Sweeter Life by Tim Wynveen Read Free Book Online Page B

sometime.”
    “But did you ever hear the likes of it?” Ronnie persisted, waiting for one of the others to agree with him. “The shapes, I mean. It’s almost frightening, isn’t it?”
    “Give it up, Conger, you’re pickled.”
    “I’m not … I’m stunned. I didn’t know, not really. This is brilliant. It’s magic.”
    No one else could hear it; and the more he proclaimed the solo’s special virtues, the more they laughed. “No more ale for Conger,” they hooted. And when he got up to play the song a fourth time, they threatened him with violence, so he bid them farewell and went back to his room to contemplate his newfound knowledge.
    Next morning, Ronnie, who until that weekend had shown no special affinity for music, who in fact had tuned it out whenever possible in favour of philosophy and football, bought himself a record player and a copy of “Don’t Look Back,” which he played twenty or thirty times without stopping. And still he could find no path into the heart of the mystery.
    He memorized the rhythms, gave the solo a phonetic structure that allowed him to scat along with the record, and then, better still, to himself as he walked along the street.
    Dwee, dohdweedoh-doodle,
Dwee, dohdweedoh-doodle,
Dwee.
Scoodely-oodelly-oodelly-oodelly
Oodelly-oodelly-oodelly.
Dwee, dohdweedoh-doodle,
Dwee, dohdweedoh-doo-dle-dum.
Bal-lum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum.
    The next afternoon, with snowflakes drifting softly around him, he walked down High Street to do a bit of Christmas shopping. And that’s when it occurred to him that if one song on the pub’s jukebox held this kind of transcendent magic, then surely others might as well, that “Don’t Look Back” and its deliciously maddening solo might be but a pale intimation of the greater wonders that awaited. It was this possibility that made him take his train fare, and the money he had set aside for presents, and spend it all on singles and LPs: pop, gospel, country and western, rhythm and blues,jazz. He called his father that night to explain that he had decided to remain in Oxford for the holidays—to study.
    From that point on he was a goner. Six weeks into the new semester he had sold all his books, liquidated his assets, cleaned out his bank account (most of which was owed to the university), and taken the train to London, where he found himself a small flat near Ladbroke Grove. It was 1963.
    For the better part of a year he bounced through a series of low-paying jobs—stacking shelves at record stores, clearing tables at clubs, anything that would put him in touch with music and the people who loved it, people who could stand around for hours and testify to the majesty of Lonnie Donegan and Doc Watson, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, Elvis and Big Bill Broonzy and, of course, Jimmy Waters, whose brilliant solo had made “Don’t Look Back” a heavenly thing. More often than not, Ronnie’s new friends were just like him, with no musical training, no ear, people who had been caught unaware by the ineffable delights of music and had none of the tools required to make sense of it. Words failed them. Hand gestures failed them. In the end they could only say, “Listen, listen,” knowing that as often as not the truth would fall upon deaf ears.
    Ronnie wasn’t stupid. He saw that he had exchanged one religion for another, that he and the others, the testifiers, approached their subject with a kind of evangelical zeal. Yet in contrast to his father’s religion, which seemed cold and commercial, with its tit for tat, its various exchange rates for salvation, music, or that evanescent glory he had discovered inside of music, was a pure and purifying thrill.
    That second summer in London, the manic fever of Beatlemania beginning to spill across the globe, he travelled north to attend his brother Kenny’s wedding in Glasgow. Ronnie now had sharp clothes and long hair, and his father could not bring himself to look at him, which promised