Steel Guitar (7 page)

I thumbed through the pile to find the right year. 1977–78 would be best.

I found the black books for '82–'83, '78–'79, '81–'82, stacked them in chronological order. Seventy-eight was as far back as they seemed to run. The first pages of each book had tables of weights and measures, lists of holidays. Then there were a few blank pages for phone numbers and addresses. I checked to see if I had entered either for Dunrobie.

I found Dee's name heavily crossed out at 555-8765, a Cambridge number, probably the Mass. Ave. apartment. I checked through the rest of the phone numbers, most of them hurriedly scrawled, with only a first name to tag them. Gary at a 734 exchange. Had I known a Gary? A Ken? Alice? That must have been Alice Jackson. Hadn't she married, and what the hell had she changed her name to? She might remember Dunrobie.

I tried the number written next to Alice. The man who answered was querulous, elderly, and quite certain no Alice was in any way connected with his phone number. He'd had it the past five years, ever since he moved up from Memphis, Tennessee, and nobody ever called much, and certainly not for any Alice. His first wife was named Mary Alice, and he sure would have remembered.

I went doggedly through the book and came up with another possibility: Angela, a blonde with pale lashes, a long nose. I punched the number and got a male voice on an answering machine. I have an answering machine myself, but I hate talking to them. I hung up.

I had phone numbers for a Jeff and a Susan, as if the people I'd met in my teens and twenties had only first names. As if I'd thought I'd always remember who they were. Asking about people's backgrounds seemed so intrusive then. If somebody had a distinctive accent, you might ask where they were from, but that was it. Maybe I shied away from that kind of talk because I never wanted to admit my father was a cop. But the other kids were the same. No last names required.

Nobody at Jeff's number answered.

I found two phone numbers scrawled on the last page. I figured one of them had to be Cal's. With no names attached, they had to be numbers I called often, or numbers I never planned to call again. I shrugged and tried the first. Three beeps from NYNEX, and a recorded “This number has been disconnected. Please check your listing and dial again.”

The second number picked up after six rings with a recorded message in a male voice. “Hi. You've reached 555-4647. Tell me what you think I ought to know.”

It was a fine deep voice, relaxed and easy. If I'd heard it before I would have remembered it.

I hung up, then redialed the two recorded-message phones, leaving the bare minimum: my name, phone number, and a request to call as soon as possible on an urgent matter. Curiosity wins out more often than not.

I checked through the rest of the books and got nothing but wrong numbers and dead ends.

Reluctantly, I phoned Dee at the hotel.

I could tell there were visitors in her room by the cautious way she spoke and the voices in the background.

“You do it?” she asked.

“I can tell you where he isn't,” I said. “Sorry.”

“I need to see you,” she said with forced cheerfulness. “We're at the Performance Center tonight, rehearsal, maybe lay down a few tracks for the album. Start at seven and work right through. Drop by?”

I hesitated.

“Come on,” she urged. “Maybe I'll let you play Miss Gibson.”

Any blues picker worth a bottleneck slide would crawl to the corner of Mass. Ave. and Boylston Street for a chance to play the Reverend Gary Davis's old guitar.

Nine

I was standing near the theater, flipping a mental coin over front- versus backdoor etiquette, when Mimi, the curly-haired blonde, sailed around the corner, and almost mowed me down.

I fell into step beside her. “Remember me? Dee's friend.”

“Oh, sure,” she replied, smiling for all she was worth. She was swinging hand in hand with a young man who was wearing one gold hoop earring that made him look like a pirate. She wore tights and a tank top in tiger stripes, a matching headband, and black lace-up boots. Roz, my personal arbiter of fashion taste, would have found her a bit passé.

She blitzed through the front door and I followed; no doubt she was with a band hanger-on—not drummer Freddie tonight, but somebody who at least knew somebody semi-famous.

I had always figured rehearsals for major-league concerts would be pretty closed affairs. If you're charging $27.50 a seat, you don't want to give it away in advance. But nobody challenged me as I marched across the lobby in Mimi's perfumed wake.

