“So it is a beat?” I asked.
“A damn near perfect one at that, presque parfait, as the French would say,” said DJ Umbra. “What’s in it? Anatomize, yo, anatomize!”
I began to break down some of the more obvious samples, getting only as far as the de rigueur Mantronix, when Elaine interrupted me by blurting out, “Popsicle!”—the name of the only Swedish pop group worth blurting out. And it was without trepidation that DJ Skillanator followed with, “Foreigner, ‘Feels Like the First Time,’ opening lick, second and third chords transposed with the handclap from the Angels’ ‘My Boyfriend’s Back,’ interpolating on the downstroke.”
DJ So So Deaf, a beat jockey who is in fact deaf, and who made a decent living playing bass-heavy music at dances and sock hops at schools and universities for the hearing impaired, began waving and gesticulating wildly in his slang B-boy sign language. His brother, DJ You Can Call Me Ray or You Can Call Me Jay but Ya Doesn’t Have to Call Me Johnson, whose bailiwick was comedy albums and television theme songs from the seventies, interpreted. “So So Deaf says, ‘Only Roger Daltrey’s epiglottal scream from “Won’t Get Fooled Again” can raise the hairs on his arm like that.’ He loves how you flared it.”
I touched my hand to my lips and kissed out a sign language thank-you to So So Deaf in return for his compliment. As the music played on, our thoughts returned to the beat presque parfait.
There were no more guesses and the Beard Scratchers leaned in, eager for just a taste of the beat’s trace elements; and seeing the wide-eyed puppy-dog looks of inquisitiveness on their faces, I felt compelled to recite the only true truism I’d ever heard. “I should warn you before we begin,” I said loudly and urgently, as if I were delivering a line from the final act of a Tennessee Williams play, “that I’m not going to necessarily tell you the truth.”
The Beard Scratchers nodded.
DJ Close-n-Play asked, “Is that a quote from Catcher in the Rye?”
It was saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe’s opening statement from his Opprobrium magazine interview, but I didn’t want to get into “Who’s he?” and “What’s ‘opprobrium’ mean?,” so I simply turned up the volume and said, “No, it’s my motto,” and went about naming my sources.
“That’s ‘Insider Tradin’ on My Mind’ by Penthouse Red,” I whispered, “from his Work Songs and Office Hollers of the Corporate Elite sampler.”
“Same cat who did ‘My Trophy Wife (Makes Me Feel Like a Loser)’?” asked DJ You Can Call Me Ray, et cetera.
“No, you’re thinking Greedy Steve McNeely.”
I went on.
“Audio Two’s ‘Top Billin’ ’ as rapped in the whistled language of the Nepalese Chepang.”
“I knew it!” Umbra said, pounding his forehead in musicolo-gist shame.
I continued my list: “Brando’s creaking leather jacket in The Wild One, a shopping cart tumbling down the concrete banks of the L.A. River, Mothers of Invention, a stone skimming across Diamond Lake, the flutter of Paul Newman’s eyelashes amplified ten thousand times, some smelly kid named Beck who was playing guitar in front of the Church of Scientology, early, early, early Ray Charles, Etta James, Sonic Youth, the Millennium Falcon going into hyperdrive, Foghorn Leghorn, Foghat, Melvin Tormé, aka ‘The Velvet Fog,’ Issa Bagayogo, the sizzle of an Al’s Sandwich Shop cheesesteak at the exact moment Ms. Tseng adds the onions . . .”
Blaze raised his hand. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’re spoiling it. You’re explaining rainbows, motherfucker.”
He let the song play out, then continued. “You know what your beat reminds me of?”
“No,” I answered, rewinding the tape.
“It reminds me of the code of Hammurabi, the Declaration of DJ Independence, the Constitution, or some shit.”
Everyone else nodded in agreement, but I didn’t understand the comparison.
“Look, dude, you’ve sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the DJ up as the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I’ve heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.”
We the true music lovers ofthe world, in order to form a more perfect groove . . .
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated Blaze’s praise, but I didn’t like my music being compared to a piece of paper and said so: “I think of it more as a timeless piece of art, you know, like the Mona Lisa of music. Your Constitution metaphor is too political. You’re making it seem like my music is propaganda.”
