Free Whale Music by Paul Quarrington Page B

he’d holler as soon as we were all uniformly attired. “No schnooze.” The other thing the father had in abundance was ideas on hair. “You’re all gonna dye your hair white!”
    Sal Goneau shivered at this prospect. Dewey Moore’s hair gave the impression that it would fight off tampering of its own volition. Monty’s hair was close to being white anyhow, and replacing God-given bleach with a bottled brand was to him repugnant. This is the first true fight we had with the father, Danny leading the attack.
    “No way,” he said.
    “I’m the boss!” screamed the father.
    “No way,” repeated Dan.
    “I
made
you!” The father was perhaps referring to the two doggedly relentless bits of sperm that had produced my brother and myself. This was not the last time we would hear this peculiar claim.
    “We are not dyeing our hair,” Danny said with finality.
    The father crossed quickly to Danny and slapped him twice on the face. Danny then reared back and caught the father with a roundhouse, laying him out on his duff. I picked the father up, whispered that I would be willing to dye my hair. He said, “Who cares?” and stormed out. The incident was never mentioned again.
    Our first gig was in some swank nightclub high in the Hollywood Hills. The father had an unclear notion as to where the Howl Brothers’ audience was, although we could have told him they weren’t in this velvet and chrome emporium intowhich people pranced from the golf courses and tennis courts.
    Setting up took twenty minutes. It’s funny to think that in a few years we would be having to fly our equipment to a city two days in advance of a concert, that we would have no less than three road crews in our employ, three complete sets of sound systems. Back then, we just had tiny tube amplifiers, little boxes that hummed discordantly.
    The patrons eyed us with suspicion. They winced as we tested our instruments. I played a sweet little major C triad and they winced. Sal patted out an inoffensive paradiddle and they winced. Monty strummed G, the chord of the singing cowboys, and they winced. So Dewey dropped a note in their laps that sounded like an elephant voiding last night’s dinner. Their faces froze in rictuses of terror. Danny grabbed the microphone, pulled it out of its holder and said, “We’re the Howl Brothers.” He gave the count and we launched into “Torque Torque”.
    Until then, rock and roll songs had threatened only that the young people would dance a lot. The worst that might happen, according to the tunes, is that the young people might stay up all night. We were different. Our songs threatened
mobilization
, we were going to climb into powerful machines and actually go out on search-and-destroy missions! No wonder the older people fished the fruit out of their cocktails and hurled it in our direction. Likewise that their children made for the stage like it was Valhalla. Danny was doing his thing, his hands twisted in the air, his head shyly buried into his chest. The kids started doing this too, it became quite the rage, you know, this dance of awkwardness and crippled emotions.
    The triumvirate were there, of course. The father was sure we were ruining our chances, he hollered at us to break out the schnoozy tunes. He wrote requests on cocktail napkins and had waitresses ferry them up to the stage, and although he changed his handwriting on every one, I had him spotted. Not many other people were likely to request “Vivian in Velvet.” Maurice Mantle was there, wearing a three-piece pin-stripethat looked like he’d borrowed it from God, who was exactly the same size. Kenny Sexstone grinned like the Vienna Boys Choir had gone co-ed and was gathered under the table, chewing him up from the waist down.
    Girls stood slack-jawed, mesmerized by either Monty or Danny. The ones who would worry about wrinkling their clothes tended to favour Monty, who looked like his shit came out pressed and folded. Girls without such concerns