She and the boy with the hoop earring disappeared through swinging aisle-doors. I followed. Inside the auditorium a humming screech rose and fell. Lights flickered. A disembodied voice echoed over a loudspeaker, calling for Pre-set Twelve, and telling Holly, for chrissake, to check the left 7 amp.

When I played with Dee, in that short-lived unmourned group, Cambridge Common, we were acoustic. Tuning our instruments was all the foreplay we needed.

A small army of electricians and stagehands scrambled on and off the stage. A scrawny boy-girl in unisex jeans and shirt carefully set Dee's Dobro, along with a twelve-string of more recent vintage, and a bright blue Stratocaster, on metal stands. A boy in jeans crawled along the floor checking cable connections and muttering into a headset.

Dee was an industry, all right.

On either side of the tall proscenium arch loomed stacks of boxy amplifiers: Fenders, Vox AC-30s, Bandmasters. Cables crisscrossed the floor. The stage was divided by platforms and risers. Freddie, the drummer; a keyboard man; and Brenda, the bass player, stood three steps above Dee and her lead guitar.

Ron. The one with whom Dee was less than exclusively involved. I wondered if Dee had ever been exclusively involved with anyone.

Dee was chatting with the drummer, oblivious to the commotion. Freddie tapped out a syncopated rhythm, using a muffled stick and a brush on an impressive trap-set—silvery snares, sides, and tom-toms, all banded in brass—a pair of hi-hat cymbals, two regulars, and a rack of chimes and bells.

Across stage, Brenda hit a few deep notes on her Fender bass and frowned at their wavering echo. She shouted something into the wings. Somebody fiddled with an amp. The hum stopped abruptly.

Dee strolled downstage, leaned over, and spoke into a microphone. “We okay out there?” she said, her voice low and husky. “Jimmy, how's the pick-up?”

“Okay.”

“Who's riding gain?”

“Me, honey,” came a different voice. “I got you loud and clear, and you're gorgeous.”

I slid into an aisle seat way down front.

Dee shouldered her six-string, plugged in the pick-up, crossed to Brenda. They tried a chord together. Dee fingered a few notes, bent some of them. She was wearing a slide on the little finger of her left hand. Her guitar strap looked like snakeskin, with a big gold buckle.

The amplified voice said, “Okay, boys and girls, this is a take,” and all the stagehands vanished. Dee moved center stage, still talking over her shoulder to the bass player. She tapped her vocal mike with a fingernail, adjusted her instrument mike, tapped her toe hard eight times in the sudden hush, and music happened.

The keyboard player started it, but the sound could have been a keening horn. Brenda picked it up on bass. The drummer came in rocking. The lead guitar hit the opening riff. It had changed a lot, but I recognized it, the song Dee had once called her anthem: “For Tonight.”

The vocal entered with a tough-gal sexy edge.

“Don't need anybody to cry out my name
,

Don't need anybody to care
.

Don't need anybody to tug at my skirt
,

Don't need anybody to share
.

For tonight, for a while, I want you
.

For tonight, for a while, I want you.”

It was a standard rocker, heavily blues-influenced, and fleshed out with a lot of fancy guitar. Dee had written it at a time when most of the hits were sentimental love songs. Recorded by more popular singers, it had kept her afloat through lean years.

She was starting the second verse when the amplified voice interrupted. “Cut there, okay? Brenda, we're getting a hell of a lot of reverb.”

The drummer crashed a forlorn cymbal, and Dee said, “Oh, come on, Brenda, get with it.”

She may have meant to mutter it under her breath, but she forgot about the microphone.

Brenda shot her a look. Somebody in the audience giggled. I suspected good old Mimi.

“Can we pick it up at twenty-four?” Dee asked.

“Start over. I might need a few extra tracks for the live cut.”

This time the lighting crew got into the act. They messed around with their colored gels at first, but they quickly got the hang of which-performer-to-highlight-when. Probably had a roadie up in the booth giving cues.

The houselights faded to black.

I stopped concentrating on the technical crap, closed my eyes, and listened. All those quarts of whiskey hadn't dulled Dee's voice. Playing bars for drinks and food seemed to have honed it, stripped away the extra trills and flourishes. Too many cigarettes had put a growl into the lower register, a weary moan into the high notes. Her style hadn't changed; it was more like she'd grown into it, become the sassy, jaded blueswoman she'd always tried to be.

