Chapter 9 Not Long Ago #2
Livvy considered this for a moment. “Kind of ironic that the bands that got the biggest press were the ones that sounded the least like garage bands. Like Paloma Doralle.”
Jace exhaled. “Yep.”
Livvy leaned in. “So why didn’t you join a band?”
Jace laughed. “Because I had utterly no talent.”
Livvy pointed to the TV screen. “According to Jerome here, that could have been an asset.”
“I was wired to be a fan,” Jace said with a shrug.
“During high school I spent most nights and weekends watching MTV and memorizing your grandparents’ massive record collection.
Then I met Sabine and got to know actual musicians at the Artemis.
Suddenly, I had friends to dissect liner notes with and trade obscure albums with.
We could see three shows in one night then play gin rummy until dawn while lobbing music trivia questions at each other. ”
“You found your people,” Livvy said affectionately.
Jace nodded. “I found my people.”
They went back to watching the documentary, which moved away from Jerome’s purple prose toward interviews with a variety of the musicians who’d been active in Paloma’s heyday.
Livvy stopped and started frequently to ask Jace if she had stayed in touch with any of them and whether they still played the clubs.
Jace would call out any time she saw footage of the Artemis, and Livvy wrote down the time codes so they could use the clip for promotion and during the pre-show.
Jace found Sabine in the background of a couple of shots, too, looking sleek in a variety of black ensembles as she chatted with some of the patrons Jace remembered as being in the audience pretty much every night; some of them were better known by the crowd than the musicians they had all come out to see.
Livvy turned to her. “Okay, we’re getting up to the part focusing on Paloma. You ready?”
“Yes,” Jace said firmly, hoping she really was.
It began with a montage of musicians each saying one word—PALOMA—then segued into a close-up of the singer.
The sight of Paloma’s face millimeters away from the microphone, her eyes green as absinthe, hit Jace in the gut.
She recognized the show instantly. It was the night Bob Sarkisian told Paloma that she had an edge over the other acts he’d recorded because of her distinctive style: In a genre full of screamers, a talented singer-songwriter stood out.
Paloma was so excited by the prospect of recording in a professional studio with an actual producer, she couldn’t keep her hands off Jace as they drove back to her apartment.
They were approaching the first summit of the rock-and-roll roller coaster that night, hand in hand.
There were more clips of other Detroit performances from 1997 to 1999, each of which took up shelf space in Jace’s brain.
The gig when Britt Ney opened for them at The Shelter and played backup for Paloma for a howling cover of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.
” That night at the Magic Stick when an unwell gentleman in the audience got on stage in between acts to demand that everyone vote for Gordie Howe in the next election.
The Fourth of July right after they’d moved into their own place when they’d hosted a barbecue and dropped by the Artemis later to watch from the audience, but the Queenlords pulled Paloma on stage to do vocals on one of their numbers.
She looked like she was having the time of her life.
The videos flickered by as unseen male and female voices reminisced.
“Paloma got her start in Ann Arbor and Ypsi. When she came to Detroit, she caught fire fast. She brought a new kind of energy. You couldn’t take your eyes off of her.”
“Her lyrics actually meant something, for one thing, and she could also shred.”
“She loved being part of the gang. When she wasn’t on stage, she was in the audience cheering us on.”
“If all these other bands defined what the Detroit garage sound was at the end of the twentieth century, Paloma showed what it could become in the twenty-first.”
Then Jerome returned to the screen.
“Paloma, Paloma, Paloma,” the former bassist said.
“She was the rising star with international aspirations who never reached back to take any of us with her as she ascended. But if you knew her like I did, that wasn’t what Paloma wanted.
That was her manager-slash-girlfriend Jace Randolph’s doing—and it’s likely that it was Paloma’s undoing, too. ”
A still of Paloma and Jace filled the screen, seemingly at a party given that Paloma was in a pink cocktail dress and Jace was in a navy-blue tux.
Jace’s face was caught mid-argument, with her mouth half open, her brows furrowed, and her hand raised like she was about to smack the photographer.
Paloma was standing just behind Jace looking stunned, her pupils reduced to pinpricks by the camera flash.
“Wow, it looks you’re deep into something there,” Livvy said. “Do you remember when this was taken?” Jace didn’t answer, feeling like she’d been elbowed in the chest.
Jerome appeared on screen, sitting in a recording studio across from a lanky gentleman in a cowboy hat and a Western-style plaid shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps down the front.
His name appeared in the lower third of the screen: Tex Mechs, Singer/Guitarist, The Moo-Town Spurs.
