Wild Violet
I wasn’t always in the closet, walls of mattress and eggshell foam, and patterned cork to dampen my screams. I was wild. And I was alive. I’m as dead as the closet now, dead as he lets me be, anyway.
‘He’ has a mullet, oily and blonde. His forehead is its name. His eyes are two dots beneath that heavy brow. His black shirt tries to conceal a belly turgid with the American diet. In the middle of the shirt is a picture of a real dog.
I’ve tried digging through the spring mattresses. I got through one, bloody and slick, to the eggshell foam, then the patterned cork, allowing a quivering quirk of my upper lip, only to find the oppressive recoil of another cotton-encased spring.
When he came in after and made me move away from where I stood blocking the hole, he stomped around as much as he could on a floor made of mattresses. He looked like a toddler, pacing and grunting little high-pitched noises with brief twitches of his chin. My attention kept pulling to the rectangular outline in dark grey foam where Jerry had come from.
I often wonder if the closet is some kind of makeshift vocal booth, or if Jerry was a musician once, because it feels like the vocal booth at Straight to Tape, where Abby and I did all our takes together. Sometimes I pretend that’s where I am, and I sing, and I pretend Abby is here with me. But Jerry only allows me whispers.
Our name was The Wild Violets. The album we made was called Violents.
It was 2035. We recorded to tape. Most studio engineers had moved away from computers after the AI crisis.
My name is Violet Vega.
Abby Apples and I were sixteen—she was the pretty one with strawberry-blonde curls, while I had the brown bangs and resting bitch face. Cory Slits on bass had a black bowl cut, and she was eighteen, though you wouldn’t know it from her size and the cloud of absence she carried with her; Greg Baker, our drummer and only male member, looked just like Ginger Baker and was seventeen.
Nancy Straights was our engineer. Straight to Tape was her studio, over on Clear Lake near Gateway rehab, where Abby went when she was like fifteen.
My parents were old hippies, so they let me drive myself to visit Abby in Gateway while she was there.
Speaking of hippies, Nancy Straights tied her tawny afro back with a long, tie-dyed bandana. She drank Natural Light all day but never got drunk.
“It’s my water,” she would say, “and I’m a fish.”
Sometimes we got to the studio early while Nancy was still adjusting levels and plugging microphones into preamps, before she cracked a beer. There was no alcohol smell to suggest earlier drinking, and Nancy never shook or acted disturbed, smiling and conversing as usual. When she got to the board, though, it was game on until 10pm for her.
She had this way of producing without producing. Abby was the producer and songwriter, but Nancy Straights’s influence crept onto the record. It was the way she held her mouth. Slant on playback was no good. Tongue between teeth had you at sonically pleasing. Spilling beer on the carpet and bouncing in her swivel chair with a big smile, and you had her. And Abby, despite her need for a vision and remaining true to art, and what I thought was a need to control what she could since her whole life the rug got ripped out from under her, wanted nothing more in the world than to get this reaction out of Nancy. Like, I think it was second to shooting up. Abby didn’t care what anyone else thought of the songs quite like that—she was just like, bleeding, y’know? Couldn’t help it. Abby was one of those, like Anton Newcombe or Daniel Johnston, just a force and no one could shake it. No one but Nancy. And that’s why Violents is such a great record.
See Abby in the bathroom trying to hit a vein after a three-hour session of frustration with trying to get the inverted tambourine into backward moan just right on the backbeat for what she thinks to be—as many others will—her best song: “Strawberry Hill”. It’s meant to sit low in the mix, and it stirs this hypnotic nausea in your gut when it's right—the inverted tambourine to backward moan—like the hump of a rollercoaster; but when it’s wrong, it sounds like a pretentious indie record. The line between transcendent and mid is thin, and we all can feel it, though the only one keeping their cool about it is Nancy Straights. She swivels and lowers the volume to cricket-speech. Cory Slits is practicing the timing of the two notes she plays throughout the ten-minute song, as if her timing is the problem. It’s not, in fact, Cory has no talent, and Abby writes around Cory’s ineptitude on bass, and the effect serves to charm. Cory is not the problem. Abby’s competence as a producer and songwriter solves the problem of Cory.
Greg Baker’s eczema crusts his hands like barnacles. When he is not beating his thighs with drumsticks, he is peeling off the white flakes of skin with his teeth with amphetamine ferocity and spitting them to his right when he thinks Nancy can’t see. She can see but pretends not to.
