Disco Man by Michael James Tapscott

Disco Man by Michael James Tapscott

There were other lonely singers with cultural capital to steal from, outsider artists, 20-somethings who walked the earth with Where Water Comes Together With Other Water in their back pockets and Beatles’ melodies in their beautiful heads, but Dexter Smalls and Freddy Jacobs chose the faded star. It was an arrogant choice, which they were in the habit of making at that time. They were certain the work they were bringing to the world would take its eventual and rightful place in the rock and roll canon alongside “Rocket 88” and “Blitzkrieg Bop.” So what if their most famous song was an anti-circumcision anthem by May Paranoia, a homeless schizophrenic from Fargo, North Dakota, if historical validation hadn’t happened yet, it was just around the corner.

 As freshman misanthropes they met on the seventh floor of the brutalist dorm on the north side of campus. Freddy had matriculated from some moneyed place back east. He’d brought a 12-string Rickenbacker with him hoping it would serve as a flag for fellow travelers. Finding no takers, he decided to manifest his new best friend when he spotted a redhead with a Brian Jones haircut strumming a beater acoustic while sitting underneath the poster that came with RCA’s 1975 pressing of Best of Dolly Parton.

“Cool poster,” Freddy said.

For the next four years they were inseparable. Freddy was the idea man. Dexter went along willingly with any scheme he cooked up. He was the one who figured out how to make the wheel turn. The co-dependent relationship that brewed their first fall in Indiana was so strong that there was little doubt when Freddy asked Dexter on graduation day, “you’re staying in town right?” Dexter’s answer would be, “of course.”

For a couple of unlikely optimists, Grim Reality was a prescient name to choose for a record label. The post-graduation business venture was the strategy the boys had cooked up after dissolving their band, Tall Grass. It was their way to stay relevant in the scene after realizing that nobody cared for their music and neither of them could write a song, play an instrument well, or live up to the macabre things they sang about. Resigning themselves to fandom, they pooled together three hundred bucks to put out the “Christmas at USP, Terre Haute b/w Lake Monroe” 7-inch by a misunderstood local bar band, The Whippoorwills. When the drummer quit during their first and only tour after the third show, he absconded with the band’s van which contained their instruments and 450 of the 500 records Dexter and Freddy had pressed. Neither the drummer or the records have ever turned up again. Far from being upset that they wouldn’t recoup on the investment, the boys were thrilled with the potential for the few remaining copies to become collector’s items. 

Freddy sat behind the counter like a high priest at All Ears, a tiny record store jammed into the basement of an anarchist coffee shop three blocks from campus. Rumor had it that the space was once used as a weapons cache for the Weather Underground. Now it was a meeting spot for the insiders of Bloomington’s college rock community. Dexter was a technical wizard, who would record any band for fifty dollars a day at his home lab. The studio was outfitted with gear of dubious origin that was the top-of-the-line in 80s home recording technology. A Fostex M80 quarter-inch eight-track had been “found” in a church basement. A 16-channel Soundcraft reportedly left to seed in a storage space in Mesa, Arizona by a disgruntled Grateful Dead roadie was sold to Dexter by a roving stoner for a hundred bucks. A Yamaha REV7 digital reverberator was bought at a police auction in Indianapolis. Countless other items, some useful and some not, were left behind or stolen from the rotating cast of misfits who lived at Dexter’s dingy ranch house out on Highway 46.

Freddy’s familiarity with record distribution and college market tastes combined with Dexter’s ability to record on the cheap was a winning formula. When money ran low, they went down to campus and signed up for Visa cards with a $5000 credit limit and a 19% interest rate from a young woman manning a coffee table kiosk where she made $6 per application. Those evil credit cards and low overhead kept them afloat during the lean years, until college radio stations, eager to pick up on a cause, embraced May Paranoia’s novelty track and put it into regular rotation. This piqued interest in Grim Reality’s deeper roster. Relentless touring of every dive bar, DIY venue, and small rock club by The Swinging Doors, a new wave band with a pedal steel guitarist, and Egret, a 6 foot 2 goth woman who played modernized versions of Scandinavian folk songs, further spread the word one poorly paid and attended show at a time. Major labels were gobbling up acts from all corners of the independent music scene in the late 80s, and while many viewed the farm system mentality with resentment, Dexter and Freddy welcomed commercialization. They saw it as a way to clear the back catalog stock sitting on pallets in Dexter’s basement and fund the next year’s slate of releases. By the dawn of a new decade, Dexter and Freddy were local celebrities and Grim Reality Records was turning a small, honest profit. They hadn’t reached the heights set by the templates of the independents, Touch & Go in Chicago and Twin/Tone in Minneapolis, but for a label run out of rural Indiana, it was an auspicious start.

