Those men of my father’s generation, especially the black men, were a different breed. Fiercely independent, brilliant, and slightly touched, they were the type who’d represent themselves in court—and win. Children of the civil rights movement, they were the first generation of African-Americans with the freedom to fail without having to suffer serious consequences. They’re the Negronauts the black race sent off into the unexplored vastness of manumission.
Race, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the mother ship Free Enterprise. Its five-hundred-year mission: to explore strange, new, previously segregated worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no niggers had gone before.
And like the first men to walk on the moon, to have gone where no man has gone before, these men, if they come back at all, come back changed. They come back humbled. Discouraged that they’d seen all there was to see and that it didn’t amount to much. Yet finding out the Schwa was still alive had restored their optimism, and many of them, after they’d left the bar, would go on to do some of their best work. The Schwa had touched all these men just as he’d touched me and Philip Glass.
Lars tells a story. In 1971, Philip Glass goes to see the Schwa in Antwerp, and during the hour-and-forty-five-minute set the band plays a total of four notes, one chord change, an accidental cough, and a chorus of room-tone nothingness interrupted only by the drummer accidentally dropping his sticks and the bassist tapping his toe twice out of habit. Afterward Glass, then in his mid-thirties, still in search of his minimalist musical voice, and thinking of giving up the keyboards for sheep farming, approaches the Schwa backstage to offer his heartfelt congratulations. To his surprise, Stone is sulking in the corner, quietly cursing himself and his instrument. Glass asks the Schwa why he’s so disappointed after such a wonderful, groundbreaking performance. A little too rock ‘n’ roll, the Schwa says, a little too rock ‘n’ roll. Glass nods and complains how his synthetic nothingness felt forced, scripted. That his music was neither improvised nor natural but was what was on his mind and not what was in his mind. Glass and Stone go out to the piano, the bouncer is trying to empty the club of stragglers, but Belgians are as stout as their beers and they aren’t leaving. Glass sits down to play, and thirty-two bars of that pounding serialism crap does the bouncer’s job for him. The place empties. Glass looks sickly. Van-Gogh-self-portrait-with-the-bandaged-ear sickly. Billie Holiday sickly.
Kurt Cobain “It’s better to burn out than fade away” sickly. The Schwa takes out pen and paper and writes out a prescription. “Beckett.” That’s all the paper says. “Beckett.” First thing the next morning, Glass runs out to Standaard Boekhandel on Huidevettersstraat off the Meir. When he enters, the ring of the bell above the door is nothing; he barely hears it. When he exits, Godot, The Collected Poems in English, Rough for Theater, Krapp’s Last Tape in hand, the ring of the bell above the door is nothing happening twice, and Philip Glass understands minimalism.
Without fail at the end of the night the visiting musicians would take out their instruments and tell the Schwa they’d be honored if he would play with them. I always hoped he’d say yes. If he said yes to Charles Gayle or Peter Kowald, then maybe, if I begged him long enough and promised him the world, he’d say yes to me and agree to bless my beat. But he’d always turn them down.
He turned everyone down except Fatima. Fatima and Charles had some special connection. They seemed to lighten one another’s moods, and the Schwa doted on her as much as a broke nonplaying musician could.
Klaudia and Fatima were the Rosa Parkses of Slumberland integration. To my knowledge, before them no black female had ever set foot in the place. Whenever they came through, the regulars treated them like black-hatted gunfighters blown into town by an ill wind. Petrified, the locals would duly deputize a couple of brave white women to find out what the dark strangers wanted. At the first sign of trouble I always backed off, imagining the conversations from the safety of the far side of the room.
“In this here saloon we don’t cotton to strangers looking for trouble.”
“We ain’t looking for trouble, but we ain’t runnin’ from it neither.”
Then the stare down until the Schwa brokered an uneasy truce by buying a round of drinks with my money. After one narrowly averted bar brawl, Fatima said to the Schwa, “How about a song?”