Jace searched her memory and recalled he’d been in a honky-tonk band around the time when Paloma started to tour, then got cast in a big-budget movie about singing cowboys and left for LA.
“Paloma was a lovely gal,” Tex told Jerome. “We knew a lot of the same people and played on the same bill at the Ferndale Family Fair one summer. Sweet, sweet gal. So generous. She let us use her amp when ours broke.”
“And we never got it back,” Jace muttered from the couch.
“Did you ever tour with her?” Jerome asked.
Tex shook his Stetson-clad head. “Paloma’s opening acts were from other parts of the US.”
“Being a music booker familiar with Detroit bands, you’d think that Jace would have brought along some of the performers from back home,” Jerome said, his eyes intense. “Why do you think she didn’t?”
Tex hesitated before answering. “Jace was a businesswoman first and foremost. She wanted Paloma to be taken seriously as a national artist, and that meant pairing her with bands from bigger cities to build her reputation. I understand where she was coming from.”
“He seems to be an ally,” Livvy commented, writing his name in her notes. More clips of Paloma in performance played as other voices came and went.
“While there were a lot of women making a name for themselves in Detroit, and frankly no one cared if you were gay or straight or in between, the national music industry was very male and very straight. Misogyny and homophobia—that had to be a lot to deal with.”
“No one understood how hard it was for Paloma to be so public, under so much scrutiny. She didn’t ask to be a role model. All she wanted was to play music with her friends back home.”
“She got popular so fast, maybe she felt like she wasn’t in control anymore.”
“Sometimes I wondered if Jace was the one who wanted to be famous, and she kept pushing Paloma higher to live her own dream.”
Three photos appeared one after the other: Paloma playing at the 1999 Glastonbury Festival in England, sweaty and fierce; Paloma in a dazzling blue satin gown singing in front of a symphony orchestra at the Millennium New Year’s Eve Concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall; and Paloma flanked by Mary and Colin on the Ed Sullivan Theater stage, her silver-spangled halter dress dazzling in the TV lights with the Late Show with David Letterman logo at the bottom corner of the screen.
The musical soundtrack halted abruptly, and the last photo began to darken as Jerome intoned, “Then, she disappeared and hasn’t been seen since.”
The action returned to Jerome and Tex in the recording studio.
“What do you think happened?” Jerome asked.
Tex looked down, shaking his head. “I can’t speak for Paloma, or Jace, although I’m guessing a lot of other folks are happy to speculate.
All I can say is, it’s hard to be the symbol of other people’s aspirations.
It means you aren’t in charge of your own dreams anymore, and that is a sad and lonely place to be. ”
There were a few more clips of Paloma, grinning on stage as fans reached toward her from the floor. In the voiceover, commenters added their two cents.
“Maybe it was drugs or booze. If that’s what happened to her, she wouldn’t be the first musician to have addiction issues. Shit, I hope she’s not dead!”
“Look, ‘Heart Fire’ was a monumental hit. That might have freaked her out creatively, like she was afraid that lightning couldn’t strike twice.”
“No one knows where she went after she did Letterman. And I respect that. She got all she wanted out of her career and just stopped. That takes integrity.”
“Maybe the music business broke her heart—her screaming, tender heart. I guess we’ll never know.”
“Aunt Jace? Are you okay?”
It took a couple of seconds for Jace to realize that the movie had stopped and Livvy was shaking her shoulder and offering her a tissue.
She’d been hit by a cyclone of memories and a tornado of questions, and she was going to have to pick through the damage to figure out how she could possibly produce this benefit with Paloma as a part of it.
She was going to have to muscle through the next few months and make it all work, no matter how she felt.
“I’m fine,” Jace said quickly, surreptitiously wiping her eyes.
“All I’m going to say is, all those people who were happy to share their anonymous opinions?
They weren’t in the room with me and Paloma those last few months before she left.
She wasn’t happy but wouldn’t tell me why.
She wouldn’t level with me. I’d set up dream bookings—the ones she’d been chasing all her life—and after an amazing show, I’d find her backstage crying, like she’d bombed.
She pulled away from her friends, she’d hole up in the hotel and refuse to go out until it was showtime.
Toward the end, she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me.
And so many times, I’d ask her what I’d done, or what I could do to make things right, and she couldn’t come up with an answer.
Shit, if all these other people want to find out from Paloma what happened, they’re gonna have to line up behind me. ”
Livvy put her hand on Jace’s and squeezed it. “So let’s go find her.”