This is what I do not bring up at this juncture: that I’m sliding into Hell too. The deeper we get into rehearsals the further from me she moves, the more she resents lil dagover the more outrageously she comes on to Ormus. I continue to discover that there are few limits to Mira’s pragmatism. Whatever works, is her motto. I keep wondering about Ormus’s bedroom door. Is that an inviolable borderline? Or will she go beyond that, too, to find whatever works?
(Trust me. Don’t you trust me?)
(Yes, darling, I trust you, baby, I truly do. But maybe I’m an idiot to do it, just one more fool for love. One more rock ’n’ roll wife.)
Rumors reach the world outside the aircraft hangar of dissension within it. Mira suspects dagover of being the source of the leaks. The two women are increasingly at loggerheads; they’re both opinionated, strong-mindedly pushing their ideas, competing for Ormus Cama’s respect. Mira tells Ormus he’s letting the technology turn his head, putting the cart before the horse, you’re like the generals with their smart bombs, she says, boys and their fucking toys. I’m the one who knows the clubs, she adds, I’ve spent more time on the scene than the rest of you put together, you’re just babbling science to sound cool but you don’t know shit. In the clubs this stuff is already over, it wasn’t enough. People are hungry, okay?, the machines aren’t feeding them, I mean it’s up to us to give them something to bite on, to give their spirits food.
Ormus is listening.
But lil dagover hits back with a well-developed theory that it’s technology that has taken the music back to its roots, its origins in North African atonal call-and-response rhythms. When the slaves came across the sea and were forbidden to use their drums, their talking drums, they listened to the music of the Irish slave drivers, the three-chord Celtic folk songs, and turned it into the blues. And after the end of slavery they got their drums back and that was r&b, and white kids took that from them and added amplification and that was the birth of rock ’n’ roll. Which went back across the ocean to England and Europe and got transformed by the Beatles, the first great rock group to use stereo technology, and that stereo mutation came back to America and became VTO et cetera. But the technology goes on changing, and with the invention of sampling you can graft the oldest music on to the newest sounds and then, shazam!, in hip-hop, in scratching, you’re right back to call and response, back to the future. Technology’s not the enemy, lil argues, it’s the means.
What is this, Mira demands of Ormus, a history seminar or a rock ’n’ roll band? If she’s right then the music’s a closed loop, it’s dead, let’s go home. To go forward, to break out of the loop, we’ve got to go on pushing what VTO started to do, what I always thought Vina stood for. Crossing frontiers. Bringing in the rest of the fucking world.
It’s an impasse, and interestingly enough Ormus doesn’t seem willing or able to offer leadership, to see a way forward. The solution comes from Eno Barber, who makes it look surprisingly easy. Eno still comes across as the brother from another planet, immaculately groomed at all hours of the day and night, never seen eating or drinking or taking a leak, unflappability incarnate. He calls Mira and lil to his mixing desk and says quietly, I was thinking, we could have it both ways. And as they listen to his loops, the tabla rhythms and sitar and yes vina riffs pushed through his sequencers along with pure synthesized sound, as he fades and balances and mixes his bubbling aural brew, something starts happening, lil picks up her guitar and starts playing along, finding the rhythms or letting them find her, riding the waves, and Mira’s singing scat mixed up with Ormus’s lyrics and Indian bols, and Ormus Cama has actually begun to smile. All over the cavernous hangar electricians and grips and roadies and record-company stiffs stop doing whatever they’re doing and listen. This is the sound of a baby being born. This is the rhythm of new life.
We’ve got a band.
There is hate mail. Well, there’s always hate mail where there’s attention, always the redneck die commie perverts messages, the religiomane you may escape from me but you can’t escape from god fortune cookie menaces, the disappointed sexual fantasists, the fans of rival cults, the secret crazies who hold down mundane jobs and have back-yard cookouts on Sundays and fill their bedroom closets with magazine clippings over which they scrawl their epithets of existential loathing. And if the volume of the poison-pen material is greater than usual, it’s partly because the band has been away so long, and the dirty water has been building up behind the dam. There’s plenty of supportive fan mail too, of course, but it doesn’t carry the same weight, doesn’t become a part of what works on you as you go about your daily business. And this time the hostility is affecting the band more than usual, because, yes, theirs has been a long silence, and it’s a new lineup, so there are uncertainties. Also, the hate mail is not just standard-issue nastiness. There’s a new strain of virulence in much of it, an extra bitterness in the bile.
Vina wannabes write in to protest the choice of Mira rather than one of them, purists write to express disgust at the exhuming of the band, which should have been allowed to remain in the golden past where it belongs instead of being subjected to this zombified return, lesbian-haters send in their four-letter views of lil dagover and her Sapphic sisterhood, and that’s just the polite stuff. Many correspondents send in near-illegible scrawls warning that VTO’s quake songs may actually have been responsible for the current wave of seismic catastrophes and urging the band to keep away from that dangerous material. Don’t stir up yo uzual trouble again oar els, you’ve maid enouff money from uman mizry as it is.
