Chapter 9 Not Long Ago
Not Long Ago
About two weeks later, Jace sat across from Livvy at the beer pub in downtown Clawson, polishing off a fried chicken sandwich and a local IPA.
The evening sky was still light, and the place was full of families grabbing dinner ahead of the long weekend that kicked off the summer.
For Jace and her niece, though, it was a business meeting.
“Have you set a date for the concert yet?” Livvy asked as she took another bite of her turkey burger.
“Saturday, September ninth.”
“That’s kind of soon, isn’t it?”
“Sabine’s bank will only wait so long,” Jace huffed.
“That was a conversation I never thought I’d have: talking about the monetary value of garage music fans’ nostalgia with a bunch of loan officers.
Luckily someone’s kid watched Olympia, California and is dying to see Paloma Doralle in person, so they agreed to work with us. ”
“Any word from Paloma’s brother?”
“Nope, and before you ask, I did search for his phone number online and came up empty,” Jace said. “I’ll email Dustin again this weekend. Have you found anything online?”
Livvy tutted. “I’ve found a ton of stuff online, but it’s mostly junk: blurry photos of supposed sightings, blog posts from fans, conspiracy theories. My favorite rumor is that Paloma, Chrissie Hynde, and Shirley Manson founded a women’s commune in Vancouver. May I have your pickle?”
Jace pushed her plate over with a fond smile.
“She has no social media accounts of her own—no surprise there,” Livvy went on. “There are a lot of TikToks using ‘Heart Fire’ as a soundtrack, though, and I mean a lot. Do you get any payout from that?”
“I wish, but Paloma owns the rights to all her material,” Jace said. Then something occurred to her. “That means Paloma ought to have had a bump in royalties lately. Could you track her financials somehow?”
Livvy’s brows knitted. “I’m a web-savvy copywriter and true crime enthusiast, not a hacker. Besides, that would be intensely illegal, Auntie.”
Jace dragged the last shards of her French fries through a pool of ketchup.
“I’m staking this whole concert on not only finding her but also convincing her to get back on stage after all this time.
What was I thinking? Oh, now I remember: I’m Sabine’s only hope, and if Paloma ever wanted to pay off her karmic debt, now is the time. ”
“I put together a list of all the musicians Paloma played with during her career,” Livvy said. “We can go through and decide who to contact first.”
Jace sighed. “And we can cross off anyone who thought I ruined her career.” She drained her beer and caught the eye of the server to signal for the bill. “Speaking of those people, we have a documentary to watch. You about ready?”
Livvy nodded, and in a few minutes they were walking through the tree-lined neighborhood back to Jace’s house.
Once home, Jace brought two bowls of ice cream into the living room, handing one to Livvy before sitting next to her on the couch. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was glad her niece was there to supply some much-needed moral support. And technical assistance.
“You know you can access the internet through your TV, right?” Livvy said, picking up a remote. “We don’t have to huddle around your laptop.”
“Of course I knew that,” Jace fibbed, closing her computer.
With a few clicks, the Cut to the Chorus title card appeared on screen as the Zoodiac song “Why Am I Here?” swelled in the background.
The opening graphics wrapped with a grainy clip of the band: lead singer and guitarist Gemi Twin commanding the microphone with gauze pads over her nipples and a length of orange fringe barely hiding her cooch from the camera; bassist Air Ram wearing nothing but purple micro-shorts that matched his eye makeup; and Lee Scales, bashing the drums in a leather bikini.
They always put on a full-throttle performance, Jace remembered; she could practically feel the sweat of the crowd brushing her skin as she watched now from her couch.
Livvy pointed at the screen. “Wait, the bassist: His real name is Jerry Cooke. He was in the Pump Ups, too, right?”
“Yup.”
“Two points for me,” Livvy said, patting herself on the back. “Did you know him?”
Jace nodded. “Everybody knew everybody back then.”
It quickly became clear that the documentary was made for an audience that had little idea of what had been going on in the upper Midwest during the twentieth century.
The first part of the film set up Detroit’s backstory, hitting a lot of familiar visual signposts: Henry Ford’s assembly lines; Detroit as the “Arsenal of Democracy” during World War II; racial segregation and police harassment leading up to the deadly 1967 uprising; streets riddled with empty storefronts and abandoned houses; the skeletal shell of the Michigan Central railroad depot looming over Corktown, its windows broken and encrusted with graffiti.
