Revival (20 page)

There were nine downtown bars where you could hear live music any night of the week, and three recording operations besides ours. Wolfjaw Ranch was the biggest and best, though. On the day I stepped timidly into Hugh's office and told him Charles Jacobs had sent me, there were at least two dozen pictures on his walls, including Eddie Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Axl Rose (in his prime), and U2. Yet the one he was proudest of—and the only one he was in himself—was of the Staple Singers. “Mavis Staples is a goddess,” he told me. “The best woman singer in America. No one else even comes close.”

I had recorded on my share of cheap singles and bad indie albums during my dues-paying years on the road, but never heard myself on a major label until I filled in at a Neil Diamond session for a rhythm guitarist who had come down with mono. I was terrified that day—sure I would just lean over and puke on my SG—but since then I'd played on lots of sessions, mostly as a fill-in but sometimes by request. The money wasn't great, but it was far from terrible. Weekends I played with the house band at a local bar called Comstock Lode, and had been known to filch gigs on the side in Denver. I also gave music lessons to aspiring high school players at a summer program Hugh inaugurated after his father died. It was called Rock-Atomic.

“I can't do that,” I protested to Hugh when he suggested adding this to my duties. “I can't read music!”

“You can't read
notes
is what you mean,” he said. “You can read tablature just fine, and that's all these kids want. Fortunately for us and them, it's all most of them need. You ain't going to find Segovia up here in the hills, my man.”

He was right about that, and once my fright wore off, I enjoyed the lessons. They brought back memories of Chrome Roses, for one thing. For another . . . maybe I should be ashamed to say this, but the pleasure I felt working with the Rock-Atomic teenagers was similar to the pleasure I got from feeding Bartleby his morning apple slice and stroking his nose. Those kids just wanted to
rock
, and most of them discovered they could . . . once they mastered a bar E, that was.

Studio 2 was also dark, but Mookie McDonald had left the soundboard on. I shut everything down and made a note to talk to him about it. He was a good board guy, but forty years of smoking rope had made him forgetful. My Gibson SG was propped up with the rest of the instruments, because later that day I was going to play on a demo with a local rockabilly combo called Gotta Wanna. I sat on a stool and played tennis-racket style for ten minutes or so, stuff like “Hi-Heel Sneakers” and “Got My Mojo Working,” just limbering up. I was better now than in my years on the road, much better, but I was still never going to be Clapton.

The phone rang—although in the studios, it didn't actually ring, just lit up blue around the edges. I put my guitar down and answered it. “Studio Two, Curtis Mayfield speaking.”

“How's the afterlife, Curtis?” Hugh Yates asked.

“Dark. The good side is that I'm no longer paralyzed.”

“Glad to hear it. Come on up here to the big house. I have something you should see.”

“Jeez, man, we've got somebody recording a half an hour from now. I think that c&w chick with the long legs.”

“Mookie will get her set up.”

“No, he won't. He's not here yet. Also, he left the board on in Two. Again.”

Hugh sighed. “I'll talk to him. Just come on up.”

“Okay, but Hugh?
I'll
talk to the Mookster. My job, right?”

He laughed. “I sometimes wonder what happened to the wouldn't-say-shit-if-he-had-a-mouthful sad sack I hired,” he said. “Come on. This'll blow your mind.”

 • • •

The big house was a sprawling ranch
with Hugh's vintage Continental parked in the turnaround. The man was a fool for anything that slurped hi-test, and he could afford the indulgence. Although Wolfjaw did only a little better than break-even, there was a lot of elderly Yates family dough in blue chip investments, and Hugh—twice divorced, prenups in both, no children from either—was the last sprig on the Yates family tree. He kept horses, chickens, sheep, and a few pigs, but that was little more than a hobby. The same was true of his cars and collection of big-engine pickup trucks. What he cared about was music, and about that he cared deeply. He claimed to have once been a player himself, although I'd never seen him pick up a horn or a guitar.

