Outbound

She had some 'cred in the music business, but not a lot, not the kind I had, anyway -- but what I did have was Pops, my grandfather. He was fairly high up on the food chain at Universal, and their MCA Records division wanted to cash in on the exploding pop/rock market that Capitol had cornered. So, we retreated into the house on Channing Way one February day and didn't come out again until May, and only then did three of us, Deni, Pete and me, hop in someone's old VW Microbus and slither down the 101 to Burbank -- straight to Pop's office.

He was old by then, seriously old, but he was also sharp as a tack. We walked in and he looked at us like we'd just crawled out from under a rock, which, I have to say, wasn't too far from the truth.

"Aaron," he asked when he quasi-recognized me, "is that you under that hair?"

You see, by 1968 my hair was hanging down somewhere south of my knees, and George Harrison's beard had nothing on mine. Well, his was probably cleaner.

"Hey, Pops," I said, 'Pops' still being my characteristic greeting. "We need a recording studio. I want to cut an album."

I am not, you understand, one to waste time on idle chit-chat.

"Oh?" he said, with one raised eyebrow. One eyebrow meant he was listening. Two meant you needed to start running for the door.

So I tossed our demo reel on his desk, a big Tascam reel-to-reel spool, and he looked at it, then at Deni. And you have to understand this about Pops: he was only interested in her tits by this point. If she could sing, great, but she had great tits and I could see that working over in his mind -- as in: she'll look great on an album cover. He had no interest in her physically, only in the commercial appeal of Deni's tits.

So he picked up his phone and dialed an extension.

"Lew? Aaron's just popped in, and he has a demo. Can I send him up now?"

So off we went, off to see the wizard. A dozen people gathered and listened to our demo and we walked out an hour later with a recording contract. We hopped in the VW and drove back up the 101 in a blinding rainstorm, got back to the purple paisley house a little after midnight -- and only then did Deni attack me. In a good way, if you know what I mean. We came up for air a few days later, and the really interesting thing about us is we realized we were heroin to one another. We were dangerously intoxicated when we mixed, so much so we knew we were in danger of losing ourselves, each to the other. We stepped back after that, afraid of our own little brand of spontaneous combustion.

Yet after those two days and nights wrapped up in one another, Deni dropped the whole Black Goth thing and went in for this deep purple paisley look. Flowing silk capes of gauzy purple, and then the house began to reek of patchouli. Patchouli incense was burning 24/7, and she put patchouli oil on everything, notably the polish she used to wipe down her rosewood furniture. The scent wasn't quite overpowering, but it came close, and the whole patchouli thing became indelibly linked to those months. I can't not think of her when I run across that scent.

Anyway, we loaded up all our gear and ambled back to Burbank a week later, and we had several days booked to get the sound we wanted down on tape. I've since read books on musicians of that era, these works being little more than monographs of artistic egoism run amok, and I shudder to think what would have happened to us if that had been the case. Instead, it seemed as if Deni and her mates knew this was their one big shot, and they had to get the job done this time or prepare to wait tables for the rest of their lives. We came together, Pete and I -- and her friends, and the results were something else.

We ended up spending a month in the studio, yet before we were finished MCA released a single that shot up the charts into the top-10, and on the strength of that alone they booked us to play three nights at the Universal Amphitheater later that summer -- and I didn't think anything about it at the time, maybe because I was so wrapped up in the moment.

Deni was our lyricist, and she was a good one too, but she wasn't quite what I'd have called an original. She listened to other recording artists all the time, listening for inspiration and ideas. Always looking for new ways to spin a phrase, new transitions between parts of a song -- yet she couldn't read or write music on her own, what you might call notation. She had an instinctual grasp of the inherent order within a musical phrase, but she couldn't see structure when expressed in notes and chords on a piece of paper. This wasn't a big deal as I looked at the innate phrasing of her lyrical constructs and went from there, and as she wrote new stuff she'd come over to me and sing variations. Not a big deal, and a lot of pop music is created that way, but it was a big move away from the classical paradigm -- where arias are derived from the inherent structure within a passage of music.

