Kid’s a hell of a songwriter but he’s weird. Let me tell you what I mean: He’ll fixate on some object or maybe even a place, and then the whole thing is about that, lyrically speaking. First time I saw him, at the Talking Spring Café’s Songwriters’ Open Mic, he starts off with this tune about an old flagpole, and I’m thinking this is perfect, but then that’s all the song’s about: a flagpole.
When he starts off singing about how it’s in the courthouse square and it’s such-and-such feet tall and it’s white, and the ball on top is gold, all the time I’m bracing for the turn. When’s he gonna lay his cards out and reveal that what he’s REALLY singing about is America, or maybe his daddy, or maybe both? Maybe he’ll tie them both together by the end if he’s more advanced than I’m led to believe by his baby face and overall aw-shucks demeanor. And I’m already thinking how perfect it’ll be, something about how America might be run down, you might take her for granted but by God if she ain’t standing proud every day whether you notice her or not. I want it for the Karew Cousins, I want it for Georgie Tint. I’m already picturing myself standing in the doorframe of the bathroom of his suite at the Hotel Capri with a portable tape recorder in my hand, Georgie in the bathtub, a bottle perched suspensefully but then again kinda architecturally impressive, distribution-of-weight wise, on one corner of the old fashioned claw-foot tub, and I say, “Georgie, I’ve got one for ya, it’s about an idea that might be a little out of style right now but damned if it ain’t still important: patriotism,” and hit play. Might sound odd, but the bath is exactly where you want to catch him with new material.
But meanwhile back in the real world, at the Talking Spring where I’m seeing the kid, he turns from the first verse into the chorus and I’m expecting that to be the moment he reveals the metaphor. Hearing as many raw not-yet-on-the-radio-and-maybe-never-to-BE-on-the-radio songs as I do, I make a game of this in my head, and I find songs where I can very easily guess what the metaphor is gonna be before this moment comes around are one of two kinds of songs: real good ones or real, real bad ones.
But when we get to the chorus I’ll be damned if he isn’t still singing about the flagpole, and how it’s in the courthouse square, in case we forgot. Really burns me up, too, because the melody is just catchy as hell, and if the words were about anything BUT a flagpole at this moment, preferably America (but hey, I’m the song plugger, not the songwriter), I would already be hop-scotching empty seats up to the front in the hopes of catching the kid right when he takes the half-step down from the “stage” that doesn’t really deserve the name.
Instead I caught the kid by the counter, told him I liked what I heard and asked him if he wouldn’t mind a bit of friendly advice. He said it depends on who’s giving it, not bitter or cranky but just with a measure of self-composure you don’t usually find in kids new to town who are trying to plant their flag, if you’ll pardon the pun. The look most of these young hands flash when anybody pays them the barest bit of attention reminds me of the Pacific when I was flying over it in the war: indiscriminate and so bright as to blind you. None of that in him, but no hardness either.
Asked him if he knew what a song plugger was. He said, “Sure. You find songs and try and get singers to sing ‘em.” I told him that was exactly right then he said “shoot,” so I did: Why didn’t the dang song that was so promising ever become about anything but the flagpole? I could’ve used it if it had, could see a quick path toward getting both me and him a nice check, nothing to retire to Tahiti on but nice, and an equally nice credit to start him out with.
“If you ever took another run at it I’d love to hear it again, or anything else you got to listen to.” Gave him my name and address at The Radford Building, which you’re basically doing anyway by telling somebody you’re a song plugger, since all of us who do this with any kinda seriousness have an office off that same fire-trap hallway on the seventh floor.
◆
Two days later, two days during which I gotta admit I often found myself whistling that danged flagpole song, but wincing to myself when I got to the chorus, like you might at running into your high school’s star point guard who had gone off to start for Red Auerbach years later sacking groceries at the A&P (All that wasted potential!), I found a package in front of my office door. Almost tripped on it, to be honest with you. Small and hand-lettered, no return address. Cassette inside, had the kid’s name on it and underneath it, the word SONGS.
