Revival, Page 9

  There are forces.

  *

  In 1963, before the Beatles burst on the scene, a brief but powerful infatuation with folk music gripped America. The TV show that came along at the right time to capitalize on the craze was Hootenanny, featuring such Caucasian interpreters of the black experience as the Chad Mitchell Trio and the New Christy Minstrels. (Perceived commie Caucasians like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez were not invited to perform.) My brother Conrad was best friends with Billy Paquette's older brother, Ronnie, and they watched The Hoot, as they called it, every Saturday night at the Paquettes' house.

  At that time, Ronnie and Billy's grandfather lived with the Paquettes. He was known as Hector the Barber because that had been his trade for almost fifty years, although it was hard to visualize him in the role; barbers, like bartenders, are supposed to be pleasantly chatty types, and Hector the Barber rarely said anything. He just sat in the living room, tipping capfuls of bourbon whiskey into his coffee and smoking Tiparillos. The smell of them permeated the whole house. When he did talk, his discourse was peppered with profanity.

  He liked Hootenanny, though, and always watched it with Con and Ronnie. One night, after some white boy sang something about how his baby left him and he felt so sad, Hector the Barber snorted and said, "Shit, boys, that ain't the blues."

  "What do you mean, Grampa?" Ronnie asked.

  "Blues is mean music. That boy sounded like he just peed the bed and he's afraid his mama might find out."

  The boys laughed at this, partly out of delight, partly in amazement that Hector was actually something of a music critic.

  "You wait," he said, and slowly mounted the stairs, yanking himself along by the banister with one gnarled hand. He was gone so long the boys had almost forgotten about him when Hector came back down carrying a beat-up Silvertone guitar by the neck. Its body was scuffed and held together with a hank of frayed hayrope. The tuning keys were crooked. He sat down with a grunt and a fart, and hauled the guitar onto his bony knees.

  "Shut that shit off," he said.

  Ronnie did so--that week's hoot was almost over, anyway. "I didn't know you played, Grampa," he said.

  "Ain't in years," Hector said. "Put it away when the arthritis started to bite. I don't know if I can even tune the bitch anymore."

  "Language, Dad," Mrs. Paquette called from the kitchen.

  Hector the Barber paid no attention to her; unless he needed her to pass the mashed potatoes, he rarely did. He tuned the guitar slowly, muttering curses under his breath, then played a chord that actually sounded a bit like music. "You could tell it was still off," Con said when he told me the story later, "but it was pretty cool, anyway."

  "Wow!" Ronnie said. "Which chord is that, Grampa?"

  "E. All this shit starts with E. But wait, you ain't heard nothing yet. Lemme see if I can remember how this whoremaster goes."

  From the kitchen: "Language, Dad."

  He paid no more mind this time, only began to strum the old guitar, using one horny, nicotine-yellowed fingernail as a pick. He was slow at first, muttering more unapproved language under his breath, but then he picked up a steady, chugging rhythm that made the boys glance at each other in amazement. His fingers slid up and down the fretboard, clumsily at first, then--as the old memory synapses guttered back to life--a little more smoothly: B to A to G and back home to E. It's a progression I've played a hundred thousand times, although in 1963 I wouldn't have known an E chord from a spinal cord.

  In a high, wailing voice utterly unlike the one he spoke in (when he did speak), Ronnie's grandpa sang: "Why don't you drop down, darlin, let your daddy see . . . you got somethin, darlin, keep on worryin me . . ."

  Mrs. Paquette came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel and looking as if she'd seen some exotic bird--an ostrich or an emu, say--strutting down the middle of Route 9. Billy and little Rhonda Paquette, who could have been no more than five, came halfway down the stairs, leaning over the railing and goggling at the old man.

  "That beat," Con told me later. "It sure wasn't like anything they play on Hootenanny."

  Hector the Barber was now thumping his foot in time and grinning. Con said he'd never seen the old man grin before, and it was a little scary, like he'd turned into some kind of singing vampire.

  "My mama don't allow me to fool around all night long . . . she afraid some woman might . . . might . . ." He drew it out. "Miiight not treat me right!"

  "Go, Grampa!" Ronnie shouted, laughing and clapping his hands.

