Doxology. Nell Zink
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glue stick.
Daniel had assumed that Joe’s first gigs would be open-mic nights at anti-folk clubs on Ludlow, squaring off against stoned women in fringed vests. But given the excellent publicity, he felt emboldened to try booking him into a rock club. It could happen. Most new artists had cassette demos and no press. Joe had a seven-inch forty-five and something approaching sanctification from Forced Exposure.
The first step was audition night at CBGB, as much as Pam dreaded the idea of ever seeing the place again. Her first reaction was an uncharacteristically whiny “Do I have to go?” She offered to stay home with Flora. When Daniel said he would buy her sunglasses and a floppy hat, she realized that she was being needlessly vain. No one would connect a backbencher holding a baby in Joe’s entourage with the pitiful diva of the Diaphragms.
Since CBGB bought a weekly ad in the Village Voice to list the auditioning bands, Joe’s name appeared in the paper. Dozens of people in New York City were regular readers of both the Voice and Forced Exposure.
“Dozens” doesn’t sound like a lot, but the farther you got from New York, the more attention was paid to media, which, after all, serve to “mediate” between the individual and lived experience. Indie rock fans who couldn’t afford basic cable were more likely to have heard of Slint than Nirvana.
As a result, the show wasn’t entirely empty. The girl who had made off with Joe’s singles from Tower Records—ensuring that Tower would never become his distributor—was there, accompanied by the friend on whom she’d pressed her spare single. They wore vintage flower-print housecoats over turtlenecks and thick wool tights and were drinking beer. When Joe took the stage, they yelled, “Hold the key! Hold the key!” Flora lay in Pam’s arms, earplugs deep in her ears, swaying with the beat. Joe played through two amps—his own new bass rig and Pam’s Marshall—with a Whirlwind splitter to divide the signal. The effects loop on the bass amp ran through her MXR distortion. The guitar amp, with the reverb turned way up and the treble way down, was fed through her Foxx fuzz-wah. Joe’s voice and the grinding of his valiant Hartke cabinet’s indestructible aluminum speaker cones cut through the haze of feedback echoing from the tortured Marshall, and he sang all his finest nonsense as though his soul were on fire. Instead of “American Woman,” he closed with “Roll with the Changes” by REO Speedwagon.
When he was done, the manager’s comment to Daniel was “Bookable. Get him a band.”
Meanwhile, the girl from Tower approached Pam and said, “Your baby is so cute, I can’t stand it!”
“Thanks,” Pam said.
“Do you know Joe Harris? It looked to us like maybe you know him.”
“We’re friends.”
“He’s so talented. Does he—does he—” Her friend elbowed her, and she rephrased her question. “Are you his wife?”
“I don’t think he’s ever had a girlfriend in his life,” Pam said. Seeing their disappointment, she added, “He’s not gay. Just shy.” She smiled at the absurdity of what she’d just said. Girls were shy of Joe, shying away soon after he opened his mouth to speak. Elevation onto the stage of CBGB, with well-rehearsed lyrics to sing at high volume, must have enhanced his sex appeal.
His new number one fan took the smile as reassurance. She giggled, not even trying to hide her relief, while her friend squealed at her, “I told you that wasn’t his baby!”
“I should introduce you,” Pam said. “He’s coming over now.”
The girls drew away to regroup. Joe hugged Pam, spoke with her briefly, and turned to stare at them both. They ran out of the club.
TO DANIEL’S SURPRISE, MAXWELL’S BOOKED JOE. HE WOULD HAVE BEEN LESS SURPRISED if he had seen the single up on the wall at Pier Platters, priced at twelve dollars, classed as a limited-edition rarity because he still hadn’t found a distributor.
Maxwell’s was a club at the far end of Hoboken, a full nautical mile away from the PATH train to Manhattan, specializing in new and obscure acts. Some were obscure without being new—Daniel had seen Sun Ra there not long before his death—but most were both. The club invited Joe to open for a band that was opening for a band that was opening for a band that was opening for the Honeymoon Killers.
Joe asked Pam to sit in on guitar. Drums could stay optional if he made the bass loud enough, but someone had to fill the chinks in his crushing wall of sound, or so he said. The debate went back and forth until her final stern refusal. She wasn’t feeling very rock and roll—she weighed six pounds more than before she got pregnant—but her main reason was Joe’s sound. On the single it was refreshingly open and airy, more like an arbor than a wall. A million indie rock bands (or what seemed like a million to her, meaning several, all from the Pacific Northwest) featured guitars screaming high over bellowing male voices. Only Joe saved that Fender Jaguar role for himself. His vocals soared over the percussive rumbling like Grace Slick’s on “White Rabbit.” If it took some electronics to make it work live, so be it.
That was her view, and Daniel more or less agreed, though he would have liked to see her onstage with Joe. She was female and women were trendy. But he wasn’t about to force it. As she said, guitar didn’t fit with what Joe was doing. The sound of the single seemed to them an accident of fate, but it was an accident they liked. In the silence of his brain, Daniel called it “bliss-core.” He didn’t plan to put that in a press release, though. A new set of accidents could change it at any moment.
THE SOUND CHECK AT MAXWELL’S WENT FINE, WITH THE USUAL EXCEPTIONS FOR strangers being irritated by Joe. He was delighted and excited by everyone and everything. He forgot to plug in his bass and sang half a song a cappella, proving once and for all that he didn’t think the instrumentation much mattered. When Daniel yelled, “Plug in!” he found the end of the cable, shoved it into his bass, and finished the song in a storm of arpeggios. He looked ebullient about being so much louder than before. The soundman said he was meshuga, but he didn’t seem to mean it in a bad way.
The hall wasn’t full for his set, but there were people in attendance. Pam and Daniel could see that many were the proper kind—indie rock fans, as indicated by their pocket tees in dark colors, unbuttoned plaid flannel shirts worn as jackets, and vintage PF Flyers or comparable footwear. Also present were two men of a dubious sort. “Major label scouts,” Pam hissed. They were dressed in sport coats and talked to each other in loud voices throughout Joe’s opening number. She heard one of them call his music “rad,” as if “rad” were current slang.
Carrying Flora, she went to stand in front of them. Every time they moved, she moved. When they eyed the rear of the club, plainly considering sitting down on the big PA speakers stored there, she went to those same speakers to change Flora’s diaper. Seeing the diaper from the inside, the scouts decamped to the bar.
A less streetwise musician might not have chased major label scouts away from Joe. But indie rock had arisen from desperate necessity, to offer artists an alternative to exploitation. The recording industry had once paid musicians flat fees. The contemporary way to stiff them while cultivating an appearance of generosity was to charge publicity against their royalties. Every video, tour bus, and hotel room came straight out of the artist’s pocket. Long before peer-to-peer file sharing and online streaming, a star could have big hits and be broke.
As Joe was starting his last song, Pam saw the cute girl from CBGB. She was alone, rushed and hectic, still wearing her coat. She had arrived when his set was nearly done. Pam could see the disappointment in her face. She strolled over. The girl noticed her with relief. She mimed looking at her watch and turned up her hands helplessly. She knew she was late. When the song was over, and she was done clapping and whooping and yelling “Encore!” and “Hold the key!” she turned to Pam and said, “I had to find someone to cover the shift after mine. That’s why I’m late.”
“What’s your