Glimpses Read online

  Lewis Shiner’s

  GLIMPSES

  WINNER OF THE WORLD FANTASY AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL

  “LEWIS SHINER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT AND PROMISING YOUNG WRITER ON THE SCENE TODAY…

  GLIMPSES captures the sixties perfectly—I was there, and it was the way Shiner writes it.”

  Dr. Timothy Leary

  “FASCINATING…EXTRAORDINARY…DEFTLY HANDLED…DEEPLY SATISFYING”

  St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “A PSYCHEDELIC ODYSSEY…

  A compelling what-if…Soars on the escapist wings of a recreated era”

  Rolling Stone

  “LUMINOUS…

  a kind of American pop magic realism.”

  San Antonio Express-News

  “THE NOVEL SPARKLES…

  A story of uncommon sensitivity,

  insight and redemptive power…

  Shiner writes with intense feeling.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “POWERFULLY AFFECTING…

  A STRENUOUS FANTASY OF ROCK-AND-ROLL”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “GLIMPSES is dead-on…It’s a mean, sweet, wry, and disturbing book, in equal portions.”

  Frederick Barthelme, author of The Brothers

  “GLIMPSES opens the way into several haunted rooms at the very heart of the myth of the Sixties”

  William Gibson, author of Neuromancer

  “A LITERARY VOICE WORTH LISTENING TO…

  A searching critique of the shortcomings in a generation’s vision”

  Austin American-Statesman

  “Lewis Shiner has found a way to write about the power of the music and the love it inspired without cloying the mysteries of time, death, sex and blood relation.”

  Geoff Ryman, author of Was

  “A GREAT NEW NOVEL…HIP…REMARKABLY TOUCHING…FANTASTICALLY COMPLETE…A MUSIC LOVER COULDN’T FIND A BETTER READ.”

  BAM

  “GRIPPING…MEMORABLE…BY TURNS HARROWING AND ECSTATIC…A MASTERPIECE OF THE IMAGINATION…AN OUTSTANDING WORK OF MAGIC REALISM”

  Los Angeles Reader

  “GLIMPSES IS SOMETHING ENTIRELY NEW UNDER THE SUN:

  simultaneously a superb contemporary novel, and a groundbreaking work of creative rock criticism…I wish I’d written it myself.”

  Charles Shaar Murray, author of

  Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop

  “HIGHLY RECOMMENDED—

  one of the few novels that successfully addresses the issue of why music is so important in our lives”

  Paul Williams, Crawdaddy!

  “Intimate…Original…

  Shiner creates an alternate reality that is at once genuinely disturbing and yet deeply personal. All that and it rocks, too.”

  Howard Kaylan of The Turtles, The Mothers of Invention, and Flo & Eddie

  “Few people would dare to daub rock music with a metaphysical brush, but Shiner’s risk is his great success.”

  Booklist

  “QUITE A PERFORMANCE…SHINER MAKES YOU BELIEVE.”

  Stereo Review

  This book is a work of fiction, although it also deals with historical events. Those segments of the work that are historical in nature are based on extensive research and interviews. Some real persons, both deceased and alive, are mentioned in the work. However, to the extent those persons are depicted as interacting with the narrator of the novel, their actions, motivations, and conversations are entirely fictitious and should not be considered real or factual.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1993 by Lewis Shiner

  Published by arrangement with William Morrow and Company, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number. 93-33

  ISBN: 0-380-72364-6

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019.