  Hector launched into the second verse, the one about how the jack of diamonds told the queen of spades to go on and start her creepin ways, but then a string broke: TWANNG.

  "Oh, you dirty cunt," he said, and that was it for Hector the Barber's impromptu concert. Mrs. Paquette snatched away his guitar (the broken string flying dangerously close to her eye) and told him to go on outside and sit on the porch if he was going to talk that way.

  Hector the Barber did not go out on the porch, but he did lapse back into his accustomed silence. The boys never heard him sing and play again. He died the following summer, and Charles Jacobs--still going strong in 1964, the Year of the Beatles--officiated at his funeral.

  *

  The day after that abbreviated version of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "My Mama Don't Allow Me," Ronnie Paquette found the guitar in one of the swill barrels out back, deposited there by his outraged mom. Ronnie took it to school, where Mrs. Calhoun, the English teacher who doubled as the middle school music teacher, showed him how to put on a new string, and how to tune it by humming the first three notes of "Taps." She also gave Ronnie a copy of Sing Out!, a folk music magazine that had both lyrics and chord changes to songs like "Barb'ry Allen."

  During the next couple of years (with a brief hiatus during the time when the Ski Pole of Destiny rendered Connie mute), the two boys learned folk song after folk song, trading the old guitar back and forth as they learned the same basic chords Leadbelly no doubt strummed during his prison years. Neither of them could play worth a tin shit, but Con had a pretty good voice--although too sweet to be convincing on the blues tunes he loved--and they performed in public a few times, as Con and Ron. (They flipped a coin to see whose name would come first.)

  Con eventually got his own guitar, a Gibson acoustic with the cherry finish. It was a hell of a lot nicer than Hector the Barber's old Silvertone, and it was the one they used when they sang stuff like "Seventh Son" and "Sugarland" at the Eureka Grange on Talent Night. Our dad and mom were encouraging, and so were Ronnie's folks, but GIGO holds true for guitars as well as computers: garbage in, garbage out.

  I paid little attention to Con and Ron's attempts to attain local stardom as a folk duo, and hardly noticed when my brother's interest in his Gibson guitar began to wither away. After Reverend Jacobs drove his new-old car out of Harlow, it felt to me as if there was a hole in my life. I had lost both God and my only grownup friend, and for a long time after I felt sad and vaguely frightened. Mom tried to cheer me up; so did Claire. Even my dad had a go. I tried to get happy again, and eventually succeeded, but as 1965 gave way to 1966 and then 1967, the cessation of badly rendered tunes like "Don't Think Twice" from upstairs wasn't even on my radar.

  By then Con was all about high school athletics (he was a hell of a lot better at those than he ever was at playing the guitar), and as for me . . . a new girl had moved into town, Astrid Soderberg. She had silky blond hair, cornflower-blue eyes, and little sweater-nubbins that might in the future become actual breasts. During the first years we were in school together, I don't think I ever crossed her mind--unless she wanted to copy my homework, that was. I, on the other hand, thought of her constantly. I had an idea that if she allowed me to touch her hair, I might have a heart attack. One day I got the Webster's dictionary from the reference shelf, took it back to my desk, and carefully printed ASTRID across the definition of kiss, with my heart thumping and my skin prickling. Crush is a good word for that sort of infatuation, because crus
hed is how I felt.

  Picking up Con's Gibson never occurred to me; if I wanted music I turned on the radio. But talent is a spooky thing, and has a way of announcing itself quietly but firmly when the right time comes. Like certain addictive drugs, it comes as a friend long before you realize it's a tyrant. I found that out for myself the year I turned thirteen.

  First this, then that, hence the other thing.

  *

  My musical talent was far from huge, but much larger than Con's . . . or anyone else's in our family, for that matter. I discovered it was there on a boring, overcast Saturday in the fall of 1969. Everyone else in the family--even Claire, who was home from college for the weekend--had gone over to Gates Falls for the football game. Con was then a junior and a starting tailback for the Gates Falls Gators. I stayed home because I had a stomachache, although it wasn't as bad as I made out; I just wasn't much of a football fan, and besides, it looked like it was going to rain.

