Say Goodbye
SAY GOODBYE
LEWIS SHINER
www.headofzeus.com
Praise for Say Goodbye
“Shiner has written a fine novel about rock ’n’ roll by believing more in musicians’ human nature than in their mythologies.”
—Mark Athitakis, New York Times Book Review
“Say Goodbye resonates like a blue note heard and remembered in a smoky, late-night club. Lewis Shiner has written the Citizen Kane of rock and roll novels, a human and moving piece of work.”
—George P. Pelecanos, author of The Sweet Forever
“Gritty, funny, cynical, and sentimental; a sharply focused epic that brings welcome revision to the sunny, pop-culture success gospels that have led so many naïve talents astray.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Every band has an inner momentum like this, its entangles and wreck-tangles, moments of bliss mixed with the jarring reality of life in the belly of the music business, and the shared song which makes it all worthwhile. Lewis Shiner sings the tale with harmonic compassion.”
—Lenny Kaye, guitarist, Patti Smith Group
“Engrossing…Shiner competently vivifies the uncertainties and boredom of the musician’s life, but more impressively, he manages to convey the almost indescribable joy of bringing an audience from a state of apathy to the edge of hysteria…A revealing look at today’s music business.”
—George Needham, Booklist
“[A] soulful elegy…fresh and original…Shiner’s extensive research gives the story an authentic feel and keeps it from becoming a soap opera or a wearisome cover version of every other rise-and-fall parable. Honest, unpretentious and heartfelt, this novel remains a haunting refrain.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A spare and remarkable book resonating with heart and bittersweet reality.”
—Mike Shea, Texas Monthly
“All the virtues of old-fashioned storytelling—a heroine you can love, a world you can live in—told in the key of urban cool. Say Goodbye is a dream of a book, perfectly imagined, perfectly imparted. Shiner’s voice comes through with all his usual passionate authority, and he never hits a false note.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austin Book Club
“Uncanny…The details are note-perfect…The completeness of the world Shiner creates brings Laurie to life, and lends a sense of fatedness to her panicked walk toward fame.”
—New Yorker
“Passionate…charismatic…an absorbing, hard-hitting tale that should be read by every rock-star wannabe.”
Dan R. Goddard, San Antonio Express-News
“Rock & roll literature? It seems like an oxymoron, but Shiner pulls it off in this artful fictional chronicle.”
Laura Morgan, Entertainment Weekly
“Say Goodbye is gritty, realistic and often funny, and it shows that Shiner has lost none of his touch. A fine novel, and a fascinating examination of the glamour industry from the bottom up.”
Jonathan Strahan, Locus
“Shiner has set up a What if? rock ’n’ roll tale that is thoroughly engrossing and quietly tragic…Say Goodbye isn’t just a cleverly worded portrait of hipper-than-thou characters; instead, Shiner paints a picture of the music business and of dreams that can never shine as bright as imagined…the story—of a million wannabe music dreams snuffed out every year—is all too true.”
—Shelly Ridenour, Newcity (Chicago)
“Two of [Shiner’s] five books, 1993’s Glimpses and the newly published Say Goodbye, qualify as the best novels ever written about rock ’n’ roll.”
—Rick Koster, The Day (New London, CT)
First published in the United States in 1999 by Subterranean Press
This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Lewis Shiner, 2019
The moral right of Lewis Shiner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781789541243
Cover Design: Ben Prior
Author Photo: © Orla Swift
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Contents
Welcome Page
Praise for Say Goodbye
Copyright Page
The City
Signs and portents
The Silk and Steel
Miracle on San Vicente
Over the hills and far away
Folkies
The session
The Band
Whittier
Jamming
Summer
Kitchenette
Eye contact
Angels
Red dress
The Tape
Brave new world
Texas
Feliz Navidad
Class reunion
Auld acquaintance
First contact
One to go
Partners
Game plans
Don’t make promises
Get ready
Sunday morning
Aubade
Panic
Of the Same Name (1)
Tracks
The set
Double lead
Gallery
A day at the beach
The ringer
Temp
Nerves
Sound check
Opening night
Mark Ardrey
The last days of Summer
A hypothetical question
Of the Same Name (2)
Mystery train
The Tour
The first time
General Records
Patrice
Celebrity bowling
Struggling
Shoot
Last week
L’Envoi
The road
Blue
The fishbowl
Phone call from Olympia
The visitors
Nobody’s angel
Fragile enterprise
Dining car
Bloomington
Red dots
The frying pan
Green, rocky road
Triage
Epiphany
Notices
I Shall Be Released
The Bottom Line
Down the river
Two Bad Mice
The big C
Home
The big time
Say goodbye
Ashes
Into the breach
Neither Are We
www.lauriemoss.com
The last time
Loose ends
Free
The Rest
Mitch Gaines
Mark Ardrey
Jim Pearson
Catherine Connor
Summer Walsh
Gabriel Wong
Corky Moss
Laurie Moss
This reporter
“Fernando”
Author’s Note
By Lewis Shiner
About the
Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
THE CITY
Signs and portents
“It was my first Friday night in LA,” Laurie says in her press kit for the album. “I was stuck on the Santa Ana Freeway, thinking about buffalo. A vast single herd covering the earth from one horizon to the other, the way they used to, placid, lost in their own grassy thoughts, then suddenly careering off at top speed, all of them at exactly the same time.
