The Accompanist - 10
Murder and betrayal haunt Jack, Karla, and Joey and manager Barry as they regroup in a new band behind Susie.
KARLA:
Funny how things work out. Joey called Don, thinking he and Jack needed a drummer for the band they were forming with Susie Sachs. They wound up with me instead, singing backup (and sometimes lead) while providing percussion on tambourine, congas, and guiro. I even played a little cowbell!
Don had moved on (a little too quickly) to another woman and a job managing his dad’s warehouse-full of porcelain penguins. My consolation prize was a bungalow in Pasadena and a mid-level position at the USC Pacifica Asia Arts Museum, where I soon learned that my college degree in Asian Art had no relevance to my true ambition. But the job did provide some income – and a schedule that didn’t interfere with pursuing my true ambition.
After Don said he wasn’t interested, Joey called me. “It isn’t just Krank with Susie in Kim’s place. It’s a different idea,” Joey said. And he was right. It wasn’t Krank at all. It was Susie’s band. The band didn’t even have a name, at first. Eventually it became the SSQ – for Susie Sachs Quartet – “The Q” to our fans. In Krank, Jack had been Dave’s righthand man, developing a repertoire to fit Kim’s supercharged soprano. Now Jack and Joey helped Susie devise spare arrangements for her blues and folk-rock dirges, with titles like “Wreckage” and “Last Straw,” mostly written during her break-up with her erstwhile girlfriend Gina. “People dig the doom and gloom, as long as it’s real!” Susie said. “It’s cathartic.”
Susie had heard Krank in person and on the cassette that Barry referred to (annoyingly) as “Krank’s Last Tape” and was impressed. “My God could that girl sing!” she said. “But my voice is different. I don’t think it’s going to translate.”
She was right. Kim’s voice had burned through the upper registers. Susie scorched an entirely different part of the tonal spectrum. Think Joan Armatrading, or Nina Simone, or even Richie Havens. As I mentioned, one feature of missing Kim was that I heard her voice everywhere, in every female singer on record or radio or in person. But I never heard Kim’s voice in Susie. Instead, I felt Kim’s body when Susie returned a hug. They had the same build, slight yet solid. But Kim had kept her distance, her torso stiff from stage fright. Susie pulled me closer so I could feel Kim’s ring (another feature of my missing her) pressed between us in my front pocket. Of course Susie liked the feel of my body. Kim had never responded that way, and now I realized how much I wished she had!
Musically, at least, we put Kim behind us. Susie liked the gloom and doom in “Cryin’,” the song Jack had written with Kim, but said she had no use for art rock. “Keep it simple,” she said, applying one of the lessons she’d learned in Narcotics Anonymous. “Just a song with three or four verses and a middle eight. That’s where I sit.”
We put a Motown cover in our set list, but it wasn’t Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heatwave.” It was “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” which Jack and Susie arranged more like Vanilla Fudge’s anguished version than the Supremes.
Susie appreciated that we’d included the feminist (and possibly lesbian) icon Bessie Smith in Krank’s repertoire. While she didn’t want to reproduce Krank’s duet of “I’m Wild About That Thing,” she was delighted by my rendition of “Sugar in my Bowl.”
“That’s some serious Betty Boop energy you got goin’, girl!” she said, citing another gay/feminist icon. And that became my first number under the spotlight in SSQ. Susie chose Bessie Smith’s “It Makes my Love Come Down” for herself, a song that was sexy and gloom-and-doom at the same time. Of course, with a nod to my role in Krank, Susie changed the lyric. it wasn’t a Red-Hot Papa who made her love come down, it was a Red-Hot Mama.
While we worked out our repertoire with Susie, we continued to hope against hope that Kim would somehow turn up alive and well. Jack talked Susie into meeting with the detective Archer to show him that at least part of his missing persons puzzle was solved. We gathered in his cramped, wood lined office where Archer offered us drinks. (We turned them down.) Then Jack, Joey, and I watched the detective interrogate Susie. She acknowledged being in LA at the time of the murders but denied contacting any of the band members until well afterward.
“I had gone through a pretty heavy program to kick my habit and hitchhiked out here. I thought I would get together with Jack, because he’d been my musical partner before. But he wasn’t around. Then I read that he and these guys were playing up in Santa Teresa. I found them in the middle of this mad scene, playing as loud and fast as they could while those hooker waitresses dealt dope and sex to a bunch of bleary-eyed college boys. I decided to keep my distance, because, well—”
Archer finished the thought: “To protect your own sobriety,” he said. “I know it’s not easy.” Then he questioned Susie on her “rather slow response” in contacting Jack after she read about the murders. He seemed to accept that she had been wary of getting anywhere near the CIA drug operation at the Albatross. Susie repeated her theory that we’d originally been sucked into the same government plot at our school in Des Moines
Archer raised a skeptical eyebrow, but acknowledged, “well, it was pretty suspicious the way the Feds shut down our investigation.”
