The Accompanist - 2
Back-up singer Karla and bassist Joey recall the early days of Kim's rise toward rock 'n' roll stardom ... and the threat posed by a growing horde of male would-be groupies.
KARLA:
The original idea was to spend our courtship there, while Don eased his way into his dad’s business as a VP of distribution and I tested my mettle as housekeeper and possibly home decorator. Then we’d get married and live happily ever after in our beautiful white castle, two doors down from the Santa Teresa boardwalk and just a couple of blocks from the Carton Mansion where Don had spent his childhood summers, before he became the hairy galoot I loved. But wasting my college degree (Asian Art) on housekeeping and home decorating wasn’t high on my list, and Don wasn’t all that hot for a lifetime of shipping porcelain trinkets to Timbuktu, even if that was his family legacy. It wasn’t a tough choice. We’d give Dave and Kim’s band a shot, welcome a bunch of near strangers into our home, and later, if it didn’t work out, fall back on our boring yet idyllic future.
Dave had been our source of various stimulants in Big D and occasionally enlisted us in pickup bands for school parties and outdoor gigs. Kim had a great voice and was easy to work with, and she and I were friendly. We knew Jack, their new piano player, as the guy who’d been glued to the side of that emaciated black-haired girl Susie, who had a following around Big D for her dark, wounded songs. Joey was the quiet kid who’d tagged along beside Dave at school and now played flawlessly as the rest of us struggled through our parts.
We fell into a routine. Jack and Joey, who hadn’t pitched in toward the equipment, left at sunrise for an off-the-books job painting cinderblock walls for a developer who was friendly with Don’s dad. They’d return late morning with enough cash to pay for our weekly turkey, groceries, and beer. The rest of us would wake up to the sound of the Ervin hearings on TV, which Jack and Joey watched in shifts while taking turns showering latex paint from their hair. By early afternoon we’d be in the basement amid the glowing lights from the amps and the musty smell of the old Persian rugs we’d hung for soundproofing.
We’d all at least touched on Dave’s originals beforehand. They usually started with a hot guitar lick, or hook, and a verse full of fast, tongue twisting patter that built to an anthemic chorus in which Kim professed her love (or more precisely, horniness) for the man who wrote the song (and by that, I mean, Dave). These musical explosions were designed to showcase Kim’s versatility and power – and to show off Dave’s guitar hero chops, honed from hours, weeks, and months of playing along with BB King, Jimi Hendrix, and Allman Brothers records.
The covers he chose— Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heatwave,” the Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR”— were always big beat, big voice numbers that would demonstrate Kim’s power. They would become our most reliable showstoppers, at least until audiences started responding to our originals with something other than blank, confused stares. We didn’t limit ourselves to covering current pop acts like the Allman Brothers, The Band, or the Stone Poneys. We covered the half century, starting with Roaring Twenties songs like “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze” and ending with recent material like Frank Zappa’s “Magdelena” and Randy Newman’s “Guilty,” which we’d learned from a Bonnie Raitt album.
But this band was supposed to be all about originals, and Dave’s half-dozen songs wouldn’t be enough to carry us. He and Jack got on this kick of trying to express distinct emotions through music, sometimes borrowing ideas from our musical idols, sometimes selecting melodic modes and harmonic structures, then writing lyrics to fit the mood.
So Dave would go, “Jack, my man. How’d you get that feeling of heartache behind Susie?”
And Jack would launch into one of his lectures. “You know, Pete Townsend borrowed that ‘feel me, see me, touch me’ idea from Dido and Aeneas,” he’d say. “It’s just a series of suspensions. It’s beyond just the heartbeat, it stretches the harmony, so it aches.” The guys would jam on a descending series of suspensions and try to come up with a suitably heartbroken melody and lyrics. Then Dave or Jack would call for another feeling—anger, or confidence, fatigue or nervousness—and assign one of the other guys to start the jam.
Sometimes these exercises flopped. “How am I supposed get ‘pensive’ out of the drums,” Don said, after failing to deliver on one of Dave’s instructions. Other times, the jams evolved into fully formed songs, which none of us could claim to have written but for which we all felt pride of authorship. In fact, those heartache chords eventually evolved into “Cryin’,” a regular part of our rotation, even though the breakup in the lyrics hadn’t yet taken place.
