Deep Cuts, page 20
The song was pure and brilliant and totally new for Joe. Updated synthpop with a snaking bass line that made me wiggle in my desk chair, my hips even more excited than my brain. The vocal line was so melodic I could hardly identify the main hook: Was it the McCartneyesque verse, the jarringly different pre-chorus, or the rousing chorus, where my “animal who’s found his family” line scaled an octave and a half before landing on a pillowy resolving chord? The full lyric contained no other direct lifts from my “Mis-Shapes” post but was thematically almost identical, the same sense of awaking from loneliness on a dance floor, the same winking generational call to action.
There was a video too, blessedly low budget: vintage Madchester-style club footage interspersed with the band performing on a black box stage. If it had been some shiny MTV cheese I might’ve passed out at my desk. Joe’s showmanship came through, though, his swagger behind the mic exaggerated for the camera.
I yanked out my earbuds and put my head back in my hands. I would’ve killed “You You You,” that was for sure. But would I have killed “Britpop Night” too, inadvertently? The way that pre-chorus sounded like it was spliced in from another song—I would’ve fought him on that, and I would have been wrong. Had I been keeping him in some sort of middle lane, avoiding catastrophes but falling short of his full potential?
I sent an apologetic email to my boss and then I unloaded to Zoe over IM. She convinced me not to confront him yet, to wait until the album came out. A single on the internet was devoid of context, she said, which I decided was fair. Maybe he’d credited my line in the booklet; maybe he’d mentioned my blog. And there was still “Bay Window”—which bridge had he chosen? How many copies of the CD should I buy? At least three, I decided—one for listening, one for posterity, one to FedEx overnight to my mom.
The days before the album’s release dragged. I kept busier than usual, meeting up with co-workers for happy hours, filling weekends with museums and shows. It would’ve been a great time for a business trip, but I was in the “analysis” portion of my work cycle, writing reports and PowerPoints, packaging up all that trendsetter intelligence. I permitted myself only a handful of “Britpop Night” plays a day, in an attempt to keep my head above a tide of emotion that rose higher inside me with every listen. The precise nature of the emotion was always shifting, moving from rage to embarrassment to magnanimity, but always building in intensity. The rage would simmer at low heat until the embarrassment arrived: Who was I to get so puffed up? I wasn’t Dylan; I wasn’t Shakespeare. “Like a lost animal who’d found its family,” I had typed into my work-issued laptop at three a.m. in a Miami hotel. An average line, at best. But of course, it wasn’t average in the song, with that melody and his warm voice and all the lush instrumentation sprouting up around it like wildflowers, a whole ecosystem of beauty. Then came the magnanimity: How lucky I was to be part of it! To have had any hand at all in this masterpiece! To hear my average words transformed into such magic! And that is when the rage would return.
* * *
—
On the album release day I left work at lunch and bussed to the San Francisco location of Amoeba. I found the CD right away on the New Releases rack, a black-and-neon graphic cover with two stickers: “NEW” and “Featuring the single BRITPOP NIGHT.” I bought four copies and tore off the cellophane as soon as I got outside.
Just the lyrics, the studio credits; no extras.
“All songs written by Joe Morrow, with special thanks to Percy Marks.”
My hands shook. A loitering punk asked me if I was okay. I started walking, first toward home, then veering off Haight toward the Panhandle. I was still holding the jewel case open in one hand; with the other, I found his name in my phone.
He picked up after one ring. “Percy!”
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“A little pissed?”
He swore lightly under his breath. “We were up against the wall to deliver a single, and the whole lyric just came out of me after I read your Pulp post. Didn’t realize I’d bitten a line until we’d laid down the track, and by then it was like, well, that’s our hook. The band all decided you’d understand. We’re loving your blog, by the way.”
“Clearly,” I said. “First question. Why no heads-up? ‘FYI, old pal, you’re about to be plagiarized’?”
He paused for a second, and when he spoke it was heated. “I don’t know, Percy, same reason I haven’t called you five hundred times over the past three years? Because you told me to leave you alone!”
“Did I?” I said. “I believe I said I wanted to stop helping you with your music, a request you somehow found a way to violate entirely on your own. Well done.”
He was quiet, and I felt a moment of triumph at having articulated the betrayal so perfectly. I jaywalked across a busy one-way street, beating a rush of oncoming cars, and entered the park.
“Anyway, it’s, what,” he said tiredly, “eight words?”
“Fine,” I said. “Forget ‘Britpop Night.’ What about ‘Bay Window’?”
He sighed. “What about it?”
“I co-wrote that song and you know it! I wrote the bridge entirely myself!”
“Well, the bridge melody was mine—”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“I made it good.”
“Classy. And totally beside the point. Even if I’d just written the lyrics, that’s a co-write.”
“For normal people, yes, it’s a co-write!” His speech was finally quickening to meet the pace of mine. “But that’s not our arrangement!”
“Our arrangement?”
“Yes! We talked about it back at school—you said you didn’t want credit, that the songs were mine, you weren’t a songwriter. ‘I just like helping,’ you said.”
