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.”