The Drifters (51 page)

As the Americans gathered around him, he cleared a place on the bar for his carpetbag and carefully unzipped the edges. Throwing back the top, he revealed two stacks of gramophone records with jackets in the current mode: weird montages, an extremely austere photograph of an eggplant titled in copperplate
Aubergine
, an 1877 grainy photograph of a public execution in Belgrade, and a series of vignettes of the American west, including the scalping of a white woman in voluminous petticoats. Records by two English rock-and-roll groups predominated: Octopus, Homing Pigeons. The records looked as if they had never been played.

‘What shall I start with?’ he asked his audience. ‘Yesterday these gems were in London, untouched by human hands. Today we offer them to the swine.’ He nodded to the soldiers. ‘I think the biggest news … the really shattering thing that has set music back on its ear … this.’

He dug among his records and came up with one enclosed in a jacket that showed a gangster accompanied by three screwball types standing under a bare tree in a western clearing. Looking at the forbidding photograph, I could not guess what the music inside contained, but Clive explained: ‘It’s a surprising departure for Dylan. A savage attack upon the church … a blistering rejection of Catholicism.’

‘What!’ one of the soldiers cried. ‘Must be terrific,’ and it was through his response, plus that of his friends, that I became aware of how vitally interested this group was in what was happening in their music. What Bob Dylan was doing in his latest record was more important to them than new army regulations or editorials in the
New York Times.
Music counted; other aspects of culture were in the hands of the Establishment or were controlled by old people like me, but this music belonged to them, and the fact that it outraged the stabler regiments of society made it doubly precious.

‘God, I’d like to hear what Dylan has to say,’ a soldier said as he watched Clive take the record from its jacket; the young Englishman behaved like a priest conducting a religious ritual. Only the tips of his fingers touched the edge of the record so as not to mar it. Gently he placed
the record on the turntable, adjusted the dials to high volume, and leaned back to hear the revolutionary music which he and his friends found so rewarding.

It was a strange record, in which every phrase had a recondite meaning. When Dylan, in his nasal tones, addressed himself to his landlord, who apparently was about to evict him, Clive said, ‘Of course he means God,’ and when Dylan challenged God not to underestimate him, in return for which he would not underestimate God, the soldiers understood. The lonesome hobo in the next song was mankind defrauded by the religion it had accepted. The wicked messenger, Clive explained, was the body of priests in all religions who misguide and thieve from the faithful; I found this a particularly savage thing, filled with youthful contempt. Tom Paine, bitterly disappointed with organized religion, was the hero of one song; a disillusioned St. Augustine, of another.

I found most of the songs jejune, the type of thinking one should have completed in college bull sessions—freshman year, not senior—but there was one that seemed better than the rest; it dealt with a ‘poor immigrant who eats but is not satisfied,’ and it displayed a deep and timeless religious spirit. When the record ended and the Americans had had an opportunity to digest its radical message, I judged from the remarks they made that Dylan’s interpretation of modern religion was more significant to them than any encyclical of the Pope’s. In succeeding days they asked Clive to play the record repeatedly, for it seemed to speak directly to them.

The actual music of the Dylan record was not impressive—mostly guitar and drum—but Clive’s next two finds got down to the hard core of modern statement. A London group called Octopus offered a driving number called ‘I Get All Hung Up,’ in which a singer shouted that phrase forty-seven times, with only a few alternating clauses, illiterate and frantic, which did nothing to explain why he was hung up. The song exerted a powerful effect upon its advocates, who told me, ‘That’s the best side Octopus has ever done.’ When I asked why the endless repetition of a single idea was commendable, they told me, ‘You miss the whole point. It’s that combination in the background.’ When the record played again, which it did no less than once every fifteen minutes, I listened to the supporting music and heard an electric organ that produced a mournful
wail appropriate to the words of the song and two electric guitars that sounded like musical machine guns. The third instrument I could not identify, so one of the soldiers enlightened me: ‘It’s a mouth organ … played very close to the mike.’ I listened more closely but was not able to confirm that intelligence.

But the combination of these instruments, plus the nasal, wailing voice singing in the accents of a South Carolina Negro—even though the singer had never been outside London—was so different and so commanding that I began to understand why the young people appreciated it so much. Did I? It had been recorded at such tremendous volume that all I heard, really, was a vast blur of noise.

When I said this to Monica, she clapped her hand over her mouth and said, ‘You idiot! You haven’t caught that wonderful twisting of the sound—like the arms of an Octopus? Where do you think the group got its name?’ So I listened again as she explained how the two guitars and the organ constantly intertwined while the shrill, staccato mouth organ carried the tune forward. It was a thin musical contribution, but at last I understood it.

‘You’ll like Homing Pigeons,’ she assured me. ‘They’re for squares.’ And when Clive put on their new record I agreed, for I could hear the words and they made sense.

Who was Clive? I never heard his last name, but he came from London and apparently belonged to a good family, for Monica had known him previously. ‘His father and Sir Charles did things together,’ she told me, ‘although whether it was in school or university I’ve never understood.’

At sixteen Clive had been a brief sensation in a musical group that had offered a series of new sounds; what they were I did not learn, but I did see a photograph of him at that period dressed in Edwardian clothes and seated at a harpsichord with twin keyboards, which must have been an innovation for rock-and-roll. When he was eighteen his group had lost its popularity and at twenty he was a used-up elder statesman. Now at twenty-three he was writing songs for others—very good songs, I was to discover—and to keep his imagination fresh he toured the centers of inspiration: Mallorca, Torremolinos, Antibes, Marrakech. On such trips he carried only a small handbag plus his purple carpetbag containing the latest records from London and New York.