I set down my little styrofoam cup of shitty coffee from the kitchenette we all share, put the cassette in and turned up my hi-fi, figuring I was the only one in the office this early and didn’t need to worry about one of my brothers or sisters in arms hearing my hot lead through the walls that are about as “wall” as the stage at the Talking Spring is a stage.
I know the kid recorded this, just him and his guitar, in the booth in back of Reinhardt Record & Sheet. It’s not soundproofed to modern standards and you can hear the trolley dinging outside every eight minutes. First song — kind of a rockabilly thing — just cooks, plus the subject matter matches the form, the way the teacher said it ought to in an English class I took on the GI Bill, because the subject matter is a drive-thru. And that goes together, right? Drive-thrus and rockabilly. Right out of the gate it made me feel like I was nineteen again, even though songs that are meant to make you feel like you’re nineteen again usually do everything but.
But then once more, just when you would expect the song’s narrator to reveal that his baby works at this drive-thru or that the whole town is rockin’ there or even just “Gee, it’s great to be young,” he goes on talking about how many stalls there are for cars (six), how far back the building itself is from the edge of the property line (thirty-four feet three inches), and I swear to God, how much water it uses in a month. The water bill! I couldn’t believe it. As I listened, I felt my nineteen year old self that had been mentally tooling around my hometown in a hot car flip an illegal U-turn and pull right back into my folks’ garage.
And they just went on like that: There was a song about a roaring fire in a hearth that was about a roaring fire in a hearth, and not only did he tell you what temperature the fire was burning at but went ahead and did the conversion to Celsius as well; a song about a grave in an old churchyard that went so far as to tell you who the name was on the grave (Alice McGee, born 1877 and died 1923) but didn’t then take the off-ramp to speculate about poor Alice’s fate, nope, that would’ve taken up time the kid would rather devote to the stone the grave was made out of, the quarry that stone was pulled from, and on back to the glacier that must’ve carved that quarry out of the Earth back in the Pleistocene or whenever it was; a song about a dusty old ceiling fan in a boarding house that rather than talk about the fella staring up at it with all the lonesomeness in the world after knowing he done wrong and getting kicked out by his wife and now all he has in the world is time to stare up at the ceiling fan, the kid just detailed the dust up there, talked about the chain hanging down, how many tiny metal balls the chain was made out of — hell, I’m boring myself telling you the kind of boring stuff the kid sang about.
But when I tell you that otherwise these songs were top-flight musically! Forget the kid, I saw myself in a house in the foothills that somebody with a family name built with oil money way back when, natural hot-spring heat, my very own bowling alley in the basement, and that’s just as a middleman, just as the schlepper (as my Tin Pan Alley equivalent might’ve called it) between the kid’s brain and the wider world. Only problem was the words, and because I really wanted it not to be, I told myself that was no problem at all. Just a matter of talking to the kid some more, maybe finding him a partner.
Bottom line, the kid was a craftsman and you could tell it had all been crafted with the same amount of thought, even the words that left you cold unless maybe you were a fellow ceiling fan. But I figured every craftsman eventually has to become a professional, if they want to eat, and being a professional involves compromise. When it’s your way or the highway, you often end up living in a box underneath the latter. Anyway, that’s the way I see it.
Stood the kid to lunch at the Hurry Inn that afternoon. Asked him how he was making it while he waited for his ship to come in. He said he was doing roofing at this new development outside of town. I told him, “Your quickest way down off that roof and into one of those houses you’re putting roofs on, a couple of nice cars in the driveway to boot, just tweak the lyrics some.” He seemed perturbed but not offended, didn’t pull a beret down over his eyes and get all huffy. Told me he’d try.
◆
Next day I came in to my office and the phone was already ringing. It was the kid. I said, “Aren’t you supposed to be on a roof somewhere?”
He told me he’s late, actually, but he wrote this song when he got up this morning and wanted me to hear it.
I said, “Good timing on both our parts, go ahead.”
He set the phone down — I could hear it thud on what I imagined was a boardinghouse night stand with a dirty glass of not-much-cleaner water on it — and started to play.