Pressing the play button, Blaze laughed, “Man, didn’t anybody ever tell you that all art is propaganda? It doesn’t matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn’t be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you’re sitting on a funky Magna Carta. An unbelievably dope beat that’s this close to being the supreme law of the land—but as it stands now is no more than a musicalized Equal Rights Amendment, a brilliant and necessary idea doomed to the dustbin of change.”
The music quieted the room with a thumping irrefutability that was indeed just short of perfection. I turned it down.
“So what’s it missing?” I asked.
Blaze leaned back in his chair and smoothed his goatee. “Like any important document, it needs to be ratified.”
“Take my track to the thirteen original colonies and get people to vote on whether they like it or not?”
Elaine scratched at her jawline. “No, he’s just saying you need that one special somebody to approve it,” she said. “Think Mick Jagger ratifying Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain.’ ”
Umbra contemplatively tugged on his soul patch and tossed out another example: “Charlie Christian ratifying Benny Good-man’s ‘A Smo-o-o-oth One.’ ”
So So Deaf stopped playing with his pointy imperial beard long enough to sign, “Like Kool G Rap on Marley Marl’s ‘The Symphony.’ “
“So who can ratify my beat?” I asked.
Blaze looked at me like I was stupid. “The Schwa,” he said, crossing his heart and blowing a kiss to the sky. “Who else?” The rest of us bowed our heads in reverence. Who else indeed.
Charles Stone, aka the Schwa, is a little-known avant-garde jazz musician we Westside DJs had nicknamed the Schwa because his sound, like the indeterminate vowel, is unstressed, upside-down, and backward. Indefinable, but you know it when you hear it. For us the Schwa is the ultimate break beat. The boom bip. The oo-ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang. The om. He’s the part in Pagliacci where the fucking clown starts crying.
He had one minor hit record, a hard-bop rendition of “L’Internationale” that ironically charted briefly in the early stages of the Vietnam War. “L’Internationale” is on his seminal Polemics album. Polemics, recorded in 1964, is an engaging, thought-provoking, and shabbily produced masterpiece. Listening to that record is like sitting in on an impromptu graduate seminar taught by a favorite, slightly tipsy professor at the campus pub. Measure by measure the Schwa deconstructs nursery rhymes, advertising jingles, and the more sonorous of the world’s anthems. Each tune, from “Ten Little Indians” to “The Battle Hymn of Andorra” to the Slinky song, is lovingly turned inside out and played in a style so free it makes entropy jealous. Sandwiched between the Nazi Party’s “Horst Wessel Song” and Johnny Rebel’s swampbilly classic “Some Niggers Never Die (They Just Smell That Way),” “Do-Re-Mi,” the whitest song ever written, becomes more than simply a song I hate: The Schwa exposes that Alpine ditty for what it is, hate music.
But “L’Internationale” stands out. I’m the type who prefers to listen to one song a hundred times rather than a hundred different songs one time. And I listened to that song a thousand times straight, its majestic strains as quotidian to my day as breakfast cereal. It was a song that made me wish I’d come of age during the Spanish Civil War, shared a foxhole with George Orwell. It was a song that would’ve shamed Stalin an
d lionized Paul Robeson. In fact, I’m quite certain that if the song had gotten more radio play, America would’ve never stopped buying union.
Background information on the Schwa was scarce. I’d scoured the underground jazz magazines and reference books, and all I could find was a scant entry in The Jazz Encyclopedia:
Stone, Charles—b. 4/17/33, Los Angeles, California. A well-respected musician proficient in the improvisational techniques of the free-jazz movement of whom little is known.
And a heavily redacted copy of a brief FBI file:
There were also scattered concert reviews from the early fifties that praised the “physicality of his performance.” It seemed the Schwa played with his body contorted in ghastly positions. Sometimes he stood onstage gyrating his pelvis or dislocating his shoulders for five minutes before producing any sounds. Most critics theorized that these corporeal contrivances were designed to illustrate that making music is more than a mental process, that a musician brings his body to a gig, not just his brain.