Unable to refuse her, he achingly kicked his way across the sandy floor to the center of the bar and scanned the room with those baggy auburn eyes. It took me a second to realize that he was looking for an instrument to play. Gauging the chair backs, swizzle sticks, and beer bottles for their kinetic musicality. Seeing nothing that met his needs, he removed a paperback book from his jacket pocket and cleared his throat.
“What’s he doing?” I whispered to Lars.
“He’s going to accompany himself with a book.”
I hurriedly took out my minirecorder and pressed the record button. Visions of bootleg riches danced through my head.
Lars giggled.
“What?”
“They say you can’t record him without his permission. It’s like taking a photograph of Dracula, you’re not going to get anything.”
The Schwa ruffled the pages of the book over his pant seam, and the resulting sound rivaled that of the best Max Roach brushwork. I nearly fainted. He lifted the book to his mouth and played chapter seven like a diatonic harmonica; blowing and drawing on the pages like leaves of grass in the hands of Pan. Who knew a Signet paperback was in the key of D? For the more percussive sounds he rapped the spine on his elbow, thumb drummed page corners, pizzicatoed the preface, flutter tongued the denouement, and bariolaged the blurbs.
Brothers, will you meet me.
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
His soul’s marching on!
His voice. His voice was a magical confluence of Louis Armstrong, the thrush nightingale, and Niagara Falls at midnight.
After he finished there was no applause. Applause wasn’t a deep enough show of appreciation. People called their lawyers and had him written into their wills. A South African diplomat approached him about running against Nelson Mandela in the next election. A widow from Wilmersdorf gave him her mother’s secret recipe for Choucroute Alsacienne.
I immediately went to play back the concert, but to my dismay couldn’t find my minirecorder. Panic stricken, I asked Lars if he’d seen it and he stopped composing the ode he was dedicating to the Schwa long enough to point his pen at the floor. There, coated in sticky wine-soaked sand, was my minirecorder. Too cowardly to hear the results, I held the recorder to Lars’s ear and pressed play. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Nichts.”
Fuck.
I put the speaker tight to my own ear. Lars was right. Nothing, not even tape hiss, which is impossible—there’s always tape hiss. The myth was true: The Schwa could be recorded only when he felt like being recorded. I was having trouble breathing, too much magic realism, idolatry, and Color Purple mysticism for one night.
Stone dropped some coins into the jukebox. A breezy Bob Dylan tune filled my lungs with air. After perusing the song list for a moment, he ambled over to me, a devious thin-lipped sneer slicing across his freckled face.
“Whikrxx-whikrxx-whurr,” he said. He was mocking me, imitating Grandmixer D.ST’s legendary scratch from Herbie Hancock’s 1983 “Rockit.” “Whikrxx-whikrxx-whurr. Taurus the Bull. Taurus the Bull.” Very funny.
We never talked much. He never said anything, but he was pissed at me for dragging him into the public light, however dim it was. I think he felt belittled that a DJ, the bane of his existence, had been the only person willing to seek him out and dust him off. To him DJing was single-handedly responsible for the complete ruination of music. His frustration with the concepts of the turntable as instrument and the DJ as musician was understandab
le.
Niels Bohr once said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word,” and in the summer of ‘83 any listener who wasn’t shocked by the turntable work on “Rockit” was deaf. That grating chatto rhythm is to modern music what quantum mechanics is to physics, except that D.ST wasn’t concerned with the subatomic but the sub-sonic. He wanted to know not what atoms looked like but what they sounded like. His ministrations on that hit single proved what earlier theoreticians—Kool Herc, Albert Ayler, and every headbanging teenager who played their heavy metal records backward looking for satanic messages—had only postulated: that by manipulating rhythm and pitch, one could use melody to bend the space-time-summer-love continuum that is recorded sound. D.ST had transformed the turntable into both instrument and time machine. For me that whikrxx-whikrxx-whurrwas a call to arms for an old jazz confederate like the Schwa, the “Rockit” video was an air raid siren signaling a firestorm, and the turntable was Grant burning Atlanta. He heard something in the music, saw something in Herbie Hancock’s eyes, the splay of his fingers across the keyboard, that I wouldn’t feel until years later. He heard jazz sublimating itself to the turntable; and for the first time in his life he heard a jazzman play something he didn’t feel. He heard a jazzman running scared.
