Dark Screams: Volume Two (15 page)

J
ANUARY 1, 1980

1:15 A.M.

The rock band Whatever, a group that many fans and critics felt defined thinking man’s rock and the intellectual cutting edge of early-seventies music, died in a fatal air crash last night outside Montreux, Switzerland.

The group had been returning to the United States after a New Year’s Eve performance. All three members were killed when their private aircraft collided with snow-covered mountains.

The group’s manager and original producer, Purdee Boots, reached in his Los Angeles offices, said, “…we’re all in shock.”

Swiss police investigators at the scene of the disaster said the interior of the crashed jet had been filled with the remains of religious objects.

“They must’ve been holding mass up there, or something,” said Detective Claude Thoin. “Some kind of gloomy thing going on.”

J
ANUARY 7,
1980

11:50 P.M.

“So, here’s my question…

“Whatever?

“I mean, talk about a band hitting its peak…”

J
ANUARY 15, 1980

I’m writing this at three o’clock in the morning.

I was unable to complete this article as I’d hoped. I’d wanted to get into the childhood of each member, the matrices of their lives prior to forming Whatever. But they ran out of time.

I hope that what I’ve gathered, while fragmentary, compared to the redblood dimension of real lives, and while tending toward mosaic, captures some of their lives and extraordinary gifts. Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe I won’t either. Life. Just like Inga said.

When I arrived at the site of the fatal collision, my eye was caught by Swiss police plastic-bagging bits of religious objects found around the crash site. It was quite cold on the mountain and as the bodies were taken away by helicopter and I watched them lift off, I remembered the night I’d flown with the group, after a show they’d done at the Forum, in Los Angeles, five years ago.

We were on our way to Dallas, and I’d been around the band long enough to earn their trust. That night they shared something enormously private with me: a ritual. They allowed me to witness it, though I was asked to take an oath that I’d never talk about what I’d seen.

Because of their untimely deaths, I feel I can now talk about it. I hope that instinct is right. This is what I remember:

The night we left LAX, ten minutes off the ground, Rikki Tutt put the band’s 707 on autopilot. Then, he came into the back with the rest of the band. The cabin of the jet had no seats, only big throw pillows. It was almost two a.m.

Rikki put on a haunting album of a beautiful choir as it sang at Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral service. The voices were filled with pain, and it had a strangely opiate effect on us.

Greg Magurk dimmed the small spotlights throughout the fuselage and the others lighted exactly one hundred candles of different size. I don’t know what the number signified. But it was observed; somehow essential. They used candleholders from the innumerable churches Wall had robbed.

The five joined hands, closed eyes. Then, one by one, each asked for truth always to be there. Wax bled onto countless candleholders, marring the tarnished divinity like Christ’s blood.

In my mind, I can still see Tutt and Magurk, cross-legged on pillows. More serious than I’d ever seen them, faces shadowed by candlelight, eyes seeming to await some onrushing fact of being.

G. G. Wall, Philip Zapata, and Stomp McGoo sat next to one another and joined hands with Greg and Rikki. All were exhausted from the show and in the flame-flicker, they glistened; Indian braves readying to meet the Great Spirit.

Truth.

It became their church. Their fortress in a city that had died.

In the end, maybe it was the seventies that did it. Who the fuck knows. Magurk once told me that the “…meretricious bacteria of the American dream” offended him. “The sordid dealings and thieveries.” He meant the music business. Washington. Democrats. Republicans. Bad music. Bad leaders.

A gravity without planet.

In music, Whatever felt the no-talents with vacuous product had ruined things. The money machine that co-opted art and used it like cheap gas ran the show.

Whatever came into mythic immensity and were enthroned in a world filled with barrels of oil worth $19.00, sold for $46.00. With peace accords that had ghostly half-lives. With meanings devoid.

I wonder if they knew the mountain was there. That they had seen enough; that the distance between what they valued and what the world had become took them before they even collided; buried in steel and snow.

It’s a thought. But it doesn’t change the fact that I miss them. That they should never have stopped mattering. That they were forgotten and replaced, entombed by the manic decay of a vain decade.

This is the last note I received from Greg and Rikki. They were in Amsterdam just before Christmas, working on the sound track for a low-budget film called
Void of Course,
about an American president who suffers a nervous breakdown and no one notices. They were proud of their compositions. The note read:

Hola Fine Man,

We’ve thought about your suggestion of doing a book about the band. We’re going to pass. Not even sure we want to do the long piece you envision in
Rolling Stone.
Bands shouldn’t be novels. Or manifestos. Anyway we’re over. Just an oldies-but-goodies tape.

Stomp says the seventies were just the sixties with worse hair. We say the seventies never even existed. We ought to know.

You thought we were about ideas, a certain Escher perception set to music. But it’s just rock and roll. Comes. Goes. Fades in the rearview.

Hey, man…we’ve been at this party long enough.

How about you?