Dark Screams: Volume Two (11 page)

N
EW
Y
EAR’S
D
AY, 1972

“I’m fuckin’ exhausted. Bad influenza.”

Jagger; straw to gimlet. Horse teeth shoving out lips; gaudy fenders. “Is that a pun? Christ…”

When he talks it looks like oral sex. He’s tanning. A lewd little boy in Spandex; the Groin Gatsby, afloat on a 150-foot bauble. Right now, he has the sniffles and a hundred temperature. His features are a water-retentive Halloween mask; not a face that should host a head cold.

The other Stones are down there somewhere, in wet slow-mo, with rented air, scoping out the coral and triggers. Scaring the specimens with horned, goateed jewelry. Scarred arms. Albino eels worth too many million to pester the math.

“Sunken cheeks amid sunken treasure,” Mick suggests. “So…what is it? You want my opinion?” He likes the idea, disaffected glee trickling. He lights an antique pipe, tokes. Answers, tucking air in lungs, sounding inside a heavy sack.

“…okay. They’re us. If we were good enough to be them.”

I jot it down. He dimples Learjet cool. Licks the edge of his perfect little glass, a pink rag sponging. Then, as suddenly, looks off into a place he wants out of, fast. A place of torrential wrongness.

“But that shit they write is intense. These guys are tormented.” He shrugs. “It’s not Woodstock anymore. Besides, like Keith says, that was just mud and bad acid.”

He blows Barnum air, yawns like the world’s richest kitty.

“But same time…I wouldn’t want to be them. The light they use inside those heads…too fuckin’ bright. You can see everything. You heard ‘Error of the Opposite’ from the first album? The songs are fuckin’ brilliant, but…where you get a light like that?”

Sunglasses reflect yachts, refrigerator magnet–sized boats sliding across his lenses. He says nothing. Sneezes. Coughs S-M Caruso guck from a throat insured by Lloyds. Groans, unhappily.

“I’d hate to see everything. That’s why they invented…what did they invent, again, mate?”

“Shadows?”

He shakes his head. No, that’s not it.

“Limits?”

He’s losing interest. You can tell when that happens to rock stars. They dive into perfect sea and soak you.

D
ECEMBER 9,1969

Petals, a soft rock group that specialized in emotion-drenched lyrics, has broken up, and its members have left to form other groups. Founder Rikki Tutt is rumored to be working in an L.A. studio with ex-Seance member Greg Magurk, known for his acerbic lyrics and dark wordplay in such well-known songs as 1967’s top ten hit “Miss Take.” Magurk recently returned from a honeymoon in France, during which his much-publicized marriage to Bibi Rousse, a former colonic hygienist, was abruptly canceled.

Drummer Stomp McGoo, late of Louisiana funk band Pressure, is manning the sticks. Phil Zapata of folk duo Zapata and Lake is rumored to be jumping ship from the latest Z+L European tour to join. Lake has reportedly filed a lawsuit against his partner. Their
Take a Guess
album has been top ten for more than five weeks.

Sounds like something plenty interesting getting rolled and lighted here, kids. Keep you posted.

1968

When I met you,

I wasn’t good for much.

A six-pack of nowhere.

Wasn’t safe to touch.

You cooked me eggplant,

Ironed my flaws and clothes.

Now I’m just a house cat.

Don’t suffer all those lows.

F
EBRUARY 1970

Newly formed group Whatever is currently recording, working with L.A. studio producing whiz Purdee Boots. Rumor is various Beatles and Hollies are sitting in and that the tracks, so far, are monsters. The as-yet-untitled album is due out within the year on VOICE Records.

J
UNE 5,1970

Portion of taped interview with Whatever manager Lenny Lupo.

Q.
How would you describe the band’s sound?

A.
It’s the death knell of nitwit rock. Got melody. Got ideas. You know Zappa’s a fan? Wants to sit in on the next album. If it was the seventeenth century, these guys would be writing operas. Tell you, if I was Bob Dylan, I’d shoot my rhyming dictionary in the head and open a dry cleaners.

