THREE WEEKS LATER JULIA was taking that same solo onstage at the Fillmore. Back in her and Cal’s home in suburban Baltimore, the only evidence of her ever having done so was the fiddle itself. There was no iconic photo of Julia onstage to hang in their basement and she didn’t know if she would’ve wanted it hung if there was one—not a nanosecond of image that was meant somehow to capture what it was like, the thirteen milliseconds of an infinite and infinitely life-defining night. No one but her, Julia, knew what it was like—she was emperor of her memory palace and not even her son or husband was invited to join her. Moving her old fiddle from basement to guest room along with all her vintage instruments was enough for her now. She remembered as she carted that fiddle up two flights of stairs now how she rode up Market to the venue in an old Volvo station wagon with TR behind the wheel and she and Spencer in the backseat together. No one sat shotgun—Spence put the jacket from his Nudie Suit up there like it was another member of the band, which in a very real way it was. It was more identifiably a part of Spencer Willmont’s act than she would ever be and it had been with him longer, too. This was his Captain America suit—he’d met with Nudie Cohn himself after he saw Easy Rider for the first time (he saw it more than a dozen, he said) and told him he wanted his closet stocked with jackets and pants like Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson wore in the movie. He had a real and easy friendship with Nudie, who’d come to the States just before the war from Ukraine with his real name—Nuta Kotlyarenko—still emblazoned on his papers and who by two years after the war was already putting together some of the loudest embroidered rhinestone-laden suits ever to come into shimmering existence in the American South, just another immigrant whose audacious original aesthetic was straight up the middle of what we come to think of as our country. He was working on a Captain America Chevy convertible for Spence to drive around in.
“There’s a kind of sartorial self-mythologizing that’s maybe my favorite part of all of this,” Spencer said as they climbed their way up Market Street. He said “all” like it was the tool. Despite his light Southern drawl, he spoke in grammatical, specific sentences like he was, after all, teaching Julia Latin now that he spoke to her at all. Awl. “One puts on a suit and puts on a show and the rest just goes.”
“Why would you leave your opportunity at good schooling after coming out here?” he’d asked Julia after their second rehearsal. She’d just looked at him and said, “Why did you?” And he broke out in a big smile and said, “Touché, sweetie, touché.”
Now in the car the awning of the Fillmore jutted out from the building up before them. Maybe three thousand kids filled the sidewalk and poured down into the street in front of them, maybe four—Spence was big, but this crowd was there to see the Dead, who they would be opening for. Julia would be lying if she said she didn’t wonder who was paying for all those suits and cars, and it wasn’t until she’d gotten free of those days of her late teens that she read about Spencer—about how his father had been a war profiteer in Raleigh, North Carolina, who’d helped lead the way for the arming of the USAF as they joined up with the Brits and Canucks as they began bombing Nazi Germany in 1944. His parents had sent Spence north to attend Yale, hoping a dose of Northeastern snow might help wet him down, but Spencer Willmont burned hot as a white phosphorus incendiary, and Julia should have realized he would stay in one place for about as long.
Tonight on the ride Spencer was the stiffest she’d yet seen him. “How do you feel the Cherub Band has developed,” Spencer said, but it was clear he was seeking no answer, just looking out into the crowd. Then his arm was around her, pulling her across his lap to look at a whole slew of bell-bottomed kids waiting to get into the Fillmore. “Just get a couple drinks in you and I know you’ll be fine,” Spencer said, and as ever when he said “you,” he always meant “me.”
Backstage she watched as Spencer had a drink and then another and this was how he transformed, how his shoulders dropped and a spliff hit his lips and suddenly five minutes till showtime and it was like the Nudie Suit was wearing him. The band was called out by its full name for the first time onstage there when Bill Graham announced them.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a special treat here at the Fillmore West,” Graham said, his thick Slavic lips and basso-deep voice carrying up to the second deck of the Carousel Ballroom. Julia could only see the shimmer of his thick brown hair under the sodium lights, and she was clutching the frog of her bow like she might choke it to death, like the abalone-inlaid ebony might give way beneath her clutch, all those kids in their nimbus of smoke writhing out there before them. Spence had his Captain America–jacketed back to the audience like he was Miles Davis, hitting a tater over and over, sliding up the D string of his nacre-crackling D-45, and he turned his Elvis head over to Julia, gave her a nod, his transformation complete, and she started tatering a G on her fiddle, too.