“Did I! Sounds like something a twenty-one-year-old would say to her crush.” I glared at a man who crossed my path in pursuit of a basketball. “And of course you never questioned it, because girls have been doing your homework for you your whole life.”
He exhaled noisily, a wounded scoff. “You don’t know half of what I know about self-reliance, Percy.”
He knew how to get me. I yanked off my cardigan—I had worked up a sticky, cold sweat. “ ‘Bay Window’ was different,” I said.
I heard some shuffling, a relocation, and he sighed again. “It was a little different,” he admitted.
“Why not credit me, then? Was it just too awful, the thought of not seeing ‘All songs written by Joe Morrow’ in your liner notes?”
“Percy.”
“Were you worried people would think you’re not really writing your own songs, because you have a co-writer? Don’t you know that only happens to singer-songwriters who are women?”
“Percy. I really thought you wanted nothing to do with me. I actually wondered if you’d be annoyed that I even gave you the special thanks. I mean, honestly—it’s been three years.”
The way he said it sapped the energy from my stride. The catch in his voice was so familiar. I sat down on an iron bench.
“I do love how ‘Bay Window’ turned out,” he said, when I didn’t say anything. “A bit out of place on the album, but oh well.”
“It was always out of place in your oeuvre.”
“I guess. What do you think of it?”
“I haven’t heard it yet. I just walked out of Amoeba.”
He started laughing. “How do you know I even used your parts?”
“I just know,” I said, but I bit my lip. Why did I call so quickly? I didn’t even remember making the decision to dial. I looked down at the four identical jewel cases in my hand. “Did you?”
“Don’t worry, you were right. It’s the same bridge.”
“Which one? ‘Zoe comes over in the afternoon’?”
“No. ‘What a day to be so weak.’ ”
I smiled slightly, against my will. He was filing the edges off my anger, but the bulk of it still loomed inside me like a tumor, hard and immovable. He wasn’t copping to it, but he’d wanted “All songs written by Joe Morrow.” Of course he had. Just like he wanted the girls. He wanted it all. I put my sweater back on and started walking again, looping back around toward Haight. A mom jogged by with a crying baby in a stroller.
“Where are you?”
“Panhandle.”
“Mmm. Foggy?”
“Like a graveyard scene in a horror movie.”
“New York is roasting. I’m living in Greenpoint now—”
“That’s nice.”
He sighed. “Did you at least hear the single?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s brilliant, but you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“Yeah?” he said, waiting for it.
“Okay fine. I can’t get over how different each piece of the song is, and yet they all work together. I don’t even understand how this song is possible. I’ve listened to it probably a hundred times and I’m still not sick of it.”
I could feel him glowing through the phone.
“The title is dorky, though,” I said. “I would’ve gone with ‘Animal’ or ‘Animals.’ But nobody else is mentioning it, so whatever.”
He cleared his throat. “Since when do you care about dorkiness? You blogged about ‘Just the Way You Are’ last week.”
“You asked for my opinion,” I glowered.
He sighed. “Fine. What can I do? ‘Bay Window’ isn’t a single—we might only get one single. It won’t earn much in the way of royalties.”
“It’s not about royalties,” I said. I was back on Haight now, walking into a tide of tourists. “It’s about how it feels to be used.”
“Oh, come on. Used?”
“Is that so crazy? I had my hands deep in those early songs, very deep. And who gets all the glory?”
“I do,” he said forcefully. I winced; it was the wrong word, “glory.” “Because I did all the work, Percy. I was up until four a.m. every night making Funny Strange. I played every part. Then I had to teach three randoms how to play those parts, how to show up to rehearsal on time, how to not become drug addicts on the road. I lived in a van with them for a year of my life, for God’s sake.”
I turned onto a side street and sat on the bottom stair of a Victorian stoop. I wanted to say that I wasn’t asking to be credited for playing the parts or being his road manager; I was asking to be credited for writing. But I was scared of what other petty accusations might be waiting in my mouth. Who cared about glory? I wanted the pride.
“I know you deserve the glory, Joe,” I said finally, quietly.
“But it still makes you mad.”
“It does,” I admitted. “And jealous. I can’t help that. The jealousy was what tipped me over the edge that night at the wedding. It was always there. I will always be jealous of you.”
“Fine. I will always be inspired by you, even when you tell me not to be,” he said.
“And I will always be critical of you too. I can’t stand it when you don’t live up to your talent.”
“And I will always be destroyed by your criticism.”
I pulled the hot phone from my ear, fighting an impulse to throw it into the street. What more could be said? When I told Zoe later, she said it sounded like we had exchanged a perverse version of vows. I can’t remember exactly how the conversation ended, who hurled the first goodbye; it was just extremely, obviously over.
The Weakness in Me
The Strong & Wrong tour was scheduled to come through SF late that summer. Zoe and Melissa had tickets; even Zoe’s parents had tickets. I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t want to explain why not, so I decided to be out of town. It was time for my recruiting tour anyway—“tour” being my boss’s word, not mine, I swear, for my semiannual trendsetter scavenger hunt around the country—though I did bump it up a week. I made LA my first stop, booking a four-day stay at the Mondrian on Sunset starting the night of Joe’s show.
