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3 Poems 2002, 2003, 2004;+ Bertie 2004,+ Station 2004; each unpub.work (c) US/LC |
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STATION, unpublished work (c) 2004, Lisa Page Weil. All rights reserved. Part Two Over at Tabb's (//prose//) No--I have a relationship with them. You have a relationship with your profession. We do not have the same professions, in fact. He has a relationship with what he's doing. I have a relationship with what he's doing. So what kind of a relationship could we have? Living with Tabb is listening to Tabb. The singer starts alone and listens to Taber--Tal in California (Tal in Cal). So they decided to replace him with someone better--with someone better then him--what do you think? Someone like them, instead. I'd hope they did, after the last ten years. I'd expect that it would improve our relationship with each other. What do you think, after the Sunspots? This is a drama; who could get in with them instead of get in with Tabb? Is that good or bad? Dale agrees. It's about time for the Sunspots. It's too long for them. Too long a show. What do you think? Instead of talking about the band; we could add him in as a lead character. He could represent other things. I don't know if Tabb can handle that; but he still has us, so he might be able to. A changed role, with the leads. He could handle it. He is--we'd have a relationship that is not out of the context of which person and which person. It is at a level where it is about what is with people. Which is a good story in a book, all of the private encounters and decisions out of the years--although we already had anything in common--this is in fictional terms. Your pop hit and departing for Europe to find out that you had to know anything about music or you don't make it. Staying home with Rudy while Dale and Tabb were off with the band. And then having the two leaders think they were the first and foremost by the time you get back with the news about the band. By then, you socialize with all of the writers and talkers and hang out with them--and with Rudy, who doesn't say anything. Because of the new bands, people talked, wrote, sang, and recorded--this is true--so they all became closer while they were going through this estrangement because of the new bands and the real stars. Without them being aware of it, and you all get together and talk about music and the band--you continue to record for them in your free time. You used to sing their hits, but they didn't keep you on your favorites at the time. By the mid-seventies, it depended on whose version worked and then what tracks worked out with the artists. Because you can perform versions of tapes from getting together over performances and ideas about the songs, and decide what kind of song will go out. And some of the new tracks were new in the catalogs going out. Yeah, so we must have had the beginning two years before the school departure, when people brainstormed ideas for the next album at the end of the year, and spent their free time getting together and talking with each other. The beginning of two years, because of the band and the new bands coming in as the stars, and because of Dale's debut album on the turntable. Yeah; so, Dale could relate to anyone, and we used to hang out at the store and look out at the sign for the flower store; and he could write in the cool shade of that street. When they put together their summer album--summer listening--he had to get his writing together for some hours there. Summer radio. So, when Dale was getting work done at school--the band's year on the turntable--he came to be the central figure in the group. Of course, he was getting himself together to do all the writing--Tabb was there. He has his own life. From Dale and Tabb; Tabb and I didn't have one; Dale's a one-man show. He sort of has his own table with other people there. He said you ruined your life, and you ruined Rudy's life, both! I ruined his life. Because he fell in love? I'm not oblivious about his unhappiness and his mostly happy life. Enough to get old and forget about him? I expect that one day I'll be old and looking out my window and listening to the clock on the wall, and that I'll be happy and not unhappy, having forgotten about whatever was before then, mostly. Not that he hadn't drifted into it touring or at some point--when he became aware of it. Dale isn't saying I told you so and getting in. He's holding it back. Yeah--he didn't know why Rudy. I don't think he thought about it. By then, he had the momentum of a part of his life not mattering full time, because it had started earlier. Ok, I don't think he knew why, at the time, either. He didn't say a thing about his personal life. Not even about his failing marriage? Nothing. I admit, I drew a blank with him. It's only vaguely based on the true story, Dale; but I think it's a good story, because it's not about what isn't the better part of people living their lives. We never became deliberative about it later. You'd have to tell him, because we love each other. Well, it's a good story about continuing to love someone. It wasn't a through transformation. That he had to go on with Dale and Tabb, and Doug, who was easier going at the same time, and a vitriolic Dale, for Dale? Rudy and Doug were outcasts in that group. I couldn't believe that at the