  I watched TV for awhile, but there was more football on two channels, and golf on the third--even worse. Claire's old bedroom was now Connie's, but some of her paperbacks were still stacked in the closet, and I thought I might try one of the Agatha Christies. Claire said they were easy to read, and it was fun to detect along with Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. I walked in and saw Con's Gibson in the corner, surrounded by an untidy heap of old Sing Out! magazines. I looked at it, leaning there and long forgotten, and thought, I wonder if I could play "Cherry, Cherry" on that.

  I remember that moment as clearly as my first kiss, because the thought was an exotic stranger, utterly unconnected to anything that had been on my mind when I walked into Con's room. I'd swear to it on a stack of Bibles. It wasn't even like a thought. It was like a voice.

  I took the guitar and sat down on Con's bed. I didn't touch the strings at first, just thought about that song some more. I knew it would sound good on Connie's acoustic because "Cherry, Cherry" is built around an acoustic riff (not that I knew the word then). I listened to it in my head and was astounded to realize I could see the chord changes as well as hear them. I knew everything about them except where they were hiding on the fretboard.

  I grabbed an issue of Sing Out! at random and looked for a blues, any blues. I found one called "Turn Your Money Green," saw how to make an E (All this shit starts with E, Hector the Barber had told Con and Ronnie), and played it on the guitar. The sound was muffled but true. The Gibson was a fine instrument that had stayed in tune even though it had been neglected. I pushed down harder with the first three fingers of my left hand. It hurt, but I didn't care. Because E was right. E was divine. It matched the sound in my head perfectly.

  It took Con six months to learn "The House of the Rising Sun," and he was never able to go from the D to the F without a hesitation as he arranged his fingers. I learned the three-chord "Cherry, Cherry" riff--E to A to D and back to A--in ten minutes, then realized I could use the same three chords to play "Gloria," by Shadows of Knight, and "Louie, Louie," by the Kingsmen. I played until my fingertips were howling with pain and I could hardly unbend my left hand. When I finally stopped, it wasn't because I wanted to but because I had to. And I couldn't wait to start again. I didn't care about the New Christy Minstrels, or Ian and Sylvia, or any of those folk-singing assholes, but I could have played "Cherry, Cherry" all day: it had the way to move me.

  If I could learn to play well enough, I thought, Astrid Soderberg might look at me as something other than just a homework source. Yet even that was a secondary consideration, because playing filled that hole in me. It was its own thing, an emotional truth. Playing made me feel like a real person again.

  *

  Three weeks later, on another Saturday afternoon, Con came home early after the football game instead of staying for the traditional post-game cookout put on by the boosters. I was sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs, scratching out "Wild Thing." I thought he'd go nuts and grab his guitar away from me, maybe accuse me of sacrilege for playing three-chord idiocy by the Troggs on an instrument meant for such sensitive songs of protest as "Blowin' in the Wind."

  But Con had scored three TDs that day, he'd set a school record for yards gained rushing, and the Gators were headed for the Class C playoffs. All he said was, "That's just about the stupidest song to ever get on the radio."

  "No," I said. "I think the prize goes to 'Surfin' Bird.' I can play that one, too, if you want to hear it."

  "Jesus, no." He could curse because Mom was out in the garden, Dad and Terry were in the garage, working on Road Rocket III, and our religion-minded older brother no longer lived at home. Like Claire, Andy was now attending the University of Maine (which, he claimed, was full of "useless hippies").

  "But you don't mind if I play it, Con?"

  "Knock yourself out," he said, passing me on the stairs. There was a gaudy bruise on one cheek and he smelled of football sweat. "But if you break it, you're paying for it."

  "I won't break it."

  I didn't, either, but I busted a lot of strings. Rock and roll is tougher on strings than folk music.

  *

  In 1970, I started high school across the Androscoggin River in Gates Falls. Con, now a senior and a genuine Big Deal thanks to his athletic prowess and Honor Roll grades, took no notice of me. That was okay; that was fine. Unfortunately, neither did Astrid Soderberg, although she sat one row behind me in homeroom and right next to me in Freshman English. She wore her hair in a ponytail and her skirts at least two inches above the knee. Every time she crossed her legs I died. My crush was bigger than ever, but I had eavesdropped on her and her girlfriends as they sat together on the gym bleachers during lunch, and I knew the only boys they had eyes for were upperclassmen. I was just another extra in the grand epic of their newly minted high school lives.