“Music matters,” he told me once. “Pop fiction goes away, TV shows go away, and I defy you to tell me what you saw at the movies two years ago. But music lasts, even pop music.
Especially
pop music. Sneer at ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head' if you want to, but people will still be listening to that silly piece of shit fifty years from now.”

 • • •

It was easy enough to remember
the day I met him, because Wolfjaw looked the same, right down to the midnight-blue Connie with the opera windows parked in front. Only I had changed. He met me at the door on that day in the fall of 1992, shook my hand, and showed me into his office. There he plopped into a high-backed chair behind a desk that looked big enough to land a Piper Cub on. I was nervous following him in; when I saw all those famous faces looking down from the walls, what little saliva remaining in my mouth dried up entirely.

He looked me up and down—a visitor wearing a dirty AC/DC tee and even dirtier jeans—and said, “Charlie Jacobs called me. I've owed the Rev a large favor for quite a few years now. It's larger than I could ever repay, but he tells me you square it.”

I stood there in front of the desk, tongue-tied. I knew how to audition for a band, but this was something different.

“He said you used to be a doper.”

“Yes,” I said. No point denying it.

“He said it was Big H.”

“Yes.”

“But now you're clean?”

“Yes.”

I thought he'd ask me for how long, but he didn't. “Sit down, for God's sake. You want a Coke? A beer? Lemonade? Iced tea, maybe?”

I sat, but couldn't seem to relax against the back of my seat. “Iced tea sounds good.”

He used the intercom on his desk. “Georgia? Two iced teas, honey.” Then, to me: “This is a working ranch, Jamie, but the livestock I care about are the animals who show up with instruments.”

I tried a smile, but it made me feel moronic and I gave up on it.

He seemed not to notice. “Rock bands, country bands, solo artists. They're our bread and butter, but we also do commercial jingles for the Denver radio stations and twenty or thirty recorded books each year. Michael Douglas recorded a Faulkner novel at Wolfjaw, and Georgia 'bout peed her pants. He's got that easygoing public persona, but whoo, what a perfectionist in the studio.”

I couldn't think of a reply to this, so kept silent and rooted for the iced tea. My mouth was as dry as a desert.

He leaned forward. “Do you know what every working ranch needs more than anything else?”

I shook my head, but before he could elucidate further, a pretty young black woman came in with two tall, ice-choked glasses of iced tea on a silver tray. There was a sprig of mint in each. I squeezed two lemon slices into my tea, but left the sugar bowl alone. During my heroin years I had been a bear for sugar, but since that day with the headphones in the auto body shop, any sweetness seemed cloying to me. I had bought a Hershey bar in the dining car shortly after leaving Tulsa, and found I couldn't eat it. Just smelling it made me feel like gagging.

“Thank you, Georgia,” Yates said.

“Very welcome. Don't forget visiting hours. They start at two and Les will be expecting you.”

“I'll remember.” She went out, closing the door softly behind her, and he turned back to me. “What every working ranch needs is a foreman. The one who takes care of the ranching and farming side here at Wolfjaw is Rupert Hall. He's fine and well, but my
music
foreman is recuperating in Boulder Community Hospital. Les Calloway. Don't suppose the name means anything to you.”

I shook my head.

“What about the Excellent Board Brothers?”

That rang a bell. “Instrumental group, weren't they? Surf sound, kind of like Dick Dale and His Del-Tones?”

“Yeah, that was them. Kind of weird, seeing as how they all hailed from Colorado, which is about as far from both oceans as you can get. Had one top forty hit—‘Aloona Ana Kaya.' Which is very bad Hawaiian for ‘Let's have sex.'”

“Sure, I remember that.” Of course I did; my sister played it about a billion times. “It's the one with the girl laughing all the way through it.”

Yates grinned. “That laugh was their ticket to one-hit-­wonderdom, and I'm the daddy-o who put it on the record. No more than an afterthought, really. This was when my father ran the place. And the girl who's laughing her ass off also works here. Hillary Katz, although these days she calls herself Pagan Starshine. She's sober now, but on that day she was so stoned on nitrous she couldn't
stop
laughing. I recorded her right there in the booth—she had no idea. It made that record, and they cut her in for seven grand.”

