Free The Sun in Your Eyes by Deborah Shapiro Page B

know. Not really.”
    â€œA lot of people have passed through here. If these walls could talk, they would probably say they’d like to take a shower.” He didn’t smile. “I’ve told those stories. It gets old. Look, people are people, and they don’t lose their personalities when they happen to be in a relatively debauched state. Jesse came here with a goal and he worked hard. He was very in control, and rather controlling, when we were in the studio. He didn’t want to just make music. He wanted to be a star, to be adored by people he didn’t know, but there’s a certain drive and pathological self-absorption that comes with that territory. I always felt Jesse looked at me with a mix of respect and scorn. He valued the function I served, but it was beneath him. He would never stoop to my level. See, we all hung out with some unsavory people—some of us still do—but it was a question of getting your hands dirty. Calculating how to capitalize on something or someone, how to profit from a situation, how to exploit—these weren’t virtues, not with that crowd. Jesse could have been strung out, sleeping with God knows who, disgracing himself in any number of more creative ways, but that wouldn’t have compromised him. He could quietly pull some old family strings to get out of going to Vietnam, and still, his hands would never have been dirty in the way that mine were. There was always something untouchable about him. Like he appreciated the low life, but he would never get that low. Put it this way: I was his Falstaff for a few months.”
    â€œYou’re saying my father liked to slum it, but he was really a snob?”
    â€œNot a snob. Just different from me. Some part of him found me distasteful, and I wonder if that part didn’t feel similarly toward Linda, as taken with her as he was.”
    With this, Flintwick seemed less Falstaff, more Iago, sowing seeds of doubt. But Lee nodded, and I wondered if this was exactly what she’d wanted to hear. A way in which she was like her father and could identify with him, against her mother. She too found her mother distasteful.
    â€œWhen Jesse was here, he had some fun—Marion was on the scene then—but mostly he was very focused. Actually, Marion sang backup sometimes. He brought a bunch of people out to work with him. Chris Valenti. They always had that thing between them, when they played together, that rowdy partnership with homoerotic overtones. Valenti was an extraordinarily talented guy, more talented than Jesse for sure, but he didn’t have half the charisma. Wound up recording insects or some shit and died about ten years ago outside of Minneapolis. But I digress. Jesse was totally lucid about what he wanted in the studio. He was going in a really melodic direction, but playing around a lot with feedback. I can’t say it was super-innovative technically, but it was classic in an out-of-its-time way. He made some gorgeous noise. Think about what was going on then. You had your disco, your funk, your stadium rock. Your let-me-get-coked-up-so-I can-write-a-song-about-the-evils-of-coke genre and its Californian twin, the pass-me-a-bottle-of-Beaujolais-I wanna-get-mellow music. You had Songs in the Key of Life. You had Rumours. You had Iggy Pop over there in Berlin getting the Henry Higgins treatment from David Bowie. Remember, you had punk by then. The beginnings of hip-hop. New wave. Looking back, I don’t know quite where Jesse’s album would have fit in, but I would love to be able to listen to it now, give it the old retrospective spin. See if it would blow me away. Some of the tracks he was working on never got to be more than demos, but they were just dazzling. He had access to that rare combination of bravado and melancholy.”
    â€œMarion,” said Lee, interrupting Flintwick’s oration.
    â€œWas a distraction. A beautiful distraction,” he said.