  Someone took notice of me, though--a lanky, long-haired senior who looked like one of Andy's useless hippies. He sought me out one day when I was eating my own lunch in the gym, two bleachers up from Astrid and her posse of gigglers.

  "You Jamie Morton?" he asked.

  I owned up to it cautiously. He was wearing baggy jeans with patches on the knees, and there were dark circles under his eyes, as if he was getting by on two or three hours' sleep a night. Or whacking off a lot.

  "Come down to the Band Room," he said.

  "Why?"

  "Because I said so, freshie."

  I followed him, weaving my way through the thronging students who were laughing, yelling, pushing, and banging their lockers. I hoped I wasn't going to get beaten up. I could imagine getting beaten up by a sophomore for some trifling reason--freshman hazing by sophomores was forbidden in principle but lavishly practiced in fact--but not by a senior. Seniors rarely noticed freshies were alive, my brother being a case in point.

  The Band Room was empty. That was a relief. If this guy intended to tune up on me, at least he didn't have a bunch of friends to help him do it. Instead of beating me up, he held out his hand. I shook it. His fingers were limp and clammy. "Norm Irving."

  "Nice to meet you." I didn't know if it was or not.

  "I hear you play guitar, freshie."

  "Who told you that?"

  "Your brother. Mr. Football." Norm Irving opened a storage cabinet filled with cased guitars. He pulled one out, flicked the catches, and revealed a gorgeous dead-black electric Yamaha.

  "SA 30," he said briefly. "Got it two years ago. Painted houses all summer with my dad. Turn on that amp. No, not the big one, the Bullnose right in front of you."

  I went to the mini-amp, looked around for a switch or a button, and didn't see any.

  "On the back, freshie."

  "Oh." I found a rocker switch and flipped it. A red light came on, and there was a low hum. I liked that hum from the very first. It was the sound of power.

  Norm scrounged a cord from the guitar cabinet and plugged in. His fingers brushed the strings, and a brief BRONK sound came from the little amp. It was atonal, unmusical, and completely beautiful. He he
ld the guitar out to me.

  "What?" I was both alarmed and excited.

  "Your brother says you play rhythm. So play some rhythm."

  I took the guitar, and that BRONK sound came again from the little Bullnose amp at my feet. The guitar was a lot heavier than my brother's acoustic. "I've never played an electric," I said.

  "It's the same."

  "What do you want me to play?"

  "How about 'Green River.' Can you play that?" He reached into the watch pocket of his baggy jeans and held out a pick.

  I managed to take it without dropping it. "Key of E?" As if I had to ask. All that shit starts with E.

  "You decide, freshie."

  I slipped the strap over my head and settled the pad on my shoulder. The Yammie hung way low--Norman Irving was a lot taller than I was--but I was too nervous to even think of adjusting it. I played an E chord and jumped at how loud it was in the closed Band Room. That made him grin, and the grin--which revealed teeth that were going to give him a lot of problems in the future if he didn't start taking care of them--made me feel better.

  "Door's shut, freshie. Turn it up and jam out."

  The volume was set at 5. I turned it up to 7, and the resulting WHANGGG was satisfyingly loud.

  "I can't sing worth a crap," I said.

  "You don't have to sing. I sing. You just have to play rhythm."

  "Green River" has a basic rock-and-roll beat--not quite like "Cherry, Cherry," but close. I hit E again, listening to the first phrase of the song in my head and deciding it was right. Norman began to sing. His voice was almost buried by the sound of the guitar, but I could hear enough to tell he had good pipes. "Take me back down where cool water flows, yeah . . ."

  I switched to A, and he stopped.

  "Stays E, doesn't it?" I said. "Sorry, sorry."

  The first three lines were all in E, but when I switched to A again, where most basic rock goes, it was still wrong.

  "Where?" I asked Norman.

  He just looked at me, hands in his back pockets. I listened in my head, then began again. When I got to the fourth line, I went to C, and that was right. I had to start over once more, but after that it was a cinch. All we needed was drums, a bass . . . and some lead guitar, of course. John Fogerty of Creedence hammered that lead in a way I never could in my wildest dreams.