharply at the sound of James’s name. “You saved yourself.”
Kurt looks down at his hands above the blue tiles on the kitchen counter.
Sophie walks over and stands before the Jovi. She reaches back behind her, runs her hands down his hips and tugs him tight to her backside. The Jovi’s hands meet around her waist. “Leave her,” Sophie says.
“I would, but Pastor Ron says divorce is a sin. He married us.”
“Were you married when she left you?”
“Yeah.”
“It didn’t stop her. Why should it stop you?” Sophie takes the Jovi’s hands away from her waist.
“I guess.”
“So do it. Life is short. Live in the now.” She steps into the sunlight. Her arms are folded, her feet are set wide apart, she is an illuminated A with two sets of lush curves, one at her breasts and one at her hips “When you’re an old man, you’re going to look back and think of this moment and all the things you could’ve had but didn’t get because you didn’t have the courage to take them for your own. Everything that’s coming to you—and it’s going to be a lot, you have no idea how much your life is going to change when this album comes out—everything that’s coming to you, you earned, you deserve, it’s yours. It’s right there in front of you. All you have to do is take it.”
Kurt looks up into the shining vision of a woman and nods his head.
DCA releases the album Thunderstik by the band Thunderstik on Friday, August 18, 1989. DCA plans an album-release party for the band at the Hard Rock Café in La Jolla. Thunderstik shows up around seven P.M. It is still sunny, and there is a betacam crew from a local television station waiting for them outside. The reporter says something about local boys made good. The band members smile and stand around for the camera.
They walk inside and the hostess asks, “Do you have a reservation?”
“We’re Thunderstik,” says EJ.
The hostess smiles. “That’s nice, do you have a reservation?”
“We’re supposed to have the whole place! Isn’t there anybody here from DCA? You know, DCA, the record company.”
She smiles and shakes her head.
“They didn’t call you? They were supposed to send someone from PR and a big box of albums too. None of us have seen it. We were supposed to sign albums and give ‘em away. They’re here to film the whole thing from Channel 8.”
The hostess cranes her neck to look outside at the betacam man. “Oh, I think I did know about this. Let me go get the manager. But do you mind if I seat these people first?” She takes a mother and two boys past the band, holding menus to her chest.
Kurt presses his index fingers into his temples, cocks his head down at the floor, and looks away from the film crew. “What’s going on here?” he says under his breath, forcing a laugh.
The hostess comes back with the manager. He says, “Thunderstik!” and grins into the lens with lots of gum and tiny teeth. “We’re all ready for you, come right this way.”
Kurt turns to the film crew and nods as if everything is cleared up. The manager leads them, film crew in tow, through the busy restaurant past the kids’ birthday parties with balloons, past the line of people trying to buy T-shirts, past the happy-hour crowd at the bar to a large wooden booth at the back of the room beneath a neon-splashed triangular guitar in a glass case signed by Eddie Van Halen. “Here we are. All set. Oh, yes, there’s a package for you.” The manager holds out an oversized brown envelope. EJ takes it.
“Well, open it,” the Jovi says, smiling at the camera.
EJ pulls it open and slides out one single copy of the album. On the cover is the screaming ghost. On the back is a black-and-white photo of the five band members guarding an outdoor staircase in a desolate industrial rust garden. In the foreground a large Kurt is staring away, then a medium-sized Jovi, then Sven, EJ, and Eric up the metal steps getting smaller and fuzzier.
Kurt laughs. “Just try walking up that staircase. Look at that. You’ll never make it.”
“Great! So that’s the album,” the Jovi says.
EJ turns the envelope upside down, as if he were expecting ten more albums to fall out. Not
hing does.
“Did they make more than one?” Sven asks.
And with that, the camera crew kills the light. Now the band members’ eyes are readjusting to the dim but pleasant light in the restaurant. The cameraman eases the betacam off his shoulder and says, “Thanks, guys.”
Eric walks out to his car, gets a cassette of Thunderstik songs, hands it to the hostess, and mercifully she plays it on the house speaks. The band sits in the booth and eats barbequed chicken. Sven, EJ, and Kurt drink a lot of beer. The Jovi and Eric drink Cokes. When the check comes, Kurt turns to Eric. “Can you float me?”
“Sure.” Eric pulls out two twenties.
That night, after the leads, after sports, after the weather, at precisely 11:29 and 46 seconds, the anchorman says, “And we leave you tonight with this. What happens when local rock band Thunderstik hits it big? They celebrate the release of their first album at the Hard Rock Café. Thanks for watching. Goodnight and God bless.” On the left side of the screen, the band stands in front of the restaurant, and on the right side the credits whiz by, white Chiron type on a black screen.
The next day Eric drives Kurt down to the Tower Records in Point Loma to buy the album, CD, and cassette. In between Throbbing Gristle and Tina Turner there is a plastic placard with THUNDERSTIK at the top, but there are no albums, no CDs, no cassettes. “Look at this,” Kurt says. “Tower is sold out. I told you it’s going to happen.”
EJ, Kurt, and Eric sit in Eric’s living room, listening to the radio and take turns calling the request line. They call and call until the girl on the other end seems to know their voices. “So are you in the band?” she asks sarcastically.
“No. I just dig those guys,” Eric says. “They’re sold out, you know. Can’t find that album anywhere.”
It finally happens. They play “Kick It Clean” on 95X. Thunderstik rides the airwaves, Thunderstik rocks the auto shops, rocks the house painters, rocks the carpenters. EJ, Kurt, and Eric hear it and think, Yes We are going to be rock stars. The music is the truth, and you can’t keep the truth down. It will happen.
It is August 26, 1989. The Dugans’ backyard is filled with flowers and family. Candles float in the pool. The bride arrives at sunset, tan and dressed in white. She walks the aisle to meet a waiting and smiling Jovi.
Before the Flock Page 24