I nodded. The annals of rock are full of similar lucky accidents.

“Anyway, the Excellent Board Brothers had one tour, then did the two brokes. You know those?”

I certainly did, and from personal experience. “Went broke and broke up.”

“Uh-huh. Les came home and went to work for me. He produces better than he ever played, and he's been my chief ramrod on the music side for going on fifteen years now. When Charlie Jacobs called me, my idea was to make you Les's understudy, thinking you could earn while you learn, play some gigs on the side, all the usual shit. That's still the idea, but your learning curve better be goddam steep, son, because Les had a heart attack last week. He's gonna be okay—so I'm told—but he's got to lose a bunch of weight and take a bunch of pills and he's talking about retiring in a year or so. Which will give me plenty of time to see if you're gonna work out.”

I felt something close to panic. “Mr. Yates—”

“Hugh.”

“Hugh, I know next to nothing about A&R. The only recording studios I've ever been in are the ones where the group I was playing with paid for time by the hour.”

“Mostly with the lead guitarist's doting parents footing the bill,” he said. “Or the drummer's wife, waitressing eight hours a day and hustling tips on sore feet.”

Yes, that was pretty much how it went. Until wifey wised up, that was, and put him out of doors.

He leaned forward, hands clasped. “You'll either learn or you won't. The Rev says you will. That's good enough for me. Got to be. I owe him. For now, all you have to do is light up the studios, keep track of AH—you know what that is, don't you?”

“Artists' hours.”

“Uh-huh, and lock up at night. I've got a guy who can show you the ropes until Les gets back. Mookie McDonald's his name. If you pay as much attention to what Mookie does wrong as to what he does right, you'll learn a lot. Don't let him keep the log, whatever you do. And one more thing. If you smoke some rope, that's your business as long as you show up for work on time and don't start a grassfire. But if I hear you're riding the pink horse again . . .”

I made myself look him in the eye. “I'm not going back to that.”

“A brave statement, and one I've heard many times, in a few cases from people who are now dead. Sometimes, though, it turns out to be true. I hope it will be in your case. But just so we're clear: you use and you're gone, favor owed or no favor owed. Are we clear on that?”

We were. Crystal.

 • • •

Georgia Donlin was just as beautiful
in 2008 as in 1992, but she'd put on a few pounds, there were streaks of silver in her dark hair, and she was wearing bifocals. “You don't happen to know what's got him all fired up this morning, do you?” she asked me.

“No clue.”

“He started cussing, then he laughed a little, then he started cussing again. Said he fucking knew it, said that son of a bitch, then threw something, it sounded like. All I want to know is if somebody's gonna get fired. If that's the case, I'm taking a sick day. I can't deal with confrontation.”

“Says the woman who threw a pot at the meat delivery man last winter.”

“That was different. That four-oh-four son of a bitch tried to caress my butt.”

“A four-oh-four with good taste,” I remarked, and when she gave me the stinkeye: “Just sayin.”

“Huh. Last few minutes it's been all quiet in there. I hope he didn't give himself a heart attack.”

“Maybe it was something he saw on TV. Or read in the paper?”

“TV went off fifteen minutes after I came in, and as for the
Camera
and the
Post
, he stopped takin em two months ago. Says he gets everything from the Internet. I tell him, ‘Hugh, all that Internet news is written by boys not old enough to shave and girls hardly out of their training bras. It's not to be trusted.' He thinks I'm just a clueless old lady. He doesn't say it, but I can see it in his eyes. Like I don't have a daughter who's taking computer courses at CU.
Bree
's the one who told me not to trust that bloggish crap. Go on, now. But if he's sittin in his chair dead of vapor lock, don't call me to give him CPR.”

She moved away, tall and regal, the gliding walk no different from that of the young woman who had brought the iced tea into Hugh's office sixteen years before.

I tapped a knuckle on the door. Hugh wasn't dead, but he was slumped behind his oversize desk, rubbing his temples like a man with a migraine. His laptop was open in front of him.

“Are you going to fire someone?” I asked.