Nancy takes a drink of Natural Light. She gulps. I can smell it. Her eyelids flirt with the line between sleep and contentment behind caramel-tinted glasses.
She rewinds the tape by hand.
Presses play.
The theremin begins its whine.
I am on my period. My tampon is full. Abby doesn’t get a period anymore because she has like soaked them up with all the heroin.
A bead of blood shows itself on the back of Abby’s hand as the theremin ululates. The bead quivers with the drumbeat. Every third beat, my voice slides a whole step, from D to E.
Cory’s bass comes in boom-boom-boom before my vocal slide. Cory plays along in the control room, the fat metal of string slapping low, D to E to E, then vocal slide. The drums go boom-boom-bap. It’s the “Foxey Lady” beat except for that inverted tambourine and backward moan that Abby can only manage to make realistic when she’s blitzed. The control room smells like old, cheap carpet. Greg is now air-drumming.
Abby is stabbing at the rolling vein that beaded with no luck of a clean draw.
Shivers prick up every hair as the rolling vein tickles her from the inside. She hates needles, but they are necessary. She is cold and sweaty. The song playing, grooving, is her only lighthouse in this fog of collapsed inbound lanes and withdrawal.
The guitars are about to start, stern-panned, both riding the whammy, mine and Abby’s parts recorded live, amps facing each other, a mic on mine, a mic on hers, and a condenser in the middle. Our wahs rock at a pace so slow you can’t tell until the tone’s entirely shifted. The reverb on my amp is way up. Abby’s effect is vibrato. I play the chords while Abby plucks the melody between verses, kind of a New Order/Joy Division thing.
On the verse, Abby strums clean and sings, and I drop my ‘ooo’ sliding vocal to harmonize the lyrics with her. But we don’t get to the guitars where it all kicks in, and that rollercoaster stomach flip created by these many shifting elements is like a washer on spin, and vertigo takes hold of the listener. We don’t get there because Nancy, like almost sad it seems, hits stop.
“And that’s where it ain’t right!” she shouts loud enough to reach the bathroom, where Abby quivers. “That’s the spot, Abby. Ain’t right.”
It’s the first time Nancy had directly commented unbidden.
Abby hears this, and it hits her right in her sick guts. She shits water into the toilet with a violent splash, contracting, bending in on herself with cramps, and this presses the needle right into a vein with a feeling like tearing cloth.
Blood blooms like an ink cloud and Abby presses the plunge, and as all that is sick within her gets well, and as she furiously wipes with a wad of paper and she can feel the music like it is right on the tip of her tongue, and she flushes and puts away her junk and she breathes easy, she skips on clenched toes for she knows how to fix it, and it’s only ‘cause Nancy Straights spoke up.
Abby rushes into the room, and I glare at her as I leave, gesturing to the small red spot forming on my crotch, but Abby knows something about the song, so has eyes only for the instruments by which she can execute that something—in this case, Nancy.
I go to the bathroom, which smells of sickness and shit. I change my tampon, but hear Abby.
“Lower in the mix,” she says, “and cut Violet’s vocal slide when my moan starts.” Abby closes her eyes, tapping a 4/4 count with her foot and humming the bass part, then my vocal slide, then her new incarnation of the moan. “A-a-and the moan isn’t backward, Nancy. Splice it so we can hear it once,” she stutters.
Nancy has been smiling, nodding her head, bandana tie swinging to the beat of Abby’s hum and tap. She unspools the tape and takes it to the splicer, eyeing it carefully before making the appropriate cut. Nancy is playing the track as I walk back into the room. And it is incredible.
“Jesus Christ,” I say.
Nancy is jumping up and down in her swivel chair and spilling Natural Light all over the carpet. Greg has forgotten his eczema skin. Cory no longer plucks at her bass. Abby looks at me.
“We record together, you ’n’ me,” she says. “Let’s redo it, Violet.”
And so we did, her part dovetailing mine every third beat, mine sliding up and stopping right when hers started and slid down. For ten minutes, we did it.
“Strawberry Hill” went on to be featured in an updated fortieth anniversary edition of an allegedly haunted film called The Black Tongue Tape. Many who hear the song report that they can no longer find joy in music with rhyming lyrics, loud vocals, or anything, really, but “Strawberry Hill”.
I close my eyes in this closet and hum, pretending I am singing for ten minutes with Abby before the mulleted Jerry is back, and he’s brought a small cassette recorder and ammonia. He wants me to sing.