Outbound

I'm sitting in my little Zodiac inflatable, puttering through the anchorage off the town of Avalon, California, and it all looks so familiar to me -- yet kind of far away, too. The sharply sloping beach is not quite a hundred feet away as I slip through the anchorage, the old casino still majestically presides over the harbor, and the rocky sea wall is as it has been all my life -- boulder strewn, imperturbable -- and improbable. Something man-made, to keep nature at arm's length, and the thought is metaphoric in the early morning air.The water below is clear and deep blue -- just as it was fifty years ago, rocks scattered over the sandy white bottom still visible forty-three feet down, the sea as relentlessly clear and full of promise this morning as it was in the late 60s. Nothing appears to have changed, not all that much, anyway, and even my boat looks the same.

I turn and look at her reflection in the water and note she hasn't changed a bit -- not as much as I have. Troubadour is my Alajuela 38, and I bought her new from the manufacturer in Newport Beach 50 years ago this year, and yes, she's seen a few miles pass under her keel, true enough, but she's been in good hands all the while. My hands, as a matter of fact. And I've been looking at my hands these last few days, maybe more than I should, or more than is healthy, but right now, as I putter through the anchorage off Avalon, I can see my hands have changed a lot the last few years, and I have to admit there are days I hardly recognize them anymore. Still, when those moments find me I have to wonder what happened to me, because Troubadour looks the same. Why? Why do I have to be the one get old? It doesn't seem fair to me right now and I'd like to understand.

I remember looking at my grandfather's hands once, when I was a kid -- I called him Pops, by the way -- and wondering what all those brown spots were. And why his fingernails were kind of yellow and ridged. He had a few scars over the almost translucent white skin, too, and most were from cuts he'd sewn up himself -- "once upon a time," he used to say. He'd dip a needle and thread in whiskey and just sew himself up, and he didn't think anything of it. It was what you did to stop the bleeding, so he did it and moved on to the next chore, which was what I ended up doing -- more or less -- over the years. Now, looking at my hand on the outboard motor's tiller I recognized those hands for what they are. They were my hands now, in a way, but they were my grandfather's, too, right down to the yellow ridges on the nails. Am I an echo? I always thought I was just me, but am I, really?

I remember one night as I putter through the anchorage, me and Pops sitting with his third wife, Terry, watching The Petrified Forest, that movie with Bogart and Davis, and he told me about his trip west in 1919, just after the first war. How there weren't highways crossing the United States, not even through roads. He had a car, and God knows how he afforded it, but he and my grandmother -- his first wife -- made the trip west together, from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. A few cities had paved streets -- Kansas City's were paved with blood red brick, he said -- but by and large the roads that connected America's far-flung western cities were primitive things, often little more than sandy tracks winding over windswept prairie or through brittle desert scrub. With the hard, narrow tires that cars had in those days, the wheels tended to settle down in the soft sand tracks, often so deep that drive shafts were worn down by the the sand, and he had to replace two solid steel shafts between El Paso and Flagstaff. Just polished down to nothing, he told me as he sifted through his memories, worn down by endless miles under a relentlessly hot sun. Took them almost three weeks to make the trip, and he admitted to me that night, once the movie was over, he should have taken the train and bought a car once he got to LA, but that wasn't my grandfather's idea of life. He wanted to get out there in the world, smell the road, meet people along the way and maybe have some fun and get in trouble too, because that's what life was all about. I guess he passed that on to me, for better or worse, because in the end I bought Troubadour and sailed to those sandy, out of the way places he never made it too.

Funny, but I didn't plan things that way, not in the beginning. Things just kind of happened.

The way things always kind of happen. Unexpected things, the kind of people you never thought you'd run into, not in a million years. Doing things I never thought I wanted to do, going places that held no interest to me -- until I got there. It's odd, looking back now, how vital the unexpected things became.