time. Yeah. I never really came to terms with that. Before, I never really gave it any thought. Yeah--it's never sunk in. I wouldn't have accepted it right off. Dale couldn't figure it out. He was the center. Tabb was the center, and none of his friends ever went near him. He was in his element, as usual, so I don't think he put it together. The Sunspots found themselves and became serious. How are they going to get a career going after that? Unfortunately, it's hard to reconcile that, emotionally. I wasn't at the same place at the same time. They were trying to beat boredom. I thought it was a good decision to add in the band, at the end; when it goes out. It was hard work getting the recording finished. I don't think it's of the temporal, but it's believable that at that point it's the new way things will be over the years, too. Because he was introspective about where it left him, at the time. So, they thought it was because he had a relationship with me? I don't know whether he thought about it. This is the tour after then--the longest tour; and it hadn't been long-lived to that point. My life was unaffected by the turmoil. But if he'd sung on his own, he'd have done it his way. That he was thinking of me, too; he might have been. It wouldn't help, if you were used to going on with your point of view and then you add that side to it afterwards. So, you think that he decided to go with that and find a turning point. Then he had afterwards. Each of those elements could have got him to that point, during that stretch of time. Because the inertia of momentum lends itself to finding a point of departure--it contributes psychologically to choosing that eventuality. When there were conflicts, it divided out into the same people fighting them. Because I get together with Dale and Tabb and we talk about songs, types of music, lyrics and writing during the same years that this is happening. Yeah, and because they had been so set against him--they were in it for them on tour. Off tour, they were trying to think of new ideas that would go somewhere for them. I understand what Dale and Tabb said about it. He had that side to the days. So, I know that he could have driven them up a wall and kept after them pretty easily. He also does do that if he feels helpless to change things for him. So, you can imagine that's a bad combination with the rest of the Sunspots. They don't all agree, and it reaches them. So, as I said, with both examples in close quarters, it's a short fuse for them on a hot day in a small car. Because both sides of it are true. He could have felt that it was too much and that would be it, ongoing; so it's one way to change that, where it's clearly not going to change, which is a different way of thinking about the car. So I don't think Dale and Tabb are immune to reality, but they have no threshold and were seeking their margins out there, which adds to the suspense of when and where. They go through it, but it's not what they are like about things. He knew he could get to them, and it affected him like a hot day, too. It's that they were unreachable and unmoved by anything other than where they wanted to go, at that point, which adds to it. I think he had to get out. That's not the same thing. That's why he kept at them until they drove him out. A never ending vicious circle that ends without you changes you. He changes whether that will be true for him then. Anyway, I don't think it would have broken up the band. We live together, too. We didn't tell you. We must have spent enough hours together for Dale to have rewritten the verses of his summer hits. I didn't know that the tour had been so long that I was at a play with a date when the departure was for real. Dale and Tabb must have got out their legal pads the next month, and started collecting material, as usual. "Great Ideas: A Reference" was on the library bookshelf in the special books room that we'd sit in when we sat on couches and talked about writers and books. None of us ever tried to read it. Maybe they were taking time off after the tour, but they were trying to get an idea of what musical direction they were going to go in. They made that transition smooth--with all of the talk and all of the friends; like in their songs on the album--we were so conversational, that no one mentioned Rudy. Years later, after I got home from college, where I didn't know what the band was doing except for their new albums and hits at the radio station, I still thought that Rudy was in the line up. I liked Denny right away, too. By the last tour, Dale had told me that Rudy had left. He didn't say exactly when, but I knew that Denny had been with them by the time they were breaking up, because I could remember him and I liked his radio song and sang along with it, when it was on. I could remember Denny standing there, and I still thought that Rudy was on the Live Jammin' album, the one I didn't buy, even when I received it as a gift years later. I suppose that, when I heard from him, which was ongoing and intermittent, I thought he was still in the Sunspots anyway. He was so known that, everyone figured he was out there somewhere. You aren't going to be there with them, but no one is sure how you feel about it. How you feel about your relationship with them. They are all going to be involved with others instead. Tabb isn't sure himself, for example. This is before