AND IT’S NOT THAT THERE WEREN’T MEMORIES of her father that pleased Julia from that period in her life. Those returned, too, as she took each fiddle in its case, each valuable mandolin Cal had let her buy though she could barely play it now, up to the cleared-out guest room. As a musician, so many of those memories were aural, came to her as the sounds twanging and warbling from their radio on weekends. Julia’s father was pious in shul and as secular as they came outside of it. Soon after his return from service and starting in business with his high school friend Fyodor Semyonich, Julia’s father had used what spoils they’d accrued after the war and bought a house more than ten blocks from her bubbe in Mt. Airy, his west of The Avenue, on Pelham Street. There on Sunday evenings her father would tune their old radio to the Grand Ole Opry. It was among her first memories, crossed with the vertiginous sounds of Hebrew on Saturday mornings, listening later in the weekend to the warp and wobble of Bill Monroe’s mandolin, to the schticky humor of Grandpa Jones, to the tough low growl of Jimmy Martin as he tore into “You Don’t Know My Mind.” It was how she’d learned to play fiddle, in fact—trying to play over her father picking his Martin D-45 worked after a fashion; by the time she could saw out a tune he was institutionalized, and in playing over the professionals there was a limitless sense of forgiveness, a sense every sour note or dropped beat was swallowed by that great brown box, incorporated into the tight performances being broadcast from a thousand miles south in Nashville. It was the only place her father seemed at peace in the times he did come home—guitar in his hand, tune in his throat. In retrospect was there a frown that came to her mother’s face when he was there and the radio was on and the King of Bluegrass sang his lyrics, when he sang “I’m lonesome all the time”? Memory had already skewed any hope Julia might have had for interpretation. She remembered they would turn the radio off and her father would play a couple of bars of taters on his pick-worn guitar, and she’d rub the thin amber of her rosin across her bow hair, kicking up a rarefied dust in the air around it, and she’d try to squeak out the melody of “Jerusalem Ridge” or “Whiskey Before Breakfast” or “The New Five Cents.” The titles made Julia almost wish there was a song called “The Fresh Ironed Tin Foil.” It might have seemed odd to their neighbors, she supposed, this family of Jews playing old-time American music on their long front porch in one of the westernmost neighborhoods of stolidly Northeastern northwest Philadelphia. But her father loved Woody Guthrie and Dave Van Ronk and her mother might have liked to have been Maybelle Carter minus the raised-top Gibson guitar, and anyway the Sidlers had been in this country since the Civil War, Jews who’d known what it was like to vote for Lincoln and read Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, Dickinson in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly as it came to their front doorsteps, even if they wouldn’t be able to attend Yale or Princeton for half a century.
By the time she was ready to finish high school, Julia Sidler was a strong enough fiddler to sit in on gigs with her father’s friends from time to time, burly Jews who’d learned to play guitars and banjos like they were goyische and who welcomed her presence as a reminder of the old friend they were missing. She’d tried to get up a bluegrass band or two, but when she was a freshman no one at her Quaker Friends school seemed to want to play in that traditional idiom anymore. In the coffee houses in Center City it was just a guy with a guitar, Bob Dylan–style, mangling the classics into some new singer-songwriter message of political and social polemicism. Her first boyfriend had written twelve different versions of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol,” each its own didactic attempt to make rhymes out of local crimes and half of them still containing variations on the line “and emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level,” a line which, indivisible as shorn memory, could not be improved upon (“and emptied the trash cans on a whole nother level”; “and cleaned out the gutters on a whole other level”; “and washed off her art smock on a whole other level”—each worse than the one before).
By the time Julia was ready to head for her first semester at Syracuse University, Dylan had already been proclaimed Judas in London’s Royal Albert Hall, and he had Al Kooper’s frenetic, jittery, raucous basslines running through his new songs, and a handful of freshmen in her central New York dorm owned tweed Fender tube amps, Strats and Telecaster Thinlines of varying pastel colors, and wah-wah pedals, trying to burn out chords and puff out shaky joints of seed-popping weed. That first semester and a half had gone fine for Julia, carrying over from her solid Quaker education at the Friends school she’d attended against her bubbe’s protestations, the best school in the neighborhood, but here in college she just couldn’t seem to find the right musicians, no matter how much she liked reading the history of art and Shakespeare and Plato and going to parties and hootenannies out in the barns of rural Dewitt. Her mother had set her up to wait tables at an Italian restaurant down on South Street starting in mid-May after that first year so she could earn some pocket money.