Something in the Dylan tune distracted him. Could’ve been the lyric. Might’ve been the violin. Or the way Dylan sings “reflection” as if it were a monosyllabic sigh. There was a hint of regret in his face. The now-or-never disillusionment of a lonely man who’d woken up in Germany on his fifty-fifth birthday and wondered what the fuck had he done with his life.
Any day now . . .
Any day now . . .
“That’s an excellent jukebox, man.”
“Thanks.”
“Lars tells me you have a beat,” he said.
“I do.”
He nodded approvingly. “Here,” he said, placing the book he’d just finished playing on the table.
I think he expected more of a reaction from me, as if he were Gabriel handing me the horn he just used to blow down the wall of Jericho, but it was just a book. The Sound and the Fury.
“Faulkner is the greatest DJ who ever lived,” he said, pressing his index finger to the cover, and again mocking me by jiggling it back and forth.
“Whikrxx-whikrxx-whuurr.”
I flipped the book over and skimmed the back cover. Each character was described in two words—beautiful, rebellious Caddy . . . the idiot man-child Benjy . . . haunted, neurotic Quentin . . . and Dilsey, their black servant. Apparently Dilsey didn’t have a personality, unless black servant is a psychiatric disorder. At first I misinterpreted his gift as a passive-aggressive gesture. The musical contemporary’s equivalent of offering peppermint candy to a friend who has bad breath and doesn’t know it. Then I remembered Philip Glass and Beckett.
I thanked him, and we had our first real conversation. Meaningless Tarantino-like banter about how the compact disc was a waste of silicon because no musician has ever been nor ever will be inspired enough to record eighty minutes of worthwhile music.
“In the history of recording, name one good double album.”
“The White Album?”
“Disjointed, and Yoko Ono. Need I say more?”
“London Calling?”
“Great album cover. Overrated band.”
“Blonde on Blonde?”
“Okay, I’ll give you Blonde on Blonde, like I give God the narwhal whale—beautiful but fucking incomprehensible.”
We were bonding. I focused my chi and gathered my nerves. I wanted to broach a sensitive subject with the Schwa, and it was now or never.
“You want to come to my house and watch a video of a man fucking a chicken with me?”
“I’ve already seen it.”
“You have?”
“Short guy, glasses, humping a Rhode Island Red?”
“That’s the one.”
“I rented it a while back. I have a little fetish for what the German freaks call fowl play. I went to the video store checking for To Fill a Mockingbird, starring Gregory Pecker, it was out, and the clerk handed me that one. Surprised the shit out of me when I heard my music on there. Needless to say, that flick is long overdue.”
“Did you know the guy in the movie?”
“You know what? He did look familiar. Back in the day there used to be a crew of young, totally square, suit ‘n’ tie cats that for the longest showed up at my gigs on the regular. Sit in the front row, grooving they no-rhythm asses off. I remember them because when they were in house, all of a sudden my band couldn’t play for shit. Asked my drummer how come when these guys show up you motherfuckers start clamming all over the stage. He says, ‘They’re Stasi agents.’ I was like, ‘Then be about your business, and play better, so when shit goes down, they’ll want to keep you around.’ Anyway, I think he may have been one of those cats. Hard to say, you know, because secret agents don’t look like James Bond, they look like plain old ordinary motherfuckers who’d get lost in a crowd of two. They have faces you forget.”
Before I could ask about playing with him, “Outstanding,” the Gap Band’s show-stopping tune, took a cautious peek from around the corner and, like a furtive, funkified pimp, dipped garishly into the Slumberland. “H-e-y-y-y,” Fatima said, grabbing the Schwa and pulling him away from me and toward the dance floor.
In a way I welcomed the intrusion. I wasn’t ready to jam with the Schwa. We both knew it; that’s why he gave me the book.