Another faction blames Ormus for the band’s long silence, calling it a betrayal. Its members suggest that his envy of Vina’s genius was the real reason for shutting down the band and that he must therefore be held responsible for what followed. If VTO hadn’t ceased trading Vina wouldn’t have needed to start building a solo career, and therefore in all probability she wouldn’t have been in Mexico on that fateful Valentine’s Day, so she’d still be alive, you fucking murderer, Ormus Cama, don’t think we will ever forget or forgive.
Other correspondents, however, take a more positive line, praising the prophetic accuracy of Ormus’s old songs, expressing the writer’s belief that his music can literally change the world and begging Ormus to turn his magical powers towards the good. Heal the breaking planet. Sing to us and soothe the aching earth.
For everyone looking forward to Mira’s début, there are five people hoping for various reasons to see her fail.
At one point during the months of gestation—this is before we get to the airplane hangar—I myself get a little carried away. Mira tells me that Ormus’s plan is to make the new show an exploration of the ourworld/otherworld duality with which he’s wrestled most of his life. He’s interested in the theme of dissolving the frontiers between the worlds, so there’s a narrative he’s developing about an overworld/underworld love story, perhaps a rescue.… When I realize he doesn’t know about the music that came before him—how much, subconsciously, he must still resent his scholarly father, how much he must be suppressing!—I get excessively hot and bothered and go out and buy a stack of early operas, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600) with the Ottavio Rinuccini libretto, Monteverdi’s 1607 Orfeo, libretto by Alessandro Striggio, and of course the Gluck, from which Vina sang her last song at Tequila. I can’t find Giulio Caccini’s rival setting of the Rinuccini libretto, but I don’t care because it really isn’t very good.
When Mira next goes over to the Rhodopé I tag along and bring Ormus the CDs. He accepts my gift and puts on the Peri and even listens patiently to what I have to say, that not only does the whole history of opera begin with these works, but it’s a myth that crosses all cultural frontiers, you hear echoes of it in the Odin story, in Celtic traditions, even, I believe, in certain Native American tales, and all those versions have their own songs too, you should really have someone hunt them down. I tell him about the birth of a new style of accompanied solo song—his own art form!—in sixteenth-centur
y Florence, at the court of Count Giovanni Bardi in the late 1570s: a song aimed at expressing the meaning of the text. This radical departure from the madrigal principle of ornamentation by division of parts made possible opera, the aria, the whole modern tradition of song right down to the three-minute Tin Pan Alley hit single with a catchy hook. This, too, is a part of his history, I tell him, and he should know it.
I try to evoke for him the first performance of Peri’s opera at the Pitti Palace, on the occasion of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV of France, and the later première of the Monteverdi at the Accademia degli Invaghiti at carnival time in Mantua, whose Gonzaga duke was patron to both Monteverdi and Striggio.… But before I can start in on the technicalities, strophic variation, stile concertato, etc., he interrupts me, very gently. I get it, it’s an old tale, it’s been sung before, especially in Italian, he whispers, not unkindly. I guess that’s always so with any story. But what I’m trying to make here is still mine, and I’ll just keep going down this stumbling path I’m on, if it’s okay with you.
Okay, excuse me, I mutter, embarrassed, I just wanted to mention that the problem everybody has is with the ending, because she isn’t supposed to be saved, you know. Everyone gives it a happy ending one way or another, but that’s wrong, I just wanted to mention that. After all, Vina wasn’t, and here I stop and bite my tongue.
Good, says Ormus, giving no sign of having heard the last few words. Unhappy ending. Got it. Thanks for stopping by.
Vina knew all this stuff, I mumble foolishly, and perhaps just a tad mutinously, and go home.
(While we’re on the classics, I should say that Ormus has set the Dies Irae to music. Mira must have recited it to him too, and clearly he didn’t pat her on the head and shoo her away. O Angry Day may be the first-ever rock lyric to be translated from a Latin original written by a duecento Italian monk.)
• • •
To proceed: the idea is to do a first, short Anglo-American tour in smaller venues, Roseland, the United Center, the Cambridge Corn Exchange, the Labatt’s Apollo, no more than half a dozen gigs in total, to let the band bed down before launching, six months later, into a full, eighteen-month-long, six-continent stadium program of performances. The famous stadium rock set designer Mark McWilliam is devising a grand fantasia of an environment for this grand tour. By contrast, these first evenings will have a stripped-down, raw, back-to-basics feel. Lets get the music right, Ormus murmurs, before we get into the show.
His own singing voice is in good working order once more, though its smaller than it used to be, needs more amplification. However, his guitar playing, according to Eno, with whose ear I do not presume to argue, is perhaps even better, more emotional, than before. He’s back all right, and the band’s sound is fat and hot. On our last day in the aircraft hangar there’s a full as-live concert before an invited audience, with nothing held back except that nobody’s in stage clothes. Even in jeans and T-shirts, however, they sound right on the money. The applause is long and sincere. VTO lives.
We’re at Roseland, September 1993, just one week after the concert in the hangar, and a couple of thousand fans are in a high state of excitement, stroked by roving spotlights into an ever greater frenzy of anticipation, and then the VTO engine room starts up.
One-two-three-four!
