Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (43 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUNNY AFTERNOONS

 

Ronnie approaches the mic, check-one-check-twos it, announces, “Hi, we're The Sunny Afternoons.”

 

•

 

On Rae's upper left arm, there is a tattoo of the outline of Florida with a hand emerging from the center of the state holding a British flag. The hand and flag are meant to be a replica of the hand and flag on the cover of the 1969 Kinks album
Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

 

•

 

Crammed into the very corner where they practice, here in the Myrrh House—plugged in, setting the levels. At the peak of the party, as the beer-buzzes reach a fine collective plateau before the inevitable spiral into a mindless lack of self-control.

 

•

 

It is October. After the rent is paid, Ronnie is broke. The last of the cash from the temp gig at the bookstore is spent, Ronnie is spent, and his days are spent alone in his room, reading book after book, happy tomes from, say, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, as the Stooges' first album plays over and over again.

 

•

 

Outside, they stand in groups of four or five up and down NW 4th Lane, leaning against cars, retelling anecdotes. Young voices bouncing around the Floridian no-season of autumnal summer.

 

•

 

Rae lets herself into Ronnie's room, carrying his guitar with her left hand, and a beige Fender Squire in the right. “Look what I just bought,” she says.

 

•

 

They learn five songs: “Victoria,” “'Til the End of the Day,” “I Need You,” “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” and “Where Have all the Good Times Gone?”

 

•

 

Two friends, playing unamplified electric guitars.

 

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“I've been practicing,” she says. She starts to play that three chord intro to “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” Strum. Strum. Strum. Two of the strings (B and D) are beyond out of tune, but this only enhances the charm.

 

•

 

Of the many many rock and roll lyricists you're supposed to admire in your admiring youth, Ronnie Altamont had always idolized Raymond Douglas Davies over all the others.

Why?

Here's why: Boozy visions of British Walter Mittys struggling and suffering and finding the briefest moments of joy in the most mundane. Less about the in-your-tits sexual innuendo of blues bands, and less about the spiritual yearnings of psychedelia, less about classic rock ego and more about the anti-ego of the reticent trying their best to get through the day-to-day.

And then, the music. It never had to go out-there to tremendous lengths to get the point across—no drum solos, no synthesizer solos, no violin bows to the guitars. Actually, from their earliest to the end, you quite often hear borderline hack attempts at the proverbial “hit song.” —But at their best, nobody does the three minute pop masterpiece better. No one has written a better song than “Waterloo Sunset.”
No one.

The demeanor. The idea of the man as an underdog overlooked genius, the Kinks usually rating fourth or fifth behind the Beatles, Stones, Who, and Zeppelin. The Beatles have plenty of champions, and most of them are insufferable bores. The Stones have plenty of champions, and most of them are shit-drunk white males who look and act like Jim Belushi and don't even care about pre-1969 Stones and get sappy at the mere mention of Charlie Watts. Zeppelin. You can't throw a dead dick at a radio without it finding some classic rock station gettin' the goddamn Led out. Seriously. I mean, I like them too, but enough already with the Zeppelin, America. There are other bands. Like The Who, another classic rock staple, and they have plenty of champions, and that's fine, because in Ronnie's mind, The Who and The Kinks are in a constant neck-in-neck for Best Band from Those Days. But Ray, he's the one-true genius of them all, and this genius is compounded in how Ronnie sensed that more than the others from the British Invasion, Ray Davies believed himself to be a vaudevillian . . . and saw the irony in it. The dichotomy of writing a song as beautiful as, say, “This is Where I Belong” (among so many others), then going from town to town and leading American audiences in the call-and-response of “The Banana Boat Song,” or even calling an album
Give the People What they Want
, or
Something Else
. Art. Showbiz. The eternal tug of war.

Anyway. Ronnie could go on and on about The Kinks. But before we move on, it's worth noting: since first hearing them at age ten—the song “Predictable,” on an HBO music video program that predated MTV coming to town—Ronnie wished he could croon like Ray Davies . . . and to live someplace where he has the chance to play Kinks songs, with others who like them almost as much as he does . . . wow, man! Just wow! Gainesville!

 

•

 

The songs hold together. Somehow. The rhythm section chugs along.

 

•

 

He leaves his room each day long enough to walk the one block to the Floridian Harvest minimart and purchase one twenty-five cent Little Lady snack cake for brunch, and a second Little Lady snack cake for dinner.

 

•

 

Bradley wears slacks with leather weave belts and French flaggy Tommy Hilfiger shirts. He aspires to one day write a best-selling book on effectively managing your money. He is the drummer for The Sunny Afternoons.

 

•

 

“And I know the choruses now, too,” she says. With tiny wide fingers, her left hand barres the frets, back and forth between B and A, over and over again. Ronnie cannot help but sing softly, “Won't you tell me / where have all the good times gone? / Where have all the good times gone?”

 

•

 

“Right now, the working title is
Effective Money Management
, but that might change,” Bradley says to Ronnie shortly after meeting for the first time, at some dreadful party Rae almost literally dragged Ronnie to, some apartment deep in some complex off of Archer Road filled with the noises of bouncing quarters and shots and gratuitous yelling. “You're a writer. You know how it is with works-in-progress.”