Maybe the bad sound quality let me fuzz out enough to say to myself, it doesn’t matter that he’s singing about a gravy boat, and the gravy boat of course never turns into anything, and we don’t even learn that it was his grandma’s old gravy boat: this song is a hit. Hell, a classic. I even started filling in words myself: I mean he’s saying GRAVY so much, that could just as easily be BABY, shit, we’re halfway there.
I asked him, already knowing the answer, if there’s any way he could take another run at the words, make ‘em not so… about a gravy boat.
“I tried. I really did… But that’s what it’s about.”
“Okay well then would you mind sitting down with another fella, lyricist, and talking it over. Guy just does lyrics, he’s not gonna try to get you to bend the third eighth note or whatever the hell else.”
He says that’d be fine.
◆
“I’m sorry,” Kelly said. “It just works.”
Kelly’s not dumb. He’s a words guy, for crying out loud. Not exactly a genius, but smart enough and he gets by, and if you can get by making up words to music the way a little kid does when he’s walking home from school along some train tracks and the train comes by and makes a rhythmic sort of noise, that’s one form of winning in this life, I think. But when he was standing in front of me in my office after he spent all afternoon with the kid on the wooden fire escape of his boarding house, I thought: this Kelly is a fool.
“It’s a whole song about a goddamn gravy boat. Can’t you just hear what a hit it would be if it wasn’t?”
“I can’t mess with it. Hell, it’s my favorite new song, I can’t stop singing it.”
“You hum it,” I said, “don’t tell me you walk around a grown man, especially one who makes his living at lyrics, singing about a gravy boat.”
“I sing it,” he said. “Sang it all the way up here on the stairs even though I was out of breath. When are they gonna fix that elevator?”
◆
I’ll admit I was a little frustrated at this point. Got the kid on the phone later to try and convince him to give it one more shot and maybe I should’ve taken a walk around the block first.
“Haven’t you ever had anything happen? I mean, this isn’t the Village, nobody expects a songwriter to just set their diary to music, but still, it could give you something to draw from, you know, even if just a feeling. Haven’t you ever been in love, kid? Haven’t you ever been heartbroken?”
“Sure,” the kid said.
“Well, do you think you could write about that? You know, push yourself a little?”
“I do,” said the kid. “And this is what comes out.”
◆
Now I wanted it even more. Okay, so Kelly wouldn’t do it. The kid won’t take another crack at it. I knew I had to get real creative with it now if I wanted to make something happen. The kid had given me a tape of the song and I took that down to Skyview Tavern where I knew I’d find Culpepper. Not a mid-level talent like Kelly, but a plain loser and a liar to boot, the type to tell you about how he went up to Annie Hungerwood’s ranch just last week to just kick around some ideas, they were playing horseshoes and everything, but you talk to Annie’s manager who was out there every day last week and he’ll say he’s never met the guy. You know he’d remember, too, because how could you not remember the goddamned ugliest ties.
I told him not to worry about the lyrics, that they were just placeholders. Make it a song about some guy and his ever-lovin’ baby. Think you can do that?
Culpepper picked up the tape, looked down at his drink, looked around.
“Do it?” he said, “I practically invented it.”
The next afternoon at my office, he had the tape to give me back and a little typed-up sheet with the new lyrics on it, much neater than you would think given his overall everything. When you know you’re not a genius you know they’re not going to spot you a crumpled-up drink-stained hand-written rag, I guess.
I gave him some cash and he left.
I was looking over the words with that tune in my head, and though they were the very definition of “they’ll do,” they would still do, and most importantly, they were there in my hand.
I started dialing up my friend Begill who had a little studio — the way I had it figured, once I had the new version demo’d and got a big name interested, I could go back to the kid and say look, the only thing standing between us and a hit record is your say-so. Sometimes you have to make it easy for people. It was still ringing when Culpepper let himself back in my office.
“Can I get a ride?” he said, like I wasn’t visibly on the phone. “Somebody took my car apart.”
“The hell you mean?” I said, then regretted asking a question because I was on the phone.
Culpepper pointed out the window.
