The Ground Beneath Her Feet (85 page)

Mira, Mira, who is the fairest one of all?

On the fourth anniversary of Vina’s death, Mo Mallick at Colchis summons the music press wearing a smile like the elated first chord of a surefire hit to announce the imminent emergence from retirement of Ormus Cama and the relaunch of the VTO supergroup in a phase-two lineup. The place of rhythm guitarist Simone Bath will be filled by the emerging gay icon lil dagover, who insists on lower-case initials, wears men’s suits and a monocle and a Louise Brooks haircut, and plays like an expressionist dream. (Bath herself, embittered by Vina’s old attack on her competence, is threatening to sue Ormus for the rights to the VTO name, a move that alarms nobody and comes to nothing.) The band will be fronted as before by Ormus Cama on vocals and lead guitar, Mallick concludes, and on lead vocals we’ll be introducing the new singing sensation Mira Celano, the closest thing to our beloved Vina any of you will ever see.

It’s like announcing a Beatles reunion, only bigger. The VTO back catalogue still outsells most functioning bands, and the classic
Quakershaker
CD, reissued with the revised version of “Beneath Her Feet” added as a bonus track, hasn’t been out of the
Billboard
top three since the day of Vina’s death. The hiring of dagover is widely applauded as a recognition of the need for the band to move with the times, diamond
lil brings a formidable résumé with her. At the age of seventeen she was hanging out with the mystery men of Kraftwerk and devising music for the all-female Japanese-Western crossover Takarazuka dance company, in which half the women dress as men and are worshipped by legions of female fans, and she has never looked back. She is highly rated by production gurus as diverse as the Glimmer Twins, Mutt Lange and DJ Jellybean’s sidekick, Whitney and Debbie H.’s producer, Toni C. A year or two with VTO should jet-propel dagover into the major leagues, so it’s a smart move for her as well as the band.

Mira Celano, however, is being kept under wraps—no interviews, no photographs, no tapes—and this is not a popular strategy. It always used to be said that VTO was Ormus and Vina and anyone, but the circumstances of Ormus’s decline are well known, his recovery is uncertain, and in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary Mira is considered unlikely to be worthy of standing in the great Vina Apsara’s shoes. She is the subject of intense speculation and much skepticism, and when it’s learned that she started out as a lowly impersonator the mood turns ugly. As ever, the Sangria siblings lead the attack, accusing Ormus of vandalizing his own legend and turning the VTO name into a joke, a theme park version of itself. (From Rémy Auxerre no more highfalutin Francophoneries will be heard. He is dead of the Illness, just a square in the quilt now. Rémy’s gone, and his sometime lover, my friend Aimé-Césaire Basquiat, is Ill.)

As for the VTO operation, we’re in rehearsal, locked away in a disused aircraft hangar in Nassau County and surrounded by an army-style security blanket. This, too, is an aspect of contemporary rock music: the move up to military scale and precision for no greater reason than to shake, rattle ’n’ roll. Once upon a time Jerry Apple and his guitar could arrive at the stage door five minutes before showtime, collect his ten thousand bucks in cash from the manager and head out on to the stage, barely acknowledging the house band provided to back him. If anyone in the band dared to ask about the playlist he’d reply,
sonny, tonight we’re gonna be playing some Jerry Apple songs
. It’s different now. Those old-time duck-walkers were itinerant tinkers. These musicians are industrialists.

Here are the sequencers, the synthesizers, the sampling devices—Fairlights, Synclaviers. Here are the musicians, working out how to lay
their own playing over the swirls and twirls, the technological sound-mattresses they’ll be bouncing on throughout the show. Ormus and lil dagover, in particular, are currently in deep musical communion, swapping incomprehensibilities with the techno gandalf, Eno Barber. (Yes, Eno from Radio Freddie; these days he’s the undisputed king of the loop, the czar of texture, King Ear. Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.) Ormus has brought Eno in to work on the new show and its accompanying album, and there’s a lot of this huddling at present. Mira hates it. As the singer, she’s largely excluded from the instrumentalists’ private club. This part of Ormus is not for her; when he’s with dagover, she feels the way I feel when he’s with her.