It seemed like a clever plan until Zoe pointed out, quite brightly, that I could still see Caroline—they were going to LA immediately after SF! They’d be playing two nights at the Troubadour while I was there! Joe Morrow was entirely inescapable! I kept my face neutral when she delivered the news, though of course she knew exactly what she was doing.
She called me the morning after the SF show. I was driving around Hollywood in my rental car, drinking spa water from the hotel lobby out of a thermos and shuffling LA music (Laurel Canyon, Rilo Kiley). My only experience driving as an adult had been in LA, and it always made me feel a mellow sort of alienation, almost pleasant.
“That was insane,” Zoe said, instead of hello.
I pinched the phone between my ear and shoulder and turned down the stereo.
“People were flipping out. I kept wanting to say chill out, you guys, it’s just Joey! But it wasn’t just Joey. He’s on another level now.”
Yet another level, I thought. “Who came?”
“My entire high school, for starters—some of them had pictures of their babies, so that was weird. Joey’s dad lurked in the back for a bit.”
“Really? Is he…”
“What, in AA?” She snorted. “He had a good year or so a while back, apparently, but no—I talked to him for five minutes and almost got drunk off the smell of him. Still, he was very proud, which was sweet.”
The idea that his dad showing up drunk for only a portion of Joe’s big show could be considered “sweet” was unbearably depressing to me—and “proud,” really? Did he get to be proud? But Zoe had moved on.
“Lots of Berkeley people, of course. Some of them said to say hi. Your old roommate was there!”
“What? Megan?”
“Yeah! I told her what you’ve been up to. She didn’t even know about your blog.”
This made me feel guilty, though I couldn’t say for sure that I was to blame for losing touch with her. She had disappeared without protest.
“I saw Joey before the show too,” she said, a bit cautiously. “He came out to my parents’ house for lunch. Melissa too. It was really—man, it was really special. My dad was so stoked to make Joey his tamales. My mom had two mimosas and got all tipsy. I wish you could’ve been there.”
I turned onto Santa Monica Boulevard, one of those blocks you see in movies, lined with towering palms. Mr. Gutierrez had cooked for the three of us once or twice, back in the fall of ’00. Melissa had probably sat in my chair, the one that was the cat’s favorite, warm and covered in tiny hairs.
“Are you still there?”
“Sorry. I’m driving.” I cleared my throat. “Did you go backstage after the show?”
“Yeah, but that was hella chaotic because he let in all our friends. It’ll be more chill tonight.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Percy,” she warned. “He knows you’re there.”
“Oh, does he? Thanks, Zoe.” I passed the Troubadour, rubbernecking as long as I could at the Caroline in black block letters on the marquee. “It’s sold out anyway.”
“Send him a text,” she said. “Seriously. I don’t care if you go backstage, but go to the show. I don’t know why you would deprive yourself of this.”
“Deprive myself! Hilarious!”
“ ‘Bay Window’ was the highlight of the night. Everyone agreed. Just him and the piano, near the end of the set.”
I put on my turn signal so I could circle back again. “Fine.”
* * *
—
I waited until I was back at the hotel, comfortable on the massive bed. Zoe said you might have a ticket for me tonight in LA?
His response was instant: Great! Just give your name at the door, I’ll put you on the list for All Access.
K, I wrote back. Probably won’t stick around tho—I’m here on a work trip.
Noooo at least come back for a hug, came the reply.
This felt oddly friendly given our last conversation. Maybe I should go backstage, I thought. It did sound exciting. And then he wrote: My girlfriend will be there, if that’s what you’re worried about.
I dropped the phone into the bright white bedsheets. A minute later it lit up again: Her band is our opener.
And again: Just sayin there’s no danger of us accidentally sleeping together like the last time we saw each other hah.
My gut spun with nausea. I googled the opener—the Troubadour marquee had said The Curlers—and knew right away it was the bass player. I’d seen her in a photo with Joe a few months back on Last Night’s Party, while scouring the party blogs for pictures I could use in my trend report. They were just standing next to each other at a warehouse party, not touching, so I hadn’t thought much of it. But now here was her face again on the cover of the Curlers’ self-titled debut, pale flawless complexion in the camera’s flash, hair a fiery shag. I found the warehouse photo again, and this time I could see it: the intimate lean in their shoulders, which were almost the same height, and a matching sheen of sweat, like they’d just been dancing, or performing.
Joe was still texting. Bay Window is bringing the house down- have you seen the updates online? Lawyers made it happen fast, they’re sending you papers.
I pulled up the iTunes Store and there it was: “Bay Window (J. Morrow/P. Marks).”
Morrow/Marks!
Now I was smiling broadly and also still nauseated. God, it looked glorious. I took a screenshot on iTunes, and then Wikipedia, and everywhere else I could find it online. On the band’s Myspace wall, a recent post:
Due to a rather extreme example of human error, the song “Bay Window” was improperly credited on the first CD printing as being written by Joe Morrow. “Bay Window” was actually co-written by Joe Morrow and Percy Marks. Check out her blog Walgreens Songs. Thank you, Percy.
I picked my phone back up: Special your welcomes, Joe.