Life for me, before Troubadour, had been like the first thirty seconds of a roller coaster ride, the part where the ratcheting chain hauls you up that first huge incline. I was in the lead car right about then, too, looking out at the world during that little pause at the top, just before the car takes off down that first steep drop. There is, I seem to recall, a flash of anticipation up there inside that hovering moment, then that little fluttering exhilaration in your gut as you slowly roll forward -- followed by a dawning awareness that life might be far more interesting somewhere else, anywhere, you're suddenly sure, else on this roller coaster. Maybe I never felt that way, not in that moment before the fall, but about half way through my ride I began to develop an appreciation for smooth bicycles on warm country roads.

Funny thing, though. That was my fault, not the roller-coaster's. And certainly not her fault.

Which, I think, makes Troubadour all the more ironic. Troubadour was a nonstop roller coaster ride, yet she's an old friend now. I know her aches and pains, her ups and downs as well as I know my own -- yet what makes that such an off-putting idea is she's not flesh and bone. She's a boat, but she's been my friend, too. A boat that became a reflection of my life. You go places with friends. You look back at that reflection and, if you've done it right, all you see is love. The ups and downs are all sunny and smooth now.

Yup. Funny. As hell.

+++++

I started playing the piano in kindergarten, maybe a little before. I was pretty good too, or so people told me, for a four year old. My first teacher, a dainty old woman who kept a regal old Steinway grand in her music room, seemed to think I had talent, yet even then I was more interested in composing music, not playing. And not to make to big a deal about it, but I always hated performing in front of people. My first recital was a disaster, and that set the stage for many more crushing performances over the years, but I think, in an odd way, my reaction to that first trembling moment paved the way for Troubadour. I do okay playing one on one, or even with a few people looking over my shoulder, but if you put me in a venue with hundreds of people I just come undone. Just can't do it, if you know what I mean. It's not stage fright...it's stage catatonia. I got over it once, for a while, but you know how these things go. They come back when you least expect them to, and it ain't pleasant when it happens.

Anyway, some time in junior high a bunch of really hip kids decided to form a band. Mind you, these guys were like twelve years old and had never played an instrument in their lives, but two of them got electric guitars for Christmas and started banging out the simple three-chord progressions of songs like Louie-Louie and Hang on Sloopy, and my best friend, Pete, got a massive Ludwig drum set -- because that's what Ringo played, don't you know -- but they needed someone who could play bass. Well, turns out I could. I was playing both the acoustic bass and guitar by that point, and my grandfather had a massive pipe organ in his house that I'd been playing for years, so I had that one under my belt too.

At any rate, they convinced me to join them and I guess you could say I taught them how to play their instruments over the next year. My best friend since kindergarten, Pete Davis, was a soulful twelve year old who liked writing poetry and was a natural on the drums, and we started putting music to the words in his head. Anyway, after he shared his musings with us, somehow real music started to take shape. Hey, you never know, right?

I look back on those first compositions of ours as something else, like a snapshot of life in the early sixties, the wonder of coming of age condensed into two and a half minutes of pre-pubescent wailing about the horrors of acne and the unexpected grief of nocturnal emissions. We were twelve -- going on twenty -- I guess, yet even then sex was becoming the center of our universe, and after we were pegged to play at our school's spring dance, the last weekend of our last year in junior high, that awareness grew front and center into something surreal. We had a couple of our own pieces to play but by and large we were set to grind out a bunch of Beatles and Stones songs, with me doing double duty on bass and keyboards, yet already we could tell the girls were looking at us differently.

I was, of course, terrified, and now I need to mention my, well, my grandmother. Her name is, again, Terry, and she was not quite fifteen years older than me. She was, as I mentioned, Pops' third wife. The first two women died on him, but that's neither here nor there. Pops was a producer by then, kind of a Big Deal in Hollywood, and Terry was not even half his age. So let's get this out in the open right now: I had a thing for 'my grandmother.' She was an actress, by the way, and in 1964 Life Magazine called her The Most Beautiful Woman in the World. So did I. Whenever she walked into my room I damn near had a heart attack. Yes, I had it bad. Real bad. Yet if she knew she never let on. She was always class, pure class.

Anyway, I was talking to Pops and Terry about my stage fright one night and Terry told me she did too, even when she was on a movie set. Oh yeah, Terry's English, grew up in London, and as the Beatles and the Stones were the rage that vibe kind of rubbed off on her. So, Terry worked with me, showed me a few tricks to make the terror a little more manageable. Some of those worked better than others, if you know what I mean. Just spending time with her like that was precious...the way she leaned close, whispered little secret tricks in my ear.

