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 and 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.