Slumberland (5 page)

When the music ended, all the Beard Scratchers scratched their beards save for Elaine Dupree, aka DJ Uhuru, the only member of the collective for whom a beard was an impossibility. But Elaine wasn't even rubbing her chin: She was dialing a number on the phone.

“Who you calling?”

“Bitch Please.”

Bitch Please was an aging, once-platinum-selling rapper who occasionally purchased beats from us whenever her latest career reinvention called for some sonic esotericism. She once said about me that when I spun, no matter how frenzied or attentive the crowd was, I always looked unsure of myself. Looked as if I smelled gas but didn't have anyone to ask if they smelled it too, much less the nerve to strike a match.

Elaine put the phone on speaker and held it up.

“Hello, this Bitch Please, the world's only rhinestone rock-star doll, baby baba. Please leave a message.”

On the beep, Elaine motioned for me to hit the play button. The beat was only ten seconds in when Bitch Please answered
the phone: “I don't know who this is, but I'll give you thirty thousand dollars cash for that track right now.”

Elaine hung up.

Thirty thousand dollars was an absurd amount of money to pay for a beat, and after the poor sales of her latest release,
Bitch Please Raps the Cole Porter Songbook
, I doubted that her bank account held half that amount. Still, it was a meaningful gesture.

“So it is a beat?” I asked.

“A damn near perfect one at that,
presque parfait
, as the French would say,” said DJ Umbra. “What's in it? Anatomize, yo, anatomize!”

I began to break down some of the more obvious samples, getting only as far as the de rigueur Mantronix, when Elaine interrupted me by blurting out, “Popsicle!”—the name of the only Swedish pop group worth blurting out. And it was without trepidation that DJ Skillanator followed with, “Foreigner, ‘Feels Like the First Time,' opening lick, second and third chords transposed with the handclap from the Angels' ‘My Boyfriend's Back,' interpolating on the downstroke.”

DJ So So Deaf, a beat jockey who is in fact deaf, and who made a decent living playing bass-heavy music at dances and sock hops at schools and universities for the hearing impaired, began waving and gesticulating wildly in his slang B-boy sign language. His brother, DJ You Can Call Me Ray or You Can Call Me Jay but Ya Doesn't Have to Call Me Johnson, whose bailiwick was comedy albums and television theme songs from the seventies, interpreted. “So So Deaf says, ‘Only Roger Daltrey's epiglottal scream from “Won't Get Fooled Again” can raise the hairs on his arm like that.' He loves how you flared it.”

I touched my hand to my lips and kissed out a sign language thank-you to So So Deaf in return for his compliment. As the music played on, our thoughts returned to the beat
presque parfait
.

There were no more guesses and the Beard Scratchers leaned in, eager for just a taste of the beat's trace elements; and seeing the wide-eyed puppy-dog looks of inquisitiveness on their faces, I felt compelled to recite the only true truism I'd ever heard. “I should warn you before we begin,” I said loudly and urgently, as if I were delivering a line from the final act of a Tennessee Williams play, “that I'm not going to necessarily tell you the truth.”

The Beard Scratchers nodded.

DJ Close-n-Play asked, “Is that a quote from
Catcher in the Rye
?”

It was saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe's opening statement from his
Opprobrium
magazine interview, but I didn't want to get into “Who's he?” and “What's ‘opprobrium' mean?,” so I simply turned up the volume and said, “No, it's my motto,” and went about naming my sources.

“That's ‘Insider Tradin' on My Mind' by Penthouse Red,” I whispered, “from his
Work Songs and Office Hollers of the Corporate Elite
sampler.”

“Same cat who did ‘My Trophy Wife (Makes Me Feel Like a Loser)'?” asked DJ You Can Call Me Ray, et cetera.

“No, you're thinking Greedy Steve McNeely.”

I went on.

“Audio Two's ‘Top Billin' ' as rapped in the whistled language of the Nepalese Chepang.”