If you were able to put them in a room now, they would both deny credit for the idea, but it was Freddy who suggested their next enterprise in leveling up – the career revival. They created a dream list of fifty has-beens and never-weres that might be destitute or desperate enough to record an album for a small amount of cash up front. Letters were sent out to all who could be found. They only received two responses. One was from Lee Hazlewood, who sent a note on embossed stationery stinking of tobacco that read, “Despite how it may look from where you sit, I have not led a haphazard life and I don’t intend to start now. LH.”

The other was from Arthur Ashby’s fourth wife, Belinda, who sent a rambling, handwritten note scribbled over six pages torn from a spiral notebook. She said Arthur hadn’t read their letter, which was forwarded by his former representatives to their current residence at the Key Motel in Nashville. He had fallen on hard times, but could easily be cleaned up if Dexter and Freddy promised to give her half of the advance in cash and not breathe word of it. According to her, as Arthur’s acting manager and financial advisor, there would be nothing fishy about the arrangement. Upon agreement to these terms, their offer was acceptable, though they would need to speak to Arthur about it and convince him. She instructed the fellas to give them a ring at the motel anytime with the caveat that after five in the evening he would likely be at the bar and before noon could not be counted on for polite conversation.

“What a character,” Freddy said after reading the missive aloud to Dexter.

There were obvious red flags in Belinda’s note, but that only made the proposition more enticing. They called down to Nashville the afternoon after they received her response. Freddy, the people person, took the lead as Dexter listened in, their heads together at the receiver. 

“Oh hello,” Belinda said, “You boys don’t waste any time do you?”

“No ma’am,” Freddy said.

“Well, I’ve told Arthur about the two of yous and I think I’ve got the skids pretty well greased. He’s out by the pool, let me go roust him from his perch.”

“Artie, phone for you,” they heard her yawp.

“Just you remember, Arthur is not immune to flattery,” she said back into the phone. “In fact, he absolutely fucking delights in it.”

& & &         

Dexter and Freddy were light on experience with advanced alcoholism at this nascent stage of their lives, though they would soon come to have a more intimate relationship with the realities of the dipsomaniac. Their naivety could also be excused because they knew little about the conditions Arthur Ashby had been living in. 

This was the pre-internet days, so the scant bits of evidence into Arthur’s present state were gleaned from his last LP, Disco Man, released in 1979, and an episode of A Current Affair that aired in 1986. Dexter and Freddy had watched the episode while getting stoned in the apartment they shared at the time. It told the grisly tale of a chain of roadside hotels once owned by Arthur Ashby. The Travelling Salesman Hotels, named after his most famous song, was a business venture Ashby and his associates entered into in the mid-60s. The flagship in Nashville was celebrated for its rooftop lounge and accompanying penthouse suite, outfitted with a swinging double bed. The episode described how the lounge became the unofficial center of country music and organized crime in Music City. It turned out that his “associates” were actual mobsters who stole all of Arthur’s money and his good name and left behind the bodies of a few meddlesome figures in the foundation at an unfinished construction site in Gatlinburg. 

While the scandal didn’t vouch for his good character, Disco Man painted an unsympathetic portrait of his musical prospects. Due to his previous fame, his later infamy, its odd choice of material, and its relative scarcity, the LP has become a sought after prize in the record collecting circles. Released by Merchants of Music, a small label based in Louisville, Georgia, the album had gained no traction, and distribution was halted when the label went out of business three months after the release date. Whatever albums hadn’t already been sold were intentionally destroyed in order to file an insurance claim. The record was not good, consisting of half-hearted covers and reinterpretations of his old classics. The centerpiece and ultimate curiosity was the title track, a string-laden disco number with a nursery rhyme melody and chintzy lyrics. Whether it was a commentary on or an attempt to join the times was unclear.

