“Means good news,” Shep concluded. “Okay, the good news is I can’t afford to pay you any more.”
“Thank goodness the money is so bad we won’t miss it,” Braith-waite said.
“I can always paint a house,” Manta said.
I joined in the mood of levity. “I can always move back to Nottingham and resume my job dragging the rain covers on and off the cricket field. At least it’s steady work.”
Muir Levy played a heavy fanfare on the piano. “And now for the bad news.”
“The bad news,” Shep said, “is that I want you to keep on playing for me. You’re sounding better all the time. the A Train was really super tonight.”
“I think we’ve just been told we’re loved,” I said.
“Is that what you call it?” Zolf muttered. “I call it rape.”
Before we left, I reassured the pub owner that we would continue showing up on Thursday nights. The following week, on Monday at half-past seven, I took a bus to Carlotta’s school. She gives a bunch of the older girls a class in voice production after which I collect her and we go for a tandoori chicken dinner at the Bombay Paradise Take-Away Café. Yes, that could become another lyric.
I was early but the girls were leaving and there was no sign of Carlotta. “She had to go,” one of them told me. “Something about a special band meeting at the church hall.”
I sprang for a taxi, spending my now-redundant tandoori money. At the church hall there was no music being played. It was more like a conference at the bank. Carlotta interpreted the expression on my face. It told her there had been activity from the Zolf department of treachery, Doublecross Division. “I thought you knew about this,” she whispered. “I expected you to be here.”
“And here I am,” I said, giving Zolf one of my nice-guy smiles. Everybody likes me, that’s why I’m the leader.
“This is about the disco gig,” Zolf said in my direction. “I thought you weren’t interested.”
“Rimless glasses,” Carlotta murmured.
“I’m interested in whatever affects The Bone’s Cornfield Quintet,” I said. “Carry on.”
It seemed Zolf had been negotiating with the manager of the Aladdin Disco. When Shep announced he could no longer pay us, the former bank employee rubbed the magic lamp. The result was an offer for us to play not one but two nights a week at the Aladdin for a fee which, if not exactly handsome, was certainly not as homely as the amount we had been getting from Shep.
At the end of Zolf’s explanation the band members turned and looked at me. “What do you say, boss?” Braithwaite asked.
“I don’t like discos,” I said. “I hate disco music. In my opinion it is to popular music what sausages are to food. I would hate to see The Bones Cornfield Quintet playing in a disco.”
“That’s another thing,” Zolf said. “I don’t think that’s a persuasive name for a disco band. We should call ourselves something like Zodiac or Starsounds.”
This opened the door to a fifteen-minute creative session as everybody suggested names for a disco band. It proved my point about the sterile disco scene: say any word that comes into your head and it can be the name of one of their pseudo-bands. Paperclip. Blinding Headache. Desk Lamp. It’s the same with race horses. You can call a race horse anything and you can call a disco band anything.
I began to realize the other four were ready to try this enterprise. The money appealed to them. So did two nights a week. The Bones Cornfield Quintet was not as holy an institution to them as it was to me, Bones Cornfield.
“There’s something else,” I argued. “The Aladdin has a bad reputation. The kids pour out into the street when the dance is over and they have gang fights. Punks against mods. They vandalize the bus shelters, intimidate people walking their dogs. It’s a bad scene.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with the band,” Zolf said, dismissing me as if I was a teenager asking for a loan. “How many of you want to give it a try?”
Diabolical sonofagun, how could anybody object to giving something a try? Up went the hands of Manta, Levy, and Braithwaite. Carlotta and I felt the ship going down beneath us.
“As for your old-style double bass,” Zolf said to me, “I’d rather have an electric bass for this gig. I know a guy. And no hard feelings, Carlotta,” he said, filling the room with feelings as hard as anthracite, “but we don’t need a vocalist for the music we’ll be playing.”
No question about it, the band was being stolen from under my nose.
I wanted to yell, “Arrest that man!” Instead I said, “Don’t count me out, Len. I can borrow a Fender bass from a friend of mine. And I’ll know the fingering by the time we play.”
“And I’ll shake a tambourine and look sexy on stage,” Carlotta said. “This is my band, too.”
One rehearsal was all the quintet needed to master the tedious music played to accompany the gymnastics of the disco crowd. After an evening’s work the group was ready with a program to be performed in half-hour chunks alternating with recorded music supervised by a DJ with a professional vocabulary of 35 words.
I brought a few tins of beer to Carlotta’s flat the night before the first gig and we conducted a pre-mortem, sitting in deck chairs on her back roof, watching strips of lighted train windows flowing past on the overhead tracks a mile away, listening to a tape of my old favorites that included the Dinning Sisters singing Me.
“I found out why Zolf was kicked out of the bank,” Carlotta told me.
“How did you do that?”
“A friend of mine works at the Wandsworth branch. She’d never heard of Leonard Zolf but she asked some questions.”
“What were the answers?”
“He took it upon himself. The loans manager was away for a week and during that time Zolf granted loans and overdrafts to several people who should not have had them. He did it because it made him feel important.”
“That’s our Zolf.”
“He takes it upon himself,” Carlotta repeated as she opened two more beers and passed one to me.
“Whatever happened to our nice band?” I asked more or less rhetorically. “And how is it all going to end?”
“Nothing stays the same,” was Carlotta’s defeatist reply.
“I’ll tell you something that stays the same,” I said, listening to the pure voices on the tape blending like silver chimes. “Sweet harmony stays the same. Good sounds.”
Carlotta picked me up and drove me to the Aladdin. As we went inside, I saw the band’s new name on a sign near the door. Zolf the banker had been at work — the group was now called Overdraft.
The experience was as boring and as threatening as I knew it would be. We played our first set all in one chunk, not even bothering to change keys. Zolf repeated a monotonous riff on the trumpet, stepping to the microphone every now and then to cry, “Get down!” and sometimes he blew a blast on a referee’s whistle. What it had to do with music was beyond me.
The kids lurked in groups and might have been in communication except when they danced. Then it was zombie time. I suppose they were all imagining themselves to be John Revolting or Trivia Neutron-Bomb. I remembered the old days when a dance meant arms around each other and heads together, sweet kisses and whispered promises.
When closing time rolled around, the kids were turned out into the street, and we soon heard the sounds of combat. We went to the doorway. There were a dozen lads fighting and a hundred watching, screaming them on. I saw boys on the ground covering up, the boot going in, lots of spit and cursing. One thing struck me — not much physical damage was being done. It was like a ritual; they did it because it was expected of them. We used to have the Home Waltz and today they have a punch-up.