Dave saw the value in getting input from the whole band, but he could be more than a little over-bearing (and by that, I mean he could be a real asshole). With Kim away at her Vegas gig, I filled in for purposes of rehearsal on tunes Dave had written for her voice, which was bigger than mine in range and volume. It was good exercise for me, and it helped the others nail down their parts. Then I proposed some covers I wanted to sing, either as the lead or in close harmony with Kim. Jack wanted to include Bessie Smith, focusing on those off-color songs she’d recorded in the early 1930s, which he said would add to the sexual tension we wanted to put across. “Kitchen Man” was a little too obvious in its double entendres, so I chose “Sugar In My Bowl,” which was plenty torchy and adaptable to my slightly smaller voice, and “I’m Wild About That Thing,” to be performed as a duet with Kim. Both songs eventually joined our list of showstoppers, but at the time Dave wasn’t happy.
One feature of our curved concrete home was that sound tended to gather toward the side of the house by the kitchen sink, so I could overhear conversation from the other rooms while I cleaned up: “I know she’s not chopped liver,” Dave’s voice came from the living room. “But you’ve got to remind your girlfriend what her role is.”’
There was (annoyingly) a long pause before Don shot back: “She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my fiancée, let me remind you. And she knows what her role is. She’s a singer in a fucking band.”
“A singer in Kim’s fucking band,” Dave said.
“And you’re the guitar player slash songwriter. And Jack’s the keyboard and music director. And me and Joey sit in the back doing whatever the hell it is we do. I know. We went over it all ad nauseam. But you gotta remember, too! We’re doing it in our house. And Karla didn’t agree to have you all crowding in here just to be the back-up.”
“Believe me, we’re all just the back-up when Kim hits the stage,” Dave said. “What the hell did you tell her was going on?”
“I told her we were forming a band. In our house!”
“Whatever,” Dave said. “Just remind her what the goal is. And you … you better work on your downbeat!”
That argument was settled, but Dave still had to put me in my place. A few days later he handed me a cheat sheet. “We’ll need some filler, and people like this one. If it’s good enough for Michael Jackson, maybe we can give it a whirl?”
The song was “Rock-in Robbin,” and I saw right away what he was doing. As a child I’d been treated for a mild speech impediment known to therapists as Rhotacism and to people of our generation as Elmer Fudd’s Disease. The therapy (which involved a lot of singing, by the way) had been mostly successful. But my Rs and Ls still gave me a little trouble when I was tired or a widdle dwunk. Don had taken to telling people I was from New Jersey, as if that explained my “accent.” But Dave wasn’t fooled and saw the song, in which Rs and Ls are almost a motif, as an opportunity to quell any thoughts I had of stealing the spotlight from his girl. I tried to rise to the challenge, singing the song a cappella while the others clapped the rhythm. “All the little birdies on Jay Bird Street love to hear the wrr-robin go tweet tweet tweet …etc.” I got through the whole song with just a couple of flubs on the last line, where I sang “Go Rockin Robin, cuz we weally gonna wock toni-ight!” A painful silence followed, as Jack and Joey studied their fingernails and the Persian rugs, absorbing Dave’s cruelty and how I might have come up just a widdle bit short.
Don snapped off a rim shot. “I’d say she knocked it out of the park,” my future husband said, gallantly enough. Jack and Joey murmured agreement. Dave could’ve acknowledged that I’d sung well. The best he could get out in front of the others was: “Ok. It’s in the repertoire!” But later he apologized, in private. “I’m sorry I had to put you through that,” he said, looking up from four lines of coke he’d drawn on the glass coffee table. “I had to make sure you were ready.”
So he’d given me my Boy-named-Sue moment: Now I was strong enough to face down whatever on-stage humiliation might come my way. Still, I wasn’t fully comfortable until Kim’s first visit from Vegas. It turned out she welcomed collaboration and was eager to share the spotlight. We’d go outside with a pitch pipe to plot out our call-and-response parts and close harmonies while the boys worked out instrumental kinks in the basement. Then we’d come back inside, take our places at the mics, and immerse ourselves in the harmonic sea.
Kim even let Jack’s girlfriend Lisa participate, even though the kid couldn’t sing a lick. Lisa always seemed to show up when Kim was there, meaning the dining table was suddenly overcrowded and at least one person (Joey) had to sleep on the living room floor. Still, she was useful in blocking out our choreography, shimmying a few steps behind the lead singer, like a Vandella or a Pip waiting to approach the mic. But I saw how she looked at Kim as if no-one else was there, and it kind of gave me the creeps. Later, on a sandy walk to the Santa Teresa Pier, I saw Don’s gaze lock onto to Lisa’s rear end as she jiggled along in front of us. I tugged on Jack’s sleeve. “She’s upstaging us on the beach,” I said, making a joke of it. “Tell her to put some clothes on!” It got a laugh from Kim, anyway.