I enjoyed watching them gyrate and twist in the sand. I’d almost forgotten how effortlessly some women ride a beat. That shake. The way their feet glide over a floor, even a sandy one, as if shod in newly sharpened ice skates. A rather large woman, Fatima was no figure skater. Her face etched in bomb-defusing concentration, she danced like a Zamboni machine circling the floor in wide sweeping circles. She was efficient, powerful, and boogied with a smooth grace that belied her size. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She reminded me of the way L.A. women got they Westside groove on.
In a twinge of homesickness, I wanted to smarmily creep in behind her, press up against her denim derrière, and grind away. Ask her in a not-so-hushed whisper what was happening back home. But I knew the answer. She’d say, “Nothing is happening back home. The word widget has lost its ineffability, the computer companies having given it groovy functionality. This generation’s young people are the first since the dawn of the jazz age whose music sucks and they know it. And most galling, after all these years, there still has never been an Asian-American male on MTV’s The Real World.”
Klaudia caught me looking wantonly at her sister. Using a wristlock, she twisted my arm into an ampersand and asked me what I was thinking.
“I was thinking about being back home.”
She released my arm and asked me what America was really like.
I told her I once heard a comedian say that if you put an apple on television every day for six months, and then placed that apple in a glass case and put that on display at the mall, people would go up to it and say, Oooh, look, there’s that apple that’s on television. America’s a lot like that apple.
CHAPTER 6
IT TOOK ME FOUR TRIES to finish The Sound and the Fury. I nearly drowned in Faulkner’s stream of consciousness, but once I got past the fact that in Faulkner’s world literary existentialism never extends to blacks, the book’s technical construction did offer some guidance. Taking a cue from his style, I decided to remove all the punctuation from my life: commas, quotation marks, periods, one-night stands, midday naps, ellipses, and the evening news.
Like Quentin Compson I too stood at an important crossroad. My junction was tri-forked; three life-altering gigs lay ahead of me. Gigs that were to me what The Ed Sullivan Showwas to the Beatles and the Newport Jazz Festival to Muddy Waters. They lifted my confidence and shaped my style and affirmed my phonographic voice. I traveled down these paths lain with vinyl only to find out that all roads
lead to the Schwa.
The Left Fork
Bleary-eyed and fighting a severe case of cotton mouth, I was returning home from an all-night gig in East Berlin wondering if my favorite German boxer, Dariusz Michalczewski, had won his fight for the light-heavyweight championship the night before. My question was answered when a gang of skinheads, still drunk and charged up by the German’s victory, forced open the car doors of the fast-moving elevated S-bahn train. A frigid wind and laughter chilled the compartment. Not knowing what to expect, the passengers held tight to the overhead handrail like frightened paratroop trainees. As the treetops of Stralauer Allee whooshed by, the skins flicked their cigarette butts into the expanse, then looked at me. I looked down. Not at my feet but theirs, regretting that there was no Roy G. Biv mnemonic to help me remember the colored-shoelace spectrum of skinhead ideologies. White laces; white power. Is green gay or vegetarian? Red . . . is red commie skin or neo-Nazi?
“Did you see Michalczewski beat the shit out of that nigger last night on television?”
Neo-Nazi.
The alpha asshole smashed his fist into his palm and whistled a militaristic tune. He interrupted himself to call me a gorilla, then returned to whistling. I ignored the lame insult, not out of prudence but because the song’s title was on the tip of my tongue.
“Torpedo Los!” I shouted, naming the once-popular U-boat tune (“Fire Torpedo!”) he was whistling. He blanched and quickly launched into another whistled march. After about three notes I buzzed in with game-show-contestant alacrity, “Hitler’s People!” The answer unballed his fist.
“Sit down, kamerad,” he ordered.
I should have replied, “I’m not your kamerad,” but I simply motioned that there weren’t any open seats.
“Do you like fascist music?” he asked.
“Not especially. I like the exclamatory titles: ‘Under the Double Eagle!’ ‘70 Million Strike!’ ‘Farewell to the Gladiators!’ ‘Germany Awake!’ ‘I Don’t Believe Hitler Can Fly, I Know He Can Fly!’”