The Devil's Chord – Chapter 6
For old times' sake
As a young musician, Toby Reid was a fine instrumentalist and had a singing voice of power and beauty. What he was not, by any stretch: a great composer and lyricist. Yet establishing himself as a singer-songwriter seemed to be where his career ambitions lay.
I guess his instinct was always to keep the focus on himself.
Alas, poor Toby. He didn’t have the storytelling gene, and he couldn’t compose melodies for toffee. Try as he might, they came out either trite and derivative, or as amorphous and over-intellectual as late-night noodling in a jazz club.
Yet after eighteen months’ silence, when he seemed to have vanished into the eastern Kentucky backwoods, Toby Reid emerged onto the alt-country scene with a new, hard-edged sound, a band of session veterans – and an album full of unforgettable tunes. Twisted ballads, full of sardonic humour; raw-throated love songs that laid everything on the table.
You could hear the country and bluegrass heritage in this music, but it had a hard-rock snarl and snap, a rockabilly backbeat, and it was as intoxicating as Kentucky bourbon. You wanted to sip on it all night long.
Oh, but they weren’t his songs.
What Toby had tucked away in his backpack, that chilly April morning when he left us for good, was a stack of exercise books. Densely-written pages, almost indecipherable scrawls often, smudged with ash and spotted with beer and whiskey, tears and sometimes blood.
A hundred songs or more, the fruit of two years on the road, kicking ideas around in a score of cheap digs, on hungover mornings and after late-night sessions. Lyrics first scribbled on beer coasters and the backs of cigarette packets. Melodies and chord progressions, hooks and arrangement notes.
The handwriting may have been Toby’s, but the words, the stories, the melodies and the hooks – they were in large part the work of a twenty-five-year-old undergraduate veterinary student from Gippsland, Victoria, Australia.
They were the distilled song-writing genius of one Kenneth James Newell.
They could have formed the core of my Ken’s life’s work in music. Instead, they were appropriated – stolen – by his erstwhile best friend, bandmate and lover.
To be generous, Ken was probably never going to do anything with them, not now. Not without Toby to stoke the fire in his belly. The notebooks had been mouldering in a cardboard suitcase under our bed for a year. The silverfish had started to nibble at the damp-curled pages.
He didn’t even notice they were gone. Not until the day the lead single ‘Old Times’ Sake’ hit the charts and the radio station playlists, even way out here in the mountains, on the other side of the world from Kentucky.
‘Nice,’ said Ken, when I called him to listen. ‘And strangely familiar.’
Toby didn’t respond to our letter, congratulating him on the hit single, reminiscing pointedly about old times on the road. Enquiring about the whereabouts of certain notebooks: had he come across them, by any chance?
A few weeks later, we bought Hell ’n’ High Water’s self-titled album at a record shop in Wangaratta. They had to order it in.
Back home, we set the vinyl on our turntable and played it once, all the way through. Afterward, Ken sat in silence for a long time. Then he nodded, his face impassive. He put the LP back in its sleeve, looked out the window and made an observation about the weather. Smiled and pulled a funny face at Niamh, gurgling happily in her cot. Nothing further was said about the matter.
Ken would have let Toby use the songs for free, with nothing more than a credit. Just for old times’ sake.
He would only have had to ask.
After that, Toby Reid was dead to us.
But by then, of course, Niamh was cooing her first words, cutting her first teeth, crawling, then taking her first wobbly steps. We had more important things to occupy our minds than a former friend’s betrayal.
I’d fallen pregnant shortly after Toby’s second departure. Start of May 1992, thereabouts. Despite the pill. It was a huge, yet joyful shock. Massively inconvenient, with our reno barely started and my teaching diploma soon to kick off.
Who says life’s meant to be convenient, though?
‘They’re only ninety-five percent effective, you know, birth-control pills,’ shrugged Ken. ‘That means five babies per every hundred roots, on average. So by rights we should have a whole brood by now. A bluegrass band. Maybe even a footy team.’
‘Yeah, I’m fairly sure that’s not how it works,’ I countered. ‘It’s a good thing you’re just a horse doctor, mate.’
I never have discussed, and never will discuss with my beloved Ken, the father of our beautiful child, the possibility, the surely remote possibility, so slight as to almost be hypothetical, that, as well as taking away something that didn’t belong to him, Toby Reid might have left behind something that did.