“So there I was, cheek to bumper with all the other cloven-tired, sun-roof-humped, klaxon-horned metal ungulates, stalled on the concrete plains, watching the hot breath steam from their tailpipes, when the sky blew up.
“I didn’t know if it was terrorists or nuclear war or the Big One that was supposed to drop us all in the Pacific, but it was clearly the end. Huge concussive explosions and fat orange cinders trailing fire out of the sky. Ashes on the windshield. Cars veering off onto the shoulder and me pretty sure I could feel the freeway shake under my Little Brown Datsun. I kept driving, though, because, really, this was what I’d been waiting for all my life: Armageddon.
“Anyway, I finally rolled my window down and looked up and realized it was nothing but the fireworks show at Disneyland. They launch the rockets, apparently, a few feet from the highway and the damned things go off right there over the cars. Some freak atmospheric condition was pushing the debris back down before it completely burned up.
“So that’s where ‘Just Another End of the World’ came from. That thought: If this is really the end, I won’t have to do laundry tomorrow. My rent check will never bounce. Of course it was just one more false alarm, not even a sign from God, only a sign from Unca Walt, in his block of ice under the freeway, and it had no more cosmic message to convey than ‘Hey, look at me.’
“Though I will say this. Once I was over my initial disappointment, it was a hell of a show. The human mind can’t leave something like that alone. It’s always going to read signs and portents wherever it can. And I remember sitting straight back in my seat, both hands on the wheel, and saying, ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be here.’ ”
The Silk and Steel
I meet “Fernando”—not his real name—in a bar called the Silk and Steel on Sunset Boulevard. It’s Monday, the 11th of November, 1996, and he is my first official interview for the book.
It’s chilly and overcast in LA, and even the clouds seem to be rushing off to somewhere important. I’m easing into the writing process by going to the people that are publicly available, the ones that I know will be willing to talk to me. “You’ll recognize me,” Fernando has promised on the phone, and he is right. He’s six-foot-three, lavishly tattooed, pierced four times in the right ear, five times in the left, once in the left nostril. He’s shaved his head, but not recently, and he has a soul patch beneath his lower lip.
“This is where it went down,” he says, in a somewhat high-pitched, nasal voice. The walls and ceiling are painted flat black, standard decor on the Strip, and the brown shag carpet has mostly unraveled. Afternoon sunlight trickles in the open back door where a kid in shorts and a baseball cap wheels in cases of beer. It’s the kind of place that needs its darkness. “I thought you should see this,” Fernando says, “because it’s the first place Laurie sang in LA. It was an open mike night, like they do every Monday—they’ll be doing it again tonight. I put her and Summer together that same night.”
Fernando works in one of the better-known Hollywood music stores. “You get jaded,” he says about the job. “A lot of the big touring acts come in when they’re in town. I’ve met Clapton, Page, both Van Halens—all three if you count Valerie. All the hot studio guys, of course. I must see a hundred kids like Laurie every year, coasting into LA in cars that barely made it over the mountains, desperate for a break. They’ve read about the Viper Room in Rolling Stone or they’ve noticed the LA addresses on the backs of their CDs, or they’ve seen palm trees in too many MTV videos.”
He met Laurie in June of 1994. She’d only been in LA for a week. “How it happened was, she called the store looking for a four-track recorder. I sold her the same Tascam I sell all the wannabe singer-songwriters, on special for one-ninety-nine. I remembered her, one, because she was cute—skinny and intense, with this bright reddish-purple hair that was kind of eighties retro. Also she’s one of those people that are a little more, I don’t know, tuned-in or something. Like they’re sucking everything in through their eyes. So when I ran into her a couple of days later at the Silk and Steel, it only took me a minute to place her.”
Fernando might forget a face, but never a guitar. Laurie’s, he recalls, was “a cream-colored mid-sixties Strat, very clean,” but not suitable for the Unplugged-style format of the Silk and Steel. Fernando found her “trying to reason with the bartender, not upset or anything, just like, ‘I can’t understand why playing an electric guitar in a folk club is still an issue 30 years after Dylan played Newport.’ As if this kid behind the bar had any idea what she was talking about. She was very naive that way, she didn’t understand that places like this aren’t about music, they’re about the acoustic guitar as fashion statement.”
