I used to be a loudness maniac. I’d try to drown out my sound memories by standing next to jackhammer operators, cupping my ear when the fire engines roared by, or sticking my sand-covered head into the deafening, numbing sting of the board-walk showers at Venice Beach. Apart from two weeks of blissful tinnitus brought on by an eighty-thousand-watt Blue Öyster Cult concert at the Fabulous Forum, these noisy escapisms always proved to be short-lived. The ringing in my ears eventually subsided, a piece of boulevard sidewalk would catch me in the face or a pushy elderly couple would bogart my shower, then proceed to flap water from my stream onto their distended, sea-salt-caked pubes. Still, I’m one of the few who relish the wailing baby on a crowded plane.
The higher I got that night, the softer and mellower my fugue. In time, the more fragile and subtle sounds from my past began to dominate my thoughts: the cuteness of every puppy sneeze I ever heard, the freedom in the whir of a Tour de France peloton coasting downhill, the unlimited artistic possibility in the click of a four-color pen, the anticipation in a firecracker fuse’s sizzle. I sifted through these sounds and tried to come up with the most comforting sound from my childhood, one that if I were on my deathbed would actually be the last thing I’d want to hear.
I remembered how I used to sit in the den with Moms just so I could listen to her read the New Yorker. In those days the literary and paper quality of that magazine was much better than it is now. Those pages had an intellectual and textual heft to them. They felt like parchment, a parchment that no family ever had the temerity to throw away. Ma would turn through the Bellow and the pages rustled as though the story had been printed on numbered autumn leaves. I decided that if I could collapse all my memories into one sound, it would be the sound of those pages turning. Crisp. Mordant. Pipe-smoke urbane. I went to my turntables and tried to replicate it. That was when I first started mining the favorite sounds in my memory bank in the hope that one day I’d compose a soundtrack that’d loop inside my head over and over again. I, like many a mixmaster who’s come before me — Count Basie, the biathlete’s heart, and the inimitable Afrika Bambaataa — was looking for the perfect beat, the confluence of melody and groove that transcends mood and time. A beat that can be whistled, pounded on lunch-room tabletops, or blasted from shitty undermodulated car-stereo speakers and not lose its toe-tapping gravitas. A beat that would make all the ladies in the house say Hey! without prompting from a concert rapper in dire need of some stage presence. A beat that couldn’t be commercialized and trivialized by Madison Avenue, reduced to thirty hard-sell/soft-sell seconds. A timeless beat, never to become an “oldie but a goodie” but always destined to be as fresh as French bread. The sonic Mona Lisa.
Above my decks hung an eight-by-ten color photo from a house party I had done a while back. In it I was positioned in some nondescript Mar Vista garage exactly as I was then, bent over a set of turntables, face barely visible, left shoulder awkwardly raised to my ear to hold the headphone in place. Fingertips freshly licked and resting lightly on the vinyl as if I were testing a hot iron’s readiness. My Piru-red XXXL T-shirt with the words TRADER JOE’S/PRONTO MARKET silk-screened just above the breast pocket, billowing away from my scrawny body. Blaze in the background, in profile, Locs sunglasses, black wool beanie pulled down past his ears, frozen in mid — pop lock, a contorted Toltec testimonial to post-Hispanic Mesoamericana. Behind him, leaning against the garage wall among the gardening tools and surfboards, a multidysfunctional lineup of West-side hoods, homies, and honeys of all races, intellects, and loyalties to Laker basketball. I looked at the photograph and knew then that all I knew was sound, and that sound would be all that I’d ever know.
“That was incredible, dude.”
It was Blaze. He was holding two cheap but intricate-looking pewter beer steins, two six-packs of beer, and singing the Löwenbräu commerciaclass="underline" “Here’s to good friends / Tonight is kind of special / The beer will pour, must say something more somehow/Tonight let it be Löwenbräu.”
“Is that Löwenbräu?”
“No, I’m just singing the song — my sister wouldn’t send me some shit we could steal from Trader Joe’s, this is the unpronounceable shit.”
Apparently Blaze’s older sister, Mariela, a tank mechanic stationed in Germany, had sent him a case of that strong leathery beer we loved so much. Beer that, no matter how much we drank, never left us with a hangover, only an urge to obey orders.
As the beer percolated in the steins, we clanked them together.
“To the Reinheitsgebot.”
“Reinheitsgebot!”
“What was that radical stuff you were playing?”
“I’m trying to find the perfect beat.”
“That was damn close, bro. Remember that offshore storm senior year when we went up to Zuma? Set after perfectly timed set of glassy eight footers, steep-ass take-offs, big barrels, remember that?”
“Yeah, even the sunset session was fucking excellent.”
“If there had been five miles per hour less wind, it would have been absolutely perfect conditions.”
“The wind made the shoulders just a tad too gnarly.”
“Well, that’s what your mix sounds like. It’s easily the best beat I’ve ever heard and probably the best beat I’ll ever hear, but it’s five miles per hour too windy.”
The beer and the weed complemented each other well. I was drunk and high at the same time. Close my left eye and I was high, shut my right and I was drunk.
High.
Drunk.
High.
Drunk.
I squinted through the mental fog and looked at the detail on the stein. The castles, elks, and mustachioed Kaisers came to life. A beer maiden, her hair in thick sausage curls, whispered my name.
Over the next few months I set about composing my perfect beat, whittling off a mile per hour of wind here and a couple of knots there. Eventually I succeeded in splicing together a two-minute-and-forty-seven-second amalgamation of samples, street recordings, and original phrases. It was with some trepidation that I played it for Blaze and the rest of the Beard Scratchers. The Beard Scratchers being the members of our record pool, and so named because of our capricious yet squandered intellectualism, the way we listened to jazz with our faces pinched in agony as if we were suffering from migraine headaches as much as from our scruffy and chronically itchy chins. Though the Beard Scratchers, like most DJs, were inveterate biters, incorrigible beat snatchers who would rip off any rhythm or melody not copyrighted in triplicate and claim it as their own, I wasn’t worried about anyone stealing it. The beat was impossible to replicate. Too many layers, obscure riffs from pop bands that never popped, folk music from countries without folksiness, sea chanteys from landlocked nations, all overlapped with my favorite idiosyncratic sounds and pressed into a musical ore as unidentifiable as a fragment of flying saucer metal in a 1950s sci-fi film. I was worried, though, that it was too long to be a beat or break. That what I had composed was an interlude or, even worse, a song.
When the music ended, all the Beard Scratchers scratched their beards save for Elaine Dupree, aka DJ Uhuru, the only member of the collective for whom a beard was an impossibility. But Elaine wasn’t even rubbing her chin: She was dialing a number on the phone.
“Who you calling?”
“Bitch Please.”
Bitch Please was an aging, once-platinum-selling rapper who occasionally purchased beats from us whenever her latest career reinvention called for some sonic esotericism. She once said about me that when I spun, no matter how frenzied or attentive the crowd was, I always looked unsure of myself. Looked as if I smelled gas but didn’t have anyone to ask if they smelled it too, much less the nerve to strike a match.