The sound of water softly lapping at—what, a pier, the prow of a small boat—came from the car’s quad mini-Bozak speakers. Slowly the sound rose, and rising with it and through it came the indescribable theremin-hike wail of an arp synthesizer, then a deep, bass throbbing. At first Mario thought it was a drum, but when it changed pitch
he realized that it was a pounding Fender bass.
“That’s—I know that,” Mario said.
Now the vocal entered, the unearthly multi-tracked female voice that he had heard often before.
“That’s ‘Styx River Boatman,’” he said. “I’ve heard that plenty of times.”
“Right. It’s the lead track on
Cthulhu
. The single’s been out for a month. Now they hit with the album and the tour. They ought to get gold
on both of them. The single’s already charted with a bullet and –”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Annie.”
“Oh. It’s music business shop talk. Daddy always talks about his work, and most of our friends are in the business. What I mean is, the Whisperers are going to be the biggest group around by the end of the year.”
Mario made a sound something like
hmmf
. He dropped the thread of
conversation, let the music fill his ears while he kept his eyes carefully on his driving. He’d banged a fender on the family Apollo last fall and still hadn’t heard the last of it. Most of the other kids in his class had cars of their own, or at least got to use their parents’ cars, and here he was riding on buses or begging rides.
The boulevard curved around and he took a ramp that ran from
it onto the freeway. He dropped the Volvo into third, then down into second when he saw the traffic on the freeway. There was a break between a Plymouth Duster and a blue-flecked wide-open dune buggy—must be somebody headed home from Stinson Beach—and Mario had the 1800 onto the freeway, across into the center land and accelerating in the space of a quadraphonic synthesizer howl.
“Very nice,”
Annie applauded.
“Listen,” Mario said, “we better do a good job on this. You’re sure this is the only interview they’re giving on this gig?”
“Yep.”
He shook his head.
“I’d just expect Wasserman to get it then, or Phil Elwood from the
Examiner
.”
The freeway wound and swooped through the hills between Mill Valley and Sausalito, plunged through the twin tunnels and slanted down the long grade
toward the Golden Gate Bridge. To their right the green wintry hills were bathed in ghostly shreds of fog that had worked their way in from the Pacific and through the valleys of West Marin. To their left the bay was a dismal gray sheet, its surface pocked with a million impacts a minute.
“They’re only doing it as a favor to daddy,” Annie called him back from his reverie. “I told you that.”
“Or—well, I’m just surprised, that’s all. If they wouldn’t do it for the dailies, you know, I thought they’d give an interview to somebody from
Rolling Stone
, you know. Ben Fong-Torres or somebody, and Jim Marshal would shoot it or Annie Leibowitz. Or they could have that guy from
Ramparts
and Michael Zagaris could shoot it. Did you see those shots he got of Jagger last time the Stones played?”
Mario missed Annie’s answer as he braked for a creeping VW minibus. He downshifted, pulled around the flower-decorated minibus, then settled for a steady 45 as they cut through the raindrops. Not yet five o’clock, yet the sun was gone, the sky a gray approaching black, the bridge illuminated only by the ghastly glare of its pink-orange high-intensity lamps.
They crossed the bridge without further
conversation, the only sounds those of the tape system working its way from track to track of the Whisperers’ new album and of the car’s progress through the frigid rain: the drops drumming on the hood and roof of the Volvo, the
beat-swish, beat-swish
of the wipers, the
shush
of the car’s four new Pirelli radials on the wet asphalt of the roadway.
The Friday commuter traffic was heavier now,
snarled and made more dense than normal by the steady rainfall. Mario swung the Volvo around the lazy curve from the bridge onto Doyle Drive, all but overwhelmed by the sheer massive numbers of the cars and commuter buses moving in the opposite direction. He made his way past neo-Corinthian Palace of Fine Arts, down ugly Lombard Street with its neon motels and grimy
gasoline stations, and turned
onto Fillmore.
A line of cars stopped him at the traffic light at Union Street. From the seat beside him Annie asked if he could see the dingy little store they’d just past. Mario looked back. “What, that button shop?”
“Know what used to be there?”
Mario shook his head.
“That was the original Matrix. Daddy says that he took me there when I was a little girl. I can hardly remember it. All of
the bands played there back in the beginning. The Airplane, the Doors, the Warlocks, the New Riders. That was back in Flower Power times.”