Fernando introduced her to his girlfriend, Summer Walsh, who’d been on the LA folk scene for ten years. “Next thing you know Summer’s offered to loan out her Martin D-15. We all sat together, and when Summer got up and sang I could see Laurie was really blown away. Have you heard Summer sing? You know she wrote that song on Laurie’s album, ‘Tried and True?’ She is so awesome, man. She could be where Alanis or Joan Osborne is, and she would be, if—” He shakes his head and shifts around in his chair. “Don’t get me started on record companies.”
After Summer’s set Laurie’s confidence seemed to falter. “Summer really wanted to hear her, so she pulled a couple of strings and got Laurie up on stage before she could chicken out. Laurie, she was nervous at first, but she did good. And her songs, you could tell she knew what she was doing. They were structured, you know, nicely put together. And hooks that fully dug into your brain.
“She was quiet sitting around the table, but onstage she had this, like, eagerness. Like at the end of each song she couldn’t wait to get to the next one. It was some very contagious shit.”
Later the three of them went down the street to the Rock and Roll Denny’s, a musician’s hangout for decades. “You could really see the energy happening between Summer and Laurie. It’s like…it was enough for me to have done that, to have introduced them. I’m happy just being around the buzz, I don’t have to be the buzz, if you know what I mean.
“Not Laurie, though. She had that bone-deep hunger. I liked her from the first, but that hunger made me scared for her too.”
Miracle on San Vicente
Bobbi D'Angelo is in her forties, her blonde hair a little brittle, her voice rough from chain smoking. She—“with the Bank of America, honey”—owns the Bistro d’Bobbi on San Vicente. It’s upstairs in a small, exclusive strip mall: burgundy window treatments, tasteful neon signage, tiled balcony with umbrella tables. Inside, behind the garlic and oregano, you can smell the yeast in the dough that waits on steel trays near the oven. A hostess in black pants and a tux shirt shows me to a small, cluttered office next to the kitchen.
The restaurant, Bobbi explains, grew out of her divorce settlement from “a very rich asshole.” She lights a Virginia Slims menthol and says, “Sooner or later I’m sure I’ll get in trouble for it, but until somebody puts a gun to my head, I’m not hiring any men here. No offense, doll. We’re a self-sufficient little matriarchy, and Laurie fit right in. All the girls have their noms du pizza—builds morale, keeps a little extra distance between them and the customers, like this joke we’re all in on. We knew her here as Gladys.”
Bobbi seems to remember every detail about each of her girls, as if they were her daughters. “She was pretty desperate when she first came in. She’d been looking for work for a couple of weeks, and it was all either fast food or topless or prep work. I hired her on the spo
t and put her to work that night. She used to say it was her Miracle on San Vicente.
“She was good with people, got along with the other girls, hell, I didn’t even know she was starstruck until the week before she quit. She’d been with us four months, and then one night she started writing the words to a song on the back of one of her tickets and that’s how I found out.”
Bobbi knows firsthand about being starstruck. “I arrived here in 1966, with a few hundred thousand others. I was just 18 and I knew in my heart of hearts that Destiny had her hand on the telephone, about to dial my number. I was something then, you wouldn’t believe it to look at me now. Smart, good-looking, ambitious. I stuck it out for two years. All I ever got were walk-ons, which I took, and propositions, which I didn’t. Finally I ran out of money and hope, and I went back to North Carolina and married Michael, who was in love with me in high school and incidentally heir to a textile business. I hated myself for being a failure and a quitter, and I drank for a while and slept around a little bit and I spent more than one afternoon with a bottle of pills in front of me, wondering if I might just take them all.
“Everybody in the world—my various agents, my roommates, producers, casting directors, strangers on the bus—all of them had reasons why I wasn’t famous. Maybe I had no talent. Maybe I had too much. Maybe I needed bigger breasts. Smaller breasts. A different agent. To stop changing agents. The one thing nobody could accept—least of all me—was that it might not be anybody’s fault at all.”
She seems eager to distance herself from the 18-year-old beauty that I can still clearly see behind the makeup and the cigarette smoke and the sardonic tone. “If it’s nobody’s fault,” she says, “then everything is random. It’s out of control. It means being a star doesn’t really prove you’re a good actor, or beautiful, or, God help us all, lovable.
“I told all this to Gladys—to Laurie, I mean. Not because I thought it would change her mind, but so that when it happened to her she would maybe feel a little less alone. She said something about how I hadn’t turned out so badly. But the truth is I set myself up to get hurt when I was just a kid, and by the time I got over being hurt it was too late to do anything else. Like get an honest job, say waiting tables. Like go to college in my spare time, write some film criticism, get my jollies at some local theater if I absolutely had to be on stage.