I needn’t have worried about Lisa. I was in the kitchen making coffee when I heard her whispers from their bedroom: “Jack. Jack, baby. I got something to tell you.” I heard Jack sniff and cough and ask what the hell time it was. “I’m sorry, Jack. I going to have to like, I mean we’re gonna have to break it off,” Lisa said. “I mean it’s swell to be here and I really like you but you know I realized I’ve just been, like using you to get close to Kim. And this summer it was getting to be as if even that wasn’t enough. It was like I didn’t just want to get close to her, I wanted to be her, and that started to feel … unhealthy.”
Jack started to stammer out something about how he didn’t care who she wanted to be, when she brought down the hammer: “Plus, I met a swell guy at school, and he says it’s time for me to grow up and move along.”
And so she did. And so did our band, featuring two, and just two, red-hot mamas.
JOEY:
They called me the quiet one, as if I was George to the Johns and Pauls of the band. It was the obvious Beatles comparison, especially at the time, less than two years after their breakup. It was true that I was a bit shy, reticent to disrupt conversations with my own voice, unlikely to express disagreement or ask for a favor directly. But the comparison wasn’t apt. First off, George wasn’t really that quiet. He was a crank and he didn’t keep it to himself, complaining about taxes and bragging about his wah-wah pedal in between his bouts of far-Eastern piety. He even walked out on the band once, because he didn’t like being told what to play. Second off, and more importantly, George wasn’t the bass player. I was a bass player and, as Dave used to explain, I spoke through my instrument. Dave had high hopes for Kim and the band, and I would be the key to their success, he said. “Jack Bruce, John Entwistle, James Jamerson. With them, huge hits! without them … meh!” By the time he sent Jack to pick me up at LAX, I was confident about my role, even if I’d sometimes feel a little tongue-tied around the hipsters who had welcomed my bass (and me) into their fold.
Jack was assigned to fetch me at the airport because he’d been a taxi driver. He pulled up at the arrivals area not in a sedan or taxi-sized vehicle but in a top-heavy container truck that wobbled toward me as airport cops tried to wave him away. He spotted me and popped open the door. I ran up, tossed my knapsack into the wheel well, and jumped into the shotgun seat, cradling my bass in its black case.
“Welcome to LA,” he said, pulling onto the freeway. He handed me a can of beer from a six-pack at his feet then skidded to a stop as traffic jammed up in front of us. “Sorry. Not used to all this weight!” An hour later, getting off the freeway, he cut a corner too tight and blew out a rear tire on the curb. We were about fifteen miles from our destination with $10,000 of sound equipment in the truck, and the rental company couldn’t get us a new tire till the next morning. We wobbled into a motel parking lot and spent the night there, Jack trying to draw me out playing identify-the-bassist, which was especially challenging on the tinny clock radio. (“Carol Kaye, not Brian on that one … Karl Radle … Bootsie!”) I wouldn’t say we exactly bonded over it, but Jack seemed satisfied that I knew my stuff.
Jack and I did bond later, and not just over music. While the others slept in, we were out painting and repainting the back of a neighborhood shopping center, earning our keep. You’d be surprised how much paint a single cinderblock can soak in. The job lasted most of the summer, as we toiled in the hot morning sun until our arms and shoulders were sore and the walls finally took on the color of the paint. The porous surface was sealed at last! And we’d shared in the agony of completing a tough job.
Rehearsals usually lasted 12 hours, including a late-afternoon break for turkey or turkey leftover dinner and a daily walk on the beach. We’d gather around Jack’s piano, where we’d study his hands over his shoulder as he formed chords and melodic lines and watch each other in the mirrored front of his old upright. My goal usually was to coordinate my bass with his left hand, matching his boogie-woogie patterns and jazzy riffs. Combined with Don’s kick drum, this created a driving metallic sound that Dave liked. “Crank it, boys. Crank it!” he’d say, eventually giving the band its name: Krank. Of course, the reference to methamphetamine (one drug Dave wasn’t dealing) was deliberate: our band was going to get you cranked!
Dave and the girls would crowd behind Jack, where I could watch in the mirror as they built cathedrals of midrange and treble over my Kranky bass. I felt more at ease, somehow, looking through the mirror at the others rather than standing face to face. One day toward the end of summer I may have gone a little too far into the looking glass. The music stopped. Karla blurted out: “Oh my god, I just made eye contact with Joey!” I felt the blood rush to my face, then watched Kim give Karla a playful punch on the shoulder. “Lay off my bass player,” she said.