“That little place?” Mario cast a last glance over his shoulder, then followed a Porsche 914 as it pulled across Union. The Porsche dived into a parking space and Mario gunned the 1800 uphill in second. “How could they make a living playing in a joint like
that?”
“I could never understand that either. Daddy says they lived on peace and love and holiness.”
“Yeah. Just like the Whisperers, right? Or do they have a different trip going?”
“They sure do. They’re making plenty. Daddy says they got a record advance from Dagon and they’re cleaning up on their tours and TV gigs. There was no such thing as rock on TV back in the old days, daddy says, unless
you could get on Ed Sullivan’s show like Elvis or the Beatles.”
Mario said, “Who’s Ed Sullivan?”
Annie said, “I think he was something like Dick Clark, I’m not sure.
“Yeah.”
The Whisperers’ new album
Cthulhu
wound up with a typically weird, heavy number with odd words about somebody called the Re-animator. Annie pulled the cartridge from the Bendix unit and replaced it with the Whisperers’
first album,
Anubis
.
The classic white apartment buildings of Pacific Heights gradually gave way to crumbling tenements as Fillmore Street changed from a high-price, old-line neighborhood into a grimy ghetto street. “Places like this give me the creeps,” Mario grumbled. He held the wheel with one hand and checked his door latch with the other.
Annie said nothing.
“Look,” Mario went on nervously,
“you really know so much more about the whole music business than I do, I’m not so sure about this interview, Annie.”
She shook her head, her reddish hair swinging into the edge of
Mario’s field of vision. “You don’t have enough confidence, Mario. I always read your stuff, and we’ve done stories together before. Don’t worry, relax, you’ll do fine.”
He found a parking place next to a boarded-up,
deserted church on Sutter Street, and backed the Volvo into it. “I hope the car’ll be safe here,” he said, reaching behind the bucket seats for his cassette recorder in its attaché case.
“It’ll be safe, Mario.”
“I don’t know. A nice car in a neighborhood like this, maybe we should put it in the Miyako.”
Annie ignored the suggestion. She hoisted her gadget bag onto her shoulder and climbed out
of the car.
They walked together past a row of Japanese restaurants catering to visiting Asian businessmen and tourists and people arriving early for the show at Winterland. Mario looked at his watch. “We can get some dinner after we do the interview, then go back for the show afterwards.”
Annie agreed.
They walked up Post to Steiner Street, then continued past the corner to the stage door
of the cavernous concert hall. Mario rapped on the door with a fifty-cent piece, the echo of the metallic clash sounding off the concrete walls and sidewalk. “Will your dad be here, Annie?”
“He said he might come over for the show,” she answered, shaking her head, “but he was stuck in a meeting all day. At least he told me this morning that he expected to be. So we should just go ahead.”
“Okay.”
The stage door, a heavy sheet of iron riveted onto creaking hinges, swung open slowly and a hostile face glowered out at them.
“Uh—the Whisperers are expecting us,” Mario muttered.
“Show’s sold out,” the doorman growled.
“Um—no, uh.”
We—The doorman slammed the heavy iron door shut.
Mario looked at Annie forlornly, then remembered. He unzipped the front of his waterproofed jacket, fished his
backstage pass out and held it in front of him. Annie grinned and hefted her heavy gadget bag to show where she’d stuck her own pass to its side.
Mario rapped on the iron again. After a few seconds the door creaked open and the doorman’s face, more hostile than ever, appeared once more. Mario shoved his pass forward so the doorman could see it.
The doorman stopped, gazed unimpressed at the backstage
pass and said, “Show’s not for four hours. That doesn’t get you into the sound check.” He started to close the door again but it stopped at Mario’s heavy hiking boot—the kind that all the kids at Millbrook High were wearing this year.
The doorman’s expression turned from one of general hostility to personal rage. “Say—The Whisperers are expecting us. It was all set up by Dagon Records. You’d
better check on it. They’ll be pretty upset when they find out, otherwise.”
The doorman grumbled incoherently, then said “I’ll go ask their manager Bart Starke about it. You better be straight with me or no backstage, I don’t care about any passes. And take your foot out of my door before I cut it off.”
