Tinker and Blue (11 page)

18

The Aquarius Café had never booked an act before, depending instead on the spontaneous appearance of hopeful amateurs, but the exception to the rule took place on an October night when the café filled with Berkeley professors, musicians and writers from across the city, reviewers from fringe and establishment publications and a random sampling of San Francisco's counter culture population.

Five weeks after the party at Peter?'s, Nathan brought a copy of
Rolling Stone
magazine to the street corner where Blue and Tinker performed. In the magazine, Blue saw his own startled picture under the headline: “Blue Antivoice – the ultimate musical revolution?” The article, written under the byline Peter?, argued that the paradigms of music needed to be shattered and recreated before the Great Revolution could find its true spirit, its true song. No revolution could succeed without articulating through music a sense of its soul. “The only true history of a people is the history of their music,” Peter? wrote.

“The shattering of establishment music has begun with the arrival in San Francisco of Blue Antivoice, a Canadian whose musical roots reach back to the Highlands of Scotland, and whose voice at first reminds the listener of badly tuned bagpipes. But as one listens closely, the singer's voice takes on the energy of exploding glass, the sound of a brick being thrown through the Establishment's concept of music. It is a sound which can only be described as Pre-Primitive. Blue Antivoice's lyrics are rich in man-as-crustacean metaphors, a soul encased in the shell of a creature that resonates to the earliest stages of evolution. One hears within that sound the agony of becoming, the genius of discord, a genius of insights, observations and wit which Blue Antivoice modestly attributed to his imaginary mentor, The Other Fellow.”

The article mentioned John the Baptist's heralding of the Son of Man, managed to weave Peter?'s theory of Plato's
Republic
throughout the piece until Blue's presence wavered in the reader's imagination like fire-shaped shadows on the wall of a cave. Blue recognized his photograph as the one taken in Peter?'s apartment during the party.

“You know what would be really great?” he asked Tinker as he passed him the article to read. “If this story was in the
Bulletin
back home. That would be really something. Who do you know reads this rag?”

“That's pretty good,” Tinker said, looking up from the magazine. “He calls you John the Baptist in it.”

“That's only second best, Tinker. Why get your head cut off when you can be crucified?”

“What does that mean?”

“Haven't the faintest idea, but I'm going to try it on Peter?. Bet he thinks it's really deep.”

The rewards of stardom came quickly to Blue. Along with the magazine, Nathan delivered a message from the manager of the Aquarius Café offering Blue fifty bucks to play there on Friday night.

“Fifty bucks and I still get to pass the hat, tell him that.”

“Great,” Nathan said. “I can see next's month's headline already. ‘Singer holds out for thirty-two cents!' Look, Blue, don't fool around with this thing because of money. Not yet. Peter? is turning you into an idea which means people are going to discuss you, and to do that they have to listen to your music. That's a dream, man. Greater composers than Bach and Beethoven have probably starved to death because nobody wrote about them in
Rolling Stone
,
or whatever passed for it.”

“We got this guy back home, eh? Farmer, a horse trader,” Blue said to Nathan. “He says if you can't buy it or sell it, it doesn't exist. Well, the way we're going to work this thing is get Tinker to be the opening act. That'll get us a few more bucks. A few jobs like this and a little luck and we'll be home for Christmas. Or on the Grand Ole Opry stage.”

Tinker opened the evening, chording on Blue's guitar while Gerry contributed some violin comfort to his songs. Both singer and musician were favourably applauded and substantially rewarded when the hat was passed around the largest crowd ever to seek access to the Aquarius Café. While they warmed up the audience for the evening's headline entertainer, Peter? introduced Blue to Dr. Herman Silver, a professor of Psychedelic Psychology at Berkeley. It was Dr. Silver, Peter? explained, who first inspired him to explore the possibility that the laws of music as practised for several thousand years were in fact not laws at all but a behavioural pattern being endlessly repeated throughout time. “Our creative expectations condition us to produce within established rules,” the professor interjected.