  First AvoNova Printing: August 1995

  AVONOVA TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES,

  MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  RA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Mary K.,

  who showed me how to end this,

  with all my love

  This book owes its existence to the gracious help of more people than I can mention. Special thanks are due to my mother, Maxine Shiner, to Paul Bradshaw, and to Mary K. Alberts. My gratitude also to Mike Autrey, Edith Beumer, Jim Blaylock, Viki Blaylock, Zorina Bolton, Harold Bronson, Richard Butner, Darell Clingman, Anne Cook, Marianne Faithfull, Karen Joy Fowler, William Gibson, Patrick Goldstein, James “Al” Hendrix, Tricia Jumonville, Howard Kaylan, Patricia Kennealy, Rick Klaw, Timothy Leary, Dan Levy, Bill Lightner, Martha Millard, Charles Shaar Murray, Domenic Priore, Bud Simons, Tom Smith, Joe Stefko, Roger Trilling, Elissa Turner, Mark Volman, Denise Weinberg, Bob Welch, Glen Wheeler, and Adrian Zackheim.

  c h a p t e r 1

  GET BACK

  Once upon a time there was going to be a Beatles album called Get Back. They tried to record it in January of 1969, first at Twickenham Film Studios, then in the basement of Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row. Their own overpriced twenty-four-track dream studio wasn’t finished and they had to bring in a mobile unit. So there they were, under bright lights, using rented gear, with cameras filming every move they made.

  Paul had this idea he could turn things around. He wanted to get back to the kind of material the band did in ’61 and ’62, at the Kaiserkeller in Hamburg and the Cavern Club in Liverpool. It must have seemed like another century to them, looking back. They tried to warm up with Chuck Berry standards and “One After 909,” something of John’s from when he was 17. But it was winter and snowy and cold. The sound stage echoed and the basement was cramped. It just wasn’t happening.

  That summer they would try again, and this time it would work, and they would come away with Abbey Road. The tapes from the other sessions would end up with Phil Spector, who would overproduce the living Jesus out of them to make them sound alive and finally they would come out as Let It Be.

  The new title pretty much says it all. Between winter and summer everything changed. Paul married Linda, John married Yoko, and Allen Klein took over Apple. By then it was too late to get back, ever again.

  My father died not quite two weeks ago. I can say the words but they don’t seem to mean anything or even matter much. My mind goes blank. So I think about other things. I put Let It Be on the stereo and wonder what it would sound like if things had been different.

  Music is easy. It isn’t even that important what the words say. The real meaning is in the guitars and drums, the way a record sounds. It’s a feeling that’s bigger than words could ever be. A guy named Paul Williams said that, or something close to it, and I believe it’s true.

  I’ve been in Dallas with my mother, straightening out the VA insurance, helping her write a form letter to send out instead of a Christmas card, answering the phone, getting Dad’s name off the bank account, a million little things that can bleed you dry. Now I’m home again in Austin trying to make sense of it.

  It’s November of 1988. The old man died right before Thanksgiving, a hell of a thing. He was scuba diving in Cozumel, which he was too old for, with my mother along for the ride. He used to teach anthropology at SMU but since he retired all he wanted to do was dive. My wife and I flew up to Dallas to meet my mother’s plane as she came back alone, looking about a hundred years old. She had him burned down there in Mexico, brou
ght a handful of ashes with her in a Ziploc bag. Elizabeth came home that weekend and I stayed up there ten days, all I could stand. Then I drove back here in his white GMC pickup truck, my inheritance. The inside still smells like him, sweat and polyester and old Fritos.

  Anyway, it’s 1988 and it was just last year that they finally released all the Beatles’ albums on CD, making a big deal out of how it was the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper. It was like everybody had forgotten about the sixties until we had this nationwide fit of nostalgia. Suddenly every station on the radio has gone to some kind of oldies format, and they’re playing the same stuff over and over again that you haven’t heard in 20 years, and now you’re sick to death of “Spirit in the Sky” and “In the Year 2525” all over again. Tie-dyed shirts are back and bands that should never have been together in the first place have reunion tours and everybody shakes their heads over how dumb and idealistic they used to be.