Then halfway through her first spring semester she met Willie Schtodt. These were memories that arrived now because she’d willed them, allowed them as she rosined up her bows and looked at those old instruments in the guest room of her and Cal’s home. Willie lived in the dorm next to hers and kept to himself, though from time to time she would see him out behind the Hall of Languages, strumming a cheap dreadnaught knockoff of her father’s D-45, which to this day she still owned and had set up with a new nut, new strings, before Mark returned home. She’d watched all year as Willie’s hair grew wavy, then curly, a wispy beard mossing his lower jaw. But after holing up in the northeast cold all winter—it wasn’t unheard of for a half-foot of snow to fall off the lake the second week in April—one day late that month the sun came out. It blazed so hot after almost seven months of gelid winter it was like an outright assault on every sense. Girls walked from the Bird Library up to the quad in halter tops. One time she saw a girl from her pre-law class wearing no top at all, just her breasts taut on her chest covered in paint like a pre-modern Scotsman marked for battle. And sitting with his back against his dorm there was Willie Schtodt, a new ersatz Gibson Hummingbird pressed to his shirtless, hairless chest, a rudimentary attempt at a bird on its burgundy pick guard, singing Jimmy Martin tunes, one after the other, affecting Jimmy’s rasp and growl. He’d been holed up all winter like some snowbound Robert Johnson, learning bluegrass tunes at his own lake-effect-blizzard-imposed crossroads. They didn’t even make eye contact. She ran back to her dorm and grabbed her fiddle. Before she knew it, they’d jumped into his MG-B and were headed across the country to San Francisco. His friends phoned to say they’d rented a place in the Inner Richmond, and against every objection her mother—her mother who’d been reduced to visiting her father in the State Lunatic Home on weeknights and weekends, who’d managed to send her to schools that allowed her scholarships to get to university in the first place—treading those very blood-strewn white tiles Julia couldn’t strike from her memory more than fifty years later—she left all but her fiddle and the clothes she could fit in her backpack at a friend’s house off Westcott Street and headed for the opposite coast, taking advantage of a freedom that felt earned and necessary and all but inevitable.
What she found there was nothing like the idyll Willie Schtodt had promised with his energetic renditions of “Sophronie” still ringing in his throat and the mushrooms his friends had picked off the manure dropped by some cows in a farm east of campus in Skaneateles looping gossamer threads through his brain. The three-room apartment his friends were all—all!—to share wasn’t in the Inner Richmond after all, but in the Mission, a dingy old Victorian at Dolores and Twenty-second, where kids slept on flattened dirty cardboard in the cool misty San Francisco evenings and begged beers and joints from all the new heads headed in from the same coast they’d themselves just fled. There were good parts to the first weeks there—the Dead played a free show in Golden Gate Park and Julia got almost far enough to the front to see Bob Weir in his ripped jean shorts barking about empty spaces and someone named Cowboy Neil driving the Further bus and taking the band through the entire twenty-two sententious minutes of “The Other One”—but after she came home to find one of Willie’s friends, a high school kid from suburban Boston, pumping naked atop his girlfriend on what she’d understood to be her and Willie’s bed, Julia resolved to head back to Philly however she could, as soon as she could catch a ride.
Willie begged her to come to a party with him that weekend. “Fine enough if you wanna head back to Momma,” he’d said, “but at least have some fun before you take off for the straights back East, you’re out with the heads now.” He sounded to her even then like someone reading lines from a poorly written screenplay about the era, hippie language loose in his mouth like ill-fitting dentures. Whatever authenticity Willie had evinced when he sang like Red Allen was absent when he tried to talk like a character in an Antonioni movie. So she was ready to leave but Willie convinced Julia to go out for one last night with him and his friends. There was a big old Victorian on Haight Street where some friend of a friend of a friend of Owsley Stanley had dosed the entire bowl of lemonade with some of Bear’s own acid, at least they all said, and it was as if the top of Julia’s head had been blown off for the next two days. They all brought their instruments with them, carrying them all the way from the Mission up the hills to the Haight. Where in the past she might have waited for Willie to pull out his ersatz Hummingbird and start a jam, and then lug out her fiddle and play quietly so no one would take too much notice, now Julia had her fiddle in her hands at all times. All in one epic night she became that Girl with the Fiddle. The Fiddle Girl. TFG. Tiff. It had been the only comfort to her that first night with Bear’s lemonade—she could feel her jaw tightening half an hour after her first thimble-full of the stuff, could see that somewhere at the seared edges of the visible world the corners were turning up just the slightest bit, like the corners of a photograph touched on all sides by fire.
