Lita
Spring 1936
DARLENE CAME OUT TO SEE THE band when we were booked at The Trianon Ballroom, opening for The Bell Family. She came out to see us a lot, all by herself, and sat right in the front and talked to us all through the set breaks. Well, she talked to some of us. She usually didn’t have much to say to me, except that she’d seen a blouse just like mine on the sale rack at Woolworth’s, or to tell me I should go and get my hair done one of these days, she knew a girl who could do it up really cheap. She flirted a bit with Henry and George, and ribbed Otto. The rest of the time she’d babble away to Bill. But one particular night she actually had something to say to all of us.
“You need a manager.”
“Huh,” Henry scoffed. “What do we need a manager for? Just someone to take our money.”
“Sure, you’d pay a manager. But a manager could line up jobs for you, do some promotion for you. Find you better places to play, get you more money. A manager could do all that and let you guys concentrate on the music. A good manager would be worth it.”
“So, what — do you know a good manager or something?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a little while. I think I could do it.”
“You? What would you know about managing a band?”
“Well, I’ve run the Belleville with my dad the last few years. I guess if I can run a hotel, I can find you guys a few gigs. For one thing, I have some connections in the hotel business.”
George wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know. A girl. I mean, you’ll pardon me, but will they take you seriously?”
“Now, hold on, George,” said Bill. “I recall a little skepticism about our girl guitarist, too, at first. And look how that’s turned out.”
“That’s different,” said Henry. “Lita has talent.”
“Well, maybe Darlene’s a talented manager. Why don’t we give her a try?”
The way he smiled at Darlene, I had no doubt that he wanted to give her a try. He acted as if I wasn’t there. To a certain degree I felt that was part of Bill’s schtick, part of the act, to smile at the ladies, to make them feel like they were the ones he was singing to. It was part of Bill’s nature, I knew that, part of why he was a singer. Bill could take up with any old stranger. He could yak away to someone in the street or at a bus stop, in a lineup at the bank, and they’d be like old pals for the ten minutes or whatever. I wasn’t like that at all. I was the opposite. I could hide away in a cave somewhere, just me and the National, and if someone would bring food and new strings once in a while I could stay there forever. But Bill loved to be on stage, loved to be the centre of attention. Since we married he’d toned it down considerably with women. But there he was, getting lost in Darlene’s eyes, and I sat and watched it happen and had no idea what to do or say.
Something else was going on as well. The owner of the Zenith Café in Saskatoon had made a gaffe a couple of weeks earlier. He’d introduced us as Lita MacInnes and Her Syncopation Five. I don’t know where he got that idea. I hadn’t suggested it, and the others swore up and down that they’d had nothing to do with it. But we got a laugh out of it. Bill laughed at the time, too. Later, though, he accused me of putting the owner up to it. I thought he was joking at first. But he wasn’t.
The guy had hit a nerve. It took me a while to understand it, but I began to see that Bill had been the centre of attention in the band until I came along. I hated to be the centre of attention, but from early on, it just developed that way. Everywhere we went, people raved about my playing. I was glad they liked it, but I hated performing. Bill was the performer, not me. But I was the girl. Years later, Elsa told me something Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane once said, something to the effect of if you put four rats and a duck on stage, the duck’s going to stand out. It was true. The trouble was, some rats really resented it.
“Why do we need a manager? What about the regular gig we’ve got at the Saskatchewan?” I asked.
“Every Saturday night? Big deal,” Bill said. “Tell your friend Jacob Stone that we need to eat every night. Darlene’s right. We need a manager. Don’t you think it’s time we took ourselves a little more seriously?”
“Jacob Stone is not my friend.”
But he wasn’t listening anymore.
Otto suggested we put it to a vote. Oh, hell. Great. How was I supposed to vote, against my husband? Henry and George voted against it, the rest of us were for.
After a while I understood that it wasn’t just about Darlene. Bill really thought a manager was the answer to the Syncopation Five’s problems. As far as I was concerned, we didn’t have any problems. The way I saw it, we had a great time playing music and more often than not got paid for it. We didn’t make a lot of money, never had any to save, but between the band and day jobs we made out okay. We all had enough to eat, and roofs over our heads, which was more than a lot of other people could say. And we had fun doing it.
But I’d noticed a change come over Bill during the winter. He’d struck me at first as very carefree, happy go-lucky. After a while, though, I realized that he was actually quite frustrated with what he saw as the Syncopation Five’s stalled career. So, Bill was frustrated by me taking the spotlight, frustrated by the band’s going nowhere, just plain frustrated.
“This shouldn’t be happening,” he said one night as we drove home after another wedding gig at a church hall.
“What shouldn’t be happening?” I thought there was something wrong with the Packard again.