The Schwa’s discography was slight: three albums and a smattering of monaural EPs that had seeped into circulation. The most recent being Darker Side of the Moon, a foray into fusion that featured a cover photo of a black man’s backside and had the good fortune of being released at the same time as Pink Floyd’s multiplatinum Dark Side of the Moon. Due to clerical errors and acid-rock fans tweaked on microdots, the record did a steady if not brisk mail-order business. But since then the Schwa had completely disappeared from the scene, an act that served only to endear him to me all the more. There’s a special place in my heart for artists who inexplicably disappear at the top of their games. The list is a short one: Gigi Gryce, Louise Brooks, Rimbaud, D’Angelo, Francis Ford Coppola.* I admire these aesthetes for withdrawing into themselves knowing they have nothing further to say, and even less desire to hear what anyone has to say to them. That’s why I’ve never read Catcher in the Rye: I don’t want the novel to ruin a good reclusion.
Elaine broke my trance. “Man, it’d be almost worth finding the Schwa just to get him to play over your beat.”
“I’ll make the first pledge,” Blaze said, throwing sixty dollars on the floor. “Seriously, you need to find him. The chance for true perfection doesn’t come along every day.”
The phone rang. “It’s Bitch Please,” Elaine announced sotto voce, her hand over the receiver. “She says she’ll pay fifty thousand dollars for the beat.”
CHAPTER 3
BACK IN LOS ANGELES I used to score porn films. Still do when money’s tight. Not much difference between the American and German smut, except that German pornographers don’t see the three Ps, pubic hair, plot, and perky breasts, as anachronisms. In the beginning I took the job seriously. Most cats just handed in any old piece of music they weren’t able to sell. They could care less about the music matching the mood. I actually watch the schlock. Sometimes I’ll go so far as to compose different themes for each character. For a while I even tried working as a soundman, thinking that would give me some insight into the X-rated mise-en-scène. However, my latent prudishness was exposed when to my open-mouthed and wide-eyed surprise I discovered 1) females ejaculate, 2) they’re capable of expelling said ejaculate over long distances, 3) it’s salty, and 4) it stings like hell! Despite my rubber-gloved, hands-on approach to scoring porn films, the only thing I learned was why the great film composers like Michel Legrand and Lalo Schifrin stayed away from the set.
After dropping le beat presque parfait, I’d composed the soundtrack for a blue movie called Splendor in the Ass. A score that Rick Chess, a director with whom I’d worked before, deemed “too musical.” I explained to him how the overlap of the progression and the extended glissando matched the sex act’s natural music. The rhythmic clapping of the stud’s testicles against the star’s buttocks accentuated the trombone runs. Her “fuck-me-you-motherfucker-harder-goddammit” guttural scatting was contrapuntal to the lower-register xylophone. Rick started to ask what mise-en-scène meant, getting only as far as the mise before grabbing me by the elbow and ushering me into the bestiality department. He removed a videotape from a manila envelope and popped it into the editing machine. A bespectacled man, his pants dropped to his ankles, was fucking a chicken. Rick twisted a knob. The music came up. A sound so beautiful it should have been incongruous with the image on the monitor, but it was instead transformative. The man was making love to the chicken, and the chicken was enjoying it. I recognized the musician immediately. It could have only been the Schwa.
Rick Chess fiddled with the hydraulics of his computer chair, raising and lowering his seat in rhythm to the music.
“This is quality footage, but it’s unusable. The music is too good. Now the shit is an art film. Some sick fuck in a peep booth on Santa Monica Boulevard doesn’t want to jerk off to art—he wants filth.”
“Who is this?” I asked Rick.
He looked at me crazily. “How’m I supposed to know? Came in the mail as an audition tape.”
He tossed me the envelope. The return address read, “Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann, Slumberland Bar, Goltzstraße 24, 10781 Berlin, Germany.”
“Can I have this?” I asked.
Rick nodded. “Sure, keep it. I want you to use this as an example of what not to do, because you’re reverting to your old ways.” He stuck his hand into his receding, greasy hairline and kept it there. “I want the hack back. I want the DJ Darky who provided nondescript background music for Lawrence ofa Labia and 12 Angry Menses, conveyed the apolitical intrigue in All the President’s Semen. I don’t want the high-concept genius.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Nonplussed in the proper Kensington-Merriwether usage of the word, I was only half listening to Rick’s harangue. I couldn’t believe that distinctive legato that swirled inside my head was coming from the Schwa. I’m not the “it all happens for a reason, God has a plan, everything will work out like an HBO television show” type. Before Rick Chess played that video, the only serendipitous occurrence in my life was that I misspelled “serendipity” during a local spelling bee and thankfully wasn’t aboard the bus carrying the area’s best spellers to the city finals when it plunged off the Sepulveda Overpass.