they got married, in reality. Remember when they got married. What about the years before, when they were single? They all were single when they started out. You sang radio earlier. Yeah you left that out. That's how I knew other artists, and later I was able to get a deal with them and sing as a solo artist. The environment is specific. The environment is their fiction and otherwise it's up to real people. Tabb's, yeah, he came out of it, of the eighties. It came back to him, that he didn't know that much yet. Yeah--the end of the dream--wake up to reality. A novel about love and the eighties? It's a good story about loving someone other than you. Dale stopped by to say hello and ask you about recovering after Europe and how it's going. Integrity was in, at the time, what if he had no connection to their new material and to what he was doing both? I couldn't have actually thought about how it would have affected him. I would think that he would have taken that as is. That I wasn't what should be for him? I was still involved with Rudy. I don't know how it would have affected him. I didn't have as many reservations about him, but at times he did, at times he didn't. I already said that, I don't think they should have fought with Rudy because of what happened--that they handled everything badly back then, and then the relationship continued anyway. They wanted to ask you about the ending, not Tabb, who likes fights--except that he'll blame you for them and get out of it. Yeah--he's got finesse in his part in anything. Yeah, well, I'm not saying what I think. I don't think they should have started fighting with my boyfriend. Or scaring him, either. Yeah--I think that's going too far with power. They were too into who's in power at that point. I told you--I'm his girlfriend--this is afterwards. It's still within its context, even if it really is true. I didn't think of it. I didn't think about marrying him. And we continued to have any relationship. Dale, is thinking that he has the story, from Tabb, who'd already gone back to meet them after rehearsal and was staring at the ceiling at the time, and had not disappeared like some people will tell you, that you and Rudy were still out; Rudy was sitting down and you were finishing your practice. I don't know if you'd been out earlier; so, you fell in love with each other. We spent some hours together off and on that year, after Greatest and the radio airplay of the single. We spent some days over those weeks together, rehearsing, after 8 or 9 pm for two or three hours a night, before we had any relationship. He'd sit and listen after thinking about how the band's rehearsal was going. So did Tabb. Over those weeks. When you can lose track of how many weeks or hours, we didn't relate to each other as much after practice; which is probably a contribution to why we fell in love with each other. We fell in love at the time. We met for emotional reasons. What about Dale's role? Write in Dale; talk about how you could have relationships with your way of life, and then start talking about your second career afterwards. Get a career and a personal life--don't relate to anyone--go places--meet someone someday. See the world. When we meet each other, we say, what do you think? Mail order everything and pack a trunk? Like a song, a minority do remember and describe things as they are or were; a majority do not, one day. What about the records and careers and shared times, otherwise? We were associated and in the same group from the mid-seventies, so they figured, no one will think of this by now, and everyone will be busy with their own separate lives by then. It won't be separately important to the same people, only to the ones trying to develop their own new context. If we were divided, (a) we have a very long-term relationship with each other, good and bad, (b) it might not affect us in our lives. We could talk about it one day to other people. To all of them; Tabb, Dale, Doug, and Rudy. So you finally found someone who will take you away from the Sunspots for good, right? That sounds about right. It could be a new story. No one asks about my fight with Dale and Tabb, after all that. You can't talk about how you feel about either of them or about your relationship with either of them, without them taking issue with you. Because they all have lives of their own. You were involved with Rudy. That's the only missing part to this. For the next two years, he said nothing about it to the Sunspots; and you two continued to be in love when you were together. You and Dale and Tabb started talking about your music and art ideas, and they became the central figures in the exchanges. When you went away, your relationship was less in love than before then, but more on and off again. During the eighties, you were more defined as not us, that's actually when you started to defend each other again, and define out what you thought about each other and what your feelings were, so afterwards, it was more emphatic than obscured that you loved each other. When the Sunspots went into the nineties and after. Yeah, I think you even told them about it by then, but during the eighties, not one thing about it. You couldn't have had an opinion of it; which is why no one knew. During the eighties, when your friends Dale and Tabb got estranged from you, and you felt outside the Sunspots, Rudy had to have