Today Mira is on edge, uncertain, she can’t stop moving, a few steps this way, a few steps that, smacking the palms of her hands together, snapping her fingers, talking fast, her eyes concealed behind alarming night-black goggle-like curve-around shades. Tara is off somewhere in Mira’s mobile-home private zone, being cared for by Clea Singh. She’s a wise enough child to know that when Mommy’s in this mood it’s best to keep out of her way. I’m not yet prepared to be that wise. I’m there, trying to be a reassuring presence, mostly just flak-catching when she needs someone to yell at. I’m the wife.

She’s soliloquizing, and when Mira is like this you just have to hang on for the ride. The negative speculation in the media has rattled her, the decision to seal her off from premature exposure has proved more stressful than she anticipated. It isn’t easy to keep your head down when half the country’s press corps is on your trail, to button your lip when what they’re saying is cruel and you want to fight your corner. But Mallick had said, if we expose you now we’re just showing them the target before we’re ready to repel their fire. On stage you’ll shut their fucking mouths so wait, just wait, please. And Ormus backed Mallick and they were the pros and so she agreed, but she’s full of doubts, feels she shouldn’t go out in front of audiences dressed up as Vina any more, feels caged in her impersonation and wants to be herself.

Come on, it wasn’t Vina who awoke him from a coma this time, she growls, it was me, Mira, me hauling him back from the dead, me firing his crooked physician with the onion breath who came on to me while I was showing him the door, me getting him into rehab along with all the other guys with pointy teeth and spiralling eyeballs, and then me making sure he stayed with the program and graduated summa cum fucking laude. When he needed someone in the night he called out for me and baby, I got up and went to him every single time, well, okay, at least until one a.m. six nights a week, I mean not right in the middle of the night when we were, when, listen, you know what I’m saying here, I left my own child in your care, okay, yours and sometimes the babysitter’s, okay and sometimes Clea Singh’s too, when he sent her over, but goddammit nobody went to him more than me, I played all his crazy games, I let him hold on to Vina through me until he was strong enough to stand on his own feet, and look at him now, he’s a man reborn, okay, bravo, kudos to him, what I’m saying here is he owes me, I’m holding his marker, it’s time he set me free. I brought him back from Hell but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to burn in the fire instead. This Vina crap, I know it’s a mistake but I can’t get myself heard and when we’re out there in the bright lights it’s me who’s going to have to take the fall.

This is what I do not bring up at this juncture: that I’m sliding into Hell too. The deeper we get into rehearsals the further from me she moves, the more she resents lil dagover the more outrageously she comes on to Ormus. I continue to discover that there are few limits to Mira’s pragmatism. Whatever works, is her motto. I keep wondering about Ormus’s bedroom door. Is that an inviolable borderline? Or will she go beyond that, too, to find whatever works?

(
Trust me. Don’t you trust me?
)

(
Yes, darling, I trust you, baby, I truly do. But maybe I’m an idiot to do it, just one more fool for love. One more rock
’n’
roll wife.
)

Rumors reach the world outside the aircraft hangar of dissension within it. Mira suspects dagover of being the source of the leaks. The two women are increasingly at loggerheads; they’re both opinionated, strong-mindedly pushing their ideas, competing for Ormus Cama’s respect. Mira tells Ormus he’s letting the technology turn his head,
putting the cart before the horse, you’re like the generals with their smart bombs, she says, boys and their fucking toys. I’m the one who knows the clubs, she adds, I’ve spent more time on the scene than the rest of you put together, you’re just babbling science to sound cool but you don’t know shit. In the clubs this stuff is already over, it wasn’t enough. People are hungry, okay?, the machines aren’t feeding them, I mean it’s up to us to give them something to bite on, to give their spirits food.

Ormus is listening.