  I run a stereo repair business out of the house. Most of the upstairs is my shop. The north wall is my workbench, covered with tools, an oscilloscope and a digital multimeter, a couple of my clients’ boxes with their insides spread out. The wall above it is cork and there are a million pieces of junk pinned to it: circuit diagrams, pictures of me and Elizabeth and the cat, phone messages, business cards from my parts people, a big black-and-white poster of Jimi Hendrix that I’ve had since college. The west wall is windows, partly covered by the corn plants, palms, and dieffenbachia that Elizabeth has fixed me up with, all rugged stuff that even I haven’t been able to kill. The south side is shelves, over and under a counter top. That’s where I keep the boxes I’m not currently working on, as well as my own system. Harmon Kardon amp, Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck, four Boston Acoustics A70 speakers, linear tracking turntable, CD player, graphic equalizer, monster cables all around. There’s something almost spiritual about it, all that matte black, with graphs and numbers glowing cool yellow and white and green, like a quiet voice telling you everything is going the way it should. It’s just hardware, metal and silicon and plastic, but at the same time it has the power to turn empty air into music. That never ceases to amaze me.

  I only have Let It Be on vinyl. The second side was playing, halfway in, and “The Long and Winding Road” came on, full of crackles and pops. I was running on automatic, my hair tied back, house shoes on, resoldering a couple of cold joints. The song is just Paul on the piano, a McCartney solo track really, with a huge orchestra and chorus that Phil Spector dubbed on afterwards. A decent tune, though, even John admitted that.

  I don’t remember the first time I heard it, but I remember the one that stuck. It takes me back to Nashville, early June of 1970. I remember it was a Sunday. I heard this announcement on the radio that my band, the Duotones, was supposed to play that afternoon in Centennial Park. It was news to me. I showed up and sure enough, there they were, sounding a little hollow and tinny inside the big concrete band shell, and there in the middle was their new drummer. Scott, the lead player, came out in the audience during the break and said, “We were going to tell you. That promoter we hooked up with, he had his own drummer.”

  I remember being able to see the individual little pebbles in the pinkish concrete under the bench. The bench, I think, was green. There wasn’t a lot for me to say. My bridges were burned. I’d spent the last month flunking out of Vanderbilt, too busy with band practice or protests over the shootings at Kent and Jackson State to go to class. I hadn’t managed to stop the war, and now I didn’t have a band either.

  I hung around until they closed my dorm and then I hit the road. I’d already told my parents I wasn’t coming home for the summer so I just drove on through Dallas, headed for Austin, where Alex was. She wasn’t my girlfriend anymore. We’d broken up the fall before. But then we’d broken up a million times and if I was there, staying at her house, maybe she would change her mind.

  All I had was AM radio in my car and it seemed like they just played two songs that whole trip. One was Joe Cocker’s cover of “The Letter,” with Leon Russell’s piano sharp as an icepick, making me push the gas to the floor and feel the hot wind through the open windows. The other was “The Long and Winding Road.” It had been a pretty long road for me and Alex. I’d known her since sophomore year in high school, since we were all in drama club together. I’d seen her long hair go from red to brown to black, listened to her rave about everything from astrology to Bob Dylan to BMW motorcycles. I’d spent the last half of my senior year and the summer after helplessly in love with her. It was my first real love affair, full of jealousy and tears, the unendurable pain of an unanswered phone, long drives back from her mother’s apartment at two in the morning, dozing off at the wheel. But mostly it was making love, in the car, on the floor of her mother’s den, at friend’s houses, in my bed with my parents watching TV in the next room.

  The Beatles didn’t get it together for Get Back and Alex and I didn’t get it together in the summer of 1970. I moved off her couch after a week or so and rented a room up on Castle Hill. Right before I left I got this letter, care of her, from my father. It was always my mother who wrote me, I guess that’s true in most families. This time it was him, on a sheet of yellow legal paper, printed in block capitals. “GO AHEAD AND PLAY IN THE TRAFFIC,” it said. Then, at the bottom, “ONE THING YOU FORGOT: LOVE.” I can’t remember him ever using the word before. It looked like a lie. He signed it “DAD.” I didn’t tear it up, bad as I wanted to. Maybe I just wanted to keep hating him the way I did right that minute.