“And,” Peter? re-interjected, his finger punctuating the air, “the Big Clue, if you will, is the correlation between music and mathematics. How can anything that can be plotted on a graph, that can be as precise and predictable as two plus two equals four, be considered truly creative? We need to break out of this bubble of pseudo-creative behaviour patterns that mankind has mistaken as reality for four millennium and turn on to the true reality beyond it. Do you follow me?”

Tinker pulled up a chair and joined the coven of revolutionaries, watching Blue's face while he listened to Peter?. Back in Cape Breton, they had often been in barns and houses where the conversation suddenly turned to Gaelic to convey information too sensitive for young ears. It left Tinker wondering what secrets he was never going to know because they were locked up inside a language he would never learn to speak. It left the unilingual behind to nod or smile stupidly in the flood of foreign inflections. Tinker found Blue a joy to watch during these moments because Blue didn't pretend to understand – he thought he did understand. That conviction turned him into a furrow of brows and a concentrated squint filled with tics and knowing nods to the speaker, much as he was doing now. He appeared to hang on to every word that Peter? and Doc Silver, as Blue was already calling him, had to say about the reality of another consciousness. Once, he turned to Tinker with a wink that asked,
Do you think I'm going to get away with it?

“Blue, what does he mean by this ‘another reality' business? Help me catch up to this conversation,” Tinker asked Blue while they all sat at the table, his question oozing with curiosity.

“Well, I better get up there before they start a riot here,” Blue said, sliding his chair back and reaching for his guitar and wiggling out of Tinker's trap. “Doc there can tell you while I'm tuning up.”

“You have a wonderful voice, conventionally speaking,” Doc Silver said to Tinker. “You could probably earn a living with it singing establishment songs.”

“If I can't find a garage to hire me soon I might have to,” Tinker replied.

“What your friend is involved in, if Peter? is right, is the cutting edge of a new reality. I teach Psychedelic Psychology which examines historical patterns of behaviour. One of our most common clichés, ‘history repeats itself,' is a basic clue that not only do individuals adopt patterns of behaviour that inhibit their true self-expression, but that whole peoples, whole cultures, the whole species for that matter, do as well. From the Trojan War to the Vietnam War, the patterns haven't changed one iota, nor has the music.

“There is the martial music of the oppressors and the protest music of the oppressed, but the reality is that they are one and the same. The oppressed just want to change places with the oppressor so that they can play the martial music. In between those two forms, of course, there is all the sentimental music that has been developed over the centuries – classical and popular – love and loss music that lulls us into believing that it reflects our finer selves. The truth is that even more than religion, music is the opiate of the people because we believe it is our finest expression of beauty. What I propose, and Peter? here is my most faithful disciple of the thought, is that the subliminal message that music has transmitted throughout the ages is one of violence and suppression. To prevent history from continuing to repeat itself we have to stop the music, so to speak, and take new bearings on reality and begin from that point to find our way toward a fully enlightened society. That's what Psychedelic Psychology is about.”

“Do you have to take acid then?” Tinker asked.

“While I do admit to using LSD myself for valuable research purposes, I don't recommend it to my students beyond experimental use because it is not the answer, only a glimpse of the answer. True reality, I believe, can't be artificially induced in a people. It has to become a universal consciousness, an awareness transmitted around the globe and throughout future generations through the only creative vehicle capably of sustaining that reality. Music!” Doc Silver said emphatically. “Music!”

“I kind of see what you're getting at, I guess,” Tinker said. “It's a little like this guy back home that I used to work for, Charlie. Charlie is working on an invention that he says is going to revolutionize the world. It's still top secret, though, so don't ask me what it is.”

“Not ‘revolutionize,' Tinker,” Peter? said, turning to Doc Silver for approval to continue. “There is no revolution involved because to revolt is to imply violence. We try to avoid words that associate our search for true music with the conventional and violent patterns of establishment music. What we are searching for is best described as The Great Growth. We grow through the walls of the music currently confining us, crushing our best aspirations.”

“And ‘The Red Lobster' does this?” Tinker asked doubtfully.