Hallucinating wasn’t like the scenes she’d seen in Dumbo as a kid at the Sedgwick Theater on Germantown Ave.—no elephants exuding bubbles and turning colors. It bore no resemblance at all to the paisley-and-purple-swirled posters her kid would hang in his room thirty years later, lit by cheesy black light. It was more like the whole world lost its purchase on her mind—she understood later it was the other way around, but that was how it felt—and in that new state she might imagine something awful. Her back ached and her stomach felt like it had contracted into a gravity-sucking black hole somewhere at the immediate center of her body, and for what felt like hours or weeks she couldn’t stand up. If she stayed perfectly still this would all at some point pass. But when it started to feel bad, like it might never end—and she understood then that nothing ever ended, it only repeated on some eternally recurring imagistic loop—if she dragged her bow across the fat G string of the fiddle she’d been playing since before her father was institutionalized, since before she had ever seen red blood on the white subway tiles that she pushed, pushed, pushed away lest it shift her trip to some whole new horror, taking over the beauty of hallucination with the ballast of memory, if she felt her right thumb against the cool ebony of the frog of her bow, things settled. The prodding of her fingertips against catgut felt right, cool and solid in the hot, vacillating world. The edges of the world still flitted up and sizzled, but now they turned toward her, everyone turned toward her while she scratched out “Wheel Hoss” on just the G and D strings of her instrument—then turned back to what they were doing. The morning a week later when some acquaintance of Willie’s came by their Dolores Street apartment asking after Tiff—okay, TFG—okay fine, The Fiddle Girl—she couldn’t even remember having played with his band. But what she’d done had impressed him.
“We’ve got a show down in Noe Valley later this week,” the guy said. He had huge muttonchops like some kind of deep-forest insect larvae had grown homeostatic inside his cheeks, and the spice of his unwashed armpits seemed to enter her and Willie’s room before he did. She looked at Willie. They’d been going so hard since that party they’d never even acknowledged she hadn’t yet returned to Philly as she planned. She was still here. She didn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. The muttonchopped guy said his name was TR. He was the bassist she’d played with the other night at the party. She didn’t remember playing with a bassist at the party.
“But listen,” he said, “I’m shit on that old double bass and I know it, tears holes in my fingers, had blisters like water balloons after that night, I’m a professional on the electric, you’ll see, you’ll see, I promise you’ll see.” He did after all have his fingers wrapped in duct tape. He mentioned for the third time since his odor had preceded him into the room how much he loved her fiddling. “And then our manager talked to Bill Graham about a gig backing Spencer Willmont at the Fillmore next month.”
This was a whole new thing now. This was something more than TR’s BO entering into their place. Spencer Willmont had been a student at Yale before he dropped out to start a band out here playing what he called “Transparent Eyeball Folk.” They made a record in Bakersfield that came out Julia’s junior year of high school, and in addition to the pile of old Decca records her father had left her, it was the only thing she’d listened to for months her senior year. What had drawn her in, of course, was their version of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky”—what Elvis had done at Sun Records to slow that song down and make it a pure country hit, Spencer Willmont had blown up the way Bear’s acid had blown the top off Julia’s head. It was listening to Spencer Willmont that had led her to the Grateful Dead in the first place, and in turn to an education in a whole area she never would have encountered. In their wide-ranging covers it was as if they were her own personal jukebox. She knew when she heard them cover Hank Williams or Marty Robbins what she was listening to—but when Pigpen sang Elmore James, or when Jerry found his way all the way to Sam Cooke, she found herself tracking those records down at a shop in Old City, where worlds of music now became familiar and new all at once.
