Dear Diane,
The knowledge that the Get Happies were preparing to mount a national reunion tour in the twenty-first century—and that you, yourself, would be a part of it—blindsided the whole sizable community who still found spiritual importance in 1960s pop music careers. I don’t think anyone else may have noticed the reunion of a band who, for years and years following the Broken Treaty sessions and your subsequent total retreat from the world, had been putting out work that—despite everyone’s best efforts and more heroic work than I have time and space to fairly record—was steadily more forgotten, a last entropic expenditure following the great nova of a collapsed band: a singularity containing all starlight, invisible unless you got close enough to notice its suck. Your band had gone wherever music went when people had no use for it anymore.
It’s not like the band was getting worse in that time since 1972. Under Adam’s direction, it was perpetually getting better, crisper, more professional. Whenever musicians hung out, they talked about the Get Happies’ tour chops, stamina, keen timing, efficient logistics chain. They talked about the arrangements: stages stacked with triple drum kits, six guitars, backup choirs, all of it precisely conducted by Adam and his guitar at the center, a weight of instrumental force that drowned out Eddie, Charley, and the stiffly gyrating Tom at the corner of the stage. If any of the original members resented being drowned out, they didn’t say anything; they were the ones, in the end, who got the applause. Why play, really? Why record new music when you could release greatest hits? Money told you what people wanted from you, and the money, in the end, was just as good this way; actually, better. So you sang about the time when heteronormativity was king and cars could fly.
Then, a few months into 1982, your baby brother Adam drove his car to the marina, abandoned it with his vintage Fender in the trunk, bought a sailboat with a suitcase of cash, and sailed it west out of Sausalito Harbor. Eyewitnesses said they could see him balancing on the boom, hanging against the tilt of the headwind—counteracting the keel with his own insufficient weight—as he headed into the ocean. Whether he made it safely to some fair harbor or not, no one knows, though many speculate.
Without Adam to mediate, Tom and Eddie’s working relationship lasted four weeks. Formally expelled from the group, Eddie spent two or three years turning up drunk or coked-out, depending on the planets, to concerts, sometimes sweet-talking security or promoters into letting him play: as the only surviving brother of the great elusive genius B——, Diane, no one really had the heart or promotional recklessness to refuse him. He spent most of these shows screaming abuse at Tom from his drum throne or soaking up adulation from the crowd as the familiar refrains began—“Suntime Funtime,” “King of the Drags,” “If We’re Married,” “Diner Girl,” “Psychic Attraction.” But soon enough, security got smarter; Eddie turned up less and less and looked more and more hollow-eyed every time he did appear. At last, the inevitable call came that summoned police and paramedics, too late, to the rental house he’d claimed over in Venice, the mark of a knife still dragged into the old, warped plaster of the walls with an apron hanging in it, spent bullet casing on the floor beside your brother’s head. John Black Zero was also there, also shot, beeswax candles burning throughout the room and a Qlipoth tree drawn in blood of uncertain origin on the wall. Amphetamine and psilocybin caps were everywhere, both musical heroes were wearing red robes (each robe sized to fit the other man). A storage space he’d leased years before turned out to contain boxes and boxes of tapes, gorgeous melodies he’d paid to record and shared with no one.
Charley Brushfire never left the band so much as faded out, his one contribution to the group as producer—The Get Happies Say God Bless America to Our Musical Heritage—justly forgotten. Instead, he began to play with various contemporary bands, filling out a rhythm section for a new wave sensation here, adding his tenor to a backup chorus there. Slowly, he became known as a session musician of great patience, skill, and professional discretion; he was someone who took his job seriously, someone you’d always be pleased to hire to finish a complicated piece of work when your more charismatic bandmates had flamed out, someone who knew lots of lore about American music that he’d be happy to tell you if you cared to listen. Look through liner notes; you’ll find him. He moved into his parents’ house when they died, sat on the porch nights and played guitar for the power-walkers who coursed by him at sunrise en route to work. And when he died—struck, while onstage with Ricky Fataar of Los Paranoias during a 2003 All-Star benefit concert to distribute malaria nets to sub-Saharan Africa, by a burning gamma-irradiated rivet from an exploded government space shuttle, a tragedy which led, via a strange chain of tech investments, to the florescence of the spaceport just down the highway from me—the few notices that appeared in the music press were gracious. His friends simply missed him, felt his lack.
Tom Happy alone survived. Tom Happy was built to survive. Now, on his own, he worked to save the band he’d inherited. He tore out the complex, costly arrangements Adam had put into place, replaced them with guitar-bass-drums-synth versions, and hired a rotating skeleton crew of twenty-something enthusiastic up-and-comers and dabbling celebrities to perform them: the new, fiscally responsible Get Happies. He sought gigs at baseball stadiums, county fairs, casinos, drive-in theaters, anywhere controlled by someone excited by the power of a famous name, famous memories; he chased lawyers for Valley Forge who’d been withholding residual income for decades; he hired a series of savvy managers to pursue, on commission, soundtrack and endorsement deals, putting his lyrical talents to work on putting a new and lucrative twist on old standards.