become upset; and after the nineties, you traded back your emotional life roles again. You didn't tell them before their reunion tour, and your reunions. Tabb knew from the beginning of it. They both knew. He's an artist, he writes his material, and I think he knows that being a singer is singing, so I don't think he's been in conflict. I had the radio and me. Then I bought Sunspots' Greatest and took it everywhere and sang with it--then we recorded a single that Rudy liked that changed the sound, practiced at home. Dale and you and Tabb worked on Greatest; the new concept was out of Dale's imaginings; about changing the setting and the playing. They'd heard they were too clichéd and they'd been on more harmonies than any time before. They weren't original, so they added members. They wanted to be discovered, and that's how they put their line-up together. So, Dale and Tabb and I talked about the Sunspots while Dale was choosing songs for Sunspots' Greatest. I didn't work on it, too. Dale doesn't think that they have the same origins as a group--he's Southern himself, but he didn't want it to be too restructured to play. They play and are then fictionally Southern--so it would be hard to characterize any of it as being about Sunspots or from the Sunspots, if you know that. Otherwise, all of their songs are reset. They thought Tabb became Southern. He gradually changed without noticing it. They wanted him to become influenced and change his character and what he contributes to the material--and they gave him the themes and the roles and the work to do it--Tabb. He got a lot of support for change. He thinks he'll be out there before the crowd is; he's first in line. Tabb was more worried about visibility, knowing Tabb. That would have done it when he went home It's true that we were already and were both pushed aside over it and rewritten. Dale will go on tour over it--he'll get an album out. They aren't serious? I don't think serious; they are serious about us. Serious, like love. Where would it leave him? We fell in love at the time. Why not leave the Sunspots? We didn't have a separation or a reassessment of this. The song had already been finished and rerecorded. I already had a performance in. If I could get that number together; I would feel more assured about my ability afterwards; it seems easy because it sounds it; but it's a hard performance not to end up with errors in. Dale doesn't think we have a life of our own, because we all have lives together instead. Everyone is like each of them, instead. We don't say the same things to each other every year, so we don't have the same times from the past together. Tabb's always from where he's from. Doug's not disorientated. Dale didn't want the album to be too designed to play--Doug's from his environment. They're who put together what it's about. You found that every person mentioned Sunspots and came up with something better. How do you know whether they mean the band members or the albums? No, he didn't know. Tabb and I hung out together, and they said that the Sunspots were with me--with Dale being in--and they were so persuasive about it that I couldn't say anything about the two years that had gone by. It was close to three years later, that they were talking about. That's around three years; we were working on our music during those three years, so we talked to each other several times a year--quarterly, at least. Rudy and I shared our feelings and thoughts about things at different times--and he couldn't reconcile himself with the events later, because of that, and because we'd continued to have a relationship from before. So, in fact, Rudy sympathized with me. Which helps, if you think about how people are feeling about who and who and them--how it defines and redefines them. I have to say that they had a lot to do with whether I was chosen as someone who could be a singer later. They were positive and had creative ideas that took people with them when you were around them. What I'd set out for once upon a time before Sunspots. It's an opportunity if you might be any good one day, which they realize. Yeah, it was entirely real, like most things. Yeah, Dale's the greatest fan of his band when he thinks about it in his free time. We're all in the Sunspots. We worked together. We weren't solo artists working, at all. We worked together when we recorded their songs. Tabb and I work together when we record the Sunspots' songs. Dale and I talk for hours about music. Yeah, so he finally isn't going to sing his song. Because it's one too many times of going out there and reminding himself that he's not where he is with things. He didn't expect that to happen to him, and within a few years it did. He couldn't relate to himself then. He couldn't find himself in his own song. So how did he get there in two years, and what would he have to come to terms with? Yes, and I'm in the Sunspots, like Tabb and Dale, a pop singles singer. Us instead, what do you think? After all, it might not have been true any more. I might have had an opinion of it over the years that gets left out. Rudy and I. If you're busy with other parts of your life, you're not busy emotionally at the same time. Someone could pursue their motivations, and be emotionally deliberative at other times. Yeah, so what about Sunspots, then: after all of that for so little? After reading Dale's gossip