The afternoon air was chattery with sparrows standing in as elizabethan larks, honeysuckle and honeybee, a sky’s faded blue, a lazy sky, unribboned with vapor trails or cloud.
Mary was too much in love with the beautiful day to finish the song she was working on. She was usually adept at fashioning darkness from sunlight, at coaxing shadow from the white page but her good mood was adding words which Aquinas would mock, or stumble over. Quickswoon, roselick, spendlove.
She shoved the notebook under the armchair and turned to her boxes of LPs, alphabetized to a private code she wished she could share with someone, anyone. Flipping through the record albums she found and lifted out the old familiar. The cover art of a biplane above a used-car lot, biplane done in full Crayola range, the skyline below in black and white. Generic or San Francisco, what did she know? The cartoony balloons on the back cover still floated with the same childish grace as the day she’d bought the album, and she still remembered the utter unexpectedness of what was pressed inside. She’d never cared for the laser-thin writing on the gatefold, white or black, both tingeing to blue over time. Perhaps it had been intentional, what looked like jabbings on a metal surface, but it had been close to impossible to read in the drawn-blind darkness of her high school bedroom.
‘After Bathing At Baxter’s’ was among the handful of records that kept a permanent place in Mary’s pantheon. With the brief exception of the second track (a throwaway joke for first-time acidheads … no man is an island … he’s a peninsula), she could always depend on a forty-minute trip that would leave her elated, and deepened, with a sense of having accomplished something worthwhile. And time always had a way of slowing way way down as she listened, as though six-foot invisible Harvey had pushed off from his lamppost outside of Charlie’s late-night bar and stopped the world’s clocks for her and Jorma (and jackgracespencermartypaul as well). The guitars had conquered her from the first. She had surrendered herself to a ravishing world. There was an occasional piano, and more than occasional on ‘rejoyce’ of course, which she’d always assumed was Grace, ribbons of single notes that she’d been seduced by in the very beginning, too much a fan to question, and then later wondering at the intent, that sort of buried counter-guitar underdub. Now she heard the piano, or rather quite distinctly saw it as a connect-the-dot sketching of a chord, pockets of greenery among the brambles and thumping, the guitar solos toning from fat to thorn without the least amble of aimlessness, but racing out the speakers with the panic-stricken authority of going all the way in broad young daylight. But maybe the piano wasn’t Grace after all? One of those cozy sixties moments, Nicky Hopkins perhaps? Like wearing your boyfriend’s shirt. The first sound was pure pleasure, a pierce of feedback reined in, letting you know what lay ahead.
She put it on the 2nd side and sat, hands on her knees, listening like she was in Chartres.
Last Wall Of The Castle … Two Heads … Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon.
She almost didn’t skip Spare Chaynge but right now at this chartrean montrosian lovely moment she wanted melody.
Next she put on ‘Bark’, loving it almost as much for its being so underrated as for the very real explosions of stripped down rock and roll which it had always promised, provided, taken away again.
Her favorite of Grace’s songs on the album.
-I’m tired and sweet from making love, bring your business around here in the morning …’
What cop would have been able to resist that, the languid pissed-off delivery of Ms. Slick, kimonoed and barefoot and sex-haired, through a summer’s screen door?
The beginning of the end though. Paul’s already having visions of Jesus and UFOs, and the ships are now no longer wooden.