Q.
You represented folk acts and surf bands in the sixties. How did you decide to manage the group?

A.
I listened. I liked. Instinct.

Q.
The debut album
Know Means Know
is rumored to be amazing.

A.
Tell you something. Whatever is the American Beatles. I defy anyone to listen to their music and not be profoundly blown away.

Q.
Surf is dead. The British invasion is dead. Where are the seventies going?

A.
Ask me in ten years.

F
EBRUARY 4,1972

Whatever, a band said to have an IQ too big for its own good, escaped imperious repute last night and shook the earth.

Their first album, the exquisitely produced
Know Means Know,
has been enjoying the view from the top of nearly every critic’s list this year. Its exacting mosaic of song and voice, via producer Purdee Boots, is a radiant marvel. But live, the Los Angeles–based quintet is even better.

Their compositions, the work of moody, ponytailed guitarist Greg Magurk and angel-faced bass player/lead vocalist Rikki Tutt, are like small novels set to highly original scores.

However, not content with mere literate Beatle-esquery, the wordplay, observation, and heartache of Messrs. Magurk and Tutt are only part of the hat trick. Their vocals and tunesmithing are also fed by primal rhythms—a voodoo body blow. Make no mistake, this is not a vinyl meringue abloom with tender nothings. It is rock and roll that keeps its mouth open while it chews.

And it is music nearly impossible to resist.

Last night, playing to a stunned crowd that packed the Bottom Line, Whatever was a dizzying Houdini. Mr. Tutt’s vocals were choirboy-sweet and soared without effort. Mr. Magurk’s baleful arias were darker, oozing sly carnality. Wicked lyrics overflowed with estimable ironies, yet never felt like self-indulged puzzles.

While the rest of rock and roll (with few exceptions, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan; perhaps a stray, poignant phrasing from Neil Young, Paul Simon, or Lou Reed) revels in stick drawings, Whatever is doing full figure studies.

Mouth-dropping chops from drummer Stomp McGoo gouged a groove so deep it’s amazing no one fell in and got hurt.

Keyboardist Phil Zapata, a former child prodigy, is all grown-up now; a honky-tonk Chopin who smokes Camels while sledging keyboard and wears shades so dark he takes on the appearance of some Steinway thug.

Rhythm guitarist G. G. Wall, draped in trademark fringe jacket and skintight jeans, chugged the songs into a trance state, power-plucking a Fender neck that must’ve needed a cigarette afterward.

Apart from the astonishing songs of Messrs. Tutt and Magurk, this band could be hugely successful on its own. Working with Messrs. Tutt and Magurk, a supergroup seems probable.

Like some fugitive smoke, Whatever has risen quickly from the horizon of poseurs and record-company puppets that stultify top 40 rock and roll. They are not kings yet. But there is royal talent here.

With its pristine vocals and lyrical savagery, Whatever has ascended to meaning and wonder. Something rare touches these young men.

A
UGUST 1976

“It’s Hubris.”

“Stanley Hubris. One of our finest filmmakers,” says Greg Magurk, Rikki Tutt’s partner and cofounder of Whatever, grinning. He’s currently at pool’s edge, under a hundred pounds of zinc oxide—a five-foot-eleven-inch can of Crisco.

“We’re forever accused of trying to make the journalists trip up, you know? Like we trade in some quicksand prattle and dare initiates to step closer.” Tutt is fed up.

It’s an ultramarine, vaporizer day in Honolulu. Tutt, Magurk, and the rest of Whatever are taking a few days off from L.A., swatting bugs from freshly written songs for the new album,
Philip’s Head,
a tribute to band member Phil Zapata, who died last month in Greenwich Village. Tutt, a private pilot, flew the band to the funeral in Sag Harbor in a retired Avianca 707 the band bought and refurbished—a floating retreat, gutted and filled with warm, fuzzy hedonisms.

The jet, which Whatever members call
SPOT,
brought them to the islands and rockets the entourage to all shows. Random guests on the passenger list have included a prime minister’s wife, who ran away to join Tutt and Magurk’s free-associative sock hop, and a Catholic bishop who lost his faith after discovering sex that didn’t involve himself exclusively, shed his red hat and ended up living with one of the members of Sister Sledge.

In passing, I ask if it’s true about the hole in Zapata’s head.