“I knew it!” Umbra said, pounding his forehead in musicolo-gist shame.

I continued my list: “Brando's creaking leather jacket in
The Wild One
, a shopping cart tumbling down the concrete banks of the L.A. River, Mothers of Invention, a stone skimming across Diamond Lake, the flutter of Paul Newman's eyelashes amplified ten thousand times, some smelly kid named Beck who was playing guitar in front of the Church of Scientology, early, early, early Ray Charles, Etta James, Sonic Youth, the Millennium
Falcon going into hyperdrive, Foghorn Leghorn, Foghat, Melvin Tormé, aka ‘The Velvet Fog,' Issa Bagayogo, the sizzle of an Al's Sandwich Shop cheesesteak at the exact moment Ms. Tseng adds the onions . . .”

Blaze raised his hand. “That's enough,” he said. “You're spoiling it. You're explaining rainbows, motherfucker.”

He let the song play out, then continued. “You know what your beat reminds me of?”

“No,” I answered, rewinding the tape.

“It reminds me of the code of Hammurabi, the Declaration of DJ Independence, the Constitution, or some shit.”

Everyone else nodded in agreement, but I didn't understand the comparison.

“Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the DJ up as the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.”

We the true music lovers ofthe world, in order to form a more perfect groove
. . .

Don't get me wrong, I appreciated Blaze's praise, but I didn't like my music being compared to a piece of paper and said so: “I think of it more as a timeless piece of art, you know, like the Mona Lisa of music. Your Constitution metaphor is too political. You're making it seem like my music is propaganda.”

Pressing the play button, Blaze laughed, “Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that all art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta. An unbelievably dope beat that's this close to being the supreme law of the land—but as it stands now is no more than a
musicalized Equal Rights Amendment, a brilliant and necessary idea doomed to the dustbin of change.”

The music quieted the room with a thumping irrefutability that was indeed just short of perfection. I turned it down.

“So what's it missing?” I asked.

Blaze leaned back in his chair and smoothed his goatee. “Like any important document, it needs to be ratified.”

“Take my track to the thirteen original colonies and get people to vote on whether they like it or not?”

Elaine scratched at her jawline. “No, he's just saying you need that one special somebody to approve it,” she said. “Think Mick Jagger ratifying Carly Simon's ‘You're So Vain.' ”

Umbra contemplatively tugged on his soul patch and tossed out another example: “Charlie Christian ratifying Benny Good-man's ‘A Smo-o-o-oth One.' ”

So So Deaf stopped playing with his pointy imperial beard long enough to sign, “Like Kool G Rap on Marley Marl's ‘The Symphony.' “

“So who can ratify my beat?” I asked.

Blaze looked at me like I was stupid. “The Schwa,” he said, crossing his heart and blowing a kiss to the sky. “Who else?” The rest of us bowed our heads in reverence. Who else indeed.

 

Charles Stone, aka the Schwa, is a little-known avant-garde jazz musician we Westside DJs had nicknamed the Schwa because his sound, like the indeterminate vowel, is unstressed, upside-down, and backward. Indefinable, but you know it when you hear it. For us the Schwa is the ultimate break beat. The boom bip. The
oo-ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang
. The
om
. He's the part in Pagliacci where the fucking clown starts crying.

He had one minor hit record, a hard-bop rendition of “L'Internationale” that ironically charted briefly in the early stages
of the Vietnam War. “L'Internationale” is on his seminal
Polemics
album.
Polemics
, recorded in 1964, is an engaging, thought-provoking, and shabbily produced masterpiece. Listening to that record is like sitting in on an impromptu graduate seminar taught by a favorite, slightly tipsy professor at the campus pub. Measure by measure the Schwa deconstructs nursery rhymes, advertising jingles, and the more sonorous of the world's anthems. Each tune, from “Ten Little Indians” to “The Battle Hymn of Andorra” to the Slinky song, is lovingly turned inside out and played in a style so free it makes entropy jealous. Sandwiched between the Nazi Party's “Horst Wessel Song” and Johnny Rebel's swampbilly classic “Some Niggers Never Die (They Just Smell That Way),” “Do-Re-Mi,” the whitest song ever written, becomes more than simply a song I hate: The Schwa exposes that Alpine ditty for what it is, hate music.