  During those long summer days in Austin I looked for work. Everything turned out to be door-to-door sales. At night I tried to put a band together with a guy who was just learning to play guitar and an organist who’d done nothing but classical. One day the bass player disappeared in his ice cream truck en route to Houston, and that was the last straw. I ended up back in Dallas in spite of myself, getting a degree in electrical engineering from DeVry Institute. That got me my first decent job, printed circuit design for the late lamented Warrex Computer Corporation.

  There’s magic, see, and there’s science. Science is what I learned at DeVry and it bought me this nice two story house off 290 in East Austin. Magic says if maybe the Beatles could have hacked it then maybe Alex and me could have hacked it.

  If the Beatles had hacked it, “The Long and Winding Road” would have sounded a lot different. Paul always hated what Spector did to it, wanted it to be a simple piano ballad. John might have written a new middle eight for it, something with an edge to cut the syrupy romanticism. George could have played some of the string parts on the guitar, and Ringo could have punched the thing up, given it more of a push.

  It could have happened. Say Paul had realized the movie was a stupid idea. Say they’d given up on recording at Apple and gone back to Abbey Road where they belonged, let George Martin actually produce instead of sitting around listening to them bicker. I’d seen enough pictures of the studio. I could see it in my head.

  Here’s George Martin, tall, craggy-looking, big forehead, easy smile. Light-brown hair slicked back tight. He’s got on his usual white dress shirt and tie, sitting near the window of the control room that looks down on Studio 2. Studio 2 is the size of a warehouse, thirty-foot ceiling, quilted moving blankets thrown over everything, microphones of every shape and size, from the slim German condensers to the old-fashioned oblong ribbon types, miles of cable, music stands like small metal trees. Here’s John, his beard just starting to come in, hair down to here, Yoko growing out of his armpit. Paul’s beard is already there, George Harrison and Ringo have mustaches. Paul is in a long-sleeved shirt and sleeveless sweater, John and Yoko are in matching black turtlenecks, George has a bandanna tied cowboy-style around his neck. The tape is on a quarter-inch reel, not the inch-wide stuff they use now. It’s been less than twenty years, after all, since the studio stopped recording directly onto wax discs. Everything about the mixers and faders is oversized, big ceramic handles, big needles on the VU meters, everything pa
inted battleship gray. The air smells of hair oil and cigarette smoke. Everyone bums Everest cigarettes off of Geoff Emerick, who is wearing a white lab coat like all the other EMI engineers.

  They’re listening to the playback. Here’s Ringo’s deadened toms, five quick chord changes on John’s sunburst Strat at the end of each line…

  And there it was. Coming out of the speakers in my workshop. For half a minute it didn’t even seem weird. I put down my soldering gun and listened, feeling all the emotion that had been buried under the strings rise to the surface.

  Then it hit me, really hit me, what I was listening to. As soon as it did the music slowed and went back to the way it always has been.

  I was lightheaded and there was a sound like tape hiss in my ears. I cut the stereo off and sat on the old brown leather couch by the windows, thinking, what the hell just happened? The cat, who is this big black-and-gray tabby named Dude, jumped up in my lap like he always does when I sit on his couch. I started to pet him and then the fatigue washed up over me. I let myself doze off for a few minutes and when I woke up my head was going like a bass drum.

  It was three o’clock. Elizabeth would be home any minute. I went down to the kitchen and ate a couple of cookies to get my blood sugar back up. I felt weird, tapped out, like I’d just come down with something. I wondered if maybe I had. Maybe I’d hallucinated the whole thing.

  I heard Elizabeth’s car in the driveway.

  I never know what kind of mood she’ll be in. Sometimes it’s been kids yelling at her all day and she just wants silence or the TV. I put the cookies away and rinsed out my milk glass. The door opened with a kind of squeak and pop. I heard her toss her purse on the table by the door, walk into the living room and collapse on the couch. “Any mail?” she said.

  I came out of the kitchen, drying my hands on a dishtowel. I could only see her blonde hair where it hung over the back of the couch, all those different shades, gold and light brown and honey and yellow and white. “Not yet.”