Then he surprised us with some news of his own. “Mrs. Ryan got a call from someone – female, though there was an echo, or some electronic distortion, that made it impossible to tell who it was. The caller got Mrs. Ryan to identify herself, then said `I’m all right, ma,’ and hung up. Mrs. Ryan called the Santa Teresa Police Department and then Mr. Carton. They both told her a ‘crank phone call’ wasn’t enough to reopen the case. She called me yesterday and I told her to contact the local police in Des Moines to get a trace on the phone if this person called again.”
Stunned, we pressed Archer for details, and his guess on whether it was Kim or just someone impersonating her. “This caller had to ask Mrs. Ryan to identify herself,” Archer pointed out. “If it was Kim, she would’ve recognized the voice – her mother, after all.”
“You think it’s some kind of hoax?” Susie said. “Some scheme to get money out of poor Mrs. Ryan?”
“That may be all it is, but I thought you’d want to hear about it,” Archer said. “She may get another call. I’ll let you know.”
Susie sat silently in the shotgun seat, as the rest of us debated whether there was anything we could do, beyond giving Mrs. Ryan a call ourselves. When we got back to the loft, Susie picked up the phone to call her own father and tell him, tearfully, that she was all right. The rest of us went out for a walk to give her some privacy.
We took a couple of months to build our repertoire – and more than a year to sort out our relationships. At first, I was an outsider, the one who had to commute, making the 25-minute drive from Pasadena to the warehouse. The piano, guitars and amps (and my growing percussion stand) were set up in the middle of the space, in front of a row of mismatched kitchen appliances, in a visual affirmation of the importance music held for us. To the left was a Shoji screen that afforded Jack and Susie some privacy as they slept together without ever having sex (with each other, anyway). Joey’s bedroom was marked off by another folding shoji panel on the right. They’d picked up a puffy chair, a Persian rug, and some threadbare pillows so guests and listeners wouldn’t have to sit on the concrete floor.
Our rehearsals were all business. Susie taught us her repertoire of about 30 songs, and the four of us worked out arrangements, sometimes adding instrumental breaks and modulations to step up the energy. We rehearsed with instruments only, then a capella, then bass and percussion only, then full band. We played the songs loud and fast then slow and soft until they all became second nature to us. Sometimes it was just us, and sometimes Barry would come by to listen and strategize on the kinds of places we would play, and which songs we should record (at Record Breaker Studios, of course).
It wasn’t until my eyes locked with Joey’s during one of these rehearsals that I remembered how much I’d leaned on his steady bass and quiet confidence amid the mayhem of Krank. I remembered teasing Don about the way Joey “handles my parts” after my former fiancé’s clumsy (and dangerous) attempt to protect me from those horny college boys. Joey really had made sure my parts were essential to his songs, and not just parallel thirds anchored to Kim’s melody. Of course, it had been my little joke to needle Don with the idea that our shy bass player was a rival. But as I prepared to go home after my fifth or sixth rehearsal with SSQ, eye contact led to a kiss, and I soon discovered that Joey, in his shy, gentle way really did handle my parts pretty well.
JOEY:
I wish time had slowed down, but the next two years went by in a flash. Dave’s death, Kim’s disappearance, and Karla’s break up with Don transformed my world. Suddenly, I was no longer merely Dave’s sidekick in Kim’s band, I was a partner with Susie, Jack, and Karla in writing and arranging, while anchoring the music with my bass. After a couple of months of rehearsals we started playing at Women’s Coffee Houses that had proliferated around LA, gaining enough of a following that Barry was able to land us gigs at downtown venues like the Troubadour and the Roxy. Of course the pay was less than we’d made at the Albatross, but as Susie kept pointing out, we weren’t being paid for our music at the Albatross, we were being paid to launder drug money. As if to prove her point, Barry took us up to Santa Teresa, where we found Ben Jones—the guy who’d supposedly fled to Mexico—back in charge at the Albatross. His waitresses were doling out cocaine, pills, and sex more openly than ever to a new generation of glassy-eyed and drooling college boys. Ben gave Barry an exceptionally cold greeting. They’d gone disco, so there was no interest in hiring us, anyway.
“What did I tell you?” Susie said on the ride back. “He was Dave’s source at school and his partner in crime here. You played there four nights a week for two years, and he acts like he doesn’t know you? C’mon!” She thought the whole thing, starting with our meeting Dave and Kim in Des Moines, was some kind of dark government set up, and I can’t say for sure that she was wrong. In any event, we steered clear of the Albatross and shot down Barry’s idea to promote SSQ as a comeback by the remaining members of Krank.
“Our music is different,” Jack said.
“The whole vibe is different,” Susie said. “It’s just as strong but a little softer. It’s music you can actually hear!”
