Pinball (20 page)

He went inside and talked to the manager, a short, plump middle-aged Mexican who spoke fluent English. In broken Spanish—to test himself with the language—Osten told the man that he worked for an American musical instruments company and would like to use the terrace of the café for two weeks to try out a new electronic console, the latest in entertainment, in front of a live audience. He was aware, Osten said, that his playing and singing would constitute a break in the routine of the Apasionada, and he was therefore prepared to pay for the use of the terrace, as well as for a room at the hotel.

Sensing he was onto a good deal, the Mexican told Osten that he rarely allowed singers into his establishment, for, liking girls as much as he did, he believed the old saying: like bullfighters, singers get all the best girls. Then he guffawed and named a sum which, though exorbitant by local standards, Osten found quite tolerable. He promptly gave the manager a deposit—a third of the total amount—and promised to return and begin his engagement in a week.

He then drove back to San Diego, parked in front of the city’s best-supplied musical instruments store, and went in. A Eurasian girl with the manner of a docile masseuse greeted him at the door. When he told her he was interested in electronic music, she escorted him to the desk of a bespectacled young salesman who, in his old white shirt, dark tie, and limp seersucker suit, could easily have passed for a scientist from the nearby Salk Institute.

The salesman introduced himself, and Osten sat down. On the desk Osten saw several brochures picturing the latest electronic music consoles.

The salesman saw his glance. “Paganini. The ultimate electone console,” he said. “Phenomenal versatility in finished sound. Its own SSFS—the synthesizing sound factory system—gives you, with unbeatable authenticity, flute, clarinet, trombone, trumpet, horn, saxophone, harmonica, tuba, oboe, violin, piano, harpsichord, ukulele, banjo, viola, guitar, harp, diapason, bass drum, marimba, xylophone, vibraphone, cymbals, and brush—among others.” He paused for breath, then went on. “The Paganini includes such special-effect sounds as banged pots and pans, dry seeds in a glass jar, party noisemakers, a plucked rubber band, finger-snapping, finger-tapping—” he paused again “—clanking silverware, crumpled cellophane …”

“I like the pots and pans and the dry seeds in a glass jar,” said Osten.

The salesman brightened. “The clever Japanese have not overlooked a thing in this one,” he said, handing Osten several of the information booklets. “In its automatic rhythm section, the Paganini contains”—he looked for confirmation in one of the booklets—“thirty-six authentic autorhythms: march, swing, rock, tango, rhumba, bossa nova, waltz, ballad, bolero, beguine, mambo, samba, as well as several less common Latin ones—”

“Latin rhythms?” Osten interrupted.

“Yes. A wise choice, given our proximity to Mexico and the Southern Hemisphere. You know what’s really amazing?” he said. “With the thousands of musical combinations possible on the Paganini, you practically invent a new instrument every time you play it!”

“I wish I could invent a new me,” said Osten.

“You almost can on the Paganini,” said the salesman, glancing into the booklet. “And the Paganini is built so compactly that you can invent your ‘new me’ almost anywhere you go.”

He took one of the booklets from Osten, wrote a price on it, and passed it back like a card in a casino. “Even the price is compact,” he said, smiling. “That’s why we sell a lot of these models to nightclubs and traveling rock performers, as well as to composers and songwriters. Did you know that some of these electone consoles have even been installed in the lounge sections of some of the big jetliners?” He was winding up his pitch.

Osten glanced at the figure written on the card.

The salesman began to worry. “What kind of music do you play?” he asked.

“All kinds,” said Osten. “I improvise a lot.”

“Then the Paganini’s your best bet by far,” said the salesman. “By means of its special line-input, you can feed any sound into it—anything you have taped or picked up live, or from any other electronic instrument—radio, TV, your record player, even your own singing voice …”

“It would have to be someone else’s singing voice, not mine,” Osten laughed.

“Don’t be so tough on yourself!” the salesman scolded. “You may sound a bit hoarse, but so what? These days, a lot of singers and musicians use modified mouthpiece microphones. The Paganini lets you modify any external sound—including your own voice. Why don’t you follow me to our music room and try out the Paganini for yourself?”