And every penny he saved, every penny he earned, he invested. He bought shares in big box corporations, tech firms, military contractors, oil futures, private space-exploration ventures, media conglomerates that licensed your hits as theme songs for conservative talk hosts whose angry white male listeners remembered you fondly from the days when you were all young together. Tom funded Republican education initiatives, compassionate conservative welfare-to-work programs, a national campaign to teach a new generation about the power of compound interest. Some of the money went to keep all the records in print, to reconfigure and recirculate the greatest hits collections, to keep the musical stock in the project high. He kept the band alive. Healthier than ever, he liked to say. I’m a big believer in health.
Some of the money went, at regular intervals, to a mysterious address, sequestered in some tiny inlet of Atlantic coast, in the shadow of stone beaches.
You survived, too. Unseen beneath the surface of the ocean, you survived, the swells of mystery volcanism beneath you sometimes propagating to the surface as whitecap rumors. Sometimes people said they’d seen you at rallies for some hermetic group or time cult, sometimes in deep conversion therapy at an undisclosed location, sometimes dirty and wrapped in windbreakers, beard full of food scraps down to your heart, screaming at the ocean. Or maybe you slipped away like Mona did, shed yourself entirely, reemerging as some aging instrumental virtuoso, industrial music pioneer, shadow producer on obscure labels far across the Atlantic Ocean. People heard traces of you in everything.
We trafficked in rumors like these, me and my post-high school pals; we played our Summer Fun bootlegs—assembled, lyricless, from smuggled acetates and undemolished masters; we wrote out key changes and melody lines from variant arrangements, tried to glean secret messages in the progressions: CAGE, BABBAGE, EGAD A# BABE. It was very important to us—to me—to know where you were, what you were doing, that you were okay. It was more important to me, sometimes, than knowing I was okay. It’s possible I conflated the two.
Remember when I said I wasn’t going to tell you anything about my life story? But I will tell you this: I’m an American. Exactly how much of my story can I realistically separate from yours, Diane, from the stories you make me listen to every time FM Radio has a retrospective weekend? From my memories of every car trip of my childhood, roller rink bound in a minivan with school friends, someone’s mom singing “Psychic Attraction” at the top of her lungs? Exactly why should I abstract myself out of the dream inheritance all of us drag around? Why is it classy or pure to do that?
Little is left to tell—except, oh jeez, for the reunion concert that all this ceremonial witchcraft mumbo jumbo brought about in the first place! How did that go, you are asking?
First, you should know that I have a ticket. Two tickets, one for me, one for Ronda, courtesy of her brother and the radio empire he works for. As a fan of the Get Happies, he wrote to me, I figured you’d be interested in these. Have fun!
Second, you probably know already that this tour is being billed as the first time in history that Summer Fun will be played live for general audiences. You know about the interviews, music press retrospectives, statements from figures throughout musical history past and present—Travis Dark, the surviving Los Paranoias, Harry Corot, old and stuttering and billed on the news as legendary hitmaker from valley forge records. We always believed in the Get Happies, Harry manages, his grin lightened by fabulous ivory dentures. Even when circumstances forced us to be apart. And of course you know that Tom Happy is making the rounds as well, his hair shock-white beneath a trucker’s cap labeled bring joy to space, his face shifting between legalistic scowl and thin-jowled grin, a new engagement ring shining on his fourth finger. His skin looks really good; he looks the way he did that night long ago when his girlfriend made sandwiches and neither of you could sleep, like he knows how lucky he is to be present at something that he can’t wait to see happen: it is his winter, this is his Christmas. You are no longer letting him down.
Third, you probably know how much money you are making with this tour. The amount of money this tour will generate is frequently speculated on. It’s a lot of money, is the consensus; it is a whole new planet full of money. Get Happies fans whose message board posts I still follow, when the computer in the office works and everything, have already published a whole PDF denouncing it. The whole point of Summer Fun is that it doesn’t exist, they assert. There could never be any Summer Fun. This is the kind of idea I used to believe in a lot.
But okay, this last thing for sure you know: there are three things that the promoters of the concert have not announced:
(1) The reason why, after years of personal silence following the abortive 1972 recordings, you’re now reemerging with your infamously lost album that infamously lacked any known lyrics,
(2) The reason why the first stop on this tour is slated to be a hastily constructed amphitheater on the property of a yet-to-be-built spaceport, and
(3) The name, anywhere in the official press releases or promo materials, of B——.
You know that this concert is your personal gift to me. We all know it.