But “L'Internationale” stands out. I'm the type who prefers to listen to one song a hundred times rather than a hundred different songs one time. And I listened to that song a thousand times straight, its majestic strains as quotidian to my day as breakfast cereal. It was a song that made me wish I'd come of age during the Spanish Civil War, shared a foxhole with George Orwell. It was a song that would've shamed Stalin and lionized Paul Robeson. In fact, I'm quite certain that if the song had gotten more radio play, America would've never stopped buying union.

Background information on the Schwa was scarce. I'd scoured the underground jazz magazines and reference books, and all I could find was a scant entry in
The Jazz Encyclopedia:

Stone, Charles
—b. 4/17/33, Los Angeles, California. A well-respected musician proficient in the improvisational techniques of the free-jazz movement of whom little is known.

And a heavily redacted copy of a brief FBI file:

There were also scattered concert reviews from the early fifties that praised the “physicality of his performance.” It seemed the Schwa played with his body contorted in ghastly positions. Sometimes he stood onstage gyrating his pelvis or dislocating his shoulders for five minutes before producing any sounds. Most critics theorized that these corporeal contrivances were designed to illustrate that making music is more than a mental process, that a musician brings his body to a gig, not just his brain.

The Schwa's discography was slight: three albums and a smattering of monaural EPs that had seeped into circulation. The most recent being
Darker Side of the Moon
, a foray into fusion that featured a cover photo of a black man's backside and had the good fortune of being released at the same time as Pink Floyd's multiplatinum
Dark Side of the Moon
. Due to clerical
errors and acid-rock fans tweaked on microdots, the record did a steady if not brisk mail-order business. But since then the Schwa had completely disappeared from the scene, an act that served only to endear him to me all the more. There's a special place in my heart for artists who inexplicably disappear at the top of their games. The list is a short one: Gigi Gryce, Louise Brooks, Rimbaud, D'Angelo, Francis Ford Coppola.
*
I admire these aesthetes for withdrawing into themselves knowing they have nothing further to say, and even less desire to hear what anyone has to say to them. That's why I've never read
Catcher in the Rye
: I don't want the novel to ruin a good reclusion.

 

Elaine broke my trance. “Man, it'd be almost worth finding the Schwa just to get him to play over your beat.”

“I'll make the first pledge,” Blaze said, throwing sixty dollars on the floor. “Seriously, you need to find him. The chance for true perfection doesn't come along every day.”

The phone rang. “It's Bitch Please,” Elaine announced sotto voce, her hand over the receiver. “She says she'll pay fifty thousand dollars for the beat.”

BACK IN LOS ANGELES
I used to score porn films. Still do when money's tight. Not much difference between the American and German smut, except that German pornographers don't see the three Ps, pubic hair, plot, and perky breasts, as anachronisms. In the beginning I took the job seriously. Most cats just handed in any old piece of music they weren't able to sell. They could care less about the music matching the mood. I actually watch the schlock. Sometimes I'll go so far as to compose different themes for each character. For a while I even tried working as a soundman, thinking that would give me some insight into the X-rated mise-en-scène. However, my latent prudishness was exposed when to my open-mouthed and wide-eyed surprise I discovered 1) females ejaculate, 2) they're capable of expelling said ejaculate over long distances, 3) it's salty, and 4) it stings like hell! Despite my rubber-gloved, hands-on approach to scoring porn films, the only thing I learned was why the great film composers like Michel Legrand and Lalo Schifrin stayed away from the set.