Mario reluctantly withdrew his boot. The door slammed shut. Mario turned toward Annie. “Nice
fellow. I wonder why he hates –”
“He doesn’t hate you.” Annie smiled at him. Mario could see the rain beading up on her forehead and the edges of her hair that extended beyond the nylon hood of her jacket. In the ghastly light of a billboard lamp advertising the Whisperers’ forthcoming album, the only light on this side of the Winterland auditorium, the rainwater puddled and ran like icy perspiration.
“He doesn’t hate you,” she repeated, “that’s just old Gooley the doorman. He’d have a thousand gate-crashers or groupies or assorted rip-offs in here every night if he didn’t come on a little bit heavy, Mario.”
They stood in the chilling rain waiting for Gooley’s return. After a while the iron door creaked open for the third time. Gooley looked a little less hostile and angry than he had before.
He made a gesture with his hand and Annie and Mario stepped over a low iron bulkhead that separated the dingily painted floor inside the doorway from the littered gray cement outside.
“Starke says okay.” Gooley gestured over his shoulder, toward a short, narrow staircase that led up to a half-elevated platform level.
A heavyset middle aged man stood on the platform. His jowly face was ringed
by graying hair. He wore a rumpled tweed jacket and baggy flannel pants. He smiled thinly at Mario and Annie.
“You the kids from the school paper?”
“Yes sir.”
“I’m Bart Starke. Hal Epstein from Dagon said you were all right.”
“Mr. Epstein is my father,” Annie said.
Starke repeated his smile, more thinly than ever. “Yeah. Look, my kids are just starting their sound check. You go make yourselves
comfy and you can talk to Johnny and Olly after.” He jerked his thumb toward a wooden door.
Mario and Annie crossed the room toward the new door. Mario leaned his head toward Annie’s and hissed “Johnny and Olly?”
“The Whisperers,” she answered softly. “Johnny Kendrick and Olivia Oldham, didn’t you do your homework, Mario?”
“Oh, okay.” He put his hand on the tarnished brass knob and pushed the
wooden panel ahead of them. “Sure. Never thought of Olivia Oldham as Olly, that’s all.”
Inside the big auditorium they made their way to the first bank of ancient, patched seats that flanked the dance floor. Annie tossed a quick look around the cavernous room, studied the stage for a few seconds and then busied herself over her gadget bag. Mario put down his attaché case and settled into a dust-soaked
cushion, then turned his own gaze to the stage that rose as tall as a man at the end of the auditorium.
The Whisperers were already in their places while sound technicians and lighting crew scuttered around them, checking cables, setting monitor speakers, aligning spots. The workers to a man wore battered blue jeans and soiled tee shirts, unconscious parodies, Mario thought, of an ancient Marlon
Brando screen image.
The only musical instrument visible on the stage was Johnny Kendricks’s white arp synthesizer; the synthesizer, and two mikes atop their chromium stands, a gigantic Sound console at one side of the stage and a towering bank of Acoustic 12-inch and 18-inch speaker cabinets under Ampeg V6C amp tops.
“Hey, don’t they work with a full band?” Mario asked Annie.
She shook her
head, pulling her attention away from the camera gear she’d been assembling. “Just them. All the rest is on tape—all the other instruments and the effects.” She turned back to the 135-mm lens she’d been screwing onto her Nikon F2 body for ultra-long close-ups.
Mario said “But—isn’t that—I don’t know, not quite—uh,
ethical
or something? I mean, this isn’t a discotheque.”
“Perfectly normal. Pink
Floyd travelled with taped effects for years. First artist ever to go all out was Todd Rundgren – well anyway, he did a whole set right in this room with a whole band on tape. Just Runt and a guitar and a deck.”
“Hmph!”
The technicians sidled away from the stage. Mario saw Annie slip away from the plush seats, glide out onto the middle of the gymnasium-sized dance floor to take some long shots
of the Whisperers; tonight she’d use her backstage pass to get into the wings or onto the edge of the stage itself for live shots.
Johnny Kendrick was standing behind the arp keyboard, Olivia Oldham at her mike at center stage. They started playing and singing their newest single. Mario looked at Johnny: he was dressed in a black satin stage outfit with crimson flashing. A heavy textured gold
chain hung around his neck, with a huge clear jewel flashing red beneath the spots.