As soon as Kim’s Vegas show ended, we started auditioning in clubs along the boardwalk. Maybe we were a little too tight, or maybe it was nerves, or maybe we just didn’t know the material as well as we thought. There was no interest. Dave got some feedback from the club owners, who said they liked the girl singers, but we needed to work on balancing the sound so the audience could hear them both. Also, they said we needed to focus on current pop hits and leave out all the old-timey numbers and the originals.
“They liked our songs, but that isn’t what a bar crowd wants to hear,” Dave said.
It was pretty discouraging after all the work we’d done, but we took a week to make some adjustments, then got an audition at a bayside roadhouse and motel where Dave said he had a previous business relationship with the owner. The place was just reopening and had no backline, so Jack and I loaded everything, including his 400-pound piano and our massive PA system into a rented truck. The chore was complicated by the weather. It really was a dark and stormy night! So we had to cover each piece of equipment with a tarp on the way in and out. Loading in was an awful chore, but the audition went better than the others, even if Jack and I looked like we’d hiked in through a swamp. Our big PA helped put the girls out front sonically as well as physically. Despite the advice from other club owners, we’d kept the Bessie Smith numbers in the set. The girls made an extra effort to “work” the men in attendance, shimmying to the edge of the stage, stroking their own torsos, making eye contact, winking seductively as they implored: “Come on and make me feel it, I’m wild about that thing!”
That last line, set off with a rim shot and delivered a cappella, was almost drowned out by howls and wolf whistles from a mostly male audience that had materialized at the lip of the stage. Our Red Hot Mamas departed amid hoots and hollers, leaving the rest of us to take an unnoticed bow, switch off our instruments, and start to pack up. Dave went off to talk with the owner, while the girls chatted with the bartenders and waitresses—and fended off advances from their newfound admirers.
Our departure was more eventful than we would’ve liked, and Jack said the dark and stormy night was at least partly to blame. Between the ringing in his ears and the roar of rain and thunder, he couldn’t hear anything and thus had no idea why the truck kept stalling every time we started to back up toward the entrance. Finally, he jumped out to see what was amiss and was confronted by two waitresses and the club owner, waving their arms and yelling “Stop.” The rear of the truck had overrun a low-lying sportscar that now sat partially crushed and sinking into the mud. Jack put the truck in forward gear to extricate what turned out to be the owner’s car, and Dave was forced to renegotiate our deal. We’d still get the regular gig we’d been looking for, playing Tuesday through Friday, four sets a night, for $3,000 a week. But thanks to Jack’s accident, we’d have to work the first two weeks for free to make up the cost of car repairs. Plus, Dave had to sweeten a side deal he’d made with the club owner. Jack was apologetic, but Dave said it was alright. “No harm done,” he said. “But from now on, just don’t start drinking until the last set!”
It also came out that Dave had headed off a discussion of an additional perk that might have come our way. “So he said a motel room or two are usually free and the waitresses are willing to date the guys in the band, but I didn’t want to know what that would cost us. I told him we weren’t interested. We already were dating each other.”
“But Dave!” I said.
“I’m trying to keep this relationship professional, and by that I mean, on the up and up, other than … you know. I don’t want to see you guys getting in trouble that we can avoid.”
“But I’m the bass player in a rock band,” I said.
“Nevertheless,” he said.
JACK:
I wrote the letter Johnny B. Goode’s mother hadn’t been dreamin’ of—informing my mom that I’d quit piano classes and my job to join a rock band. Then I fished the unsent letter to my former musical partner Susie out of my suitcase, opened it, and wrote a shorter, less anguished version, telling her I’d hooked up with some musicians she might remember from school. Maybe she would come check us out. It was just a friendly, factual update. Susie didn’t need more than that from me. It wasn’t like she ever depended on me. She was a solo artist who’d let me back her if the venue had a piano and an owner willing to overlook that I was underage. She’d liked my technique, as Kim said, because it freed her to emote vocally without the distraction of playing more than basic chords on her guitar. We were friends. We drank together when her girlfriend Gina wasn’t around. Susie was protective of me, as if I was her younger brother, warning me off the harder drugs that she sometimes indulged in—also when Gina wasn’t around. In the revised letter, I suggested there might be opportunities for her in LA, but I didn’t implore her to join me, didn’t promise to help her refocus, didn’t urge her to leave her troubles in the Big D behind. I didn’t know where Susie was living, so I sent it care of her parents, remembering how her dad, who somehow imagined that I would be the one to get his daughter off her lesbian phase, handed me a bottle of Southern Comfort and encouraged me to stay overnight. Susie and I wound up passed out of the floor of her girlhood bedroom, still fully clothed, a Vanilla Fudge record clicking on the turntable. Well, I did wonder how Susie was doing, and I wanted to let her know what I was up to.
