Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

So usually we would be sitting there and I would be reading one of my books and eating my dinner, looking up between pages or paragraphs, or during a bite, at Jim Lehrer — which is practically medicinal TV — and Mom might comment, and I would then comment back while still not interrupting my activities.

By the time I’ve finished my dinner, my mother, if one were to notice, still would not have eaten very much at all. But she will have managed to refill her glass of wine several times. She then will get out her trusty turquoise-and-silver Tapestry -era lighter and her little metal elbow pot pipe. Yeah. She usually gets stoned right at the dinner table. That’s no shock, though, is it? During which I take my book to the bathroom, where once again, for the life of me, I cannot just do one thing. I get bored, even if it is just for a three-minute crap. Then I go back to my room, check e-mails, my cell phone voice mail, and finish burning a CD of music I’ve downloaded or traded with some other music freak I found on one of the fan sites.

But that’s all the usual thing. The day Gage was hanging late in my room was unusual for us. I was unveiling my most prized possessions, unleashing the holy grail of my Beach Boys collection. The jaw-dropping stuff. So far, Gage seemed only mildly impressed. We were looking through my comprehensive collection of demos from the Beach Boys’ fake lo-fi, unproduced, spontaneous, “non”-studio album, Party! when she knocked on the door. I ignored the knocking, figuring she would give up. But she continued to knock.

“Yes?” I said through the door. I am always instantly exasperated with her. She said something muffled. I opened up without lowering the music, which was pretty obnoxious, I mean it even annoyed me . Does it make sense to do things that annoy yourself? But I like to get her frustrated. I like to make her speak up. She stood there and tried to look past me into my room.

“What?” I said.

“Do you want me to set a plate for your friend?” She eyed Gage, who was mostly obscured behind my generously cut, mammoth jersey. Gage sat on my bed surrounded by stacks of CDs, LPs and 45s. He waved at my mother. He looked at me and shrugged.

“Sure.”

She smiled, her eyes darting from Gage to the stuff piled on the bedspread and then to me, her hands worrying the hem of her sweater throughout, all of which I ignored.

“Ten minutes,” she said, but I had already begun to close the door on her, so she really had to shout it, “Ten minutes!”

Gage held up an LP. On the cover was a bearded man in a faded, salt-stained blue-green T-shirt. He stands on a grassy hill with the ocean behind him.

“Wow. Is this?”

“Yes.”

“I’d love to hear this. Where did you find it?” It was a bootleg of an unreleased solo album by Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys. This album is significant for two reasons, which I will take a moment to explain since it directly bears on a situation that I will soon recount.

First, lost albums. These are the legendary albums that never saw commercial release, or only had a very small release many years ago. Sometimes the tapes are said to have been destroyed, but the chance that they will resurface is always there. For example the Keith Richards — Gram Parsons heroin sessions in the South of France, 1971. The legend is that the music was a mess and Gram dumped the tapes, but one hopes it will be unearthed someday, however sloppy-slurry the playing may sound. Then there are the label disputes, or someone has died. Or the jam sessions meant for private reference only. These eventually surface in legitimate form after years of being available extralegally as bootlegs. The most famous one is The Basement Tapes, the Dylan and the Band bootleg that everyone preferred to what Dylan actually put out ( Nashville Skyline, which, of course, I like and actually prefer to The Basement Tapes ). There are also great albums that only saw a brief initial release and are now out of print, or were recorded but never actually released for some tragic reason, usually death: solo demos by Pete Ham, the lead singer of Badfinger (classic hugely popular power pop), recorded weeks before his suicide. The solo album of the obscure member of that famously obscure band Big Star (classic unpopular power pop), Chris Bell. Or the previously mentioned album by Skip Spence, or his British counterparts, Syd Barrett and Nick Drake. Made and then disappeared. There are a million. And if they are truly great, they do often make it aboveground. Eventually in expensive box sets or digipaks with liner notes and extra bonus tracks. But until then they are the holy grails of music freaks — probably all related to the finite nature of a dead artist’s output. Couldn’t there be one more secret album out there, or one more song?

So this album Gage had in hand actually hit all of the above points: it had one disc of an album out of print coupled with its follow-up — a genuine never-released gem. Naturally it was a find. But what is even more important was that this was by Dennis Wilson.

Dennis Wilson is a man I hold very close to my heart. To most people he is still a tragic joke, a colorful loser, a complete disaster. How could I not love him? Dennis was famous for being not only the only Beach Boy who actually surfed but for being so incredibly derelict for the last ten years of his short life that he actually drowned in a boat slip in Marina del Rey in like six feet of water. He was also the “good-looking” Beach Boy. He was also the Beach Boy who hung around Charles Manson because of all the easy drugs and easy pussy. (As if being a rich, handsome rock star didn’t give him enough easy drugs and easy pussy and he needed Charles Manson’s, or maybe there was something particularly potent in unbathed, helter-skelter cult pussy.) But what is hardly known about Wilson is that he recorded these two excellent if maudlin solo albums in the bad years before he drowned. This bootleg had both records in one double gatefold album. The second one is truly a “lost” record, nearly done but never released, and actually wonderful. Wilson was just too out of it to bother putting it out. Admittedly there are a lot of plink-plink sob-type piano songs sung in this almost embarrassingly sad, rusty voice. These real dirgy, messed-up vocals, unashamedly full of self-pity and raw emotion. I found it operatic, a complete expression of a tortured, not-too-bright, not-too-gifted, weary guy. But here is the thing, say what you will about skill, technique, control, brilliance: this stuff is truly moving. To me anyway. I don’t know why, but I listen to that album and I start bawling, I really do.

So, anyway, Gage sat on my bed, listening to this priceless artifact. I had it cranked way up. He started to roll his eyes, smirking and laughing a bit.

“It’s so swoon-on schmaltzy, isn’t it?” he said, giggling and then kind of moaning. After a few seconds I realized he was trying to make a parodic facsimile of Dennis Wilson’s vocal track. Then he stopped. “Just pathetic, this drunken guy crying about all his suffering, all his cliché regrets.” I flicked the needle handle up, interrupting the song, and snatched the album cover out of his hand.

“Time to eat,” I said. We stumbled toward the dining room — TV room — kitchen area. As I said, the usual things were not in effect. For Gage’s sake we had the TV off. The table was set with a little more formality than normal. My mother even broke out a bottle of some wine that came in a 750-milliliter bottle instead of the 1.5-liter power jug of oenological glory that she usually poured. She filled our wineglasses. I realized then that Gage was fully an adult and actually not that much younger than my mother. For a millisecond I entertained the horrible thought that they were attracted to each other and they would end up together, but that thought was discarded when she proceeded to ask Gage a series of interrogative-type, as opposed to conversational-type, questions.