“Blue's music is best considered as a signpost along the way to the new reality,” Peter? explained. “It doesn't necessarily anticipate what the music of the future will be, but Blue, particularly his voice, brings the establishment music to a crashing conclusion. I can only describe it as a hopeful satire of the whole spectrum of music, the end of what has been and the beginning of what will be.”

19

The conversation was silenced when Blue, ready to perform, welcomed everybody to the Aquarius Café.

“
Ciad mille failte
, as we say in Cape Breton. That's Gaelic for a hundred thousand welcomes. My buddy Tinker, the guy you just heard, and me, we came out to 'Frisco because we heard about the gold rush, but we missed it by about a hundred years so we're singing for our supper these days. I'm just going to sing a few things for you, most of which is a song called ‘The Red Lobster' which I've been working on for quite a while. When it's done it's going to have a hundred verses and the chorus after every one of them. I wrote two verses just this week, making it sixty-three finished. So just sit back, relax and enjoy yourself while I sing it for you.”

Blue began picking the musical introduction on the guitar and looked up at the audience again.

“We got this fellow back home, eh, Farmer, a horse trader whose idea of Holy Communion is lobster. One time he told me that his dream was to wake up one morning and see a herd of lobsters pulling a flat car of beer into his yard and then committing suicide by jumping into vats of boiling water. If they were land creatures he'd probably be raising them for a living. So I'd like to dedicate this song, what there is of it so far, to my old friend, Farmer.”

Your beauty traps me

like a lobster in a pot

and I turn red

when the water gets hot

.......

Blue's voice, filled with dangerously sharp fragments of broken notes and the shattered remains of a melody, crashed through the candle-lit café as the newly discovered singer performed for an audience whose curiosity was quickly turning to opinion. The gallery of expressions ranged from suppressed giggles to shock to fingers-in-the-ears to head-shaking disbelief to the intense, nodding approval of those who heard what Peter? told them they would hear. No one was unaffected by Blue's work.

By the tenth verse, seduced as usual by the power of his own material, Blue had slipped into a trance out of which the volcano of sound spewed forth while his strumming arm cranked down on the guitar where two strings had already joined the spirit of his voice by snapping in two. The audience, hypnotized or paralyzed by the irrepressible onslaught, was pinned to its seats the way former San Francisco residents had been pinned to the floors of their homes by the roofs of their houses during the quake of ‘06. And with forty-four more verses to go, Blue was only a small piece of the way into “The Red Lobster,” growing louder and more confident as it progressed. Only Tinker had an inkling of what was to come if the song continued on without interruption, which it didn't.

It was during the thirty-third verse, as Blue's voice reached up in an effort to assault higher octaves and bring renewed vigour to his epic work, that the screaming started, along with a sudden shuffling of tables and chairs and the frantic movements of people in panic. The external discord became so pronounced that it disrupted the reverie of Blue's internal one, drawing the singer to the surface of his song to see where his unexpected competition was coming from. It was at the moment, with his eyes barely able to adjust to the candle-lit darkness, that Blue saw people leaping up from their tipping-over tables, and saw, at the last moment, the reason for their terror. The huge, black bulk leapt from the darkness and hurled itself at Blue whose scream, the audience noted, was surprisingly in tune.

The maddened intruder hit Blue with the impact of a football tackle, tipping the singer and his stool to the floor and pinning him there. Fangs bared, the beast lunged at Blue's throat and wiped his face with a long swipe of its tongue.

“Barney!” Blue shouted once he realized that his throat hadn't been ripped out and that it was saliva, not blood, on his face. Throwing his arms around the German shepherd's neck, he buried his face in the dog's fur. “Barney! My old buddy Barney!” he yelled, the words muffled by the dog's neck. Next came the realization that if Barney was here in the Aquarius Café smothering him with dog kisses then—

“Hi, Blue. Are you surprised? We read about you in
Rolling Stone
and then saw the poster for tonight's show. Barney, let Blue up.”