In front of the building, his rundown rust-red Chevy was off its wheels, and the wheels, and the headlights, and just about everything on the car that wasn’t the one big solid piece of metal was scattered all around. It looked like when I was in flight school and they handed around a diagram with an “exploded” view of the plane, and they said the better you learn this the less likely your plane is to actually get “exploded.” Down on the street some kids were already kicking the smaller parts down the sidewalk, and they were bouncing and tinkling and shining in the sun.
◆
Now I had extra starch in my collar about moving out of my office as soon as we all got paid off this. Neighborhood was getting rough, or weird, or both.
Begill’s studio was nothing fancy, though ironically it sat on the back part of a lot shared with the Fancy Freeze drive-thru, with the studio just a squat little rectangle all the way on the other side so if you didn’t know any better you might think it’s where the pimply young kids that work there take the trash out to. For a vocalist I got Dot Nielsen, nice young gal with a decent voice who mostly sings back-up when she’s not working for Raider Macpherson’s publishing company.
Begill fancies himself a multi-instrumentalist and he had a half-decent backing track laid down by the time we got there, and half-decent was all it needed to be: you wanted an artist to hear the potential without feeling like you’d already wrung everything out of the song there was to get. Dot got in the booth, or rather, the smaller booth within the booth we were all in, and put the cans on.
Begill started the track rolling for a take. There was a short intro where he’d had played some laid-back slide guitar, the kind of thing that would let, say, Grover Drummond And His Moon Rocket Playboys know that if they wanted to record the song that might be a good place for some of Grover’s signature slide work, without TELLING Grover how all it ought to go, and then Dot starts in on the verse.
She didn’t get but one line out (used to be something with the word ‘vessel’ but Culpepper had switched it to ‘tressel,’ something about a railroad track that had carried the singer’s baby away) when the little metal ball slid off one end of the nut that holds the arm of the mic stand up. The mic went crashing to the floor and Begill whipped off his own set of cans ‘cause they were filled with the amplified sound of mic hitting ground, which can’t be too pleasant. Poor Dot reached down and picked up the mic but now it’s in pieces, and we saw her mouth words like “Aw shucks, fellas,” but then there were patterns of light on her face moving and shifting, and I realized it’s because the pane of glass that walls in the recording booth was falling toward us. We also heard a clattering sound, and it was every button or knob on the mixing board, they’d come loose and were rolling down the incline of the board. Me and Begill wanted to get up on account of the pane of glass falling toward us, and I guess I’d always taken it for granted, but it turns out a big part of getting up out of your chair is having that chair all sturdy to push off from. Our chairs were sliding apart underneath us instead.
Begill said something like, “what the hell.” I tried to wave Dot out of the booth. I felt like we were in one of those shacks you’d see in newsreels of the atomic bomb goin’ off, except this one was coming apart in slow motion. Thank God the place was so small cause we were outside of it in half a second once we realized what was happening.
Not that we actually knew what was happening. I think a freak earthquake was all of our first thought, but when we got outside it was a beautiful afternoon on stable ground in God’s America. A girl on rollerskates who worked at the Fancy Freeze across the way was rolling idly across the parking lot, staring at us as we tumbled out of this shack that was falling apart like Begill had built it out of playing cards and wouldn’t you know it, there had been a soft breeze.
I am not a superstitious or even a particularly religious man (though I will occasionally play one when trying to sell a relatively churchy artist on a relatively churchy song) but I was at a loss for reasonable-seeming explanations for this. We were all shaken up pretty bad by what happened so I offered to stand us all to a drink. The Skyview was the nearest bar and that was the one criteria we were going off at that point so I pulled in.
Shocked as I was, I was even more shocked to find Culpepper not at his usual stool when we walked in. I was mildly offended, even. Was my money not good enough to drink away? Hell, his stool wasn’t even there. In fact they were a few stools light at the bar.
I asked where he was. Funny story, Ernie the bartender said, he didn’t know Culpepper ate enough solid food to put on real weight, but last night he’d sat down and his old stool had broken out from under him. Ernie figured, hey, he’s put his hours in on the thing and it’s finally had enough, no harm done, so give him another one, it’s not like it’s Grand Central Station in here right now anyway. But then Ernie had only turned his back for a second when it happened again. They kicked the pieces over to one side of the room (they were still there, looking like decent kindling with the exception of the fake leather and its yellowed glue-y underside) and pulled him over yet another stool. And just as Eddy Arnold on the jukebox hit the highest whoop in “Cattle Call,” wouldn’t you know it, it happened AGAIN. They didn’t know what was to blame, didn’t even necessarily think he was doing it on purpose, but since he was the common denominator they had to 86 him unless they wanted to pay out every cent he’d ever spent in there on a furniture bill.