My shoulder bag bit into my side. I put it on the empty worn velvet seat beside me.

Dee slid into an old Billie Holiday thing, then livened the set with a Delta blues, maybe John Lee Hooker. She was moving with the music, almost dancing, but it didn't seem showy or out of place, didn't even look planned. It was just part of the song, a sexy harmony.

I don't look straitlaced or anything, not with my tumbled red hair. But Dee, well, the word “sensual” springs to mind. Dee, when she plays guitar, looks like she has nothing on her mind but sex. I don't know if she was born that way, lips slightly parted, eyes smoldering, or whether it comes from singing lowdown, dirty blues.

I can practice a song and practice it, and when I get it right—right notes, right tempo, clean fingering—I'm through. I lose interest and move on to the next song. I can pour heart and soul into the effort of learning, but once the song is there, whatever magic has occurred is over and done.

Dee takes the practiced song, and then she starts her magic. She sings her stuff as if she's making it up on the spot, as if she's got something urgent to tell you, and isn't it nice that the band happened along. She sings like she's got a secret, and if you listen long enough, she'll tell it to you—and only you.

My eyes grew accustomed to the dark and I glanced at a guy two rows up on the aisle. He looked like he'd forgotten to breathe.

Dee wore a white tuxedo jacket and white pants. She kept the jacket buttoned, but her apparent lack of a shirt was quite a come-on. The lights made her a rainbow. And she moved and sang and played as though the songs were pouring out of her, as if she'd never have enough time to tell us all the things she needed to say.

While Dee was lit with the dancing spotlights, her group played in shadow unless spotted for a solo. Her lead guitar looked tall and wiry. The drummer hid behind tinted glasses and a scowl. Today his wristbands and headband were neon-green. The keyboard player, a scruffy youngster with a two-day stubble, kept his head thrown back, never staring down for the notes, his eyes closed in ecstasy. Brenda seemed less involved than the rest, more laid-back, as if she alone were clued in to the fact that this was just another rehearsal. Dee didn't seem to be holding anything back.

In the middle of the sixth song, Dee hit a deliberately dissonant, jarring chord, and backed away from the mike, eyes flashing. “Jimmy,” she yelled, “are you listening to this shit or what?”

“Yeah, hon, what do you want?”

“Are you hearing that bass line?”

“I'm hearing it.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, it's not what we've been doing, is it? It's not what I want.”

Brenda said, “I thought I'd give it a try.”

Dee said, “You talk to me first next time.”

“I've been trying to talk to you for two damn days, and you're all of a sudden so busy, nobody can freaking find you. I thought you'd like it.”

“It stinks, Bren. It sounds like a goddamn dog howling.”

“Kind of like a bitch, you mean?” Brenda said with a nasty edge to her voice. I decided to give her the same benefit of the doubt I'd given Dee: maybe she meant to mutter it under her breath, but her microphone picked it up and echoed it clear to the balcony.

“What did you say?” Dee asked.

The amplified voice interrupted her. “Okay, Brenda, can you just do what Dee wants here with the bass?”

“No, Jimmy, I can't. It's too damn boring. I'm gonna freaking fall asleep.”

Dee said, “Well, I can find fifty bass players glad to do it, better than you can anytime.”

“Oh, yeah?” Brenda unplugged her instrument, lifted it over her head, and carefully laid it down on the floorboards. Then she gave Dee the finger and walked offstage.

“Bren, get the hell back here,” the drummer yelled into his mike. His volume overloaded some circuit and the whole business fed back with a high-pitched hum that made me slap my hands over my ears.

“Jimmy,” Dee was saying, “I talked to her about that break a hundred times. It's a blues thing, not a rock thing. I want something easy and bluesy. She's giving me all this hyperactive-note shit.”

“Take ten,” Jimmy's voice said wearily. The house-lights snapped on and the sound technicians and the light technicians and the stagehands swarmed.

Dee shaded her eyes with her hand and surveyed the audience. I waved, and she yelled, “Hi,” and motioned me up onstage.