“This band has been together since I was seventeen. We shouldn’t still be playing weddings and parties and two-bit hotels is what I mean. We’re good. We should play real gigs, and get paid every time.” His jaw was set and the muscles in his cheek rippled. I stifled the urge to laugh and point out that there was little work for all kinds of people, let alone jazz musicians, in Regina.
“It’ll come. Be patient. And anyway, I started with you guys when I was seventeen.”
“That’s different. You’ve only been with us a little while. But this band is my baby. This is it. And I feel like after five years we’re hardly any further ahead than when we started.”
“Things are hard for everyone right now. And I don’t think we’re doing so bad. We’ve got a house.”
“That my mom paid for. When will I start to make some money of my own? The harder I try, the less it happens. It’s like grabbing for water. Everything slips through my fingers.”
“You’ll make money, don’t worry. You’re a young guy. Anyway, is that all you’re in this for?”
“No. But I wonder how much longer we’ll have to pay dues, how much longer we’ll be a bunch of nobodies. Bing got his break when he was twenty-three. That means I got a year.”
I hated to hear him talk that way. “We’re not nobodies. We work hard and we’re getting better all the time. We’ve got one regular gig.” I looked at him to make sure he had his eyes on the road and wouldn’t be able to see me cringe in the dark before I added, “And now that we’ve got our manager, maybe we’ll get more.”
“I hope you’re right.”
I thought our differences in opinion about the band’s fortunes were because Bill was older and had played in front of audiences much longer than I had. After all, I’d had nothing but my guitar and my chambermaid job before the band. Now I was a working musician, married to the man I loved. We had our own house that no landlord could kick us out of. We’d never have to skip out in the middle of the night. I didn’t fixate on success the way he did because I already felt successful. But it was more than that. Bill came from a comfortable middle-class home. His mum always asked him when he would get a real job, made little remarks that let him know how she felt about what he was doing with his life. The fact that he even played music annoyed her, never mind that he dreamed of making a living at it. The way she saw it, a respectable man might play music as a hobby, though that might even be a problem depending on how much he did it. That he now had a wife and would presumably soon have a family to support only strengthened her argument.
Her attitude reminded me of the story of Bix Beiderbecke’s disapproving family. That young genius coronet player, whom many compared to Louis Armstrong, sent copies of his early records to his folks back in Iowa only to discover them later in a closet, unopened, unplayed. I think that his family’s callousness played a part in his death from drink in 1931. He was only twenty-eight. I didn’t want to see the same thing happen to Bill. I urged him to ignore his mother, and he said he did, but her words had to have an affect on him. How could they not? To people like Bill’s mum, the world was black and white: either you were a success or you were a failure. And he would not fail. So he was driven, under a lot of pressure to succeed.
I think marriage caused a shift in his attitude, too. Before we were married the band meant something different than it did to him afterward. Before, it was something he did because he enjoyed it, a means of artistic expression. Afterward it became this thing, this career that didn’t move along the way he wanted it to. Of course, he knew that the economy, particularly bad in Saskatchewan, was partly to blame. And we were young and working our way up. Although he already did everything he could, he was always trying to find ways to do more. And he was enormously frustrated.
At the time, I couldn’t really understand all that. I only saw Bill’s frustration about all the things he didn’t have. Compared to so many others, we were doing well. I saw men who stood in line outside the unemployment office and I didn’t feel so sorry for my husband. Spoiled rich kid, I sometimes thought, doesn’t know when he’s got it good. Later I realized I was as bad as Bill’s mum, in my way, passing judgment on him.
Darlene got on the job straight away and lined up gigs at hotel lounges in Regina, Saskatoon, and Moose Jaw, as well as at the beach resorts at Waskesiu and Little Manitou Lakes. Big deal, I thought. That took no particular managerial skill. Lots of these venues we’d played before. But now we were working five nights a week, which was new. And Darlene came out to see the band every night.
I knew it was coming, saw it coming, but had no idea what to do about it. By the time Darlene had been managing us for about three months, no one could deny it made a difference. She did all the non-musical things that Bill mostly used to do, and did them better. Now we had lots of work and didn’t have to spend any time with self-promotion. We were certainly in a position to be grateful to her, no question. And so the day finally came when she asked us during a rehearsal if she could join us onstage for a number. Well, Bill, actually. She asked Bill.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked.
“I thought I could join you for ‘What’ll I Do?’ You know, a duet. I think it’d be cute.”
I looked over at Henry. He could be counted on to go a long way to avoid things that were cute. He made a face like Harpo Marx, and I had to smile.
“Well,” Bill turned to me for assistance. He was red-faced, grinning. He had the hots for Darlene. Of course, that much had been obvious to me for a long time. Right then I wanted to slap him. Darlene, too, while I was at it. I knew he was waiting for me to take action, to lay down the law. For me to say, “Bill MacInnes, don’t you dare sing a duet with that brazen hussy! You come home this instant!” But I did nothing of the sort. I smiled sweetly and turned away to work on a tricky little riff I’d picked up from the latest Hot Club of France record. I refused to come to his aid.
