Nine

I was standing near the theater, flipping a mental coin over front- versus backdoor etiquette, when Mimi, the curly-haired blonde, sailed around the corner, and almost mowed me down.

I fell into step beside her. “Remember me? Dee’s friend.”

“Oh, sure,” she replied, smiling for all she was worth. She was swinging hand in hand with a young man who was wearing one gold hoop earring that made him look like a pirate. She wore tights and a tank top in tiger stripes, a matching headband, and black lace-up boots. Roz, my personal arbiter of fashion taste, would have found her a bit passé.

She blitzed through the front door and I followed; no doubt she was with a band hanger-on—not drummer Freddie tonight, but somebody who at least knew somebody semi-famous.

I had always figured rehearsals for major-league concerts would be pretty closed affairs. If you’re charging $27.50 a seat, you don’t want to give it away in advance. But nobody challenged me as I marched across the lobby in Mimi’s perfumed wake.

She and the boy with the hoop earring disappeared through swinging aisle-doors. I followed. Inside the auditorium a humming screech rose and fell. Lights flickered. A disembodied voice echoed over a loudspeaker, calling for Pre-set Twelve, and telling Holly, for chrissake, to check the left 7 amp.

When I played with Dee, in that short-lived unmourned group, Cambridge Common, we were acoustic. Tuning our instruments was all the foreplay we needed.

A small army of electricians and stagehands scrambled on and off the stage. A scrawny boy-girl in unisex jeans and shirt carefully set Dee’s Dobro, along with a twelve-string of more recent vintage, and a bright blue Stratocaster, on metal stands. A boy in jeans crawled along the floor checking cable connections and muttering into a headset.

Dee was an industry, all right.

On either side of the tall proscenium arch loomed stacks of boxy amplifiers: Fenders, Vox AC-30s, Bandmasters. Cables crisscrossed the floor. The stage was divided by platforms and risers. Freddie, the drummer; a keyboard man; and Brenda, the bass player, stood three steps above Dee and her lead guitar.

Ron. The one with whom Dee was less than exclusively involved. I wondered if Dee had ever been exclusively involved with anyone.

Dee was chatting with the drummer, oblivious to the commotion. Freddie tapped out a syncopated rhythm, using a muffled stick and a brush on an impressive trap-set—silvery snares, sides, and tom-toms, all banded in brass—a pair of hi-hat cymbals, two regulars, and a rack of chimes and bells.

Across stage, Brenda hit a few deep notes on her Fender bass and frowned at their wavering echo. She shouted something into the wings. Somebody fiddled with an amp. The hum stopped abruptly.

Dee strolled downstage, leaned over, and spoke into a microphone. “We okay out there?” she said, her voice low and husky. “Jimmy, how’s the pick-up?”

“Okay.”

“Who’s riding gain?”

“Me, honey,” came a different voice. “I got you loud and clear, and you’re gorgeous.”

I slid into an aisle seat way down front.

Dee shouldered her six-string, plugged in the pick-up, crossed to Brenda. They tried a chord together. Dee fingered a few notes, bent some of them. She was wearing a slide on the little finger of her left hand. Her guitar strap looked like snakeskin, with a big gold buckle.

The amplified voice said, “Okay, boys and girls, this is a take,” and all the stagehands vanished. Dee moved center stage, still talking over her shoulder to the bass player. She tapped her vocal mike with a fingernail, adjusted her instrument mike, tapped her toe hard eight times in the sudden hush, and music happened.

The keyboard player started it, but the sound could have been a keening horn. Brenda picked it up on bass. The drummer came in rocking. The lead guitar hit the opening riff. It had changed a lot, but I recognized it, the song Dee had once called her anthem: “For Tonight.”

The vocal entered with a tough-gal sexy edge.

“Don’t need anybody to cry out my name,

Don’t need anybody to care.

Don’t need anybody to tug at my skirt,

Don’t need anybody to share.

For tonight, for a while, I want you.

For tonight, for a while, I want you.”

It was a standard rocker, heavily blues-influenced, and fleshed out with a lot of fancy guitar. Dee had written it at a time when most of the hits were sentimental love songs. Recorded by more popular singers, it had kept her afloat through lean years.

She was starting the second verse when the amplified voice interrupted. “Cut there, okay? Brenda, we’re getting a hell of a lot of reverb.”

The drummer crashed a forlorn cymbal, and Dee said, “Oh, come on, Brenda, get with it.”

She may have meant to mutter it under her breath, but she forgot about the microphone.

Brenda shot her a look. Somebody in the audience giggled. I suspected good old Mimi.

“Can we pick it up at twenty-four?” Dee asked.

“Start over. I might need a few extra tracks for the live cut.”

This time the lighting crew got into the act. They messed around with their colored gels at first, but they quickly got the hang of which-performer-to-highlight-when. Probably had a roadie up in the booth giving cues.

The houselights faded to black.