An unknown named Elton John showed up while we were in the studio and he listened for a while then disappeared, and I dropped by one of his sessions a few days later and was blown away by his exuberance, his showmanship -- even in the studio. And it hit me then, my lump on a log stage mannerism, and I knew I was not and would never be an Elton John. He was an impressionist masterpiece, and I was a Dutch still life -- destined to reside on the edge of the stage, the edge of the world, my back to the action -- and I knew there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. As soon as the lights went up I began to freeze inside, like my mind was suddenly and completely encased in brittle ice. I was jealous.

So, the album was released and it was a bigger hit than even Pops thought it would be. And yes, there was lots of cleavage on the front cover. Purple paisley and cleavage. My God, Deni did have canyons of cleavage. We played a few small gigs on Sunset and Hollywood, a few parties in the Hills of Beverly too, and we started mapping out our second album during that time. Then our first night at the Amphitheater came up and everything inside just kind of snapped. I couldn't even walk out on stage for our practice session that afternoon, and for the first time what had been kind of a modest idiosyncrasy turned into a real liability. I looked at my mates looking at me and I knew they couldn't understand...hell, I didn't understand...but this was something that could seriously fuck up their chances of making it big.

Pops called a doc, some Beverly Hills shrink, and she came out and gave me a shot in the hip, told me to rest for a half hour, and she sat with me and we talked.

She looked like Faye Dunaway, if you know who I mean. About fifty, blond hair and seriously gorgeous. Smart? Dear God. It was like she had this ability to look inside souls, take an inventory and figure out what was wrong. Me? It was all about losing my parents when I was a kid. My dad was an actor and he had gone down to Mexico, to Acapulco, to receive some kind of award, and their plane crashed on the way back, so yeah, separation anxiety lead to more and more anxieties and Pops had had no idea. Hell, neither did I. But Terry did. Anyway, understanding did not lead to catharsis and by the time we were called on stage I was no better. The doc's magic potion helped, but Terry was there and just seeing her helped me keep it together long enough to do the show, and while it was magic, the ovations and the wild applause, as I walked offstage I passed right out. Down like a sack of potatoes, right on the edge of the stage.

Or so I read in newspaper accounts the next morning. Despite not having diabetes the episode was ascribed to hypoglycemia and that was that. I spent all that next day working with a studio musician who would be on standby, a kind of understudy, in case I cratered that night -- and yes, of course I did.

I watched from backstage as this stranger played my music, and in fact he played better than I had, a supple fact not lost on Deni and my bandmates. I didn't even show up for the third night's performance, and when we returned to Berkeley the next day everyone tried to not make a big deal about it -- but I knew something had changed between us. We all did, Deni most of all. I felt like damaged goods, a broken doll that not even all the king's men could put back together, but we started writing music and pretty soon all was forgotten -- if not forgiven.

We went back to Burbank a few months later and started laying down tracks when word came that we were going to tour North America in the fall and Europe the coming winter -- and I started going to the shrink in Beverly Hills more often. Maybe she could help, I told my mates. Yeah, maybe, they said.

Then a funny thing happened. The shrink invited me to go sailing with some friends of hers the next morning. I accepted the invitation, too, if only because I wanted to get to know her better, and I ran out and got a haircut too. Bought some boat shoes, of all things, and some natty red sailing shorts to go with them. Oh, I looked so Beverly Hills! Well, no, Newport Beach.

The boat, a huge racing yacht that had been famous in the 30s, belonged to her husband, of course, a billionaire property developer who owned half of LA and all of SanDiego, and they had a professional crew sailing the boat so all I had to do was sit around and look interested in my boat shoes. Yet the truth of the matter was I did indeed find sailing interesting. In fact, the idea of sailing away from all my anxiety seemed enticing. I talked to the skipper about boats and sailing for a while and I learned a lot that afternoon.

There was another couple on the boat that day, a property developer from Newport Beach who had brought his wife and daughter along. The girl looked a little younger than I, and she was studying some kind of psychology at UC Irvine. And hey, she loved our single. Her name was, of course, Jennifer. Every other girl in OC is named Jennifer, has been since the beginning of time.

