Chapter Four
It's often assumed that because I've been cast as Crystal's best friend, I'm also the one who knows most about her childhood or at least about her life before she became a musician. That's just not true. Her husband Mark knew Crystal's family far better than I ever did.
Mark was never really a close friend. In fact, I regarded him rather more as a rival. Neither Crystal nor Mark were jealous lovers but that wasn't what it was like for me, although I accepted Crystal's sexual promiscuity much more easily than I could her almost uncritical emotional promiscuity.
I know that Crystal Passion was christened Christine Giordano, that her mother, Marianne, was Irish and her father, Giuseppe, Italian. And I know that her family home was an unremarkable semi-detached house in Harrow, North London. I'd also heard the rumour that Polly Tarantella makes such a big deal about which is that Crystal was the bastard daughter of a millionaire who was paying her some kind of an allowance. That would certainly explain why Crystal managed to live relatively comfortably when Giuseppe's income was never any more than what you'd expect for a middle-ranking civil engineer.
As to why she'd adopted the name Crystal Passion, I guess it was just as accidental as my stage name of Pebbles. And mine was entirely because of a supposed resemblance to a character in the Flintstones cartoon series.
All I know about the circumstances of Crystal's birth are what Polly discovered in her research for the biography. How she tells it was that there'd been an outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease that closed the local maternity ward in Carlisle where her parents were living at the time and the result was that Crystal was born instead in a Lake District cottage, but I don't attach nearly as much significance to this accident of birth as Polly does. I think the theory hinted in the chapter of her biography about Crystal's birth that her father was a man who wasn't her mother's husband is entirely speculative. Marianne was an old hippy and she gave birth to her daughter during that time in the 1960s when the practice of free love was flaunted as a statement of identity. It'd almost be more incredible if Crystal's parentage
could
be verified without DNA analysis and that wasn't available in those days. It's even more unlikely that this alleged real father would agree to take responsibility for an unplanned pregnancy.
I've met some of Marianne's friends from the time of Crystal's birth. They're all very nice people who're rather bemused and even dismayed that the fashions of their age, which appeared to herald a long-lasting—even permanent—change, turned out to be as ephemeral as every other fashion. And I can see where Crystal might have picked up her attitude regarding habitual nudity and polyamory.
I once spent a few days with Crystal in a New Forest farm house where her parents previously used to live. It had been a kind of hippy commune from the late 1960s to nearly the 1980s. It was now wholly owned by Zack and Liz who'd lived there for all of that time. They were real old hippies in every sense. Long greying hair, ethnic clothes and always smoking hash and weed. I really enjoyed their company, so it was pretty much inevitable that Crystal and I should join the two elderly hippies in bed. I'd never had sex before with people old enough to be my parents, so this was a first experience for me but not one I made a habit of until I was pretty much that age myself. I can't imagine Zack and Liz would be up to such a vigorous foursome nowadays, especially as, being the only man, Zack had to invest a disproportionate amount of his energy.
I also met their son, John Aaronson, but not at the farm house nor indeed with either of his parents. He's rather better known as John River, of course: lead singer with the River Bank. In the early days of Crystal's musical career, when she was a History undergraduate, she and John were an acoustic duo prosaically known as John & Crystal. It could have been called Aaronson & Giordano, but that was too much of a mouthful. Polly Tarantella dedicates a whole chapter to this early partnership. She believes Crystal is the natural successor to the River Bank's legacy, but I don't think there's much in common between John's music and Crystal's. Nothing was recorded from the time they performed together, but Crystal told me they mostly sang other people's tunes. And a weird selection it was too. Songs by Bob Dylan and Nick Drake, of course, but also songs made famous by Billy Holliday, Everything But the Girl, Abbey Lincoln and an acoustic version of
Big Fun
by Inner City.
John and Crystal guested on each other's gigs later on, but this was before the River Bank did the music for that weird ballet with the Hereford Salon Ensemble that was infamous for its depiction of violence, nudity and explicit sex on stage. It was that rather than the River Bank's version of Al Green's
Take Me to the River or
their own
Thunder in the Sky
that is most in tune with Crystal's music.
From what I've been told, there was nothing very special about Crystal's school life. She was a bright pupil and excelled at school, but not so much that she was ever the star pupil. She was a sort of geek that no one could imagine was destined for a career as a sexually promiscuous musician. Although she excelled at Music Studies, she didn't pursue it as an academic subject. She played guitar with a school folk group that mostly played covers of Top Thirty songs. The photos of her at the time show a pretty girl dressed unremarkably for a 1980s teenager. There are no pictures of her in the nude. Indeed, there are no nude photos of her at all until Christine Giordano became Crystal Passion. Even so, I'm sure she was just as habitually naked in the family home with her hippy parents and their hippy friends as she was in later life. And, despite Polly's lurid conjectures, I have no reason to believe she'd ever been exposed to inappropriate sexual behaviour from within the family circle.
Crystal's parents were separated by the time we set off on our American tour but they hadn't yet divorced. I think they were waiting for Crystal's brother, Justin, to finish university before making it official. I don't know why they split. Marianne always seemed to get on just fine with her husband, although Crystal hinted that another man was involved. And I got the impression that the extramarital relationship this other man had was with Crystal's father rather than with her mother.
Although Crystal had never been on holiday to America as a child, it was to San Francisco that Marianne chose to move when she separated from her husband and where she lived with some English friends who'd settled there in the 1970s. It was a natural destination I suppose, since San Francisco had once been the beating heart of the hippy movement. And so she should see her daughter perform on the Crystal Passion American tour, Marianne was staying at the time with some other friends who lived in the Pennsylvania countryside. She was scheduled to meet us at our hotel when we arrived in the City of Philadelphia for our second official gig on the tour.
Although I'd made love with Zack and Liz, I've never had sex with anyone other than Crystal in her immediate family. I don't think Justin would want to have sex with one of his sister's friends and Marianne quite simply wasn't a potential partner. I'm sure Crystal's mother had dabbled in Sapphic pleasure in her younger days, but it was obvious to my now expert eye that she wasn't truly attracted to other women. And so I again disagree with Polly who says that Crystal inherited her sexual proclivities from her mother and that Marianne split up from Giuseppe so she could shack up with her friend Marcia in San Francisco. Marcia wasn't gay either. In fact, I don't think she's ever been in a permanent relation. She was far more devoted to her three young children than she was to any lover.
Before we set off from New York to Philadelphia, we had the opportunity to perform in the Big Apple as the full band—albeit at the last minute—in front of a very small audience in a basement club somewhere in Brooklyn. Homeland Security had finally released our equipment and Kai Pharrel, or his boyfriend Pedro, arranged a last-minute gig to support a Math Rock group with the suitably dull name of Attenuated Dissonance. The MF Club could hold at most a hundred people, but the number of people who bothered to come and watch us play was barely a quarter of that.
It was a real treat to have my Rolands back and even better to perform as part of a full band with Crystal at the front of the stage with Thelma, the Harlot, Andrea, Philippa and Judy gathered around her. At the back, and constantly being bumped into on the small crowded stage, was the rhythm section of Jane and Jacquie and me. The set was mostly based around material from our third album,
