Laughing Boy Read online

  Laughing Boy

  STUART PAWSON

  To Doreen

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  By Stuart Pawson

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to the following for their help:

  Dennis Marshall, John Crawford, Clive Kingswood, Dave Mason, Matthew Perkins, Ron Ellis and John Mills. Special thanks to Greg and Shelley Davis of Blue Coyote and extra special thanks to the genuine Tim Roper and Fool’s Progress, whose ‘music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory’

  Time’s vibration falters

  Caught mid-breath

  Between the parchment past

  And wide-eyed tomorrow

  Silence dangles

  Fecund, ripe as plums

  So pluck the best

  And leave the rest for fallow

  Until with leaden head

  And lidded brows

  Engulfed and mellow

  You find the time

  To be

  Embalmed by the warm

  But watch out for that needle, Son

  This is the eye of the storm

  This is the eye of the storm

  Complacency seduces

  Enfeebles from within

  Enervates the core

  To draw the marrow from all desires

  Voiceless ashes turn

  Where once burned bonfires

  As unquestioning as a faithless friend

  Whose answers like smoke rings

  On falsehoods are borne

  So watch out for that needle, Son

  You’re in the eye of the storm

  This is the eye of the storm

  Tim Roper (1944–1969)

  Prologue

  California 1969

  The tiny figure jerked across the stage like a clockwork matchstick man, dwarfed by the paraphernalia of the rock concert that surrounded him. Banks of dry ice gas piled upon each other, violet and pink, and the flickering strobe lights made the set look like a vision of hell from an early movie.

  “It’s been a good day in the war,” he yelled into the microphone, and the capacity crowd standing before him screamed their approval and swayed from side to side, arms aloft, holding burning cigarette lighters and candles, girlfriends on their shoulders, bandannas around heads, long hair swirling to the beat.

  The singer was stripped to the waist, his whiteness heightened by greasepaint and sweat that sent the spotlight beams glancing off into the night sky. All he could see was an ocean of faces, each one illuminated with religious fervour, adoration even, as the group hammered out the bass line. This was what they wanted to hear. This was power – the power of music. Hey man! This was love!

  It’s been a good day in the war,

  And ain’t that just the TRUTH!

  He howled the last syllable and the sound system amplified his voice a thousand times.

  Pratt and Whitney are up ten,

  And Boeing are through the ROOF!

  The guitarists that flanked him, Carlo on rhythm, Oscar on bass, glanced across at each other and grinned, but there was a hint of fear in their smiles. This time he had the audience, he really had them, and if he didn’t bring them down there could be trouble. Two youths had been stabbed to death after an earlier concert, and it was written into the contract that they would end the show with a slow number to lower the tension, cool the emotions, before five thousand disciples of anarchy were loosed out into the night, on to the streets of downtown San Diego. Behind them, Zeke on the drums and Eddie on keyboards had no such inhibitions. Eddie was the oldest member and the musician of the group. Brought up among jazz bands, he’d seen the writing on the wall and made the transition to rock. He gave the group, who called themselves The LHO, respectability, injecting long solos and complicated twiddly bits into the ceaseless beat and mundane tunes.

  Zeke was on the most fantastic trip of his life. Earlier in the day his wife had gone into labour and at that very moment was giving birth to their firstborn in St. Catherine’s Sisters of Mercy hospital. He laid stick against skin with a verve that threatened to burst his drums asunder. His musical theory was simple: If you hadn’t hit it for a while, do it now, and do it hard. Eddie glanced across at him and winked. “This is the life; this is what it’s all about,” was the message that flashed between them. Zeke grinned back and hammered the cowbell.

  Body bags are doing well,

  And so is Uncle SAM.

  He can pay his debts now,

  Thanks to ol’ VietNAM.

  Tim Roper, the lead singer and creator of The LHO, windmilled his right arm, bringing his musicians back into time with each other and winding down the tempo. Zeke slowed the beat and Eddie went into the band’s standard finish, ending with a drum roll, a few wailing chords and a final crash of everything that made a noise.