She looked like one of Southern California's home grown Hitler Youth so common to Orange County back in the day: rich, privileged, blond haired and blue eyed, yet she was sweet in a troubled kind of way -- and she loved sailing. Well, I thought I might love sailing, too, so we had something in common, right? Anyway, we talked boats and I figured out pretty quick she knew a lot more about boats than I ever would, that she'd grown up around boats, and also that she really, really liked our single. She even had an original 45 of Lucy-Goosy, bless her heart, and we went out for a burger after we got back to the marina, then I drove her down to Newport, to her dorm at UCI -- called Middle Earth, of course -- but when we got there she pointed me towards the beach and we went down to the peninsula, watched the moon fall on Catalina just before the sun decided to show up for a return engagement. She was sweet and I got into her way of talking real fast, thought it was kind of cool.

There was a boat show in Newport, she told me, usually in April or May, and she wanted to know if I'd come down and go to it with her. I said 'sure, sounds fun' before I knew what had happened, and we looked at one another when I dropped her off at the dorm like we were not quite sure where this was going. I wanted to kiss her, and I could tell she wanted me to, but I couldn't -- because I was afraid, and I told her so, too. I told her about seeing the shrink, about my looming performance anxiety and she seemed to understand. Anyway, I gave her my number at Pop's house and she leaned over and kissed me once, gently, then again, not so gently, and then she told me I didn't have anything to be worried about where she was concerned -- and everything kind of slipped into place after that. Right there in the car, as a matter of fact.

We finished the second album over the next few weeks then took a break, our first big tour not scheduled to begin for a month or so, and I went to Pop's house to unwind. Everything seemed pretty much the same there, except Pops seemed to be slowing down, and suddenly, too. He said his back hurt more than it had until recently, and Terry and I talked him into going to see his doc.

And Jennifer called my first night there, said she was going to be at the marina Saturday and wanted to know if I wanted to go out on a new boat. Sure, I said, and we set a time to meet up -- and after that I couldn't think about anything other than her -- until my next appointment with the shrink, anyway. Pop's internist was in the same building as my shrink so I dropped him off for his appointment then ducked in for mine, but when I came back for him an hour later he was still inside -- so I sat and waited.

And waited.

And a nurse finally came out and asked for me, led me back to some forbidden inner sanctum -- where I found Pops all red-eyed, an old internist handing him tissues. Prostate cancer, advanced well into the spine was the preliminary diagnosis, but biopsies would be done early Monday morning and we'd go from there. We left and he was pissed off because the same doc had told him a year ago the pain was probably related to a fall he'd taken a few years before. Maybe if he'd been more thorough he'd have a chance now, he said, because if it had moved into the spine that was it.

"What do you mean, that's it?"

You have to understand that while my parents died when I was three, since then no one I knew had kicked the bucket -- and now, all of a sudden, the most important person in my life was telling me he was going to die, soon? That this was it? The ride's over already? No more ups and downs?

I had an emotional disconnect then, I guess you might say. I was a little more concerned with my well being than his in that moment, well, a little more than afraid -- but for me. No, let me rephrase that. I fell apart and we held on to one another there in the lobby for way too long, then we walked over to Nate 'n Al's for bagels and lox. He called some of his buddies from the studio, told them to come over for a few hands of poker that night -- which was code for 'shit has hit the fan' and we sat there watching the ice melt in our glasses of iced tea, neither of us knowing what the hell to say to one another. Terry would surely come apart at the seams tonight, he said, then this lanky gentleman walked in and came over to our booth and sat down next to me.

Jimmy Stewart, in town between shoots and an old friend of the family, looked at Pops and sighed. "Aaron, you look awful. Now tell-tell me, why-why-why all the long faces?"

So Pops lays it out there and then Jimmy is all upset, the ice in his iced tea is melting along with ours, then he finally turns and looks at me.

"Heard that album of yours. It sure isn't Benny Goodman, is it?"

Pops broke out laughing at that. "It sure isn't, but that lead singer of theirs sure has great gonzagas. World class, if you know what I mean."

Stewart rolled his eyes, shook his head. "All he can think about at a time like this is tits. Aaron? You'll never change."