C'est la vie? When you're that age the world is nothing but testosterone, isn't it?

So, not only were there several hundred people at that dance, I knew each and every one of people in that room -- students and teachers. I had chewed my fingernails down to bleeding stumps by the time we were set to take the stage, and I found that the only way I could play was to turn my back to the dance floor -- so I did. For two hours I rocked and rolled and I had not have the slightest idea if anyone else was out there, and when it was finally all over I turned and faced a sea of adoring faces -- girl's faces, by and large -- then I packed my stuff and went home -- vowing I'd never do anything like that ever again.

We were, of course, invited to participate in a local 'battle of the bands' contest to be held in early July, and we needed two polished songs of our own in order to be contestants, so were turned Pete's composition into something really special while I cobbled together something generic and altogether bland for our second entry. Then we practiced and practiced until we were blue in the face -- then it was time to set up our instruments on what was indeed a really BIG stage.

"How many people are out there?" I asked one of the promoters as I tried to choke down a wave of rising bile.

"Oh, last year we had almost two thousand, but we've sold five thousand tickets so far..."

My knees were knocking by the time they announced us, but I had turned the organ so I faced away from the lights and we launched into Pete's soliloquy -- a soothing, polished love song that just sounded silly when five thirteen year olds worked through it, but apparently the girls out there loved it and they went wild.

Then we slipped right into 'Lucy-Goosy' -- my hastily contrived fluff piece, and that one brought down the house. Thunderous applause, the whole nine yards. We won the contest and picked up a recording contract -- with Lucy on the A side and Pete's soliloquy doing the B side. The 45 sold a half million copies in just a few weeks that summer, before we were even in high school, and as I was the songwriter listed on Lucy the lions share came to me.

And that was the end of that, of course. Lots of bitter vibes because of money. Always. The band split up yet Pete and I stayed together. He always stuck with me through thick or thin, and I never turned my back on him, either. We ended up having some fun over the years.

I haven't mentioned my parents because, well, they died when I was young, like three years old. An airplane crash, a jetliner taking off from Mexico City, and really, I haven't the slightest memory of either of them. I lived with my father's father and his second wife, and I grew up in Beverly Hills. Then wife number two died, and I don't want to make too big a deal about it, but death kind of defined my reality in those days. Things didn't last, people died -- and that was that. My parents were show business types, too, by the way; he was a director and she an actress of some repute, and I don't know how to say this other than I grew up around Hollywood types, lots of famous people were always around the dinner table, so my upbringing left me with, well, a different sense of proportion. If people saw glamorous stars and western heroes, I saw sullen, moody drunks sitting by the pool out back -- all fawning over Terry's -- my third grandmother's -- legs. I mention all this only to add context to the sudden fame thrust on me after Lucy-Goosey went platinum later that fall. I also mention Terry's legs because they truly were the most fantastic things on earth, and it's a bitch growing up lusting after your grandmother.

I, for my part, decided to concentrate on classical compositions after the band fell apart, which pissed a whole lot of people off, but I kept at it all through high school and right into college, yet by then what fame Lucy generated had all but slipped away -- and I was grateful, because I considered the piece pure garbage.

If I forget to mention it later, all musicians hate their own stuff. The more they hate it the better it sells, too. Go figure.

So, anyway, I like to think I went to Berkeley unencumbered by all the fame baggage I grew up around, and I studied composition and philosophy with nothing in mind -- until a friend asked me to join a group he was putting together with some friends. Once it became more widely known among those people that I had, once upon a time, penned Lucy-Goosy, well, for some reason they wanted me to join their little group.

"I always wondered what happened to you," Deni Dalton said, and that's how we met, Deni and I. She had this smokey voice that seemed to seethe this otherworldly, potent, dark sexuality, and when she looked me in the eye I felt like a banana being peeled in the monkey house. Whatever protective layers I had slipped-on that day, say that look of smug condescension I liked to slip on from time to time, she cut through that stuff like a new scalpel.

