Whale Music (11 page)

We went into a real studio this time, state-of-the-art machines, separate cubicles for bass, drums and vocals. The father knew that to get good product, you had to spend good money. Freaky Fred Head thought he’d died and gone to Heaven. The song “Brenda” was recorded, the five voices laid down on individual tracks, but as we listened to the playback, I was dissatisfied. “It’s not big enough,” I complained.

“Do it again,” said Fred Head.

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with the way we did it.”

“No, do it again. Sing everything twice.”

Kenneth Sexstone shook his head. “His elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor.” Kenny Sexstone liked to hang around the studio when we worked, and I will say that he never tried to force his will. I didn’t know that if anything had gone wrong, Kenny likely would have ordered bombers to destroy the building.

“Watch.” Freddy directed us back to the vocal booth. He set up the echo machine, a separate loop of tape that adds depth.
We redid our vocal parts—
doubling
it’s called these days, as common as tuning-up, unheard-of back then—and then Freaky Fred pressed down on the echo-tape flange ever so lightly. There was a slight, ethereal
wow
, and suddenly the music opened up like the Pearly Gates.

“Freaky Fred strikes again!” shouted Danny.

“Nyuk-nyuk,” chortled Freddy. He continued this manual manipulation of the echo-tape for the rest of the song.

“What are you doing?” demanded the father. The father was still nominally our producer, although on that session he spent most of the day figuring out how to operate the intercom.

“Disturbing the phases,” Freaky Fred answered cryptically.

“Weirdness and abnormality,” noted Kenny Sexstone, not unhappily. “The ferry doesn’t quite make it to the other side.”

This wasn’t Fred’s only innovation, although it certainly is by way of being his most famous. He went home that night and designed a box to do what his finger was doing. He called his invention the “out-of-phaser,” and sold the idea to an electronics company for three hundred dollars. Nowadays the phaser is used all the time, whoever owns the patent is a multimillionaire, but Fred Head, I guess, has the satisfaction of knowing he invented the thing. (Except, you know, it’s a bit of an iffy question as to whether or not Freddy actually
knows
anything these days.)

His other noteworthy contribution that session was on the flip-side, the raucous number “Jaguar June.” This is the first recording where Danny lets down his hair. We’re talking Rapunzel time. Daniel entered the vocal booth stripped to his scivvies, his teeth clenched with amphetamine grit. A drunken lion with its balls in a bear trap. At any rate, there is a guitar solo overdub on this tune, and Monty worked out an effete series of licks that implied that uppermost on Monty’s mind was not mussing his hair. As Dewey Moore put it, “Sucks like my daddy’s boot in a cowflop.” Freaky Fred Head reached forward
and picked up a screwdriver that was lying on the recording console.

“Freaky Fred prepares to strike again,” whispered Danny.

Fred Head walked into the studio and savagely stuck the screwdriver into Monty’s amplifier. Monty was stunned. Freddy dug the metal into the speaker and ripped the paper. Then he stood back and nodded at the guitar player. “Go,” said Freaky Fred. And of course the sucky little licks screamed out of the ruined speaker like banshees having their nosehairs tweezered.

“A classic,” muttered my brother Danny.

And it is. Ask anybody, ask a critic, ask the verminous rodent Geddy Cole if you must! Maybe five of our tunes are bona fide rock and roll classics: “Jaguar June”, “Brenda”, “Kiss Me, Karen”, perhaps “Slow Sundown” (the critics are divided), “Big House” for certain. Mind you, we had a special guest artist on that last tune, the Killer himself. Jerry Lee Lewis came into the studio, drunk and tormented. Jerry Lee banged away at the piano keyboard, each chord another step towards eternal hellfire and damnation.

Danny was very taken by this.

By the way, I am not speaking to Geddy Cole. Oh, I know, I am not speaking to anybody, if you want to get technical. But Geddy Cole is high-lighted, underscored, capitalized, and has been ever since the release of his libelous little tract,
Howl! An Unauthorized Biography of the Howl Brothers
.