Beaming, he got up and under the indifferent gaze of the other salesmen, he led Osten through a labyrinth of desks to the music room.

With the Paganini secured in the back of the Jeep, Osten drove home through a pass between the Cuyamaca and Volcan mountains. He stopped to fill the gas tank in
Julian, once the region’s gold-mining center, where the two hundred inhabitants now took pride in apple and pear orchards and dense oak and pine forests.

It was near sundown when he passed through the gates of his ranch, which he had named the New Atlantis after a book which had impressed him greatly. In it, in 1624, the philosopher Francis Bacon had described the music of the future as being created in

Sound-houses, where wee practise and demonstrate all Sounds … of diverse instruments of Musick likewise to you unknowne, some sweeter than you have; Together with Bells and Rings that are dainty and sweet… . Wee also have Strange and Artificial Echoe’s, reflecting the Voice many times, and as it were Tossing it; And some that give back the Voice lowder than it cam, some Shriller some Deeper; Yea some rendering the Voice, Differing in the letters or Articulate Sound, from that they receyve.

Situated four thousand feet up in the Laguna Mountains, the New Atlantis covered three hundred acres and overlooked the entire valley below. In addition to the two-story house Osten occupied, there was a small gatekeeper’s house where his helpers lived. They were three Shoshone Indians—middle-aged brothers who had worked for him ever since he had acquired the ranch.

The Indians rushed to help him unload the Paganini. Even though every day, and for years, they sat staring for hours at a television set, they still barely spoke English, and in communicating with-them Osten often had to rely on gestures and wordless sounds.

The men helped him carry the console to the big house, which, with the exception of a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, was an elaborate soundproofed recording facility. There, on the ground floor, the Paganini joined an impressive array of musical instruments and recording equipment—electric organs, amplifiers, synthesizers, guitars, drums, and effect boxes—all dominated by the Gershwin,
the state-of-the-art, twenty-six channel, sixteen-track recording console that gave Osten complete flexibility in digital computerized recording and playback techniques.

When the Indians left to prepare his dinner, Osten went into the studio to listen to Leila Salem’s favorite Mexican songs.

As soon as he heard them, he knew how he wanted to play, sing, and eventually record them. He knew it all at once because that was how his mind worked, but also because he was already seeing himself—with Leila—in Tijuana.

Here, in his own House of Sound, the sanctum of his creative retreat, he felt safe and secure. He had designed every inch of it, selected every instrument. There wasn’t a single object he didn’t know as intimately as he knew his own body; not one keyboard, push-button, switch, wire, patch cord, plug, oscillator, potentiometer, generator, or amplifier was alien to him. It was his secret nickelodeon, where he could cease to distinguish between memory and fantasy, the two springs of his imagination—one of the past, the other of the future. Here, all alone, a vivisector of his talent, he could instigate and control the whole creative process, from the initial source—his own songs and voice—to his arrangements for any of the electronic and nonelectronic instruments he used to produce the Goddard sound.

At times, uncertain of the direction his music should take, he would consider the enormous potential for modern music in the field of electronic experimentation. He studied the music of those composers who wired their heads to neurological amplifiers in order to transform the brain’s signals into sympathetic resonances in an ensemble of musical instruments. Although he was intrigued by the technological virtuosity of these works, he always found them lacking in inspiration. He was equally familiar, and equally disenchanted, with laser and sound-sculpture experiments, as well as with all contemporary efforts to
create multimedia music. In the last analysis, as a composer and performer, he knew that he had to rely solely on his own ideas and emotions and to search inside himself for the sounds and words that would express them, both for him and for all those people to whom his music could serve as echoes of their feelings.

He also paid attention to silence. He admired what John Cage had said: “The music I prefer, even to my own or anybody else’s, is what we are’hearing if we are just quiet.”