“Well, I guess that’d be all right,” he finally said. “Right, fellas?”
Fellas, indeed, I thought. Nobody said much of anything. We ran through the number and I grimaced at the sound of Darlene’s voice. Maybe she didn’t really sound as awful as I thought she did, but how could I be objective? Her voice was thin, a little reedy. Someone charitable might have called it untrained, weak. She did stay on key, mostly. But the sound of her voice against Bill’s was like listening to nails on a blackboard for me. Because his voice could still make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, make me wish that I was all alone with him, even in a crowded barroom, even when he crooned some smelly Rudy Vallée number. He knew it, too. You could say many things about Bill, but he was no fool, not when it came to women. We’d get home after a gig, and he’d start to croon “After You’ve Gone,” the old Tin Pan Alley standard, while he washed up, sang it while he lay in wait for me, and by the time I got into bed I was putty in his hands. That song always did it to me for some reason, and he knew it.
And at home later that night he sang “After You’ve Gone” again all right, but to no avail. It wouldn’t have mattered what Bill sang right then — nothing would have worked on me. I had half a mind to go and sleep on the Winnipeg couch his mum gave us after she came over and discovered we owned almost no furniture. But then I decided there was no reason I should sleep on the couch when I was the innocent bystander. I slipped into bed, back to him, extra careful not to touch him, and turned off the light. Still singing quietly, he ran his hand up and down my side. I made no move, clenched my teeth.
“Lita?” he finally asked.
“Yes?”
“Something wrong?”
“Whatever would make you think something was wrong?” You big dope.
“You don’t seem very interested. It can’t be that time again already, can it?”
As if there could be no other reason. “No, it isn’t that time. I just don’t want to stand in for Darlene, that’s all.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Do you think I haven’t noticed?”
“That’s your imagination.”
“Is it? First, she’s our manager, now all of a sudden she sings a duet with you. I thought when we ran through it once, that that would be it, she’d have had her fun, and we’d get back to work. We ran through the goddamn song five times. Five times. And she can’t sing worth shit — ”
“Aw, c’mon,” he interrupted. “Be nice.”
“This is not an amateur hour, Bill. We are professionals. She can’t sing and you know it. So what is this all about? I’m afraid from where I see things, the answer looks pretty obvious.”
“I know she can’t sing. But what am I gonna do? After all she’s done for us, we owe her something.”
“She doesn’t do all this stuff for free, you know. She gets her ten percent. She gets paid because she does her job, that’s all. We let her sing with us and it’ll finish us off.”
“Oh, come on now. One little song is going to finish us off, when we have three hours worth of other material?”
“I don’t mean it’ll finish off the band.”
“Lita. Is that what you’re afraid of?”
“Seems like a pretty reasonable fear to me. The way you look into her eyes, laugh at her jokes. You talk to her all through our set breaks.”
“Well, I’ve got to talk to somebody during our set breaks. All you do is sulk in a corner and play your guitar. You never put it down. And can I help it if I have to talk to her? I’ve always been the one who takes care of all those little details like bookings and money. So it’s only natural that I’d talk to her about stuff like that.” Bill was a master at turning the tables, I had to give him that.
“You sure seem to have a gay old time doing it. I never saw you laugh and chatter away like that with any of the bar managers you dealt with before.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
He rolled over. “Yes, it is. Just put Darlene out of your mind. There’s nothing to worry about.”
His words and subsequent behaviour put me at ease for a time. He seemed to understand that whether my fears were unfounded or not, I saw Darlene as a threat, and he backed away from her accordingly. Then Darlene came up with the idea of the record.
It was the next logical step for the Syncopation Five to take, she said. We could record a couple of our best songs, and give out copies to radio stations and sell them at gigs. It sounded like a great idea, until we got into the studio. We’d agreed to record a couple of show tunes, a certain person’s favourites: “Isn’t It Romantic?” by Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin’s “So Am I.” I wouldn’t have picked them as our best songs. Had it been up to me, we would have recorded something a little more “hot,” as Henry would have put it. We did a good job with “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal, You,” for instance. But Bill finally convinced us that these two show tunes had the most appeal with audiences, so that settled it.
We were all excited about the record. Otto wanted to mail them to all his relatives for Christmas, and George was sure he could sell copies at the garage where he worked days. We were about to begin “Isn’t It Romantic?” when Darlene joined Bill at the microphone, all smiles. Bill and I stood closest to the mike, so that it would pick up his voice and my solos — that was how recording sessions went in those days, one microphone that we all played around. Otto and his fiddle were in the middle, and George on bass and Henry on drums were the farthest away so they wouldn’t drown the rest of us out. I looked at Darlene, then at my husband. He tried to pretend he didn’t notice. I tried to think what to say, when Henry said it for me. Good old Henry.