While Blue gazed up at the silhouette, back-lit by an aura of candle light, standing over him, he could hear Tinker's voice reassuring everyone that the dog was not rabid, just an old friend of the family who dropped by to say hello.

—

For a variety of reasons, most of the audience chose the unexpected intermission provided by Barney to tiptoe out of the Aquarius Café, leaving in their wake Tinker and Blue, the hippies from Colorado and their friends from the street. Two tables were shoved together and Tinker and Blue introduced Karma, Kathy and (without a great deal of enthusiasm from Blue) Capricorn to Peter?, Doc Silver, Gerry and Nathan.

Looking around him, Blue was really beginning to enjoy his fate among what he had begun to call the gentiles, to whom he brought word of Cape Breton. Tinker was lost to him already, he and Kathy carrying on a shy courtship of glances and blushes. Blue felt no such certainty. Karma was with Capricorn again. The jealousy of it kept Blue off balance about where he belonged in this picture. That he belonged was a given, but he deeply dreaded the thought that some cosmic prankster had written another one of those awful songs where he winds up as the best friend. No more demoralizing a role can befall a fellow, Blue always thought, than to be trusted by a girl. It was one of the world's more effective forms of castration, but that fear was only a distant ripple in the joy Blue felt about this night, which belonged so strongly to him that he didn't even try to control it, just let it happen. Together, he and Tinker told Karma about how Blue rose from the cracked concrete sidewalk to become a story in
Rolling Stone
and the first star ever featured at the Aquarius Café, which never pays anybody to appear, anybody, that is, but Blue and his Pre-primitive sound. The best part was that he could see she was really interested, and tried to interpret what that meant. And when Tinker and Blue, assisted by Peter? and Nathan, had filled in the missing months, it was Karma and Kathy and Capricorn's turn to catch up.

Taking Barney with them, they explained, Capricorn, Kathy and Karma had driven the van down the mountain to get supplies. Actually, Capricorn said, they ran out of gas on their way down the mountain and had to coast all the way to town. On their way back to the commune, they found themselves following a strange convoy of police cars, squad and ghost. When the traffic turned up the mountain trail leading to the Human Rainbow Commune Capricorn simply drove past and continued along the main road. After a few minutes, they returned, concealing the van and sat in it, watching and waiting. It was more than two hours before the cars descended, Tulip and Cory seated side by side in the back seat of the first squad car. The rest of the commune population was carried away, one or two to a car like princesses in a small-town summer parade. When the police were out of sight they drove their van up the mountain.

“The place was a shambles,” Capricorn told them. “Furniture tipped over and ripped apart. Holes broken through the walls. Clothes thrown around. They were looking for drugs, of course, but found nothing. A few seeds and twigs, but nothing to justify arresting everyone in Colorado. But you could tell that they had a good time. They enjoyed destroying the commune. You could feel that sort of sick pleasure people get out of destroying things. It's what's most attractive about war, I suppose.

“What they didn't get was our crop of grass, thanks to Cory's foresight. We were always cautious about a cop raid so we never kept much smoke on hand. We weren't into pushing it, anyway, just personal use. Cory made a small paddock around where we planted it, but never let the horses in there, of course. But the moment he heard the police cars arriving, he took the horses from the pasture and opened the gate to the paddock. By the time the cops finished wrecking the buildings and began looking elsewhere the horses had already taken care of the grass.”

“We had to stay there for three days,” Karma said, continuing where Capricorn left off. “The horses couldn't do anything but stand under a tree, staring at sunsets and sunrises like animal Buddhas. We couldn't move them for days, then Kathy and I walked them down to the farmer who sold them to us and asked him to look after them until we got back. Then we drove here.”

“Well,” Blue stated firmly, “we got to get Cory and Tulip out of jail. It's not fair locking a girl up like that. You must miss her something awful, Cap, old buddy. God meant you two to be together. I could see that way back in Colorado. Ask Tinker if I didn't say that! So let's bail her out. I got fifty bucks right here in my pocket that should cover it. There's no way you two should be apart.”