“Well how about that,” I said, like I hadn’t just watched an entire recording studio fall to pieces in basically the same way. I felt nauseous. Went into the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face, and the cold-water tap came off in my hand. I dropped it into the sink, where it clanged a few times, three unpleasant notes that didn’t belong together.
The barkeep was screaming when I came out: “This some joke on me or something?!” Begill was in a pile of tinder that used to be the last stool at the bar. If he’d been a cartoon character there would have been birds around his head, but there weren’t. When a cartoon happens in real life, it’s just violent and scary.
I had to talk to the kid. Told Begill and Dot I’m gonna go see about this whole thing, and even I didn’t know exactly what I meant. I asked the barkeep to push open the door for me. It wasn’t the ninth strangest thing that had happened to him that day, so he just did it and nodded to me as I passed without even calling me the Queen or anything.
◆
He was on top of a roof. Nails in his mouth, strips of tar paper at his feet, at the edge of a cul de sac. I asked him what the hell the big idea was.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know?” I said.
“No,” he said.
I’ll admit I was pissed. When you are scared you get angry, angry you were made to feel that way, like you are your own best gal and somebody just made you cry. But I decided to play along.
I explained about how sneaky I’d been, then said, “And I can see how maybe that was a bit dishonest, but we were never gonna make a real record without you signing off. Anyway, now this keeps happening,” and I reached out and touched the wall of the house and the whole one side of it just rolled up and came apart, beams timber-ing outward and nails rolling away like they were saying “hell, I tried, but now you’re on your own.” Being that the kid was standing on the roof, he was now more down at my level, on his ass, dazed. He still managed to look at my feet and asked what had happened to my shoes.
“What do you think happened?”
“They come apart like the house just did?”
I told him he was a real smart kid. “Now what in God’s name is this? Some kinda curse, ain’t it? And if it is, could ya take it off?”
“I didn’t do it,” he said. “Nobody could. People don’t have nothin’ to do with it.”
“What are you talking about? If people don’t have anything to do with it, how do you even know? You’re a person, aren’t ya?”
He said it was just something he knew. He picked up a nail from where it had landed in the grass. “This stuff. Things that aren’t alive. We think they’re here for us to look at, and use, but what if it’s the opposite?”
I said I had no idea what he meant.
“That’s no surprise,” he said, cracking a smile. “I’m not much for words, you said so yourself.”
I smiled a little too. I think he could see I was sorry for what I’d done, even if I was only being made to face it by me and everyone else involved not being able to touch anything without it literally coming apart at the seams, and he said:
“Look, I don’t know what all is going on. But like I said, we use these things. And people, we have our uses too.”
And what was my use?
◆
You hoped to catch Georgie Tint in the bath. It wasn’t that he only let song-pluggers come through his eighth-floor suite at the Capri and hawk their wares when he was bathing, you could come by when he was cooking breakfast, or watching Carson, or even as he was in the middle of giving a pep-talk to the staff of his namesake Tint Mercury-Ford dealership in front of a cardboard stand-up of himself with a bunch of balloons tied to it, as one unlucky fellow I know had had to do. But it seemed to be the only place he ever actually bit, so you’d call his manager and say “he in the bath?” and the ideal answer for the manager to call back with was, “no, but he’s about to be,” and if you were smart you’d be at the payphone across the street and just go right over and his butler Crandall would let you in.
I was lucky. I had paid a neighborhood kid to bring along the tape and a portable tape player. The kid handed the tape player to a bellhop downstairs, and when Crandall opened the door on the eighth floor, the bellhop handed it to him.
“Got a cold,” I said, by way of an explanation that wasn’t really a very good one if you stopped to think about it.