& & &

After some hacking, Arthur spoke. “Who’s this?”

Offline, Belinda could be heard saying, “It’s the boys from Indiana I told you about.”

“Indianapolis is a shit town,” Arthur said.

“Actually, sir, we are in Bloomington. Where the university is.”

“This about a college gig? Those always paid well.”

The particulars were worked out over a punctilious hour-long conversation. Arthur would come to Bloomington in the fall to make an album that would be recorded by Dexter in his subterranean studio. All recording, pressing, promotional, and distribution costs would be covered by Grim Reality. After those costs were covered, Arthur and his new record label would split the profits 50/50. Freddy assured him they would have no problem reaching this benchmark. A small advance (minus Belinda’s unmentioned fee) would be paid as soon as he got to town.

“Well, you boys have made me an offer I can’t understand,” Arthur said. “I don’t know what you want to do this for. I’ve got no friends and no fans.”

“You still have a lot of fans,” Freddy said in earnest.

“Old songwriters don’t die, son, they decompose.”

& & &

That October, true to his word, Arthur and Belinda rode into town on a rusty, Neptune Blue-colored Cadillac convertible. Freddy set them up at his apartment for the two week stay, he would vacate to bunk with a lady friend. Meanwhile, Dexter had asked a local band to back Arthur in the studio. The band, known as The Quarry, were townies in their twenties that played a stew of progressive, country, and punk. They had “no hits” according to Dexter, but were a cracking band. Dexter had imagined that the recordings would be like the sessions Marshall Chess did with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters in the late 60s, when he used avant garde rock guys to update their hillbilly leanings into heavy slabs of psychedelic blues. He figured kids raised on R.E.M. and The Replacements would dig Arthur’s sophisticated pop songwriting if bathed in a harder sound. Freddy booked a concert at The Bluebird at the end of the recording sessions, intending it to be a soft launch of the next chapter in Arthur Ashby’s illustrious career.

Arthur was not awake when Freddy went to escort him to the studio on his first morning in town. 

“He’s sleeping it off,” Belinda said from behind the cracked door. “The drive up from Nashville took a lot out of him.”

“Can I pick up some coffee or breakfast for you?” Freddy asked. “We were hoping to get a good start today. Introduce Arthur to the band.” 

“Tell that bastard to get me four Egg McMuffins and two black coffees,” an unseen Arthur screeched from somewhere in the apartment.

& & &

It was nearly one in the afternoon by the time Freddy got him over to the studio. Arthur had insisted on stopping at Big Red Liquors on the way and emerged forty minutes later in a noticeably better mood with a shopping bag of provisions. Dexter and the band had been waiting for three hours. Alarming, but not unheard of in the world of temperamental artists. More troubling was that not only did Arthur not have new material to record, he didn’t have an instrument to play.

“He doesn’t even own a guitar,” Belinda said when one of the band members asked him about his gear.

“I can answer for myself,” Arthur said.

“Well, go ahead then.”

“I’m between guitars right now, son. If one of you would be so kind as to lend me a friend, I prefer him to be Spanish.”

Dexter had anticipated that Arthur might arrive with a dearth of fresh songs and had instructed the band to work out arrangements of his old hits. In Arthur’s day, his chart toppers had been sophisticated slabs of Nashville pop, deceptively simple with moving time signatures, sui generis polyrhythms, and quirky lyrics full of backwoods wisdom and puns. Back then, the record companies had sold Arthur Ashby as a cleaned up man of the people, like Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd. He even had a short-lived NBC variety show in 1966 where guests like Liberace, Richard Pryor, and Petula Clark performed skits and musical numbers with Arthur and the Pierre Petar Orchestra. Decca, the record label that ushered him through stardom until they gave him the unceremonious boot in 1969 after a precipitous slide in album sales, obliged him to produce three LPs and ten singles per year. The fuel that got him through the 60s, pharmaceuticals, women, and mindless spending had left him in the 70s with major drug and alcohol addiction issues, three ex-wives, seven children to support, and no record contract or representation. What little reputation he had left in the business was wiped out by the mob-affiliated hotel scandal. 