Next up was concert footage of well-known Detroit-born or -based musical icons from jazz, blues, the Motown era, and the hard rock and proto-punk of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
“But if that’s all you know about Detroit—about the music of Detroit—then you’re an idiot,” the voiceover scoffed. “Let me take you to the garage.”
“Who is narrating this?” Jace asked. “That voice sounds familiar.”
“Jerome Brinkley,” Livvy said after a quick search on her phone. “He directed it, too.”
Jace put her head in her hands. “Oh God…Jerome.”
“You know him?”
Jace looked up. “I fired him. He was Paloma’s bassist when we first met. I told her she deserved better.”
“That explains why he found people to talk trash about you later on,” Livvy said. “He was a disgruntled employee.”
The film sped through footage of seminal local bands, with Paloma featured last. Then it cut to Jerome himself, sporting a goatee, wearing a black Detroit vs. Everybody T-shirt under his black bomber jacket.
“What is a Detroit garage band?” Jerome asked. “Well, it isn’t as simple as the fact that the musicians are from Detroit or that they played in Detroit. And I’ll bet most of those guys and gals didn’t start their bands in a garage.”
But Jace was less focused on Jerome than on the text at the bottom of the screen that read: Jerome Brinkley, Former Bassist for Paloma Doralle/Blogger.
“Pretentious bastard,” Jace said. “He played a total of three dates with Paloma, and now he’s building his whole reputation around it.”
“Glad to see he’s self-confident enough to admit he’s a blogger,” Livvy deadpanned.
Jerome continued to opine. “It didn’t matter if they could sing or play an instrument; they’d figure out enough to get by.
They could groove on any genre: punk, hard core, indie, roots, honky-tonk, a mash-up of all of that, or something else completely.
What qualified them for Detroit Garage Band status is what they put into the music: the unironic authenticity, the tenacity, the no-holds-barred energy that came from people who didn’t know how to sit idle and created something that belongs to them, belongs to Detroit—and belongs to anyone who’ll listen. ”
“That’s awfully romantic,” Livvy said archly. “Maybe he should have been a songwriter.”
Jace was nonplussed. “Anything other than a bassist.”
Jerome went on as clips of stock footage and home movies illustrated what he was saying.
“By the nineties, with Detroit being treated like a ghost town from the Wild, Wild West, we were ready to make our own music out of a crazy quilt of the colorful past. Play the bootleg cassettes and demos from back then, and watch the shaky handheld videos. You’ll hear the ramrod conviction of an industrial city that people wrote off to rust and ruin.
And that thrill could be yours anytime you put on your headphones. ”
Jace could barely watch, pulling away from the screen like it stank. “Oh my GOD!”
Livvy stopped the video. “What’s wrong now?”
Jace gesticulated toward the screen. “Who appointed him the historian of all things Detroit music? He talks like every band from the nineties was on some mutually agreed-upon crusade to redefine all of popular music, which is bullshit. And while there were folks who moved to Detroit because they wanted a cheap place to live while they made music, it’s not like the city was empty and silent until the guys from the suburbs showed up.
” She took a hot breath before finishing with, “And, Jesus, does that guy love the sound of his own voice.”
Livvy snorted. “Tell me how you really feel about him.”
“Plus he doesn’t even know what a ‘garage band’ even is. Poser.”
“Well, what is a ‘garage band,’ Aunt Jace?” Livvy asked with a good dose of side-eye.
“I am so glad you asked,” she replied with a smirk.
“The term doesn’t apply to every indie band out there, and the genre certainly didn’t start in the nineties.
In the 1960s, a lot of guys—probably mere seconds after the Beatles took their last bow on The Ed Sullivan Show—started bands with no musical training or experience.
On top of that, they couldn’t always afford good equipment, and they couldn’t access a proper studio crew to produce a polished sound.
But they forged ahead anyway, and it was catchy and fresh.
Analog, lo-fi, lots of distortion, great to dance to: That’s a garage band’s stock in trade. ”
Livvy nodded. “Songs that sound like they actually were recorded in a garage.”
“Exactly,” Jace said. “A lot of musicians I ran with were trying to emulate that DIY ethos from the sixties. Once certain bands started getting known around town, other bands took inspiration from them, and soon you had enough going on to say there was a Detroit garage scene. And once the big music execs flew here expecting to discover the ‘next Seattle’ after grunge was winding down, everything got tagged as ‘Detroit garage’ even if it didn’t sound anything like it. ”