“She's out,” Capricorn said. “She and Cory were the last to be let go. The FBI kept them a week, but they really had nothing to charge them with. It was me they were looking for. There's a federal agent, Bud Wise, who is obsessed with me, but we won't go into that. The important thing is that Tulip is back at our pad, and Cory—”

“Tulip's free! Wow! That's the best news I've heard since I left Cape Breton. You hear the man, Tinker? Tulip's free!”

—

“There's a God, Tinker! There's a God and my mother's got Him lassoed inside her rosary and He works just for her, doing nothing but looking after her bouncing baby boy Blue.”

“You think that's what your mother's been praying for, Blue? For you to move in with a hippie in San Francisco? Dare you to phone her and tell her that her prayers have been answered,” Tinker nodded with feigned innocence.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways, as the other fellow says, Tink. Take my mother's prayers, for example. Did I ever tell you about the time I shot the flaming arrow through Sandy Malcolm's parlour window? They got the fire out before it did much more than scorch the couch in the parlour. It was an accident anyway. I was trying to shoot the arrow into his coal shed but the wind must of took it or something because it takes this weird curve toward the house and goes through the open window and sticks in the couch. My bad luck was that Sandy Malcolm's mother was lying on the couch and she was like two hundred years old and what does she do but goes and takes a stroke. You'd of thought I shot her through the heart the way Sandy Malcolm went on after the fire department got the fire out and the doctor got his mother to the hospital. I was about eight, I guess, but Sandy Malcolm was swearing to my mother that I was born to hang by the neck until I was dead; I could see it in my mother's face that she was scared he might be right. She took after me with Dad's pit belt that night, and then hung this rosary around my neck,” Blue said, fingering the rosary. “I guess she figures as long as I'm wearing the rosary nobody will loop a noose around it. It's worked so far.”

Tinker and Blue were in their hotel room gathering their belongings. Blue told Karma and Kathy they would load up the Plymouth in the evening and move into the Human Rainbow Commune, San Francisco branch, first thing in the morning.

“I don't get it, Blue. Why didn't we just pack up and get out of here tonight? They asked us to move in, for Christ's sake! When you said, ‘in the morning,' like you were going to think about it first or something, I pretty near punched you. What if they change their minds tonight?”

“Tinker, I had to buy us a little time. We're moving into a hippie commune. I know that. You know that. But what both of us know, too, is that these hippies eat like birds, and I don't mean carrion crows, to quote the other fellow. We need to have signals, like if I say, ‘Let's go hunting, Tinker,' then you know that we are going after some meat that comes from that delicious animal called the hamburg. If we work out a few codes like that, then we'll be able to talk to each other in a crowded room without telling anybody else anything.”

Tinker walked over to the window and looked down into the parking lot at the back of the hotel. The shape of the rusty Plymouth was a ghostly presence in the unlit alley. Behind him, Blue picked up his guitar, flicking notes into the silence that had fallen in the room, the fragments of music revealing a glimpse of Blue that Tinker saw far too seldom. He believed that Blue was neither a poet nor a songwriter but a mellow, bluesy musician. He never brought it up anymore because Blue never heard him when Tinker used to try to encourage him.

“Blue,” Tinker said, turning around to look at his friend propped against the pillows of his bed, strumming his guitar, “I wish we had gone there tonight. I don't like having time to think about stuff like this. It makes me scared. Christ, it makes me lonely. Explain that to me if you can. I'm about to move in with a girl I think I love and it makes me lonely and scared. Do you ever get scared, Blue?”

For a moment, he thought Blue hadn't heard him. He never glanced up at Tinker's confession or question, never missed a note of the piece he was quietly exploring.

“Sometimes,” he said finally, watching his fingers work the strings as if they mattered more than what he was saying, “but the way I look at it, Tinker, loneliness and fear are like a couple of nuns at a high school dance, grim chaperons there to make sure we don't have a good time while we're alive. We have to say to hell with them or we'd be still back in Cape Breton wishing we had gone to San Francisco.”