 

•

 

No shit. Where have all the good times gone?

 

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They run through the song, from beginning to end. They play it a second time, now with Ronnie singing along, louder now, what he remembers, which is most of it. The third time, Ronnie puts more feeling into the vocal delivery. It has been too long since he has picked up the guitar and played something.

 

•

 

On the bass is Mitch, this big lug of an expatriate Midwesterner from Austin, Minnesota, the town where Spam is manufactured. He wears a worn Twins ballcap, white t-shirt, khaki shorts. With a thick red pick he plucks a pink bass guitar he's borrowed from his younger sister, who isn't using it anymore since her ill-fated feminist grunge band Bitch Slap broke up last year.

 

•

 

“That's a very functional title,” Ronnie says before drunkenly burping. Rae punches him on the arm.

 

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Played nonstop, the set is a nice and tidy fifteen minutes. With Rae's incessant worrying factored in, the set pushes the half-hour mark.

 

•

 

“Here's your guitar back,” Rae says. Her speech is a rapidfire torrent, tinged with the phlegm of the chainsmoker. “At one of your parties you showed me how to play the beginning of ‘Lola,' and then you told me I could borrow your guitar and learn the rest because you said you didn't need the guitar anyway and that it meant nothing if you had or didn't have it.”

 

•

 

Her name isn't even Rae. It's Lauren. She changed it in honor of Ray Davies.

 

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Heckles—smart, dumb, funny, and unfunny—were Gainesville's “Bravo! Encore!”

 

•

 

Rae's hair is red ringlets looping to her shoulders. Freckles dot her face and arms. Hazel eyes under horn-rimmed cat's eye glasses worn only by elderly diner waitresses and hip girls. Short. Thin. Bouncy. A green t-shirt silkscreened with the minimalist childscrawl of some Pacific Northwest indie-pop band. Black skirt. Doc Marten boots. And the tattoo.

 

•

 

They run through their five songs as they have every evening now for nine days straight, in preparation for playing here at the Myrrh House this upcoming Saturday. Ronnie feels like some kind of grizzled veteran you see in old sports movies, the kind of grizzled veteran who knows he's washed up and turns to boozing, but these ragtag kids with their sugary heads filled with dreams give him a new lease on life, so he puts the bottle down and decides to give the game one more shot.

 

•

 

Ronnie downstrokes a first position A chord, then flamencos the strings like Townshend, then stops and says, “The Sunny Afternoons. That's what we're called.”

“I thought we could be called Ronnie, or, The Decline and Fall of the Floridian Empire,” Rae says.

Ronnie laughs, says, “No.”

 

•

 

Rae rescues Ronnie from this miserable, uncreative, self-inflicted youthfully naïve funk. Every night for two weeks, Ronnie sits on the patchwork rug in her living room and she sits across from him and they strum their five Kinks songs. Ronnie enjoys her company. She does all the talking. Ronnie is sick of talking, sick of being the one who does the talking. For too long, he hasn't listened, opting instead for the mindless barf of alcoholic chatter leaving his mouth before the brain steps in and says, “Whoa! Easy!” On her walls are Pavement promo posters, pictures of the Kinks gallivanting around London, tiny paintings clipped from the pages of art history books. The TV is always softly playing one of those movies that's always on in these Gainesville houses—your Hartleys, your Jarmusches, your Jadorowskys, your Godards, your Trauffauts. You know. The red curtains are shut and that outside world of Ronnie's mistake-filled life doesn't exist in here. In here, Ronnie feels like a teacher; it's not an unpleasant feeling. He enjoys spending time with Rae and has no interest in anything more than friendship. He has blown it so many times with the people he cares about. He doesn't want to be like that anymore.

 

•

 

There will be no scathing music on the stereo, no scathing French literature dog-eared on the floor. Instead, Ronnie stretches out on the mattresses, strumming first position chords on the guitar until he falls asleep, and if this action isn't one of the secret pleasures afforded to guitarists, Ronnie will make a meal of his guitar and use the strings as dental floss.

 

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She stands in front of Ronnie. Facial tics contort her mouth. Their guitars hang off their shoulders, clanging into each other.

“Ronnie,” Rae says, turning away from the dozens beginning to concave around them as the set is about to begin. “I can't do this. I'm too nervous.”

 

•

 

On some nights, he stares at the typewriter, but no words come. And that guitar, this same guitar Rae holds in her hands as she steps into his room, well, Ronnie had been wondering whatever happened to that thing in the same way you might try and figure out what happened to that book or record that's missing that you're not terribly concerned about, seeing how you didn't really like the book or record that much to begin with.

 

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In the middle, Ronnie stands, running through the songs, singing into a microphone on a stand, cable plugged into a Peavey amplifier as he strums his guitar again, and the simple joy of being here, doing this, is enough.

 

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After practices, Ronnie turns up the stereo loud enough to be heard up on the roof, where he climbs up with a four-pack of Old Hamtramck tallboys. Roger works weeknights now—when he's not at the library studying—and the neighbors expect the Student Ghetto to be loud. Mitch sticks around after practice, follows Ronnie up an easily-climbed tree next to the roof, steps across.