Arriving at one of his stops, he would seek out some bar or café with a record player, and there he would ensconce himself, at no pay, and report upon what was happening in the music world, playing his disks at their maximum noise-level and infusing the area with reverberating echoes of whatever new sound had come along within the past six months. The highlight of any such visit came when he placed on the turntable one of his own compositions, and now in the Alamo the time had come for him to uncover what he had been up to since his last visit.

‘I’ve done two songs,’ he explained. ‘One for Procol Harum.’ This turned out to be a London group with a fine reputation. ‘And the other for Homing Pigeons.’ He played the latter first, and I was unprepared for either its content or style, for musically it derived straight from Mozart and poetically from Homer and Sappho.

The Homing Pigeons had given Clive’s composition the right touch; basically they played with an eighteenth-century lyricism, but in unrhythmic lines like ‘Selling little girls to fat bankers and trustees,’ they gave it an awkward, hammering quality that made it quite modern. I was surprised at how attentively the soldiers listended to Clive’s song; without saying so, he had launched an attack upon the Establishment, and this they approved.

At about two in the morning Clive said, ‘It’s been a long day. I’m getting tired. Is the sleeping bag still there?’

‘Yigal’s using it.’

‘So be it. What’s available?’

Britta answered. ‘You could sleep in the pop-top.’

‘Wait a minute!’ Gretchen protested. ‘I do my own inviting.’

‘What I meant was,’ Britta explained, her cheeks flushed, ‘was that Yigal and Clive could sleep in the pop-top and you could take over the sleeping bag.’

‘Now that’s a sensible idea,’ Gretchen said, and with no more planning than that, off they went to bed.

On one point I was mistaken about Clive. His effeminate mannerisms had led me to think he might be homosexual; certainly the soldiers who were meeting him for the first time thought so, because I heard comments of a fairly purplish hue, but one of the Americans who had been at the army base for three years offered a correction.

‘You cats have this boy Clive all wrong. He shared my flat during one trip, and he had so many girls running in and out that the Guardia Civil came around to see if we were running a whorehouse. When they saw Clive, a skinny hundred and forty pounds, one of the Guardia asked me, “What’s his secret?” ’

The soldier was right. With Gretchen sleeping indoors, Clive and Yigal had the pop-top to themselves, and they arranged the bunks so that four could sleep conveniently and from their pillows survey the sea. It was thus an ideal spot for entertaining young ladies, who later drifted indoors for coffee and bathroom facilities. Whenever I visited the apartment it was populated by girls who seemed prettier than the ones I had seen before. Clive was favorably known along the coast, and some of his guests drove long distances to talk with him about music and to share the bed they had enjoyed on his previous visits. He was a pied piper, attracting the best youth in Hamelin, but before long I saw that whereas he might be sleeping with various young ladies who sought him out, he was interested primarily in Gretchen.

I was present when the infatuation started. (Don’t ask me how a young man could entertain four different girls
in a pop-top during one week and at the same time be infatuated with the owner of the bed he was using; the young people didn’t think it strange.) It was on the third day of his stand in Torremolinos and we were all in the Alamo, where he was playing his records: ‘I have one just over from the States that’s absolutely delicious,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll love it, and you’ll be astonished when I tell you who’s done it. Johnny Cash. Yes, the hillbilly. Listen!’ It was a rollicking song about a southern gambler who had named his son Sue and then abandoned him. Father and son meet in a Gatlinburg saloon, where all hell breaks loose. It was, as Clive had said, a song everyone would like, and as he replayed it, I kept thinking that in America the new music was discovering what the automobile makers and the cigarette companies already knew: that in the modern world, with its crowded and dirty mechanical cities, romance can live only in the open spaces of the south and west. Sue meets his baleful old man in Gatlinburg; the soldier dreams of his girl in Galveston; the lineman comes from Wichita and the absconding guitar player is on his way to Phoenix. You can look at a dozen automobile advertisements on television, and you’ll get the idea that every American car is driven on dirt roads in the far west. Same with cigarette smokers. You never see them in a city, always beside some cool stream or herding white-faced Herefords beyond the mesa. The open spaces, the goodness of rural life represented what was desirable in American culture; the cities were abominations to be forgotten.

I was contemplating all this when a group of Americans and Swedes entered the bar, listened for a while to Clive’s records, then told Joe, ‘We thought the girl was to sing at five.’ When they looked at Clive accusingly, Joe said, ‘She’s gonna sing,’ and he explained to Clive that in recent weeks Gretchen had been playing the guitar and singing ballads.

‘Marvelous!’ Clive shouted above the music. ‘Simply ripping.’ He lifted the needle and gently returned the record to its cover, then sought out Gretchen and said, ‘I hadn’t a clue, old dear, not a clue.’

‘I like your music better,’ she said, but after a chair was produced and she had tuned her guitar, I could see Clive widen his eyes when she struck the first professional notes.
He looked at me and nodded vigorously, as if to say, ‘This one knows.’

‘Child 81,’ she announced, and soon she was singing the saucy account of how high-born Lady Barnard met Little Musgrave in church one Sunday morning and propositioned him with blandishments that even a young man intent on worship could not withstand:

Little Musgrave went home with the lady and was caught in bed by her husband, Lord Barnard, who preceeded to hack him to pieces.

Gretchen sang the ballad with a bewitching charm, and Clive, who knew a good singer when he heard one, said, when the applause had died down, ‘Most elegant. You sing like a Scottish girl … with real boggy coloring.’

I suggested that she sing ‘Mary Hamilton,’ at which the Swedes clapped loudly, for the song was well known in their country. Clive, surprisingly, did not know this famous ballad, but even on first hearing he appreciated the unusual beauty of the opening and closing stanzas. ‘Exquisite!’ he cried, and for the rest of his stay it was he who saw to it that Gretchen was called to the high chair at intervals to sing, and it was he who led the applause when she did.