Dexter had done his homework while preparing for Arthur’s visit, and in doing so had allowed a deep skepticism about the project to enter his heart. Arthur hadn’t made a public appearance in over a decade and his last album not only revealed a lack of creativity, but the degradation of his clarinet-like baritone. Still, Dexter was shocked by the former star’s appearance in his living room. Arthur was short, five and half feet tall, which his management had kept secret with lifts and trick photography, but now he had a noticeable stoop that made him appear even shorter. He was only 54, though he looked twenty years older. Most unnerving was the state of his voice. They’d heard it over the phone, but it didn’t do justice to the slurry croak that was now asking if he could smoke inside. 

“Sure you can,” Freddy said.

Dexter gave him a look that implied exasperation and turned to Arthur.

“How are you feeling today?”

“On a scale of 1 to 2,” Arthur said, blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth, “I’m a 1.”

Freddy and the band laughed. Dexter did not. He told Arthur and Belinda to get acquainted with the fellows while he and Freddy discussed some business. He motioned for his partner to join him in the kitchen. 

“Have you paid him yet?” Dexter asked.

“Well, yeah,” Freddy said, “that was our deal.”

“Christ, Freddy, the guy sounds like a sunburned toad. He looks like he died yesterday and he doesn’t have any new songs.” 

“We planned for that, right? We’ll think of some tasty covers for him. Contemporary stuff. The guy’s a legend, the record doesn’t have to be good.”

“For five grand it better be.”

“Hey, at the very least we’ll have a story to tell.”

“I don’t have the money to pay for good stories.”

“We’ll be fine,” Freddy said with the smile that always got Dexter to submit.

The sound of music pulled them from conversation. Arthur and the band had moved into the basement studio. He had grabbed someone’s acoustic guitar and was leading them through a cover of Mickey Newbury’s “T. Total Tommy.” Arthur’s mien had transformed. The old wino had become young again and was getting a kick out of the band’s squalid sound. Stopping to light up another cigarette, Arthur began strumming in waltz time. “You boys know this one,” he asked and began to sing “(Margie’s At) The Lincoln Park In” by Bobby Bare. The Quarry’s lead guitarist nodded with a grin and began to chop at his Fender Strat. 

Dexter scrambled to set up microphones and turn on the tape machine. For the next six hours, Arthur and the Quarry ripped through obscure covers, traditional folk songs, and Ashby classics, pausing only to pull on cigarettes, tell stories from the olden days, sync up key changes, and sip cocktails. Arthur’s drinks were mixed by Belinda, who sat through the session unmoved, smoking, and leafing through a Robert Heinlein paperback as if she’d seen this performance a hundred times before. The screwdrivers she prepared for Arthur in a pint glass were 95% orange juice with a bit of vodka floated on the top, a seasoned move since he made short work of them. 

With a self-satisfied smirk, Freddy stood next to Dexter as he fiddled with knobs and faders on the mixing board. 

“I told you we’d be fine,” Freddy said.

“They don’t sound awful. A little more rehearsal and we may have something.”

“You would think someone would have been hip to this in Nashville.”

The afternoon session broke around 8 with Arthur claiming hunger. He asked Freddy to run over to Burger King for cheeseburgers, then pulled a pint of Ancient Age from his coat pocket and broke the seal. 

“Toss me one of them beers,” he said to The Quarry’s drummer, “I need something to wash this rotgut down.”

Belinda let out a heavy sigh. “I’m going back to Freddy’s, he’s your problem now, boys.”

The scene was dark and getting darker when Freddy returned with two bags of Whoppers. That afternoon, Arthur’s voice, while not as strong as it was when he was a pop star, had contained a ragged glory. Now he was slurry and off-key. Sinking lower in the folding chair, he no longer had control of volume or pitch, forgot lyrics, and stopped playing songs halfway through. The Quarry had done their best to go with the flow, but when he began crying during the opening verse of “Farther Along” it became a bit much for them. 

“I think we’ve got to call it a night,” Dexter said to Freddy.

“It’s still early. We just need to get some food in him.” 

“He looks like he’s about to fall asleep.”

“Yeah, right, I guess we should try again tomorrow.”