Now I turned my focus to solidifying Kim’s band and building a repertoire.
Of course, we had to include some Bessie Smith to pay tribute to the Empress of the Blues. We decided to avoid “Nobody Knows You (When You’re Down and Out).” Clapton had already done it, incorporating a dumbed down chord (a B-minor instead of an F-sharp diminished) that 1970s rock audiences would now expect, and that I was loathe to deliver. We decided to draw on Smith’s raunchier songs from the early ‘30s, figuring the sexual references would translate well to rock and would get our male fans heated up. (Little did we know!) Karla suggested “I Need a Little Sugar In My Bowl” for herself and “I’m Wild About that Thing,” to be performed in close harmony with Kim. Both songs, performed as Karla planned, would become highlights of our act, though Dave generally relegated Karla to lighter, novelty songs like “Rockin’ Robin” and the Beatles’ “Obladi Oblada.”
We landed a regular gig quickly, and it was a pretty sweet arrangement. We’d barely chosen a name for ourselves (The Krank) and already were earning $3,000 a week. Each band member would get $300 of that, with the rest going to repay Dave and Don’s parents for the equipment.
It was like the moment in adolescence when you realize who you are and your life kicks into gear. Suddenly we were one. We woke up together, ate together, played our four sets a night together, then got stoned together and slept, if not together, at least at the same time and under the same roof.
Playing four 50-minute sets a night was a challenge, even if we padded the final set with repeats from the first three. We had become adept enough at improvisation that we could kill five minutes at the beginning of each set with a jam. Dave or I would call out the emotion and the key—hunger in G mixolydian, despair in f-sharp minor—and see what developed before we brought on our Red Hot Mamas. Sometimes it worked. Other times, well, the audience probably thought we were tuning up.
We also padded our sets with some numbers sung by me, which provided comic relief and gave the girls’ vocal cords a break. Building on a gender bending theme in Kim’s repertoire, I’d follow her rendition of the Stones’ “Stupid Girl” with my take on Carole King’s “Will You Still Love Me.” I played it as straight as possible – and tried to look hurt when I heard the laughter. And if the room was still crowded for the fourth set, I’d do my extended version of The Impossible Dream. With all respect to Andy Williams, it’s a terrible song, at least the way I sang it—a touch too slow, allowing for unnecessary, Broadway style vibrato at the end of every line; and a touch too close to the mic, which helped set listeners’ teeth on edge. I’d usually get some boos before I got to “the unreachable star” at the end of the second verse. The booing and catcalls would increase when, instead of coming to a merciful conclusion, I’d pick up the melody again and start improvising verses about unattainable women, unthinkable smells, irrelevant thoughts—anything that came to mind. Neither rhyme nor meter was necessary. The booing would intensify, and Dave and Joey would rush up with a hat (usually a purple Fez we’d bought at a yard sale), imploring the audience to throw in their dollars and change if they wanted to tip the piano player and bring back the girls. Shouts of “Make him stop! Please make him stop!” would grow louder as our fans lined up to throw their bills and change emphatically into the hat. Once it overflowed, Kim and Karla would shimmy up to their mics, and the boos would turn to cheers as they cleared the air with a Chuck Berry or Little Richard rocker.
Dave had declined an offer from the waitresses to date the boys in the band, so our hope for female groupies was almost nil. Most of our fans were young men intent, in the words of Karla’s Bessie Smith cover, on putting a little sugar in the girls’ bowls. After the show, Dave, Don, Joey, and I had to gather around Kim and Karla like football linemen in a V formation, clearing the way as we left the building and leapt into our cars.
But these guys were drunk and persistent. A couple of times, they followed us home and howled from the street until we turned out the lights. Finally, after an exhausting Friday night set in January, one of them burst through our front door and dropped his pants, yelling, “Hey hot Mama! You wanna little of this?” Karla who was just a few feet away, planted her feet and responded with a shriek: “Beat it, Cweep!” At which the guy’s eyes bugged out and he backed away.
Don was standing behind Karla, glaring over the barrel of a shotgun.