I first encountered the scabrous lout in those early days. The Howl Brothers Band had packed our equipment into an old station wagon and lit out for parts unknown. We were playing a town in Oregon, and after the first set this kid approached us. He wore huge glasses, like his mother had bought black horn-rims four sizes too big in the hopes that the child would grow into them. This kid was also afflicted with the worst case of acne I’d ever seen. I was usually sporting a whitehead or two,
but this kid looked like the pimples were battling over possession of his very soul. The kid selected me as the likeliest target for his purposes, which, I admit, was simply to make friends. He sidled and angled over, leaned against the wall beside me. “Hi,” he said.

“Hello.”

“It’s real cool stuff you cats are playing.”

“Oh, thank you very much.”

“You want to blow some reefer?”

“Oh, I think not.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the phrase rang with illicitness.

He removed the scrawny and bent cigarette from his shirt pocket. “It’s good stuff,” he said.

“I smoke Salem Menthols myself,” I said, taking out my pack by way of illustration.

This weird kid laughed, sucking on the intake, one of those mulish guffaws. “Hey, pretty funny. Come on, let’s smoke this.” He took my arm and led me outside. The kid fired up the little cigarette with a lighter that flamed like an acetylene torch. He inhaled deeply and held the smoke in his lungs for a long time. He passed the thing over to me. I followed his example. “Strange-tasting stuff, not exactly pleasant, reminiscent of fetid jungle underneath trampled by smelly feet.” This kid then grabbed the thing back, I had never shared a smoke in such an urgently formalized fashion before. When we were through I turned to re-enter the club and promptly walked into a wall.

That, then, was my indoctrination to the world of Better Living through Pharmaceuticals. Very impressive. Much more impressive, in fact, than my indoctrination to Sex. That transpired in Little Rock, Arkansas. I wandered into Danny’s motel room in search of a light for my cigarette, a scrawny home-made with a taste recalling bogs in Mesopotamia. There I found three girls, in various states of undress, and Stud E. Baker.

“Big Desmond!” shouted Stud, standing on his bed in stained underwear. “What’s cooking, Daddy-o?”

“I’m watching television next door. Dewey and Monty are out somewhere.”

“Right.” Stud E. Baker bounced off the bed, caught my head in the crook of his arm and ran with me into the bathroom. He slammed the door behind us and fished two beer out of the sink. The sink and the bathtub were loaded with ice cubes and beer. Stud tossed a beer in my direction, bouncing it off my forehead. (Those scrawny cigarettes mess up your reaction time.) Finding himself in the bathroom anyway, Danny/Stud E. Baker decided to have a pee. He pulled his thing out of his underwear and blasted. Stud E. Baker had an overhand holding technique. I tried to adopt it myself, except it obscured my line of vision and usually made me spray all over the wall. “Desmo, baby,” he said, “pick your choose.”

“Huh?”

“I can’t figure three women all at once. I
know
there’s a way, dig, but right now I can’t figure it. So pick your choose and take her away.”

“Take her out for a soda or something?”

“Desmo!” shouted Stud. “Take her to your room and get your horn scraped, for God’s sake. Get a bee-jay, get reamed! Do whatever you like to do.”

“I don’t know.”

“How about the big one? The one with garbonzas?”

“Well …” My stomach tied itself in complicated Boy Scout knots.

“Her name is Lois. You just say, like, hello Lois, would you like to come next door and watch a little television?”

“She wants to stay with you.”

“Who can blame her? I am Stud E. Baker! I wear the wang that makes the women whimper! I own the dork that pops their cork! But I’ll say, like, you want to go with my brother, that’s cool, I’ll dig you later. Get it?”

“Umm …”

“Come on.” We re-entered the main room. Stud E. Baker removed the Confederate Army cap and became, for a
moment, Daniel. “My brother Desmond,” said Dan, “is lonely. I think the world of my brother Desmond, and it makes me sad that he’s lonely. Now, if any one of you wants to keep my brother company”—he singled out this girl Lois with a stab of his hawklike eyes—“then I’ll be very, very grateful.”

“Grateful enough to give me a solo shot tomorrow night?” asked Lois.

“Absolutely, Lois. Tomorrow night, it’s me, you, the Stud and the stars.”

She bounced off the bed. “Let’s go, Desmond.”