But Spencer Willmont, who hewed closer to the originals than any of those more hard-core rock-and-rollers, bringing space and edge to the Louvin Brothers or Delmore Brothers songs he covered, made a sound that felt like it had come out of her and found its way into his mouth. It was pure American music, America distilled as it was in “Young Goodman Brown,” as distilled as it was in the em dashes of Dickinson or the varieties of William James’s religious experience. Listening to him was like reading a line of Melville that reached out across the decades and thousands of miles and layers of stilted language to speak back to her what was in her own chest. Jerry Garcia himself had even played pedal steel—her father called it “the electric table”—on Spencer’s first record. And here she was, in the Mission, bridging those miles and languages right back, being asked to gig with Spence Willmont himself. It was like traveling to the Temple Mount only to discover the plan was to eat shawarma and tahini with King David.
Julia actively avoided making eye contact with Willie.
She said she’d come sit in on some sessions with them, when and where.
The minute TR left the room—he didn’t take his spicy odor with him, but left it in the room for days after his departure, where it settled in like a new roommate, reminding her and Willie what had been proffered—while continuing to avoid eye contact she told Willie she wouldn’t do it. She didn’t need it.
“I mean, Fillmore West? I’m not good enough to play Fillmore West. It could be the biggest opportunity for the biggest embarrassment of my whole life. It’s an opportunity to fail on a bigger scale than anyone we know has ever had an opportunity to fail before. It could be like failing myself and all of America all at once. It could come to define me.” Willie didn’t say anything. “Or it could come to make me. Who knows. It’s just so risky.”
Willie put a shirt on for the first time since they’d arrived in San Francisco almost a month earlier. He found the roach of an old joint in an ashtray and emptied it on a whole other level. “I mean, I’ve never even played my violin through an amp before, let alone played one onstage in front of three thousand people.”
“Bill Graham has roadies at the Fillmore to set up a fiddle player,” Willie said. “He could make your grandmother’s matzoh ball soup sound hip on that stage.”
Now they did make eye contact for the first time since TR had left his pheromones behind. It was like the edges of her world were searing again, only this time not from a hallucination but from tangible jealousy and confusion in the man—well, boy—who’d brought her west in the first place.
Willie left their apartment and didn’t come back for days. Julia wouldn’t have known he’d come back at all if it weren’t for the fact that three days after he walked out, a lid of weed was gone from their top drawer, and only the two of them had keys. She found herself thinking about something other than Willie Schtodt for the first time in a month. The next night, she went to the address TR had left for her. For the first hour after her arrival, no one said a word to Julia. She was The Fiddle Girl and she found that what had made her comfortable when she was tripping her eyelashes off at a party was the same salve in any social situation—she clamped down on her fiddle with her chin and sawed out a line of “Soldier’s Joy.” It was only notes to them, but in her head she blurted out the lyrics her father used to belt in his mock-drunkenest blurt when he’d come back to join them on their Mt. Airy porch: “Well, it’s twenty-five cents for the morphine, and it’s fifteen cents for the beer, it’s twenty-five cents for the morphine, won’t you get me out of here!”
Spence’s new band was to practice in this huge empty house in Pacific Heights, in a part of the city Julia hadn’t even imagined existed after three weeks of the trek up and down hills from the Mission to the Haight. Long, open streets were lined with pastel-painted Victorians—but these Victorians reminded her more of the subdued ones she’d seen back in Westcott, her favorite neighborhood in Syracuse, more than the rococo flourishes and bright solid colors of the Haight. These were buildings that had gone up since the fire of 1904, that had been around when Emma Goldman came here speechifying, that had been standing when the U.S. joined the war effort twenty years earlier and that were now better-up-kept, flourishing in the dollars flowing back across the Atlantic after V-J Day. San Francisco may have gone from haven to hellion in the last couple years, tens of thousands of kids flocking to a city that would never be able to hold even a million people total, burbling over into the outskirts of its Bay Area neighbors, but they were still flush with the ease of the two decades since their parents freed the world’s wealth for them, cashing in on the last breath of the breadth of resources all those European colonialists had been collecting from Africa and Asia for almost a century, freed to grow their hair and minds and drop out. Did any of these musicians give a thought to it then, in their lysergic smudge, as notes flew improvised from the instruments their parents had bought them? Julia sure didn’t, not then at any rate. Not until she was back on the East Coast with that same fiddle she would one day come to move to a second-floor guest room so her son could move back into the basement, anyway. Living in the moment afforded a freedom from memory but it demanded a freedom from thought as the price. Thought was not a primary mode of currency for anyone in those moments. It was in fact the one time in her life when Julia could live mostly free of thought, free of that thought-tormented age she would later live in, free of perseveration guilt and overweening memory. Free.