“Since when is this outfit the Syncopation Six?”
Darlene laughed. “Why, Henry, don’t get all excited. Just a little back-up vocal, that’s all.”
“If we’d wanted back-up vocals, we’d have hired a singer. And we would have rehearsed with her.”
“Listen here, I’m doing you guys a favour. I won’t charge you for this.”
“You won’t charge us? I’ll say. Nobody in their right mind would pay you to sing.”
It went on back and forth between them for a few minutes. Then the recording technician reminded us that we were being charged by the hour for studio time. That brought things to a close. Good thing, too, because it was getting a little ugly.
“We should have worked this all out before we got here. This is a waste of time,” Bill complained.
The nerve. I couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “We did have it all worked out. All those times we rehearsed, there were five of us. No one said anything about this.”
“Listen,” the technician suggested. “Why don’t you run through the numbers once with the backing vocals? We’ll cut a wax test, and if you don’t like it, we can leave them out on the final version. We should have time for that.”
Finally, a reasonable idea. We did just that. We listened to the first song: it began with a twelve bar intro and then Bill started. When Darlene’s voice came in, I shot Henry a little glance and he made the Harpo Marx face again. I had to look at the floor. I couldn’t look at anyone else because I was afraid I’d start to laugh. Not only is love blind, it’s also tone-deaf.
“I don’t think that’ll do,” Henry said decisively after it was finished.
“Fine,” said Darlene. She marched out, pulled up a chair behind the technician and sulked as we rerecorded the numbers. What a relief, I thought.
After that, The Syncopation Five spent a month on a tour of southern Saskatchewan that Darlene had lined up, played bars and dances. I found that very pleasant, a month away from our manager. As soon as we got back to town Bill took the Packard over to the studio to pick up the records. He had a big box full of them. It probably wouldn’t seem like much now, but then, 250 records was an impressive number. Of course, 78s were heavy; maybe that’s why they seemed so impressive. They were something to see, all right, with their royal blue labels and silver inscription: THE SYNCOPATION FIVE. That made it seem like we’d arrived, like we were big time, now. Side A was “Isn’t It Romantic?” and Side B was “So Am I.” I was about to slip one onto the record player when Bill stopped me. He went out for some beer and I got on the phone to get the others over so we could all listen to it together for the first time.
We cracked our beers and Bill dropped the needle onto the wax. As the twelve bar lead-in started we clinked our bottles in salute. But soon our faces fell. Darlene’s voice was like nails on a chalkboard to all of us this time.
“Oh, God,” gasped Otto.
“That idiot screwed up! How could this have happened?” Bill was furious. I was glad to see he wasn’t in on it, or at least didn’t appear to be. I didn’t believe for a second that that version of the song ended up on the record by accident. Nor was I alone.
“You don’t really think this was a mistake, do you?” Henry demanded.
Before Bill could answer, I jumped in. “Some mistake. She was up there in the booth with him when we left the studio, you all saw that. She obviously switched the masters on him, or sweet-talked him into doing it. Sweet-talked him, or something.”
“Probably the something, if you ask me,” George said. “I wonder if there’s any way we can get them to cut us another batch?”
Worse, the wrong recordings got on to both sides. Bill and Henry went down to the studio to see what they could do. And it wasn’t much. The technician apologized, but he swore that he was sure he’d picked up the right master. If Darlene had convinced him to switch them somehow, he wasn’t telling. The other masters, the right ones, were already gone and if we wanted to rerecord it, we’d have to book and pay for more studio time and pay for more records to be pressed. They might be able to cut us a bit of a deal because of the mistake, but they couldn’t just give it to us. The other option was to live with it.
Which is what we had to do. There wasn’t enough money to do it all again, even at a cut rate. As it was, the first time had stretched our resources as far as they would go. Bill talked briefly about borrowing some money from his mum to do it. But he didn’t. Probably wouldn’t have been able to tell her the story. As for Darlene, she denied any part in the mix-up, though not even Bill believed her. We still sold the records at our shows and gave them away to the radio stations, but they didn’t sell the way we’d hoped.
Strangely enough, though, the net effect of the whole thing for me was good. Bill was so angry with Darlene he threatened to fire her. She insisted she had nothing to do with it. We couldn’t prove it, so she kept her job, but she no longer came to every practice, and she didn’t sing anymore. That was a blessed relief. After a while I was even glad she mixed the masters up or convinced the technician to do it. I was glad because Bill couldn’t stand the sight of her after that, at least for a while. And, I reasoned, there would be plenty of opportunities to do more records later. This was not a big deal, the way I saw it. My eighteenth birthday came and went and I relaxed for the first time that year.