This was no happy accident. I turned my attention back to the video. Serenaded by an exquisitely delicate diminuendo, the stud and the hen reached a cackling, groaning, mutual orgasm.
Chess elbowed me in the ribs. “Who came first, the chicken or the egghead?”
When I got home I took a good long look at the envelope. I didn’t have to be Easy Rawlins to figure out the Schwa didn’t send the tape. The use of esszet ligatur in “Goltzstraße.” The crosshatched 7s. The handwriting just looked too German.
I called up West German information and over a staticky connection asked for Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann’s phone number in West Berlin.
The operator couldn’t stop laughing.
“You making fun with me. This must be that American television show . . .” I could hear her flipping through her dictionary. “. . .Straightforward Kamera.”
She meant Candid Camera, but at $3.75 a minute I wasn’t in the mood to correct her.
“So there’s no Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann in the Berlin directory?”
“Nein. We have an Andreas Dunkelmann auf der Lausitzerstrasse. A Dieter Dunkelmann on Derfflingerstrasse. A Hugo on...”
“What about the Slumberland Bar?”
“Please, hold for that number.”
“Hallo, Slumberland,” the bartender, a woman with a sultry Mae West rasp, yelled into the phone, trying to make herself heard over music and the raucous din. I remember thinking the place sounded dangerous. I asked for Dunkelmann.
“There are many dunkel men here. Who do you want to speak with?” she asked, sounding a bit leery. I felt like I was making an international crank call.
“I’d like to speak to Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann.”
The bartender paused for a moment. “Yo
u want to speak with maybe a DJ Black Man or a DJ Dark Person?”
Suddenly the cryptogram became obvious. “Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann” was an approximation of my nom de musique, DJ Darky. The bartender explained to me that in German, Dunkelmann means “obscurant” or, more literally, “dark man,” and that Schallplattenunterhalter was an East German term for “disk jockey.” East Germany being a place where the global predominance of English had yet to suck the fun out of the language’s tongue-twisting archaism.
The phone call sealed it: I had to go to Germany. Obviously someone there had heard my music and appreciated it enough to think I was worthy of finding the Schwa. What I couldn’t figure out was why all the subterfuge. Why not just tell me where he was?
Music history is rife with no-brainer collaborations that should’ve but never happened. Charlie Parker and Arnold Schoenberg. The Osmonds and the Jackson Five. The Archies and Josie and the Pussycats, and though I didn’t even have the name recognition of Valerie Smith, Josie’s tambourine-shaking sidekick, such a missed opportunity would not befall the Schwa and Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann. If I could figure out a way to raise the funds to get my ass and my record collection to Germany, history would have its perfect beat.
Of course, I wasn’t about to sell my beat to Bitch Please or any other track-starved rapper, so I started saving my cash and begging every German Institute and art organization I could find for grant money and a visa. But after discovering that DJs and porno composers don’t qualify as musicians or artists, I took another tack. I became a jukebox sommelier.
CHAPTER 4
THE JUKEBOX-SOMMELIER IDEA came to me not long after hearing the chicken-fucking song, during a night out at Sunny Glens, a dive bar on Robertson Boulevard populated by Hamilton High alums who’d graduated in the bottom third of the previous twenty graduating classes. Bridgette Lopez and I were on one of our rare public dates. Some days I thought I could marry Bridgette. She was a forty-five-year-old divorcée who, during my Sunday-night gigs at La Marina in Playa Del Rey, sat next to the DJ booth, her pudgy legs crossed at the knees and looking like two porpoises trapped in fishnet stockings. She’d ply me with cosmopolitans and five-dollar bills, scratch a long ex-chola burgundy fingernail down my forearm, and request a song or sex act. More often than not I granted both her requests, and by the end of the evening we’d be singing sweet doo-wop oohs and coos and making slow jam vows to love each other always and forever. Apart from having to listen to Heatwave ad infinitum the rest of my days, a life with Bridgette wouldn’t have been too bad.