“On behalf of the band, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the Fillmore stage for the first time, Mr. Spencer Willmont and his Band of Cherubs.” TR thumped hard on the G on his bass and Spence spun around, Nudie Suit jacket sparkling like a dwarf star in the Fillmore lights overhead, the Dead’s huge tube amps blaring acoustic instruments at a level that might never be replicated in human history as he sang high and hard the opening lyrics to the Louvin Brothers’ “You’re Running Wild,” a song he’d adapted as if it was his own. They played one long, cosmic, spaced-out set, forty-five minutes to the bounding heads out across the ballroom as they were picked out like individual motes by the lights above. They were opening for Moby Grape, who were opening for the Dead, who were the main act for the night, but Julia never even said hello to that other Spence, the Grape’s lead singer, as by now she could do nothing but look at Spencer Willmont.
After the set he hadn’t said much more to her than, “Nice solo on that last one,” but she knew all his covers and all his own songs from listening to his record, and he had her singing tenor harmonies over him on half their set. She’d heard that Dylan rehearsed and recorded this way, too—just some charts up on a stand someone else had drawn up, one sketched-out run-through of each song on a guitar or piano so the musicians had an idea of what he was after, and the band was expected to get in there and sing and play as tight as a polished group. She was happy to do it all on the fiddle but she truly didn’t know if she had the vocals to go there, too—there was no hiding behind a flat note three steps above a singer like Spence, no matter how blazing stoned they or their crowd were. You could make your voice all forceful and strident like Joan Baez or Donna Jean Godchaux, who had sung a couple steps above Dylan and Elvis, or you could get right in there and hit the note like you were doing a session in Motown. But song after song, rehearsal after rehearsal at that big, empty, echoey house in Pacific Heights, she nailed it. So while Spence seemed a lot more interested in the spliff he and Skip Spence were sharing in their backstage room there, Julia sat back and just continued to saw out double stops on her fiddle while all the rest jabbered and sang a chorus or two. At one point she felt certain Jerry was looking over at her, his big black beard roiling in the half-lights backstage like some wiry hirsute sea, but he was wearing a big old pair of aviators and there was no real way to know if he was looking at her without being able to see his eyes. He didn’t say a word to her. For years later it was the story she didn’t tell anyone because what story was there to tell? What was the beginning, what the middle, and how could there ever be an end? What was the story? Once when she’d almost become a famous musician she’d almost talked to Jerry Garcia after a show but in the end she was too shy so she didn’t? It was like another image in and of itself, a nanosecond and an eternity, an event never begun and never finished and nothing to tell. It was like she’d have to take a story all the way back to the day of her birth to try to track what story she’d be telling—I was born and I played music and then I didn’t and then I spent weeks cleaning out my basement so my one-day-to-be-a-domestic-terrorist son could move back, the end.
Before she knew it, Julia was calling her mother back in Philly to let her know she was going to be on the road all summer. In a phone booth outside of the one-ish-plus-star hotel where they were staying, she dumped dime after dime into the slim slot and pulled the slick plastic of the receiver close to her face. She didn’t even ask how her father was doing because she didn’t know what she would say if she learned the answer, any answer. The Cherubs were planning to hop on a bus and travel the southwest route, through New Mexico and Texas and across to Tennessee and North Carolina, playing shows at night and performing on radio stations in the afternoons, supporting Spencer Willmont in all his Nudie Suited peregrinations. She never even said a proper good-bye to Willie Schtodt—the afternoon she came back to their apartment he was still gone, though there was a fresh seed-and-stemmy quarter of weed in their top drawer, and she only saw his high school Bostonian friend, the same friend she’d walked in on with his girlfriend that week they first arrived on the West Coast. Looking at him now, it was like a year had passed instead of a month. She could hardly even remember the kid she’d been when she first got there.
“Going somewhere, sweetheart?” the kid said when she walked in. He was wearing a shirt for the first time she’d seen, but no pants, just a loose pair of tightie whities that hung around his hips like pachyderm skin. He looked like a boy, like a child, like some kid calling her sweetheart without knowing any better he was about to be grounded.
“I’m going everywhere, Yank,” she said, already out the door. “I’m going fucking everywhere.”