Dancing in the Dark (8 page)

            October explodes in this (wooded) hilly & potato rich enclave at the northern end of the Niagara escarpment. Alliston, on the Nottawasaga, & other towns west to Orangeville are warm & soft & gusty this Friday, 7:35 a.m. Orange and blue umbrellas on front porches, rain slickers out on the farms. Everywhere you look the trees have gone as berserk as a loon’s hypothalamus with riots of orange yellow red pale vermilion savagely oversweet turned on itself crimson dark. There is a fine October rain coming down, so fine that you can hardly see it, almost a mist, it barely wets your face. 16°. A few 40 mph ducks skim the tops of distant lush wet trees. Geese crossing in loose Vs down by the bridge. This is western Ontario but continentally almost as far south as Massachusetts, Point Pelee, or Frank Lloyd Wrights Chicago. The air is full of oxygen. The dense rich colours swim in this air like Matisse nudes, blue knees & elbows, magenta buttocks. Warm thick air gives a tremendous lift to your motion. I seem to fly above the pale dark grey early morning towns of soft hills & steeples almost like Chagall’s crazy mystical Rabbi fiddling over the scant roofs of pre ww 1 Minsk. (1000s of miles north of where Babel wrote about Itzak the gangster. Where Gurdjieff sold the barrel of bad herring and put the money into fresh animal skins.) Water trickles gently along the curbs into the cosy black gratings of innumerable sewers. It’s warm & wet & gorgeous. My Rockports squelch on the gravel. I lift my face up to the sky. I open my black umbrella. I wave to you happily my friends across the shimmering slopes of the western escarpment.

                        Postmoderns like things to be laid out calmly

& precisely like design components on a large drawing board.

Like Robert Smithson’s Earthworks, for example. Earth & works –

postmodernism is gutsier than people think. Mississippi

earth is swampy as you get south of Oxford down to the gulf.

I don’t like F’s
Absalom, Absalom!
very much. I don’t like the way

it begins with the runaway slave. F himself is very present,

but in a confused sort of way – splashes of author colour come

through but seem disparate. It’s like a camera falling

through the narrative & it doesn’t work. The characters don’t tell their

   own stories

explicitly or implicitly.

Ask any of your friends about their favourite Faulkner

characters and they’ll probably say, Popeye,

Temple Drake, Jason, Caddy, the barn-burning father. Claes Oldenburg’s

giant hamburgers take us back to the 50s. Faulkner was young

in the 20s. And was then smacked in the face

with the 30s & the Depression. I’m probably being unfair

to this book. I’m reading in a sunny room and listening

to Wynton Marsalis’s solos on a
CD
with Kathleen Battle

who is singing up a rich dark storm & Wynton, it’s Handel, is

right there as if he had written the music himself. Sure

there is probably a point of view from which you could enjoy

Absalom, Absalom!
I don’t know, I sort of like the title.

But not as much as
Light in August
or the story of Jason & Caddy.

Marsalis goes up into C & I toss the book over on the couch

& watch the small English sparrows & the grey squirrel

outside my front windows on this cool blue May afternoon. The

title’s interesting, isn’t it?
Absalom, Absalom!
It sounds

too biblical for the 1930s of Huey Long.

              Hayden Washington Jones, 6’5”, close-cropped hair, chocolate satiny skin, quiet, at times almost mordant. A tall guy, for sure, taller than Tom Garrone, and blocky, not tall and thin like Tom. In addition to which Hayden had an immeasurably greater knowledge of music than Tom possessed, and had never been even faintly tempted to write stories (although Hayden had stories, but he was a quiet amused kind of guy in regard to conversation) in the manner, although he had lived in Paris for a while and had driven a little Peugeot minor, of some French guy like Albert Camus.

Hayden had been an A student at Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, a scholarship student, music obsessive, tight end distinguished for broken field play at Yale in the late 60s, a music compulsive, Juilliard in New York, and then Paris in 1974.

His mother was a school teacher and a regular churchwoman. His older sister Dahlia was the neighbourhood beauty in their part of Brooklyn, and a bit of a sass and also a bit of a snoot, she could look down her nose at a school teacher or a bank manager with equal ease. But she sang in the church choir and when she sang she was a somewhat different kind of sister.