The newly formed Cherub Band rehearsed inside a house that must have been three, four thousand square feet, not an inch of it furnished—no rug touched its floors, not a chair to be sat in. The only way to sit was backed up against a wall or in the ample space of the house’s uterine bay windows. It was like playing music inside the body of a giant flat-backed violin, part of some acoustic infinite regress, San Francisco as imagined by M. C. Escher. In a room at the back of the house a guitarist in a raggedy poncho picked out the opening lick to Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” over and over and over and over, never looking up, bum bum bam-bum, bah bum bah-ah bum. Years later when Julia read Joan Didion for the first time she found the famous passages in “The White Album” about Didion’s going to visit the Doors both familiar and off-putting—of course the rest of the band had waited hours for Jim Morrison to show up for recording sessions! You didn’t become a rock star so you could arrive at rehearsal on time. You didn’t become a rock musician so you could drive straight to the hospital to give birth. You became a rock musician exactly so you could take a detour to eat some Chinese food on the way to giving birth to your first kid. It wasn’t a cleverly-if-cynically-observed ancillary. It was the thing itself.
An hour after she arrived and just after she was herself considering leaving—she hadn’t learned the lessons yet that Didion herself hadn’t learned—TR came in, with Spencer behind him. TR’s muttonchops had taken on a whole new dimension, and the body odor now carried a sense of peculiar familiarity. It was its own kind of image, never as strong as the visual images Julia kept of her grandmother and her tinfoil or her white tile with its lines of blood, but the evocation of a different kind of memory nonetheless: sense memory. That smell. She would smell it on her own son when he got old enough to perspire but hadn’t yet discovered deodorant and again when he returned from his interminable games of pick-up basketball when he came home in his thirties. Spencer Willmont himself was a whole other variety of human. He was maybe six foot three, six foot four, and while in photographs she’d only ever seen him in the most audacious of his intensely American Nudie Suits, that first time she saw him in person in their Pacific Heights rehearsal space he was wearing a dun brown suede serape with beaded tassels hanging down off his thin, flat, hairless chest. An acoustic guitar was slung across his back even as he walked in through the door. His gait was reserved, genteel even, as if he was preparing to lecture to them from Wheelock’s Latin, not play his spaced-out American music. Before anyone said a word to him he flipped it around his body and across his chest and started pounding on an E chord with the flat pick in his right hand. For the first time since the first time she’d drunk Bear’s acid, Julia stopped sawing on her fiddle. She’d never heard anyone play Bill Monroe’s “Sitting Alone in the Moonlight” in E before, a key that would make playing it cleanly next to impossible on the mandolin or fiddle, and it took her a second to consider how she’d move from the E a step back to the E-flat that defined its changes before she realized everyone was looking at her. Well, not everyone—Spence wasn’t looking at her, but somehow the rest of the band knew he wanted her to kick it off on fiddle without his even having to. She hadn’t played a note yet. TR was thumping an open E string on his bass and staring at her. She could see the collective hairs of his left muttonchop writhing under the clenching of his jaw. But while it felt like they’d been staring at her for seventeen days, it hadn’t even been two bars yet, and no one had spoken or would speak, and Julia hit the first note of the melody as if she’d been waiting to voice it with the conviction of her own syncopation, hopping in on the shimmering slip between an E and an E-flat, jumping back and then away from that blue note in the melody, and it was clear now she knew what she was doing, that she was a fiddler with the solid up-the-middle chops of Kenny Baker and the blue notes thrown in like she was Vassar Clements or Stéphane Grappelli, she was the right choice. She saw Spencer look up at TR and TR look down at his fingers and everyone else look down at their toes, bangs willowing into their faces, a coy smile playing across Spence’s lips as he stood in the half-light filtering in through the bay windows behind him.