EAST VILLAGE, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK | 1969
Woodrow hurried down a rainy East 6th Street, turned up Second Avenue, and dove into the stage door in the back of the former Yiddish Theater. The drummer held a special love for New York City as, out of all American places, it reminded him of home.
Everywhere you looked, layers of history piled atop older layers, reaching down past an age of tenements to find the Dutch of New Amsterdam, digging deeper to find the trading post of Juan Rodríguez and the village of the Lenape, and past that to an island of black bears, wolves, muskrats.
The sold-out crowd packed into the Fillmore East was being to get rowdy as the National Loaf was more than an hour late taking the stage. Billed as a record release party for “friends and family,” the venue on New York’s Lower East Side had long become the go-to place to catch shows that often lasted until the Sun came up.
The Loaf was rumored to have undergone a musical sea change on the forthcoming album, Cut the Loaf, however, the “Crumb Bums,” as the rabid fan base had begun to call themselves, had taken their medicinal cues from the group’s last psychedelic masterpiece, Take My Mind and Eat It. Various and sundry shifts in perception had already begun in earnest, leading the promoters to give a nod to the communal artists that ran the house light show to distract the crowd by flooding the stage with glowing, swirling, and shifting forms.
“I’m just going to get a T-shirt that says, ‘Where the Fuck is Lucious Cole?’ I am so tired of saying it,” Wilkie dropped his cigarette into a half-drained glass of champagne where it died with a truncated hiss.
“He’ll be here, don’t worry,” Woodrow appeased, even as he nervously drummed on the green room’s well-scarred coffee table. “This record is his baby. You know he is chomping at the bit to get this one out there.”
“Champing,” Cornell uncharacteristically corrected.
“Excuse me?” Woodrow snapped.
“Champing at the bit. Horses champ, you pillock,” Wilkie pilled on. “Alligators fucking chomp.”
“I’ll chomp you, you clever Dick!” Woodrow rose from the table, drumsticks ready to serve as a suppository if called for.
“Easy, lads,” Cornell stepped in-between the warring rhythm section. “How many times have we been in these straits and our man has come through.”
“Sod that,” Wilkie refused to let it go. “That is exactly the problem. We are expected to be the responsible ones while Lucious waltzes the fuck in whenever he feels like it. We are supposed to act grateful that he graces us with his presence. I’m done with it.”
“What are you going to do, quit?” Woodrow asked. “Cole writes the songs, sings the fucking songs, like it or not, he is the face of the bloody Loaf.”
“Face, my ass,” Wilkie seethed. “These people just want to watch him self-destruct. They want to be able tell their friends that they were there when Cole… fill in the sodding blank.”
“Cornish, do you feel the same way,” Woodrow probed the depth of the band’s discontent.
“Jere, you know I respect his talent,” Cornell admitted. “I just don’t know about this new direction. I mean, we are not cowboys for fuck’s sake. We were all born within a stone’s throw from bloody St. Giles-Without.”
“So what? What’s to be said about that? It’s all gone, and I say let it bloody go. What is this really about? Not money,” Woodrow looked from face to face. “We’ve all done quite well following Louie’s muse. You think Ringo gets a quarter share of publishing? He does not.”
“It is unnerving working with someone who swears that he knows every move in advance,” Wilkie confessed. “It really gives me the willies, especially since he is always right.”
“What about this ‘meditation chamber,’ Jere?” Cornell asked. “Have you seen it… have you ever used it yourself?”
Woodrow rubbed the back of his neck in contemplation before coming clean. “I’ve seen it, yea, even stole a seat in the bloody thing myself. I got nothing out of it, just the reflection of an idiot sitting on a stool. The only thing missing was a dunce cap.”
The vision Woodrow painted finally broke the tension as the trio laughed together at the idea.
“Is he bonkers, then?” Cornell wondered out loud. “Has all this been a lie?”
“This is real,” Woodrow countered. “All those people out there believe in it. I think that makes it real, no matter where Lucious pulled it all from. I mean, who can say where art comes from? If his muse finds him when he’s sitting in a coil of aluminum sheeting, well, that’s where he should sit. Who gives a monkey’s arse?”
“Right then,” Wilkie conceded. “I’ll see where this goes tonight, but if our man can’t pull his head out, I’m going to find a real band.”
“Good luck with that,” Woodrow laughed. “You think our peers aren’t every bit as dysfunctional as the Loaf? You should go ask The Ox what he thinks about working with an auteur. And at least I’m not driving my cars into swimming pools.”
“You don’t drive,” Cornell unhelpfully pointed out.
“That’s not the bloody point, is it?”
From out in the venue, a chant of “Loaf! Loaf! Loaf!” began in earnest, prompting a visit to the green room from a nervous promoter. “Where the Fuck is Lucious Cole?” he asked, counting heads.
“Bloody hell,” Wilkie sighed, checking the tuning on his Fender P-bass for the umpteenth time.
Román Leão 