Whale Music Read Free Page B

ringing in my ears (
ringing
might be putting too fine a point on it, it’s theearwig equivalent of J. P. Sousa and the American Eagles), and part of my love for music, especially very loud music, is that it drowns out this strange sound inside my skull.
    Danny’s earliest memory, which he recounted on many occasions, is of climbing out of his crib and crawling slowly and painfully into the living room, where the parents were having a cocktail party. My mother confirms this, even though Danny was only ten months old at the time.
    A fairly early memory goes like this. One day my mother brought home a recording, placed it on the little turntable. (I was colouring a picture of Captain America,
shizzam
. Danny was playing with a Dinky toy.) The record was made by a failed country-and-western yodeller who was trying his hand at something new. The record began like this:
    One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock!

Five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock rock!

Nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock rock!

We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight!
    My mother stood with her back pressed against the living-room wall, for some reason short of breath. When the slap-bass began she wheeled into the centre of the rug, twirling about in an alarming fashion. Her skirt lifted until her underwear was plainly visible. Danny abandoned his toy truck and joined her, and those two danced (I stared at them) until the father descended from the den upstairs and broke the record over his knee. “Twaddle!” shouted the father. “That stuff will never sell. It’s got no
schnooze!”
    Don’t even ask about this schnooze business. That’s just the way the father viewed music. It either had schnooze or it didn’t. Most of my stuff, according to the father, lacked schnooze in a big way.
    Bill Haley has been called the father of rock and roll, and while that may not be true, he certainly got things going for us chubby white boys.
    Danny and I met Bill Haley, you know. This was some time in the seventies. We were in Mexico, I forget why, but we were in a motel on the dark edge of a town, and all of a sudden Danny remembered that this is where Bill Haley lived. Danny was flying pretty high, whiskey and cocaine, a nice little combo if you care to feed your soul to intergalactic vultures. Danny got it into his mind that we must go visit Bill Haley. Dan’s then-girlfriend was about fourteen. She shrugged, assuming, I think, that Bill Haley was simply an old friend. I didn’t want to go, of course, it must have taken all of Danny’s persuasive powers to get me to Mexico in the first place, but Danny prepared some pharmaceutical concoction that encouraged socializing, and I agreed. (A recipe: cocaine, cocaine, the garrulous drug, a little mescaline to fill the night with portent, alcohol to heat my Celtic blood, to make me feel like boozing with the gobbers at the nobby. Danny and I shared a very alchemical attitude towards intoxicants.) The four of us—I had a girl with me, back then I wasn’t half so fat, and there was a rumour going about to the effect that I was a genius, which some women find attractive—piled into the rented Jeep and drove into the heart of this desert town.
    Bill Haley answered the door dressed in his old cowboy yodelling clothes, a ten-gallon hat and sequined shirt. He was paunchy, the last few pearl buttons were popped open, and his belly shone in the gloom of his bungalow.
    “Howdy!” Haley said. He still had the little kiss curl plastered onto his forehead. Bill Haley was blind in one eye, and that eye was cocked at nothing in particular. The good one was bloodshot and pointed at us.
    Danny told him who we were, but I don’t think it meant anything to Haley. It meant something to him that we had women with us. He grinned. He still had that famous grin, like he was trying to hook the edge of his mouth over his ear. “Come on in, pardners,” he said. “Do you want something to drink?”
    “That’s