Yet, as Niamh grew into a petite, dark-haired, hazel-eyed, olive-skinned girl, then a graceful young woman, sunny-natured, kind and prodigiously talented, I sometimes looked at her pretty face and wondered.
Now they’re about to meet, and I’m scared.
My phone rings. It’s Ramona Ferrier, Brendan’s wife, in her capacity as BOTMS secretary. Can I please organise someone to pick up the wristbands from the printers in Wang tomorrow? The promised forty-eight hour turnaround turned into a week, and with things this tight, we don’t want to risk Australia Post.
Ramona’s a great one for getting other people to do work. She’s the queen of delegation. In this case, the distraction of a errand out of town is welcome.
‘No probs. I’ll drive down and get them myself,’ I say.
With a bit of luck, and if I spin out the trip, it’ll get me out of town when Hell ’n’ High Water arrive. I can choose when and where I see Toby Reid, rather than wait around for him to grace us with his presence.
My absence puts even more of the responsibility for tomorrow evening on Ken’s shoulders. He’s the chef in our family, but I feel a little bad about leaving him to do all the prep as well.
By way of compensation, and to dissipate my nervous energy, I spend Wednesday evening bustling around, attacking the kitchen, dining room and lounge with duster and vacuum cleaner. Vehemently plumping cushions, wiping surfaces that were adequately clean to begin with.
‘Are you going to sit down and relax at any point?’ wonders Ken. ‘Busy weekend coming up. At this rate, you’ll be buggered before it starts.’
‘Leave me alone,’ I reply. ‘If I don’t keep busy, I’m going to fret.’
Ken shakes his head.
‘What’s got into you, love? It’s only Toby fucken Reid and a few of his mercenaries coming to dinner. Sorry, musos. It’ll be fine. Not worth getting in a fluster over that prick. Come and sit.’ He pats the bench next to him. ‘I’ll get you a glass of wine. That Rutherglen muscat you like?’
I relent, try to sit and relax, listen to the night-time garden, the soft chuckle of the creek. But it’s no good: I can’t settle. I tip the good wine back so fast, it’s a waste.
‘Sorry, got to get on.’
Last thing before bed, I change the bedclothes in Niamh’s room and put fresh towels in her ensuite. On my way out the door, hand already on the light switch, I pause to look at the photo on her bedside table. It’s a little sun-faded now; its plain wooden frame is beginning to come apart at the corners.
Niamh and Ken down at the creek. She would have been twelve. It was a hot summer that year, I remember. Our daughter’s in her bikini, swinging in the tyre that used to hang out over the water, suspended from the bough of the big river redgum. Her wet feet rest on her dad’s bare shoulders as he stands below her, waist-deep in the water. They look so happy, laughing into the camera.
Twenty years ago!
She’s turned out well, our little girl. Everything we might have hoped for. A pity we couldn’t give her a younger sibling, despite trying. We put Niamh down to beginners’ luck.
She’s driving up from Sydney tomorrow, her text says. Just her. Starting early. By the time I get back from Wang, she’ll be here.
No explanation as to why she’s coming solo, but we speculate that maybe Takumi’s out of the picture. He’s been a notable absence in her communications of late. That’ll be a shame, if it’s true.
He’s a nice lad, if maybe a bit young for our thirty-two year-old daughter. It was a surprise, when she brought home this baby-faced twenty-three-year-old, two Christmases ago. She’s always had an old head on her shoulders, and tended to go for older men, until Taku-chan came along.
The strain of maintaining a long-distance relationship might have told in the end, maybe? It’s been a busy year of touring for her orchestra. London, Prague, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Milan, Budapest … so many European cities we’ve lost track, then a short Middle East tour on their way home.
Such is the topic of our murmured bedtime conversation, until Ken stops responding. I listen to his breathing in the darkness: deep, steady, reassuring. Finally, I drift off too.
Next Tuesday in The Devil’s Chord: Meg meets daughter Niamh and puts her in the picture. Niamh has news of her own.
Title photo ‘Suitcase of Secrets’: the author’s original photo, modified in Gemini 3.
Steve, I am wondering would there ever be those songs if Ken and Toby weren’t bandmates. Stories are only made in certain context.
Who does it really belongs to? Maybe Both. How can we assign the ownership?