Anyway, first song, as in first love, first sex, first time bareback, first time driving home from Jones Beach, not that his family owned it, nobody owns Jones Beach, although it isn’t really public property either. Hayden Jones wrote his first song when he was about 11 years old. It wasn’t a bad song. It was a song about playing tag with his brother. It was a 4-bar blues. And who knows, maybe it was about his sister. It wasn’t about his mother, and it wasn’t about Jesus. His mother said it was a good song. His father didn’t say anything. His father was at the race track in Detroit, Dee/troite, hanging out with Fox & Masters & Wilberson & Lapointe. It was a pretty good song for a boy who was already 5’10”, handsome enough to be noticed on the street, LaFayette & Lancaster, and hadn’t started showing any interest in girls as yet. It was a pretty good song with his own melody
and he did the harmonic himself both vocally and on the family living room piano. But he didn’t write another song or even think about writing songs again until he was about 27. He was a little older than the rest of the Desperados, the black / white blues band he helped to form after coming back from Paris, where he knew Tom Garrone from, where he knew Stash and the others. He was about 4 years older, and as far as music was concerned he was a lot smarter, but he didn’t go around saying so. Hayden was a composer, blues-based and a Bartok obsessive, and unlike most composers he was hooked up with a hard line, flat out band that was about to take America by storm, if they would listen to him, that is. He wasn’t, when Tom Garrone met him, walking around in a loft whistling scores to himself, although he sometimes did that as well.

Juilliard followed Yale. Hayden had been playing with groups and arranging, becoming an arranger as well as a brilliant keyboards player, but arranging was definitely his first and greatest love supreme, and had been since he was around 15.

It was amazing that he never worried about his hands when he played football. First at Jefferson, then at Yale. At Yale more seriously, because
it
was more serious; for example, these guys at Yale were tough, really tough. They were nothing like Yale boys doing their M.A.s in philosophy and having a sandwich and a beer at Cookie’s, a familiar sandwich place for lunch, booths and all, in New Haven. Uh, uh. They were tough.

But Hayden never worried about his hands when he played football, and he never worried about his mind. He didn’t joke around with the older guys in the locker room that much, not especially, not so you would notice, Hayden was very contained, again, not very much like Tom who is tall and thin and likeable, but at times a bit of a schlemiel, a sincere guy but a guy who babbles a bit too much.

Hayden lived in a garrett, well, a third-floor maid’s room, when he studied in Paris. Not quite like Erik Satie, to whom Hayden’s heart belonged absolutely, although he was not to follow in Satie’s direction. He lived on croque monsieurs and cheap hamburger meat from a little Algerian butcher down the rue. So when he first met Tom in the spring of 1976, Bats brought this tall pale Italian guy with a huge smile into Dempster’s where
they were eating after a rehearsal, down on the Lower East Side, he was immediately sympathetic because he thought of himself living in the cold third-floor maid’s room in Paris.

Following this pace, which was really more a scheduled pace than he really wanted, his feelings about music were pretty wide and handsome, and free and full of initiative. He came back to New York a little restless and wound up doing more work than he really wanted, for
NBC
and
ABC
, which is when he first met up with the Desperados.

Hayden loved the funk of jazz, and the history of European music. He had been named after a great German composer, whom his father had picked up a book about almost by accident, when he was in one of his reading phases, trumpet, reading, lamplight, bourbon and burnout, off to horses and Fox & Wilberson. But Hayden’s father, at that point in time, 31 years ago, knew fields of sweet peas about arranging, knew fields of sweet yams and tobacco about the history of music, European included, historical or otherwise, compared to what his brilliant son Hayden came to know, even some bits and pieces from contemporary South American, although those bossa nova and bossa samba trips were not really Hayden’s specialty.

So Hayden Washington Jones, 29 at the time, about 4 years older than the other members of the Desperados and much more experienced, in matters of music at least, in matters of composition and genre, half note and full note, harmonic shading and harmonic disruption, continued his daytime work for
NBC
and
ABC
, and gave up most of his evening freelance stuff, including an interesting film offer. He became the resident keyboards player and resident arranger for the Desperados. They numbered 7 at that time because Tom had not yet become a member of the group, nor had Tom yet introduced Whitney to the group. And Yvonne had not yet come into the group to do her fabulous one-of-a-kind, Detroit back-up turned around
R
&
B
background vocals.