Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

“Crow,” I urged, “you need to see Walter. He needs to see you.”

It might not work out well; I knew that. Crow would listen to Booker T and the MG’s playing “Slim Jenkins’ Place” and he would classify the track as “sounds.” He would look at what Walter was doing and might classify what he saw, and what it might produce as music, as “a nightmare made real.” Even so, I knew that bringing them together was what I needed to do next. It occurred to me that the ally I needed to persuade Crow to visit Walter was Frank Lovelace. He might see a reunion in it for the Stand, or some kind of opportunity to make money. All I cared about was that Crow reconnected with Walter and would look at what he was doing.

A large wooden wheel rolls through the dust of an unmade road. The cart creaks. The ox pulling it wheezes. The driver mutters as he snaps his straight whip at the ox’s seesawing haunches. A street seller shouts his wares, peanuts and biscuits, in Gujarati. Children giggle and laugh as they pass, neatly dressed, on their way to school. The blare of an overdriven radio pumps out bhangra-style dance music, distorted and colorful, energetic and rhythmic, lilting and swaying but with deafeningly vibrant drums. Sacred cows wander in front of hooting petrol-driven three-wheeled rickshaws, their bells clanging somberly in the racket. The pit-pat and stuttering across the square of a distant tennis match on a hard court, laughing voices in cultured England-educated Indian accents. A thundering, rocking, overloaded bus drives past, several ghetto-blaster radios playing at once, Qawwali, Bollywood, Indian disco, and more bhangra. A mullah calls the Muslim faithful from a distant tower, his voice amplified in the distance. Birds squawking, flapping, and fighting over a dead mouse in the road. Darkness. The flicker of a candle.

Steve and Patty Hanson had sold fifty-three million of several albums over fifteen years. Hero Ground Zero, the band started by Paul Jackson aka Nikolai Andréevich in the sixties that the Hansons had revived in the nineties, was a prog rock band of the old school that broke all records in arenas and stadiums around the world. Patty had stopped playing the drums and stood up front in a wispy dress banging a tambourine. It was rumored salaciously that she performed without underwear. The light show was legendary, her body was legendary, her tambourine playing was Royal College of Music Grade 10, but it was her voice that made the band so huge. She sang like a husky siren, her voice almost without vibrato; it was a cold sound, but still passionate and vulnerable. She and Steve together wrote ambitious and audaciously pretentious songs. They wrote about Kings Arthur and Alfred, the Greek myths, beautiful cars, dreams, nightmares, color, science, and even fashion. One successful album consisted of a series of songs based on early Hollywood movie titles.

They respected no conventions, broke through all boundaries, sneered back at anyone who dared to sneer at them. They took drugs, they drank, they crashed cars; Steve Hanson even crashed a small plane and walked away. Patty spent more on dresses that would reveal her (alleged) lack of underwear than she did on drugs, but on their last recording session she had (allegedly) run up a bill for three hundred thousand dollars with her cocaine dealer. Also managed by Frank Lovelace, the Hansons were high in the Rich List.

But by 2011, when Walter was trying to emulate the sound he was hearing every day in his head, Hero Ground Zero were burned out, creatively depleted. They were still filling large venues and attracting bids for festivals, but I could tell they could not write songs anymore.

After I had spoken to Crow I called Steve and got Patty on the phone.

“Louis,” she sang my name. “How fantastic to hear your voice, my darling.”

She still sounded like a music teacher, slightly posh and had obviously risen at six and spent the morning practicing the cello or whatever. She also sounded slightly exhausted; perhaps I was projecting onto her voice what I wanted to believe: that they needed Walter. I asked how she and Steve were doing.

“We’re a bit like Abba, my darling.” She laughed. “We are still married but have other things going on, if you know what I mean. Louis, you don’t want to take me out to dinner, do you? That would be wonderful. You could take me to Le Caprice. I haven’t been there for years.”

“I’d love that.” I wasn’t being entirely truthful, but Patty was still a very beautiful and sexy woman. “I wanted to let you know I’ve got some interesting news about Walter.”

“Is he still working on that peculiar labyrinth thing in his garden?”

“He calls it a maze,” I corrected.

“Take me out, Louis,” she pleaded. “We can talk over dinner.”

After speaking to her and arranging to meet her at Le Caprice that night I knew intuitively that where Crow might need a hard sell to go back to work with Walter, the Hansons would hungrily consider what Walter was now creating and might rediscover hope for their old band.

As she smoked a small postprandial cigar that enraged even the sophisticated folk in Le Caprice, Patty fluttered her eyelashes at me. Did she think I wanted to fuck her?

I wanted to explain my real reason for needing to see her. I told her all about the soundscapes and ended by saying I was sure that Frank would feel they could trigger a band reunion. That seemed to alert her.

“So Walter is hearing anxiety, and wants to make music out of it. It all sounds interesting, Louis. Most intriguing.”

I coughed, and she laughed at me.

“You’re a saint, Louis, really.” She showed her amazing white teeth as though posing for a press photo. “But you do need to speak to Frank about this. Not me. The business stuff is all so boring. I’d love to hear one of these soundscape thingies though. I’ve completely run out of new ideas myself and Steve is no better. Walter always was a dark horse.”

A mathematically organized arrangement of notes cascades rapidly from a slightly out-of-tune upright piano. The patterns sound like an attempt to evoke a Bach partita or prelude. In a major key, the patterns hardly come close to melody but are pleasant, like the sound of a waterfall. Light reflects from the surface of the rippling pool; the sun is reflected. The first piece is short, quickly followed by another in a darker and more somber mood. Again, there is a Bach-like modality to the composition and a two-handed elegance to the performance. This piece too is short, followed by another, very fast, optimistic, and eloquent set of passages that ends suddenly with an ostentatious and flamboyant flourish.

I contacted Frank and he felt, as I had predicted, that we should try to bring Walter’s band back together. I would rely on Frank Lovelace to run things once I had planted the seeds, since it seemed to me that in order for Walter to survive the embedded and indoctrinated musical ego of Crow on the one hand and the grandiosity of the Hansons on the other, he would need a more musically adept mentor than myself.

I spoke to Maud from time to time. Old Nik’s paintings were selling very well and were still the backbone of my business as an art dealer. He painted the same scene over and over again with small variations: a sweeping field of human souls presided over by vast angels.

Once when I called I said, “I thought it might be a good idea if Nik could spend some more time with Walter, which could help him harness and unleash his own angels and demons,” I suggested nervously. “Walter’s are sonic ones of course.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” said Maud. “Nik is dying. He has advanced leukemia.”

“Bloody hell!” I was stunned.

“He is reliant on intravenous morphine, and is surviving, but it’s reset his clock. He’s also even madder than usual.”