You could see green tile in the little sliver of the open doorway of the bathroom. Georgie’d had it redone in his signature color and I remember his long-suffering manager saying something about I got the only client in the world who would renovate a room he don’t own. I had asked why he would do a thing like that and the manager said something about how he likes the idea of one day after he moves out a bellhop pointing out to some visiting dignitary the green tile and the bathroom and saying, “Georgie Tint had this whole thing redone.” Envisioned a plaque on the outside of the room. The Georgie Tint suite.
“Hey there,” Georgie said as I appeared in the doorway. “It’s Helicopter!”
Georgie calls me this because I pitched him “Am I A Fool For Lovin’ (Or Just A Fool For Lovin’ You)” in this very bathroom, and he ultimately took it number one country, number one pop, and it hovered there for a few weeks like the helicopter he would eventually buy with the proceeds. So I figured I got some goodwill stored up.
“Got another one for ya, Georgie,” I say, “But before you hear it, I need you to open your mind a little.”
He says, “Open mind? Didn’t you hear that sitar on my last album?”
I told him I had. “But this is something a little different.” I nodded to Crandall, who put the tape recorder on the all-green counter, and hit play.
He nodded his head approvingly for the first minute or so. Took a couple swigs from the bottle and always balanced it back on the corner of the tub without looking, which made me more nervous than I already was.
“I like it fine,” he said after it was all over, which coming from him was like another artist saying, this is the song I’ve been waiting for my whole career. “Have to fiddle the words around a little bit, but I like it fine.”
“Well see that’s the thing,” I said. “Writer’s… I mean he’s a hell of a writer but he’s… particular. Won’t let the song go if the words are gonna be messed with.”
“Gosh,” he said, like he invented sarcasm, “Mae Belle Cruckworth didn’t want her son to drop the family name to become a big star, either, but she sucked it up and wouldn’t you say it’s been worth her while?”
“Sure has, but not everybody’s as wise as your mama…”
“So this writer, he can suck it up too. I’m not sending the record company a song about gravy boat and nothing else.”
“Look, stranger stuff has happened — Waylon covered that song about a cake!”
“Yeah but it’s got love stuff in there too,” Georgie said. “The cake’s just a metaphor. You know what a metaphor is?”
I told him I did.
“I got twenty songs I like just as well, a story or a metaphor in every one. Fly on, Helicopter.” He grabbed the bottle again for punctuation.
“You know The Beatles, Georgie?” The way I asked it was a little bit of payback for how he’d asked me if I knew what a metaphor was.
“‘Course I do,” he said, “one of ‘em’s named after me,” and winked.
“What about that song where the guy started a joke?”
“See that’s what I need,” Georgie said, “at least a guy you can sorta hang your hat on—”
“Not my point,” I said. “What if I told you that John and Paul, they wrote that song and gave it away to prove that it was their craft, not just the Beatlemania, that was putting them on top of the charts? Well Georgie,” I said, “I suppose if you cut this song, it’d prove the opposite: Georgie Tint is so goddamn—”
And here he cleared his throat to remind me that no matter how rich or famous or debauched he got, no son of Mae Belle Cruckworth could stand for blasphemy in his very own suite.
“Sorry,” I said, and continued: “— Georgie Tint is so gall-darn good he can take a song about a gall-darn gravy boat to number one. It adds to the legend!”
Georgie looked me up and down. “Alright, fine. This thing does good enough, maybe we can get you some shoes.”
◆
Tuesday. Records come out on Tuesday. That morning I got out of a bed that had been a pile of unwound springs and cheap fabric for days, and skipped across a floor where the nails had been sticking up a little bit more every time I put my foot down, so I had mostly tried not to. I was weak from hunger. Reached for my doorknob, and it held out. Went downstairs and to the record store. Asked if they had the new Georgie 45.
It would ultimately become his worst-selling single of all time, but when I took it outside and slid it out of the sleeve, the sleeve didn’t peel apart, the glue didn’t drip onto the sidewalk. When I held the record in my hand, the wax stayed in the shape of a grooved platter. I flipped it over and the sun glinted off it, right into one of my eyes, and the way I squinted, it must’ve looked like I was winking back.