column book for $3.99, I was thinking of ideas that he forgot, that I can add in. The drama of his personal life and the ceaseless conflicts. I think that Dave deciding to leave was given the low profile that it should have in the book. Because Dave is an important contribution to the Sunspots and Rudy brought him in--so it downplays the turmoil and foreshadows both of them deciding to leave within a few years; without changing what part he played in the band. I don't think that they really change what part Rudy plays in the band, with all of their stories about the end; but I don't think that they should have polarized the Dave stories; the fans will think that Dale was central, and that was what went on in the band. Then the reader doesn't focus on what's happening in the band on those last tours and what the stars are like then. So, he was thinking that, if the radio is on, and the Sunspots are on, and you are practicing; then Tabb goes on next. So, during the school and music school and career departures, he's playing his repertoire. You record songs. After the eighties, and Tabb, and Dale's no-one-finds-love tour; at home or away; you don't send in letters or tapes or audition for them So you go home to practice your repertoire and record, and when you come back from traveling, your music teachers ask you about singing. That's about where it left them. No one but Dale ever says anything about the Sunspots--when he had to tape a show and raise money for charity, he stopped by to say hello and ask you about recovering after Europe and how's it going. He's who tells you about the new Sunspots. When they tour, you get Rudy's ticket, and see all of them. You sing with Tabb. You continued to record catalogs after returning and continued voice lessons. I really was trained to sing songs. For a few years I didn't tell all my friends that I'd be a singer one day, but I sang to the radio after school when I got home on the bus. I had some 45s, too, for 99cents each, that I could get at The Warehouse. I started to think that I might end up a singer. When I went away, the year before Rudy left the Sunspots; I auditioned for voice lessons with the voice teacher for the music department at the high school, and I was chosen as a voice student. The department ran a sign up sheet for the auditions in the fall--I was worried that I wouldn't make it, but I was on the class list--that gave me a lot of moral support. Before, I had me and my friends, to talk about art and music with; and after, other people started to think I might have enough talent to go into music. Learning from pop--you have to learn to think and feel from a lyric, and you have to get your phrases to turn, too. As a singer, the first thing you lose sight of is your relationship with your material and with your audience; it's easier to have a connection to your voice and where it is; but it's not the written side, as often. From a singer's point of view; it's hard to lift the lines because they are all the same, so they turn into an expression of what the song means to you, stated through it, instead of what the lines follow as lines and what you think or feel over a number. As a pop singer, it's all the phrases and turning them, you can feel that, so you lose touch with stated phrases. It's not the same type of demands for the singer. After I arrived at college, I went into to the music department to see if they were offering voice, which the course listings for incoming students mentioned. The college offered voice lessons for students who auditioned and were selected, and there was a white paper sign up list on one of the department doors for audition times. I signed up for an audition, and sang my recital music for the voice instructor. The department sent a letter to me saying I was able to enroll in college voice. I signed up for music theory and voice. The music theory teacher turned his class into composers. During the next spring, I'd go into the record library at the radio station when I wasn't scheduled to be on the air as a college disc-jockey, and sing. (I'd been a high school disc-jockey the year before college). Afternoons and evenings, I sang in my dorm room, and I warmed up before lessons in the music department practice rooms. You can write about going west; California, and getting into school; then getting the audition--then going back out, while Rudy tours with his friends. Or singing that pop album--you can write about everyone getting together over the two years it took to collect the material and get the ideas for it. All the hours playing together and deciding what would be on it. You could get up at 4 a.m. and type to meet the morning deadlines. College voice was harder than high school voice; and it helped to have that extra year before starting, because you have some of the same exercises for breathing and for increasing your range, and because you're used to having to sing scales for class. In addition to having half of your lesson being in figurations, instead of in deliberating enunciation and lyric hard syllabic stresses, you have to sing through a book of opera arias. The class time goes by fast, and at the end of the year, you have so much time for technique for singing, and so much time with tricks to get through the extra high passages and the hard passages of the songs. |
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