“Don’t you want to get dressed?”

“I sort of assumed you wanted me this way.”

“Sure he does,” said Danny. “And Des, for god’s sake, take it easy on this one. Don’t break her heart. Don’t show her Paradise and then say baby, you can only glimpse it.”

“Danny—”

“Go!” Danny gesticulated grandly, he rammed the Union cap back on his head and became his alter ego, Stud E. Baker. “Present those backsides!” he bellowed at the two remaining girls. “Let’s do it jackal style, like laughing hyenas!” Lois and I ran next door to my room. I sat down on the bed and watched the television. Lois sat down beside me, laid a hand on my hip. “What’s your favourite thing?” she whispered in my ear.

“Music,” I whispered back.

“What’s your favourite pleasure?”

“Mu—” I started, but she placed a finger to my lips, shutting me up.

“How about a bee-jay?”

I shrugged. Lois worked at my zipper, she extruded the pale thing. “Hmm!” she said. I concentrated on the television. Lois placed one of my hands on one of her large garbonzas. She lowered herself, took me into her mouth.

I needn’t go on. It was less than satisfactory, and it was less than educational, as for a long while I thought that sex consisted solely of bee-jays. Eventually I grew to appreciate
the bee-jays, and then I married Fay, who refused to give me one.

Up the stairs, up the stairs, a feeble ascension towards the Land of Beulah. This means I’m going to bed, I suppose, at least into my bedroom. What prompted this course of action, I’ll never know. I’ve been working on the “Song of Congregation”. It’s not going especially well, there is an undercurrent of menace, subtle, yet more than enough to drive the whales away. I think I might be depressed. Watch out.

Down the hallway, then.

Here is a photograph on the wall, one not likely to cheer me any, a picture of Fay and me vacationing in the Bahamas. She is wearing a string bikini, her breasts tumbling out of the top. I am dressed in a suit, complete with watch-fob. Fay is quite an attractive woman, I’ll give her that much. Actually, with the divorce settlement, I’ll give her a lot more, and for the rest of my life. I only glance at this photograph. (Lurking in the background is Farley O’Keefe, my erstwhile probationer and nursemaid. He is wearing a bikini swimsuit, his thick and pugnacious prong all but peeking over the top. I would mention that he is as hairy as an ape were it not for a desire never to offend apes. Look at his big muscles, look at his tiny head. I hate Farley O’Keefe.)

I pass the bathroom. Claire is in there applying makeup to her face. It looks like war paint, heavy black lines across her eyes. Claire’s body is no longer pale, it is quite a rich gold, every
square inch of her. I thought I had grown used to it, but Claire’s nudity is somewhat unsettling today. I pull the door shut. And into my bedroom. There is a white grand piano. I sit down on the bench, and, because my nerves are ruffled, I draw out a major ninth. A major ninth is a lot like a major seventh, except it not only makes the soles of your feet itch, it makes the hairs in your ears tingle. Then it’s up to the second, the minor, adding a flattened seventh for lushness. The door opens and Claire bounces into the bedroom. “Sounds good,” she tells me. Her hair is piled atop her head, contained there by an ingenious arrangement of bobby pins. Claire goes to the closet. I watch her buttocks, the muscles working hard. She swings open the door and appraises her small collection of clothes. First she draws on a pair of black panties, then she puts on a frilly and feminine undershirt. Up to the third, again a minor, I’m gearing up for the next chord, which is going to be the fourth, a major seventh, except I’m going to cluster all the intervals tightly together. It will sound like God gobbing on the sidewalk. Claire pulls on a pair of leather pants, then a satin shirt, a silver one that reminds me of metal. Here comes the chord, are you ready for this, ooh, I’m horripilated, I’m … my goodness. Do you see what I see? Is that not a bulge underneath my bathrobe? Call Dr. Tockette!

Before I can stop her, Claire sits down beside me on the piano bench. She plucks out a couple of high notes—real beauties, too, the very ones I would have played had my enormous fanny been perched up at that end—and then she glances at me with a smile. I guess I have a peculiar expression on my face, she realizes something is not as it should be. “Well, well,” she says.