Deni was, I saw, Music wrapped in pure Sin. She was bigger than life back then, too. I was in love with her within minutes, but then again everyone who laid eyes on her fell in lust. She always wore black, too, back in those early days. Black hair and black eyes, heavy black makeup -- she was pure Goth before there was such a thing. I hate to say it, but she was into really dark sex, too. Very dominant, yet to me it seemed like she was compensating for something equally dark -- and submissive. Like she'd been forced into clothes once -- that just didn't fit.

Because under it all she had kind of a black heart, too. Mercenary, I guess you'd say. Not what I'd call educated, she was smart and from a very poor family. She hung out around Berkeley to slip on a cloak of academic respectability, but she'd dropped out of high school and slipped -- unnoticed -- into the music scene. She was, again, street smart and read people like kids at Berkeley read books, but maybe because of her upbringing she had a real hangup about money. She was always looking for the angle that would lead to fame and fortune, and I think after she took one look at me she saw an irresistible opening, like I was her entry into big time music. Turns out maybe she knew more about me than I did, and while I knew what the score was I still liked her. She wore her greed on her sleeve but didn't let it get in the way of her music

"Your Dad still with Universal?" she asked after I sat next to her.

"My father died when I was three."

"Aaron Dorskin? He's not your father?"

"My grandfather."

"Oh, right. He's still with Universal, isn't he?"

"Last I heard."

"Well, we're looking for someone new on keys, and Luke says we should give a listen. So, I'm listening."

We were in the living room of this run down three story house in Berkeley, and all there was in the room, besides a dozen or so people on a u-shaped purple velvet sofa, was an old upright piano -- and then, wouldn't you just know it, one of the girls on the sofa went down on the guy sitting next to her.

So...I sat at the piano and looked at this chick for a moment and started playing to her rhythm, then Deni caught where I was and she stood and started swaying to the music coming from the other girl's mouth. I was drifting between Bartok and Dave Evans until this chick hit the short strokes, then I just let the music flow for a while, a loose, swirling flow, and Deni came to me and kissed me for a long time, before she and I played a little music of our own. But that was Deni. When she felt like sex was the key inside the moment, she played every note she knew.

And so began a very interesting time in my life. I like to think of it as my purple paisley patchouli period, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

+++++

It was a funky house, of that much I'm certain. Channing Way was an epicenter of seismic music in Berkeley for a few years back in the late sixties, and maybe for a few months Deni's purple paisley house was ground zero. Her background was coffee house folk, kind of a dark California counterpoint to Paul Simon's more upbeat New York vibe, and you might get that if irony is your thing. If Simon had inherited a little bit of Gershwin, Deni had been mainlining Thelonius Monk for years -- yet she felt like she was ready for fatter, more complicated sounds. She wanted to create tense, epochal rock, anthems for a new generation already growing tired of tangerine trees and marmalade skies. She didn't want reflecting pools and kaleidoscope eyes, she wanted steamrollers and a wrecking ball. Most of all, she didn't want to play small clubs anymore. She wanted to hit college campuses and then, maybe, if she got lucky, move on to bigger and better things, but she saw rock and roll as a doorway, an entry into something really big and bold.

To me, as a keyboardist in 1968, big, bold -- and fat -- meant synthesizers and mellotrons. Yes, fat is a real term -- usually associated with big, beefy synthesizer intros. Those two instruments, I surmised, might allow some of the more bombastic elements of classical forms to merge with the somewhat more simplistic forms of folk and rock that seemed to be yearning for release -- and like every other classically trained musician on the planet I realized Sgt Peppers had shown us the way to the door, while Pet Sounds had given us the courage to break on through to the other side. Martin and the Beatles began introducing classical motifs on Sgt Peppers, but it was their Fixing A Hole that caught fire in Deni's mind. The Beatles married the baroque to old English choral music and it was brilliant, but it wasn't American. The Beatles were a Jaguar XK-E: think of something restrained and elegant, gorgeous yet full of barely contained potential; what Deni wanted was a Shelby Cobra with glowing pipes, something untamed and unleashed, music that would overpower the soul and make people scream -- she wanted the elation of the moment to overpower sense and sensibility.