  The audience, almost all living under the threat of draft into the army, went wild.

  City ordinances demanded that the concert end at eleven p.m., and it was nearly five to. A roady in the wings tapped his watch and held up five fingers. Tim nodded an acknowledgement. Breach of the rule would mean failure to obtain licences for further concerts.

  “Let’s do the breakfast song,” Tim shouted at Eddie, intoxicated to a height that drugs alone could never reach. He was reckless, wanting to live dangerously. Fuck the city ordinances, he was thinking, and if a couple of dope-heads were stabbed it wouldn’t hurt record sales. They’d given one encore, but the crowd was shouting for more; waving arms and stamping feet until they gradually fell into time with each other.

  “We can’t, man,” Oscar yelled back. “We finish on ‘Storm’. We agreed.”

  Eddie heard the exchange but didn’t argue. He just played the riff from ‘Eye of the Storm’ without waiting for a cue and the foot stomping changed to a cheer of approval. Tim had been overruled. He didn’t like it but there wasn’t much he could do. Carlo picked up the melody and Zeke fell into the rhythm as easily as falling into a warm bed. In ten minutes he’d be out of here, on his way to St. Catherine’s. Eddie pulled a face at the girl in the front row with devotion in her eyes and what could have been a small family of illegal immigrants inside her T-shirt. If the roadies did their job well he could be having sex with her before the night was much older. Tim yanked his guitar back into position with a scowl and spread his fingers into the appropriate chord.

  “This is the eye of the storm,” Tim sang. It was his most popular song, their only small hit, and a slow number in contrast to the thrashed metal that they were moderately famous for. “Watch out for that needle, Son, ’cos this is the eye of the storm.”

  Blue Coyote sound studio where the band hung out was in Sherman Oaks, a district of Los Angeles adjacent to Hollywood and all the film studios. It was in a basement below a converted garage and run by Eddie’s younger brother, Pete. Pete was one of the finest saxophonists on the West Coast, and heading for a great future, until he discovered the hard way that Harley-Davidsons with bald tyres didn’t go round corners too well and didn’t go through brick walls at all. He came out of hospital in a wheelchair, with a permanent tremor in his left hand that meant his playing days were a memory. Eddie organised a series of gigs, added his life savings and set Pete up in Blue Coyote.

  Three days after the San Diego concert the m
embers of The LHO congregated at the studio. It was the first time they’d met since the post-concert party, and there was much to talk about. Outside, the streets flinched in the glare of the morning sun, but down in the cellar all was cool and dim. Carlo was drinking coffee, Oscar and Tim sipped the vodka laced with jalapeño chillies that had become the band’s favoured tipple. Guitars leaned against music stands, amplifiers lined the walls, blinking in time to the sound of Tim’s voice coming from the slowly-turning reel-to-reel recorder that had captured the last performance of ‘Eye of the Storm.’

  “You sound good,” Pete told Tim. “Real good. Lots o’ soul in it.” He was insincere. He regarded the band as talentless amateurs and he couldn’t stand Tim, but if it kept him in joints who cared about a few white lies and a little hypocrisy? Pete had a reputation for his prodigious consumption of marijuana, but he took it for the pain, not the highs. Pete knew a lot about pain, in all its forms. He spun his wheelchair in the area of clear floor next to his control desk and adjusted the bass balance.

  Eddie was next to arrive. He poked his head tentatively round the door until the others yelled at him. “Hey, man,” he said, “the friggin’ red light’s on. Been waiting outside nearly two hours.”

  “Two minutes, more like,” Carlo responded.

  “Whadya know!” Tim exclaimed. “That was me.” He’d been playing about with various switches and had activated the Recording in Progress sign on the door. He found the switch and restored it to its proper position. He was wearing a skin-tight T-shirt with velvet flares and his hair was tied back in a ponytail. “So,” he went on, “tell us all about Miss San Diego 1969.”