“We got some good stuff today though. With a little more structure…”

Their plotting was interrupted when Arthur dropped the guitar and fell out of the chair. The Quarry’s drummer gave him a cautious shake. 

“Just give me five minutes, damnit,” Arthur said from behind the veil. He then began to snore. 

“Alright fellas, let’s pick it up tomorrow at the same time,” Dexter said.

“He sounded pretty good for a while there,” said the bassist. 

“He was great, he was great,” Freddy said in an effort to convince the room and himself. “Would you mind helping me get him in the car?”

The brawny bassist was able to pick up the diminutive icon like a child and deposit him in the back seat of Freddy’s car. During the short drive back to his place, Arthur mumbled something about burned books and telephone wires, which reassured Freddy that he was alive. He managed to get him up the stairs and into the apartment where Belinda was watching TV and talking to someone on Freddy’s telephone. 

“I’ll have to call you back. My knight in shining armor has arrived,” she said with dripping sarcasm to whomever was on the line. She cackled into the phone before she hung up as Freddy dumped Arthur onto his bed. 

“Well you made short work of him,” she said to Freddy from the bedroom’s doorway.

“He’s probably exhausted from the trip up here.”

“Yeah, that’s probably it.”

She returned to the couch and fired a cigarette. The ashtray and stench of the room spoke of her own bad habits. 

“You’ve got a lot of nice stuff in here for a young fellow,” she said with feline flirtatiousness. “This little record label of your alls must do beaucoup business.”

“I wouldn’t say that. My father died a few years ago and left me some money.”

“Oh, a Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not quitting my day job.”

To Freddy, it was unclear if she was coming on to him, insulting him, or both. Whichever it be, he felt leaving was the best course. 

“I’ll bring breakfast and coffee by at 10. Do you think he’ll be able to record tomorrow?”

“Oh, he’ll be ready to roll, honey.”

“Ok, then, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Belinda gave him a coquettish wave before he closed and locked the door behind him. He nearly ran to his car. She was a much older woman, but not without her charms, and Freddy was at a point in life that carnal missteps occurred with regularity. Dexter would kill him though, and Arthur, proving to be an unpredictable character, might actually murder him. 

The door to his apartment was wide open when he returned with McDonald’s in the morning. Inside, everything of any value was gone. So was any trace of Arthur and Belinda. Freddy sat on the floor, ate four Egg McMuffins, and contemplated his lot. He wondered how they had fit everything in that Cadillac. When he told Dexter, his partner put the onus on him and called him a damn fool. 

“I knew we should never have trusted him,” Dexter said.

“We’ll be fine,” Freddy said, but couldn’t manage the smile.

Freddy didn’t mention the fact that Dexter had never vocalized anything but enthusiasm for the deal until it was too late. He took the blame and he didn’t call the cops on Arthur Ashby. He lost interest in the label after that and Grim Reality Records ground to an unceremonious halt a year later. A financial dispute and a love triangle poured kerosene on what was left of their relationship. 

Freddy went into steadier business, he became a landlord. First buying the record shop he worked at, then the anarchist cafe above it, then the whole building, and eventually a swath of cheap apartments. Due to an uncharitable reputation amongst his tenants and the opening of a burrito shop above his cafe, he became known around town as “the pinto bean bastard.” Dexter moved to New York and continued to try to make it as a recording engineer. Though he brushed against fame a time or two, he had to work odd jobs to indulge his habit. In 1999, when Arthur Ashby died after freezing to death while sleeping in the back seat of his Cadillac outside Kimbro’s Pickin’ Parlor in Franklin, Tennessee, Dexter unearthed the reel-to-reel recordings he had made back in Bloomington. He edited together the best takes along with some quips, anecdotes, and malapropisms he had recorded Arthur making at the studio that day. Ending the set with Arthur weeping, Dexter felt he had put together a package with an interesting emotional arc and tried shopping it to record labels. Arthur’s death had renewed interest in his material, but apparently the Grim Reality session was not so unique. A half dozen others (most famously a couple in Shreveport who had picked up Arthur hitchhiking and had recorded him in their kitchen on a shoebox tape machine) had similar items for sale.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Michael James Tapscott 2024