Often at dawn, when the Shoshones were still asleep in the small house, he would drive to one of the dry washes of the Anza Borrego Desert. He would get out of the Jeep and walk into the empty reaches of stone and scrub that opened before him like a dungeon of heat and sand. In the distance the rising mist revealed the lofty pinnacles of scraggy mountains, a reddish streak against the sky’s blue, and below, like dry bones stripped of flesh, the hillocks of the Borrego Badlands.

Here, where no sound broke the quiet, he would stand and imagine that one day the well of his music might become as dry and as soundless as this desert. Until then, he knew, he had to search his inner life for traces of any spring that had so far eluded him.

Osten loved his anonymity because it guaranteed his freedom, and he loved his freedom because it let him be anonymous. Even though his roots were in New York, only when he was secluded in the New Atlantis was he really at home—a disembodied spirit floating in a mysterious continuum, a mystic possessed by melody, as removed from the natural world as music itself. He could write his music and lyrics the way he liked and record them to suit himself. He rejoiced each time a digital master tape was finished and he could play it in the studio one last time before sending it to Blaystone. Such tapes gave perfect sound reproduction, free of any distortion. He was delighted by the pure sound of his voice, his words, his instruments
pouring out from the quadraphonic speakers and converging on him, solitary there, slumped in an easy chair in the center of the room. Like an artisan in his shop, he would listen to what he had made, his eyes occasionally fixing on the ancient maxim he had hung as his motto on the white soundproofed wall:
Ogaun ’suoi il segreti
—“Everyone has his secrets.”

Once a record was made from his master tape and published by Nokturn, his music would boomerang back into his ordinary life, where as Jimmy Osten he would listen to it as everybody else did. Then he would realize all over again that only his anonymity kept the public from trespassing on him and on the stimulus that gave birth to his music, and he would cherish his freedom to start fresh and create more.

There was another advantage to his situation. If, for whatever reason, he ever chose not to record anymore, no one would ask him why; no reporters would appear on the doorstep or follow him around trying to find the cause of his creative block; and no explanations, true or false, would be expected from members of his family, from past and present lovers, from friends and associates, from his agent, from his manager, or from record company executives.

In order to succeed, rock stars—no matter how talented they were—needed the visibility provided by the media, just as Renaissance artists in their time had needed the support of rich and princely patrons. Yet Osten knew that he had succeeded alone—and had done so in spite of his self-imposed invisibility.

Best of all, the sales of the records he produced in seclusion secured the future of Etude Classics. Thanks to him, his father could live out his life a happy man, convinced that he had succeeded in bequeathing to his adopted country an everlasting legacy of classical music—the best expression of mankind’s spirituality. He need never know that his bequest was financed by his son’s success in rock, a field of music Gerhard Osten despised.

Jimmy Osten’s commitment to his public thus ended where it had begun—at the New Atlantis. Once his music was published, it became public property, and people
could then respond to it according to their own needs and means. He was no exception; he became at that point one more anonymous listener, and his critical judgment—whether he was listening in a car, a music shop, a disco, or at home; whether alone or among others—was no better, no worse, no more astute or more valuable, than the judgment of any other listener.

His denial of a public self was therefore the ultimate affirmation of his private self. Freed of Goddard, Osten could welcome new experience, let his feelings emanate honestly, be justly critical, and carve out from life’s unlimited possibilities his true emotional destiny.

If, out of occasional loneliness, he had ever doubted the wisdom of his choice to remain anonymous, his doubt had vanished when John Lennon was murdered. Osten had been in New York City at the time, and he had gone to stand with the thousands of anguished mourners outside the Lennons’ apartment building.

He realized that Lennon, by stepping too easily and too often into the midst of his fans—whether to sing for them, shake their hands, or autograph their albums—had unwittingly undermined his separation from ordinary people, which was the essence of his charisma.

Given an easy chance to be close to the famous man, the assassin—once a fan of Lennon’s music—had seized the opportunity to kill him, as if by doing so he could usurp the very greatness Lennon had sacrificed by stepping down to the crowd, by attempting to prove himself ordinary.

Standing in that wailing throng, Osten had been happy to be James Osten and not Goddard.