  Eddie removed his dark glasses and shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me, Old Son. You just wouldn’t believe me.”

  They almost always held some sort of party after a concert. Nothing very grand or organised: drinks and draw in the hotel, fried chicken or Mexican food, and some music. While the band were playing the roadies handed out invitations to the likeliest-and sexiest-looking girls in the first few rows, carefully avoiding the weirdos who followed every group. This time they’d done well, and Eddie had quickly found himself chatting to the girl he’d made eyes at during the performance. He gave a brief smile, aware of Pete, sitting in the corner, in the shadows, in a wheelchair. “She was… OK, a nice kid,” was all he added, downbeat.

  The door opened again and the grinning head of Zeke appeared. He looked around then bounced into the room, carrying a bundle in his arms.

  “Hey! Zeko!” they called. “Whadya got there?” He was followed into the studio by his wife, fragile looking in an ethnic jacket and tie-dyed wrap. “Carol-Anne!” they greeted. “Come in; sit down; make a space for her.”

  They took turns to embrace Carol-Anne and shake hands with Zeke. He unfastened the baby’s shawl and formally introduced him to each band member. “Theo,” he’d say, “I’d like you to meet Tim. Tim’s lead singer with The LHO and the best goddamn singer-songwriter in Sherman Oaks.”

  “Theo, eh,” someone remarked. “After Theodore Roosevelt, I suppose?”

  “No,” Carol-Anne replied. “After Theodore van Gogh. He looked after his brother, and we hope this little feller will grow up the same.”

  “Which reminds me,” Zeke interrupted, turning to Pete. “This little feller, this little chickadee, is going to need a godfather. We, er, we were talking on the way over, like, and, er, well, Pete, we’d be mighty pleased if you’d agree to take on that responsibility.”

  Pete sat silently for a few seconds, looking confused, then said: “Sure,” and reached out for the baby. Carol Anne walked across to him and put her arms around his neck as he nursed young Theo.

  Tim sprang into life like a jack-in-the-box whose time has arrived. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “I’ve written a song.”

  “A song?” they echoed with mock enthusiasm. “Wow, Tim’s written a song.” Jeez, here we go again, thought Pete.

  “Yeh. When you rang me, Zeke, to tell me about young Theo, I just thought, you know, like wow! I flipped, man, I just flipped. A new life, procreation an’ all that. What you’ve done is, like, well, it’s incredible.”

  “No it’s not,” Eddie interrupted, “it’s natural. The difficult bit is not to have kids,” and the others laughed.

  Tim blushed. He was the driving force behind the group, but was the smallest and youngest of them. “Well, man, I just thought I’d make our newest member a little present. It’s nothing, really, just a little nonsense thing, y’know. I have it here, somewhere.” He retrieved his leather jacket from the back of a chair and delved into the inside pocket. “I, er, ran off a few copies. It’s hardly finished, might need a few touches.”

  “We gonna lay this down?” Pete asked, handing Theo back to his mother and switching on the eight-track deck.

  “Why not.” In a few seconds the room was filled with the noises of guitars being checked for tuning. Tim ran his thumbnail across the strings of his Fender, made a slight adjustment and looked at Pete, who was blessed with perfect pitch. Pete nodded. Zeke manoeuvred himself behind the drum kit and rattled off a few trial rolls.

  “We won’t need the cowbell for this, Zeke,” Tim told him with a smile.

  “I like the cowbell,” he protested.

  “It’s just tum ta-ta tum ta-ta tum,” Tim said, tapping out with an imaginary stick, and Zeke responded with the real thing.

  “Nothing intricate, just C and F, going to G and G-seven,” he told the rest of them. They clipped the sheets on to music stands and shuffled into their seats. Only Eddie, the keyboard man, didn’t take up his instrument. He lifted Theo from Carol-Anne’s arms and walked round the studio with him, pointing to pieces of apparatus, saying: “And that’s a Radio Shack 500 watt amp; and that’s a Yamaha state-of-the art keyboard; and that’s…”

  “One two, buckle my shoe, Uncle Joe is stuck in the glue,” Tim sang quite slowly, strumming the appropriate chord just once at each change. “Two three, he’ll never get free, as long as he sits there in that tree.”