But lil dagover hits back with a well-developed theory that it’s technology that has taken the music back to its roots, its origins in North African atonal call-and-response rhythms. When the slaves came across the sea and were forbidden to use their drums, their talking drums, they listened to the music of the Irish slave drivers, the three-chord Celtic folk songs, and turned it into the blues. And after the end of slavery they got their drums back and that was r&b, and white kids took that from them
and added amplification
and that was the birth of rock ’n’ roll. Which went back across the ocean to England and Europe and got transformed by the Beatles, the first great rock group to use stereo technology, and that stereo mutation came back to America and became VTO et cetera. But the technology goes on changing, and with the invention of sampling you can graft the oldest music on to the newest sounds and then, shazam!, in hip-hop, in scratching, you’re right back to call and response, back to the future. Technology’s not the enemy, lil argues, it’s the means.

What is this, Mira demands of Ormus, a history seminar or a rock ’n’ roll band? If she’s right then the music’s a closed loop, it’s dead, let’s go home. To go forward, to break out of the loop, we’ve got to go on pushing what VTO started to do, what I always thought Vina stood for. Crossing frontiers. Bringing in the rest of the fucking world.

It’s an impasse, and interestingly enough Ormus doesn’t seem willing or able to offer leadership, to see a way forward. The solution comes from Eno Barber, who makes it look surprisingly easy. Eno still comes across as the brother from another planet, immaculately groomed at all hours of the day and night, never seen eating or drinking or taking a leak, unflappability incarnate. He calls Mira and lil to his mixing desk and says quietly, I was thinking, we could have it both
ways. And as they listen to his loops, the tabla rhythms and sitar and yes vina riffs pushed through his sequencers along with pure synthesized sound, as he fades and balances and mixes his bubbling aural brew, something starts happening, lil picks up her guitar and starts playing along, finding the rhythms or letting them find her, riding the waves, and Mira’s singing scat mixed up with Ormus’s lyrics and Indian
bols
, and Ormus Cama has actually begun to smile. All over the cavernous hangar electricians and grips and roadies and record-company stiffs stop doing whatever they’re doing and listen. This is the sound of a baby being born. This is the rhythm of new life.

We’ve got a band.

There is hate mail. Well, there’s always hate mail where there’s attention, always the redneck
die commie perverts
messages, the religiomane
you may escape from me but you can’t escape from god
fortune cookie menaces, the disappointed sexual fantasists, the fans of rival cults, the secret crazies who hold down mundane jobs and have back-yard cookouts on Sundays and fill their bedroom closets with magazine clippings over which they scrawl their epithets of existential loathing. And if the volume of the poison-pen material is greater than usual, it’s partly because the band has been away so long, and the dirty water has been building up behind the dam. There’s plenty of supportive fan mail too, of course, but it doesn’t carry the same weight, doesn’t become a part of what works on you as you go about your daily business. And this time the hostility is affecting the band more than usual, because, yes, theirs has been a long silence, and it’s a new lineup, so there are uncertainties. Also, the hate mail is not just standard-issue nastiness. There’s a new strain of virulence in much of it, an extra bitterness in the bile.

Vina wannabes write in to protest the choice of Mira rather than one of them, purists write to express disgust at the exhuming of the band, which should have been allowed to remain in the golden past where it belongs instead of being subjected to this zombified return, lesbian-haters send in their four-letter views of lil dagover and her Sapphic sisterhood, and that’s just the polite stuff. Many correspondents send in near-illegible scrawls warning that VTO’s quake songs may actually have been responsible for the current wave of seismic catastrophes and urging the band to keep away from that dangerous
material.
Don’t stir up yo uzual trouble again oar els, you’ve maid enouff money from uman mizry as it is
.

Another faction blames Ormus for the band’s long silence, calling it a betrayal. Its members suggest that his envy of Vina’s genius was the real reason for shutting down the band and that he must therefore be held responsible for what followed. If VTO hadn’t ceased trading Vina wouldn’t have needed to start building a solo career, and therefore in all probability she wouldn’t have been in Mexico on that fateful Valentine’s Day, so she’d still be alive, you fucking murderer, Ormus Cama, don’t think we will ever forget or forgive.

Other correspondents, however, take a more positive line, praising the prophetic accuracy of Ormus’s old songs, expressing the writer’s belief that his music can literally change the world and begging Ormus to turn his magical powers towards the good.
Heal the breaking planet. Sing to us and soothe the aching earth
.