"Amen to that, brother," Pops said. "What do you have in that sack, James? Another model airplane?"

"Yup, yup. Me 'n Hank Fonda, you know how that goes?"

"Did you ever see his model room, Aaron?" Pops asked me.

"Yessir, been a few years, but..."

"I was building that B-52 when you were up there, wasn't I?" Jimmy recalled. "Wingspan this big," he said, holding his hands about a mile apart and we all laughed. He got up and patted Pops on the shoulder a minute later, told him he'd call soon, then he ambled over to a table where Gloria was already waiting and I could see the expression on her face when he told her. Small town, Beverly Hills. Good people, too.

I got up early the next morning and drove down to the marina, met Jennifer at the anointed hour and she took me down to a slip below an apartment building and we hopped aboard a brand new Swan 4o. There were two other girls onboard already and they slipped the lines, let Jennifer back the boat out of the slip while they readied the sails. We sailed out of the marina after that, then turned south for Palos Verdes -- and with barely enough wind to fill the sails the girls soon gave up and turned the engine on. Seems they were delivering the boat from the marina to it's new owner down at the LA Yacht Club and I was along for the ride, but by the time we cleared the Point Vicente lighthouse we had enough wind to raise sail again and had a rip-roaring nine mile sleigh ride after that. Feeling the motion, the wind through my hair -- the power within the wind -- was almost a religious experience, too. I was hooked, big time.

There was a big difference, too, between 40 feet and 83. The smaller boat felt almost alive compared to the old J-class boat I'd sailed on the week before, and I found myself mesmerized by the sharp sensations. I didn't know it at the time, but Jennifer studied my face that day, told me once she was reliving her earliest sailing experiences by watching my reactions that day. She was very dialed into me, I guess you could say, even then.

We turned the boat over to her new owner and drove down to Newport Beach, stopped and had an early dinner at The Crab Cooker, and after we dropped off the girls she drove me back up to the marina, and I told her about Pops then, about what my grandfather really meant to me, and she remained quiet all the while, let me ramble-on until we pulled into the lot where I'd left my car. She parked and turned to face me, leaned the side of her face on the seat and stared at me.

"What are you going to do now?" she asked. "Try to go on tour?"

"I don't think I can do that. I need to be here now, with him."

She nodded her head. "I think so, too. You need anyone to talk to, just call me. Any time, day or night. Got it?"

I nodded my head, then looked her in the eye. "What happens if I fall in love with you?"

"If?" she said, grinning.

"Okay. When I fall in love with you?"

"Are you sure you haven't already?"

I can still feel that moment, even now. Like it was the most important moment of my life, those precious seconds are still right there with me, wherever I go.

"I know exactly when I fell in love with you," I said -- still looking in her eyes.

"Oh?"

"About a minute ago. Before that I was fighting it."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I think you've been fighting it all day. I know I have."

I smiled, felt real relief inside, then asked: "You want to go meet my Pops?"

She nodded her head. "Yeah. I think that'd be good."

So we went. She met Pops and he loved her too, which was kind of a good thing. It was the first time I'd ever come home with a girl, and the moment wasn't lost on either of us. My grandmother, Terry, was a little coy about the whole thing, a little too reserved one minute then effusive the next, but by the time we left she'd come around too. Back then I could never quite tell what was on Terry's mind.

"So, you're the one?" Pops asked when he walked us to the driveway, and Jennifer didn't know what to say just then, but I did.

"Yeah, Pops, she's the one. You mind if we run off to Vegas and do the deed, or did you want us to do it here?"

"Let's all go to Vegas," he said. "I can hit the tables after, and who knows, maybe I'll get lucky," he added, popping my grandmother lightly on her tail-feathers.

And we all laughed at that, even Terry, but we weren't fooling anyone. Not by a long shot. Life's never as simple as it seems, especially when it's staring you in the face.

"He's kind of cool," Jennifer said as we drove back to the marina. "Old school Hollywood, I guess."

"He is that. Not many like him left in town."

"Thanks for letting me meet him. Even if you were joking..."

And I looked at her just then, like maybe I'd been joking, or maybe I hadn't. And she looked at me, too.