  The others joined in as they picked up the melody, nodding their heads and foot-tapping to inject some rhythm.

  “Hey man, this is cool!” Oscar shouted.

  “I like it,” Carlo agreed.

  “Call the fireman, call the vet, call the doctor but don’t call me.”

  Carlo suggested a couple of key alterations to add some variety and they ran through it again at the proper speed. Third time they put it to tape. Pete wrote the details on the label, then asked for another run-through, saying that he’d like Oscar’s bass guitar bringing more to the fore. “Then maybe Eddie can add some flourishes and fancy bits later.”

  They all agreed and played it once more.

  “Hey, Tim,” Zeke said when they finished, “that’s cool, real cool. I’m touched, man, touched. It’s the best present young Theo could ask for.”

  “It’s real sweet of you,” Carol-Anne agreed.

  “No problem, man,” Tim replied. “As long as it stays within these four walls. If it gets out that I wrote it…well, man, my reputation is shot to pieces. Can you imagine? Gee, I’d be dead meat.”

  Pete wrote the labels and fitted the reel into its can. This was the most commercial thing that The LHO had ever done, and one thing he was certain of was that it wasn’t going to stay within those four walls. He spun his wheelchair round to face Tim and said: “Yeah, man, real cool. Anybody need some draw?”

  Three days later KWOV, Sherman Oaks’ very own radio station situated on the corner of the same block as Blue Coyote, broadcast ‘Theo’s Tune’ to its peak-time audience. They received three enquiries from listeners wondering if it was available as a single.

  “Three,” Pete repeated when he heard the news. “That’s not many.” He was sitting in the outer office of the station, sharing a joint with the station’s owner and chief DJ. With their long hair and Pete’s headband they could have been pirates, discussing a raid, and in many ways they were.

 
“Hell, man,” the DJ replied, coughing as he drew on the joint, “I don’t wish to minimise the influence of li’l ol’ KWOV on the good residents of downtown LA, but if you took three as a fraction of our total audience, then multiplied it by the population of the entire US, it’d prob’ly work out at about a hunnerd million people. That’s a hit by anybody’s standards.”

  “You reckon?”

  “I reckon. Hell, man, we only had two calls about the moon landings.”

  Pete had a demo disc made and it was played by several other local stations. One by one the band members heard themselves on radio, belting out ‘Theo’s Tune’, and were pleased and bemused. They were in the business to be heard and to make money. Artistic integrity didn’t pay the bills.

  Tim didn’t agree. He called Pete as soon as he found out what was happening and said some things he later regretted. Pete, fortunately, had just taken delivery of a stash of Aztec Honey and was feeling particularly mellow. “Hey man,” he responded. “I made you famous. I made you goddamn famous.”

  They held a meeting and Tim berated them all for not respecting his intellectual property, as works of art are known in the business. He told them that The LHO had built up a reputation for its anti-establishment, anti-government, anticapitalism, anti-war, anti-everything, stance, and that could be destroyed by a silly sentimental song like ‘Theo’s Tune’. They had a growing audience of young disaffected Americans, black as well as white, and they could easily lose them.

  Eddie put the opposite view forward. Much as he enjoyed making good music, he was in it for the money. There were places he wouldn’t go, depths he wouldn’t reach, but ‘Theo’s Tune’ wasn’t quite there. He was happy to be associated with it. “An’ listen, man,” he concluded, “if we don’t do it somebody else will, and we can always use the bread.”

  Tim was adamant, but eventually a compromise was reached. They’d release ‘Theo’s Tune’ as a single under the name of Blue Coyote, with a Bobby Vee number on the B-side. Everybody was pleased.