Here, belatedly, are the rules of magic: you draw the signs. You clear the space. You invite in the archangels, you summon the powers you must summon. You ask them for what you want. You listen to what they ask of you, in return. And then you decide what you can offer, and what you can accept. And then, finally, it is time for you to thank them, to allow them to go: to return to the world you have left, the one that you aren’t at the center of, the one that moves whether you leave it or not.
Imagine this concert. Serpentine lines of rabid fans flown over from the UK, wealthy nostalgic couples south from Taos, north from Las Cruces and Texas, east from California, west from everywhere, LA and NYC journalists converging in the mountains as fast as expense accounts can get them there. Bootleg merch hawked to thousands of people waiting, sweating in the heat (the original, never-pressed album art, beer cozies and model hovercars and surfboards with the sun stenciled across them, your face screened on black tees.) And there’s legit merch sold inside by tired-looking kids who stand behind official tables with big jugs of water, security guards with earpieces and tats hired in biker bars in Albuquerque who scream at everyone to get in line and have their IDs out, the Westboro protestors, the spatter of urinal troughs and excretory footprints in the sand, murmurs of speculation about the soundcheck’s bleats of bass guitar—
Everyone eats, pees, takes their seats—the stage is empty, save for a drum labeled with the leering mystical face of a medieval moon—time clicks on past the appointed hour—fifteen, thirty, an hour past—the sun has long since gone down, maybe it’s a mirage, maybe this reunion is a fake just like all the other chimeric reunions were over the years, maybe there never was a Summer Fun, maybe there never were cars that flew, maybe there never was a band—the hideous aporia where people have yet to be entertained—even the hit parade PA system has gone silent; there is no music; there are only confused and lonely people corralled into uncomfortable seats and lawns in a freezing and unpleasant desert, full epiphanic moon hanging overhead emitting selenic death rays, no food, no buildings to speak of, just fake-looking conquistador gear shoved to the side in boxes—
And then the altar lights up. Roadies, then musicians emerge, cross to guitars—young ones and old ones, surviving members of Midnight Automotive called into service nearly fifty years later for one last duty, the bassist setting aside her cane, strapping her bass across her seated legs, smiling. Thousands of people whose brains tell them to believe in the same idea begin to roar, and it echoes around the canyon as the band raises hands in cheers and blessings and signs. Tom Happy emerges, old arms waving, limping imperceptibly as he crosses to the mic at center, his beard grown in long like a goat’s. He points to women in the crowd, capers, mocks deafness to increase the cheers. On a platform at the center of the stage, just between Tom and the drummer, is the same piano that sat in your house. Spotlights cast from materials as expensive as moon rocks trace it in lights. Tom spins, leaps—and then the spotlights pirouette, slide to stage left, where someone is emerging—they catch, first, the splash of silver sequins as if from a crown in the shape of a moon—and then it is happening—you are coming onstage—and the applause is fighting with the silence of a thousand sudden gasps, silence that you will have to find a way to fill.
Polite society has advanced to meet you, Diane; the time to make money from your secrets has arrived at last.
I mean this is how I have to imagine it, because it’s not like I actually went to that concert. I mean seriously I have so much better shit to do than that. I don’t want to be healthy on those terms; I want to be healthy on mine.
The purpose of any magical action, Diane, is to perform the Great Work: to transform those heaps of dirt and money that surround us into something true. To perform it, though, they say you must work as hard as you can to divest yourself—shave your head, let go of your ego, lay down all your possessions at the gate, make yourself light enough to walk through. You failed for so many years in your Great Work because you couldn’t bear to divest yourself. That’s one narrative, and it’s nice to believe that you could have done that. It makes it easier on everyone if we can find concrete ways in which you have done the wrong thing.
I wish I knew how to divest myself, too. But I know—or have been taught—that there is no excuse for not trying. And I know that we don’t always divest ourselves by letting go of what we’ve been given.
Therefore, here I am, watching the smoke that used to be our concert tickets, all these pages of all these letters I’ve written: what a mess I was, to do that! What a mess I am! The letters commit themselves to the air, curl into smoke sigils over the altarpiece that sits between Ronda and I in the desert (if she trusted me enough to join me), here in the ghost town we’ve walked to, the place we got to after walking from our doorstep as far east as we could. Here we walk the circle—we draw the pentagrams—we banish everything evil from our hearts, for today, for right now. We swear we will work really hard to keep it all from coming back in. And we draw a card: The World, a woman entering at a door. It is a pretty good omen, I think! We talk about The World. We clean up our campfire mess. And then—turning ourselves west, we think—we are maybe lost and don’t want to admit it, but Ronda swears she can see lights at the horizon, it could be California—we walk, single file, through the desert, dragging our inheritances behind us, toward the home we are building. And you can come and join us there, Diane, if you are willing to travel light, if you are willing to be kind to yourself, if you are willing to try—
2009–2019