We all lived together in that industrial space, honing the dark, regretful sound Susie wanted, while sticking with our daytime jobs. Also unlike in Krank, where I was a third wheel, I found myself paired off with Karla. It was the fulfillment of a fantasy I’d entertained since our eyes first locked in the mirror of Jack’s upright piano. I remembered Karla teasing Don that there might be something going on between us, knowing it was just a joke, but wishing that it wasn’t. It started with an awkward moment at the door, as Karla was leaving. We were going to kiss each other on the cheek, moved our heads side to side and missed, clanking teeth. “Oops,” she said. And she pulled me back for a proper kiss, our lips and tongues swirling – and my knees shaking.
“Hey! Lay off my singer!”
It was Susie, standing by the door with Jack as they awaited farewell hugs. It was a joke, I thought, remembering how Kim had told Karla to lay off her bass player in Krank. Of course, Susie wasn’t one to joke.
Karla and I explored each other’s bodies as new lovers do, even though we’d known each other for years, and had spent time together on the beach and in dressing rooms. The erotic surprise for me was the pinkish-red dent that Kim’s ring had left on Karla’s pale skin. “Go ahead and kiss it. Stroke me there,” she said. And I did, happily, and not just because it reminded me of Kim.
Karla moved out of her bungalow in Pasadena, though she continued to commute to her day job. We made love behind our shoji panels, moving our bodies in sync with Susie’s voice and guitar, as she sang lullabies to Jack. “Poor old Jack,” she’d sing from across the room. “Can’t get on the track. Jack wants his mama back. Sad, so sad!”
Conveniently for Jack, another unexpected difference from Krank was that SSQ began to attract female groupies. We were followed home not by horny college boys cranked up on coke, but by Susie and Karla’s fans, young women who were either bisexual, or heterosexual and experimenting—and usually a little drunk. That led to threesomes for Jack and Susie – and for me and Karla, too. As our folk-rock following grew, we found ourselves tangled up in the group-gropes that people imagine to be the bailiwick of hard rock musicians.
Eventually—inevitably, I guess—Susie and Karla paired off during one of these post-gig orgies. I watched over some woman’s shoulder as Susie discovered the red mark of Kim’s ring just below Karla’s tummy, and stroked it, and kissed it as I had. I watched Karla respond. And the sexual dynamic shifted again.
BARRY:
Just when things were going great, my thing with SSQ fell apart. And it happened fast. First Susie and Karla came up with all that new material. The wistful, sorrowful folk songs we’d just recorded at Garner’s studio were replaced by cheerful, upbeat anthems, all in major keys, with jangly guitar parts and joyful titles like “Now That I Found You” and “Girl Power.” Susie, who’d always been smoldering hot in her stage outfit of black satin pants and a black vest with no shirt, replaced the black vest with navy blue. That was her big concession to the new vibe. Karla replaced her tight jeans and filmy hippie halter tops with torn t-shirts and corsets and stockings from a new boutique that had opened on La Cienega Boulevard. I questioned whether the sex slave look would turn off their feminist fans, but Karla said she was being ironic, and the audience would get it. Whatever. Their following exploded. Throngs of young women lined up down and around the block. They’d crowd the stage, fists raised in solidarity as they sang along, while their boyfriends gawked at Susie and Karla. A friend of mine had an in at Capitol Records, so I scheduled more sessions at the studio, thinking I could give my buddy a demo of the new material and get the Q a big contract.
I called Jack to tell him the schedule, when he gave me the news.
“They left town,” Jack told me. “They fucking left town!”
Turns out while I was off talking to Garner, some promoter had paired Susie and Karla with a girl drummer and a girl bass player and flown them off to Austin, Texas, to record for an indy label there. They toured around the southwest and eventually across the country as the Q Girls. You’ve probably heard them. They got a lot of radio play and sold enough records to support themselves and their goddamn feminist-mafia entourage for years afterward.
Jack and Joey were totally bummed. They’d been dumped by the women they loved and fired from the band. Joey left town to join his father’s accounting business in Des Moines. Jack stuck around the LA area. I think Susie may have thrown some session work his way, but pretty soon Jack gave up on being a rock musician, too, and got a job teaching piano and music theory at a local high school.
Me? I gave up on representing the talent and focused on the technical side. Garner went on an expansion spree, opening sound stages and studios across the country. I provided the publicity and picked up new clients, mostly manufacturers of sound equipment. Musicians and bands? My experience was nothing but murder and betrayal! I pushed Dave and Kim out of my memory. I lost touch with Jack and Joey. And, as their records fell off the play lists, I gradually forgot about Susie and Karla, too.
Then, just the other day, I got a ring from Garner.
“Turn on your TV,” he said. “Somebody got ahold of that tape we made for your guitarist that got murdered. I’m listening to that singer now, the one who went missing. The one with the little rip in her voice. They’re playing it on MTV!”