The drummer, Patti LaBeef, the original tall Texan and one of the first women drummers to make it into the big league, is in her own monosyllabic way as much a hall-of-famer as Ormus and Vina up front. In the early days young men in the audience would yell at her, God, you’re horny and she’d ignore them, spit, and get on with her job. The VTO bassman, Bobby Bath, comes from Montserrat, island of earthquakes and sound studios, and plays as if his life’s ambition is stability, no more. Plenty of players got more tricks, he says, but it was always the basics that I loved, to be rock solid, yeah?, to lay down that bass line and let them up at the front dance all over she. Bobby Bath was briefly married to the outcast Simone, but he has no problem about being back in the lineup. What she’s against, I’m for, baby, is his attitude. That’s a bad-tastin’ drink of rum and I drunk me all I need.
And here’s dagover, there’s a big cheer for diamond lil, her personal fan club’s out in force tonight, and then the dry ice clears and Ormus Cama’s in his bubble with his pedal steel guitar, plunging into the intro for the first song, a souped-up version of the hard-driving oldie “Ooh Tar Baby.” He takes the first verse himself and it’s just like old times, only better, because lil dagover is fitting in well and filling the band’s old Bath-shaped hole, and then Mira runs out and things start going badly wrong.
I’m sitting with Mo Mallick and we both see the problem at once, we see that Mira was one hundred percent right and Ormus, blinded by his need to believe in Vina Apsara’s return from the dead, was very, very wrong. The audience isn’t pleased. What, you’re really sending out a girl in a Vina costume and we’re supposed to swallow it? The moment we see the reaction we know the evening’s a bust, and VTO could die again tonight. Here in this old ballroom it’s looking like Ormus Cama’s last dance.
Or not-dance, because the kids in front aren’t moving, they’re just standing stony-faced and staring up at the stage, pouring out their dumb hostility at Mira. How long before they start to boo? How long before they walk out?
At this point Mira Celano does an astonishing thing. She holds up her hand and the band stops playing. Then she addresses the angry crowd.
Okay, fuck you too, she says. You don’t like my look, and the truth is neither do I, but for now we’re both stuck with it, so why not just let’s see if the music’s any good, okay?, I mean if the music’s no good then shoot me, fine, you’re entitled, but if it’s music you came for we’ve got some to give, and if you don’t like my outfit, take my tip?, open your ears and shut your fucking eyes.
Patti LaBeef comes in here: a thunder-roll on the drums, a cymbal smash. Patti’s rooting for the girl, and Patti has a lot of money in the bank with the paying public, Patti’s credible. The crowd settles, grum-bling, half convinced. Then it’s lil, it’s dagover, who fought Mira most of the way to tonight, blasting out the famous “Tar Baby” riff. That does it. Five-six-seven-eight. Ooh Tar Baby won’t you hold me tight. We can stick together all thru the nite.
Ormus and Mira have discussed stage-diving. He can’t do it—he’s fifty-six years old and trapped in a soundproof cubicle—but she thinks she should. If we’re talking about blurring the frontiers, she argues, then we’ve got to erase the line between us and them.
I’m against it, but my being protective only drives Mira further into danger, and so it’s settled, she’s going to do it, about halfway through the gig in the middle of the sequence of Quakershaker songs. But now that the show has gotten off to such a rough start, and even though the band is playing brilliantly the crowd is only about eighty percent with them, surely she won’t go through with it, I think, surely she’ll be smart enough to hold back.
She dives.
For an instant I think they aren’t going to catch her, I imagine her body broken and trampled beneath the crowd’s surly lethal feet, I think of Tara. But the arms do go up, they’re holding her, she’s swimming over the sea of hands, she’s safe.
That’s what I think, but I can’t see what she can—the anger in many of the faces below her helpless body—I can’t feel the hands that are starting to claw at her body. Only when somebody rips off her red Vina wig does it become clear. I’m on my feet now, Mallick is yelling into his walkie-talkie, it’s a riot, get her out of there, but before the security guards can wade in she has somehow managed to regain the stage, and when she stands up we can all see the cuts on her midriff, her back, even her face, her long dark hair is blowing wild and ragged at her back and the bustier has gone, but she won’t stop singing, she doesn’t miss a beat, she stands front and center in her ripped leather pants and sings bleeding and bare-breasted right into their goddamn murderous ungrateful faces and that’s when I k
now, when every one of us at the Roseland concert hall knows for certain that Mira Celano is going to be a big, big star.
Afterwards, backstage, I want to hold her and comfort her and to hell with Ormus and his delusions. But she’s on fire and needs encircling by no man’s strength. She has come off stage to lay down the law. It’s not much of a greenroom and we’re all crowded in there and we all know what has to be said and that a woman with the guts to stagedive into a crowd she can’t trust also has the balls to face up to Ormus Cama and tear the scab off his deepest wound.
No more Vina, she says. She’s standing toe-to-toe with him, she’s the taller and stronger of the two and isn’t planning on letting him get away. Okay, Ormus? We do it my way or let’s forget the whole thing right now. Are you listening? Can you deal with this? Nobody comes back from underground. Nobody did return. Vina Apsara’s gone.