“You don’t like your picture taken?” He ran his hand through his brown hair, which was like a mop. He’d grown a beard over the spring. It balanced his piercing green eyes, which nearly erased the rest of Rick’s features. “You look like Peggy Lipton.”
Sandra snorted. “I wish I looked like Peggy Lipton. And no, I don’t like being the focus of attention.” She returned to her notebook but smiled. She’d thrown a long light-blue coat with light-brown fake-fur cuffs and collar over her shoulders. The garage had no heat, and if she wasn’t playing, she was always chilly.
“Then you’re in the wrong profession, my lady.”
Was he flirting with her? Sandra twirled her pencil and considered this. Rick moved around the garage, taking photos of the empty drum set, the unplugged Fender. Sandra couldn’t help notice everything about this man—his yellow Western shirt, faded jeans, and cowboy boots, the way the Nikon sounded when he advanced the film, and the way he stopped between each shot, rarely taking multiple photos.
Sandra picked up Hugh’s unplugged Fender and began to strum chords that she thought would work. Hugh loved this guitar and took it everywhere. He said that it had belonged to Roy Clark but Sandra had her doubts that Roy Clark ever owned a Fender; more than likely she thought someone had told Hugh the story to sell it to him at a steep price. It was a battered guitar and Sandra knew that Hugh could call his dad for money for a better one, but he never did and that raised Hugh in Sandra’s estimation.
“So how many bands has he been in now?” Rick kept snapping her photo as he motioned to Hugh.
“Hugh? I think he said he’s up to six now.” Hugh seemed to have a history of forming bands, but little success in keeping them together beyond jamming. In the spring, he’d been between bands and posted flyers all over the campus to form a new one, first finding Ezra Gunn, a drummer who was majoring in philosophy.
“How did he find you?” She noticed Rick’s eyes for the first time over the camera frame—they were a light green with dark lashes, a stark contrast.
“He’d seen Ray Manzarek at London Fog and became convinced that a keyboardist was what he needed this time.”
“For band six?”
“Band six has a name. No Exit,” Sandra corrected him.
“Oh, they all had names,” said Rick. “They were terrible. The name has to be your influence because it’s good. Sartre?”
“Ezra said being in a band was like a form of hell. The music was fine; it was the bandmates that he hated. Hugh and I both thought of Sartre’s play—only we had four people living in hell together for eternity instead of three.”
“How did you get hooked up with Hubert?” He snapped more pictures as she talked, here and there like small pecks on the cheek.
Hugh was a powerful pull, like the tide. If you weren’t careful you could get sucked into his surety, the way he thought the world should work. But there had been something about him that Sandra had needed—maybe she needed him to defy his father so she knew she could do it herself. Until Hugh, Sandra had never thought she could be in a band—never imagined she could be a part of something bigger. For his part, Hugh needed Sandra’s discipline. While he was blurry, she was focused. Where he started songs, she finished them.
“He started searching UCLA’s practice studio rooms, going up and down the halls, peering into windows and listening for the right sound. I was working on something—a bit of a blues composition—when I heard this awful pounding noise. The door even shook.” The memory made her smile and she pointed at Lily and Hugh, entwined and silhouetted. Sandra felt a pang of envy. “I found those two peering in the window at me. Hugh kept shouting ‘I found her.’”
“I think this one might make it, though.” Rick switched the flash. “Kim thinks so, too, but she likes to tease him.”
“Why do you think band six will make it?”
“You.” He pointed the camera directly at her and snapped.
Ezra came rushing in, bursting through Hugh and Lily, who were still deep in discussion. With his mop of dark hair that he rarely cut, there was a child-like sense to everything Ezra Gunn did. Often Sandra thought that it would have been easy to fall for Ezra, but there was something dangerous and tragic about him that forced her to keep her distance, almost like he was impermanent.
“I got held up,” Ezra said, plunking himself down at his drum set.
Hugh and Lily had called a truce and come into the garage. The band starting warming up with a few covers “Sunshine of Your Love” and “All Along the Watchtower”—stuff they knew well. Ezra counted them in.
They moved into their own songs, “You Slept On” and “The Fall,” both deeply confessional lyrics written by Hugh about the death of his mother. Sandra had written the music to both songs. “You Slept On” had a more classic piano melody that had been in her head. Sometimes, music came to Sandra in her sleep. When she woke, she’d often race to the practice rooms at UCLA to see if she could capture on the keyboard the fleeting melody in her head.
They’d been experimenting with another section to “The Fall,” a transition that was on the verge of working. Hugh stopped. “I don’t think that’s it.”
Sandra had a melody with a different time in her head. She’d been holding it back, hoping that they could use if for another song, never exactly trusting that another melody would be there, but something about this riff felt right for this song. She flicked a few switches to get a different sound and tried it. Hugh’s face lit up. “That’s it… that’s fucking it, Sandra.”
Sandra could hear Rick’s camera advancing. For a moment, she’d been so engrossed in what they were creating that she’d forgotten about Rick. He was sitting on the floor, taking his time capturing the exchange between Sandra and Hugh.
Hugh picked up the Fender and added another flourish to Sandra’s riff until it felt more complete. A solid self-taught guitar player, Hugh’s true gift was lyrics. He wrote poems and lyrics on little pieces of paper and in his large array of notebooks. Upon hearing what Hugh was playing on the Fender, Sandra layered it with a few additional flourishes on the Gibson. It was this push and pull between them that made the band work. Sandra’s tastes were more classic and folk while Hugh was embracing the psychedelic sound that she thought was coming to an end. She could almost feel what was coming next, the stripped-down sounds of acoustic folk paired with simple, almost country-influenced melodies.
“Let’s try it from the top.” Hugh turned to Ezra to count them in and then he played the first few chords of “The Fall,” singing in his nasal baritone, which had become the signature sound of the band. The melodies were haunting and the music had a timeless quality to it, with people sure it was a cover of something older.
Still, the band needed a bass player. Sandra had seen Ray Manzarek perform; inspired by him, she’d learned to mimic the bass line on her Gibson’s black bass keys. It would have to do until they could find a fifth member of the band.
Midway through “The Fall,” Ezra’s timing was off—way off.
Rick shot Sandra a look of alarm as he kept snapping photos.