I stopped concentrating on the technical crap, closed my eyes, and listened. All those quarts of whiskey hadn’t dulled Dee’s voice. Playing bars for drinks and food seemed to have honed it, stripped away the extra trills and flourishes. Too many cigarettes had put a growl into the lower register, a weary moan into the high notes. Her style hadn’t changed; it was more like she’d grown into it, become the sassy, jaded blueswoman she’d always tried to be.

My shoulder bag bit into my side. I put it on the empty worn velvet seat beside me.

Dee slid into an old Billie Holiday thing, then livened the set with a Delta blues, maybe John Lee Hooker. She was moving with the music, almost dancing, but it didn’t seem showy or out of place, didn’t even look planned. It was just part of the song, a sexy harmony.

I don’t look straitlaced or anything, not with my tumbled red hair. But Dee, well, the word “sensual” springs to mind. Dee, when she plays guitar, looks like she has nothing on her mind but sex. I don’t know if she was born that way, lips slightly parted, eyes smoldering, or whether it comes from singing lowdown, dirty blues.

I can practice a song and practice it, and when I get it right—right notes, right tempo, clean fingering—I’m through. I lose interest and move on to the next song. I can pour heart and soul into the effort of learning, but once the song is there, whatever magic has occurred is over and done.

Dee takes the practiced song, and then she starts her magic. She sings her stuff as if she’s making it up on the spot, as if she’s got something urgent to tell you, and isn’t it nice that the band happened along. She sings like she’s got a secret, and if you listen long enough, she’ll tell it to you—and only you.

My eyes grew accustomed to the dark and I glanced at a guy two rows up on the aisle. He looked like he’d forgotten to breathe.

Dee wore a white tuxedo jacket and white pants. She kept the jacket buttoned, but her apparent lack of a shirt was quite a come-on. The lights made her a rainbow. And she moved and sang and played as though the songs were pouring out of her, as if she’d never have enough time to tell us all the things she needed to say.

While Dee was lit with the dancing spotlights, her group played in shadow unless spotted for a solo. Her lead guitar looked tall and wiry. The drummer hid behind tinted glasses and a scowl. Today his wristbands and headband were neon-green. The keyboard player, a scruffy youngster with a two-day stubble, kept his head thrown back, never staring down for the notes, his eyes closed in ecstasy. Brenda seemed less involved than the rest, more laid-back, as if she alone were clued in to the fact that this was just another rehearsal. Dee didn’t seem to be holding anything back.

In the middle of the sixth song, Dee hit a deliberately dissonant, jarring chord, and backed away from the mike, eyes flashing. “Jimmy,” she yelled, “are you listening to this shit or what?”

“Yeah, hon, what do you want?”

“Are you hearing that bass line?”

“I’m hearing it.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, it’s not what we’ve been doing, is it? It’s not what I want.”

Brenda said, “I thought I’d give it a try.”

Dee said, “You talk to me first next time.”

“I’ve been trying to talk to you for two damn days, and you’re all of a sudden so busy, nobody can freaking find you. I thought you’d like it.”

“It stinks, Bren. It sounds like a goddamn dog howling.”

“Kind of like a bitch, you mean?” Brenda said with a nasty edge to her voice. I decided to give her the same benefit of the doubt I’d given Dee: maybe she meant to mutter it under her breath, but her microphone picked it up and echoed it clear to the balcony.

“What did you say?” Dee asked.

The amplified voice interrupted her. “Okay, Brenda, can you just do what Dee wants here with the bass?”

“No, Jimmy, I can’t. It’s too damn boring. I’m gonna freaking fall asleep.”

Dee said, “Well, I can find fifty bass players glad to do it, better than you can anytime.”

“Oh, yeah?” Brenda unplugged her instrument, lifted it over her head, and carefully laid it down on the floorboards. Then she gave Dee the finger and walked offstage.

“Bren, get the hell back here,” the drummer yelled into his mike. His volume overloaded some circuit and the whole business fed back with a high-pitched hum that made me slap my hands over my ears.

“Jimmy,” Dee was saying, “I talked to her about that break a hundred times. It’s a blues thing, not a rock thing. I want something easy and bluesy. She’s giving me all this hyperactive-note shit.”

“Take ten,” Jimmy’s voice said wearily. The house-lights snapped on and the sound technicians and the light technicians and the stagehands swarmed.

Dee shaded her eyes with her hand and surveyed the audience. I waved, and she yelled, “Hi,” and motioned me up onstage.

I reached over to the seat next to me to grab my handbag, a reflex move. There was nothing but air on the shabby red cushion. I quickly flipped up the seat, looked underneath, groped around on the sticky floor, and scanned the whole area. My bag was gone.

“You coming, Carlotta?”

“Shit,” I mumbled under my breath. “Coming,” I shouted out loud. I gave a quick glance around the auditorium: maybe fifty people. A movement at the top of the far aisle caught my eye, just the glimpse of a foot, the flash of a closing door.

“Be right back!” I yelled at Dee, and I took off.