Tutt nods, dripping pineapple on the decking of this rented house on Diamond Head. “Trepanation. Did it to himself. Decided on the drill bit size and…in he went.”

Magurk plays with a telescope, squints through precision optics, trawling for undesirables.

“He always wanted a higher state of mind. Way Phil figured it, babies are born with skull unsealed…and it’s not until we become adults that the…” He searches for an image.

“…ossified helmet,” Tutt suggests.

“…right. Anyway, that it’s formed, which encloses membranes that moat the brain and block pulsations from the heart. Idea is the brain gets too compressed and starved for sun in there and would love a little fresh air. So, Phil gets it into his head…”

“…temporarily, anyway,” adds Tutt.

“…that he was losing touch with dreams, aberrant ideation and so forth. Then he figures his mental balance is tending toward egoism and eventual psychosis, which Phil argued was man’s inheritance, collectively and individually. That’s when he decided to drill a hole in his head.”

Tutt is humming and wrestling a coconut that keeps escaping his lap and knife, rolling away.

“Anyway, he did it by hand with this weird tool he bought at a surgical store. Called a trepan. Corkscrew thing you work by hand. Sort of a metal spike surrounded by a ring of saw teeth,” explains Magurk.

Tutt takes over. “Spike was meant to be driven into the skull. Then you hold the trepan steady until the revolving saw makes a groove, after which it can be retracted. If all goes well, the saw band removes a disc of bone and exposes the brain.”

“Assuming one’s in there,” says Magurk. He lowers his voice, sadly. “It was a total mess. He bagged it, halfway.”

“Cops said it looked like he had a big flower on his forehead.”

Magurk focuses his telescope. “You can’t force imminent well-being. Who said that?”

“That guy on
McHale’s Navy
?”

They nod somberly.

While Tutt and Magurk have been criticized for trading in flippant and cruel conversation, after an afternoon with them, it’s clear this sort of talk is only their private walkie-talkie humor, which delights in esoteric couplings. Indeed, they plan to give a sizable percentage of the
Philip’s Head
profits to Zapata’s widow, Joyce, who is left with two young sons, Lon and Will. Tutt and Magurk are the godfathers of the boys and call them often from the road. Meanwhile, they’ve brought various studio legends in to take over Zapata’s keyboard chores on the album.

And what about the new songs themselves?

“We like them. Phil would’ve liked them. But before we record, we just want to try the new stuff out in smaller clubs. It’s perfect here. Very low-key. Everybody’s happy in Hawaii.”

“Even the lepers are upbeat.”

“Anyway, we’ve come to avoid the evil ink-ees.”

He means the critics. It’s not that the band gets bad reviews. It’s that Tutt and Magurk can’t help but be appointed
the
voice of their time. They never angled for that pulpit.

“They treat us like we’re a cortex on a marquee. I mean, c’mon guys, who nominated us the skewering conscience of the post-hippie stupor? We’re just songwriters.”

“Look,” says Magurk, “we don’t deny what’s going on. When you’ve got the last few years filled with venal kings in the palace, with their duplicitous munchkins bugging the competitor’s HQ, and the country in that ghastly war, burning children alive, how can you just write about love?”

They fall silent. We watch waves break. Clouds inch.

Magurk scribbles in a notebook, rewriting lyrics for a new song the band has already laid down tracks for in L.A.’s Music Plant. It’s called “Flesh Diction.”

“It was easy ten years ago,” says Tutt. “You just dressed better than John Sebastian and quoted from
Siddhartha
to get laid.” He glances at the spearing sun with a misanthrope’s half-interest. “…Marmalade skies, y’know?”

Magurk isn’t even listening. “Hawaii is a complex braid of man and nature,” he says to no one in particular, eyeing a buxom palomino rising from the surf.

S
EPTEMBER 1971

Nominations were announced today in all Grammy categories. To no one’s surprise, Rikki Tutt and Greg Magurk’s Whatever is being considered in the Best New Rock Group and Best Album categories. The group’s debut album,
Know Means Know,
has been a huge seller and critical favorite and ranks at number 2 in this week’s
Billboard
top 100 albums.