Wonderkid Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR wonderkid

  “Wesley Stace has always been the only genuinely gifted fiction writer who also happens to be a rock star, but Wonderkid is the book he was born to write. And if you prefer your novels brazen, poignant and hilarious, as I do, you were born to read it. Like a great show, this will stay with you long after the last cymbal crash and power strum.”

  —SAM LIPSYTE, author of The Ask

  “Wesley Stace has written one of the very few novels about rock bands and the music business that doesn’t have a single false note or outsider-wannabe pretensions. It’s a relief—and a joy—to read about the weird particularities of the lives of musicians by someone who knows the world so intimately. He deconstructs, with an elegant and sharp eye, the heightened sense of the unreality of fame, the relentless grind of touring, and the Ego and the Id made deliciously manifest in the Wonderkids (my favorite new band). He is both ruthless and compassionate, but never cynical. I thought about these characters even when I wasn’t reading the book, and the story will stay with me for a very long time. Wonderkid has both enormous entertainment value and serious literary worth, a very hard trick to pull off.”

  —ROSANNE CASH

  “Highly pleasurable. And unusual, not least because this is a rock ’n’ roll novel written by someone who actually knows what he’s talking about.”

  —PETER CAREY, author of Parrot and Olivier in America

  “Rock ’n’ roll is an infantile business, but never more so than in the hands of the Wonderkids, a group of post-teens, playing music for pre-teens, whilst living chaotic adult lives. In Wonderkid, Wesley Stace absolutely captures the band experience: the triumphs, the letdowns, the sell-outs, the success, and the scandal, with an extra helping of absurdity. There were times reading this book that I could actually smell the dank dressing rooms, or feel the bus rolling down the highway to the next gig.”

  —PETER BUCK

  “Finally, a sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll book for Dan Zanes fans! Wonderkid also happens to be one of the best books about fathers and sons since Turgenev.”

  —GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Super Sad True Love Story

  “I can’t believe that this amazing book exists. Wonderkid is by far the best music novel I’ve ever read, and the most unexpectedly wild ride I’ve ever been on. Every detail is perfect. Do you want to read about the music business? Family dynamics? Children’s entertainment? The often uneasy relationship between the US and the UK? The creative process? This book lays it all out with love and wild imagination. Wonderkid is uplifting, inspiring, unhinged, and unpredictable, just like rock ’n’ roll itself.”

  —DAN ZANES

  “Wesley Stace’s Wonderkid is a marvelous satiric mashup of rock ’n’ roll and pack ’n’ plays. It’s sweet and funny and knowing—and this is me, holding up my lighter for more.”

  —JOSHUA FERRIS, author of The Unnamed

  “At turns illuminating and heartbreaking—but always funny— Wonderkid is A Visit from the Goon Squad for the kiddie music world. A pitch-perfect excavation into the lighter heart of the music industry.”

  —COLIN MELOY

  “Wonderkid is a gem, a rock ’n’ roll novel written from the inside, with an insider’s knowledge of music and the music business, and all the exhilaration and indignities that come with the territory. Wesley Stace is a wise and witty guide to the career of Blake Lear and the Wonderkids, a fictional band that becomes so real over the course of the novel that you’ll think you heard them on the radio.”

  —TOM PERROTTA, author of Little Children

  “Wesley Stace writes with verve, pace, and great good humor. Wonderkid is a flamboyant novel about rock ’n’ roll, sex and drugs, broken dreams, and Brits on tour in America. Buy it at once.”

  —PATRICK MCGRATH, author of Asylum

  ALSO BY WESLEY STACE

  Misfortune

  by George

  Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

  For Tilda & Wyn

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2014 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the address above.

  Copyright © 2014 by Wesley Stace

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-0982-9

  Contents

  Advance Praise For wonderkid

  Also By Wesley Stace

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Seven Songs

  Rock Around the Bed

  Lucky Duck

  The Story of Dan, Beth, Chris, and Blank

  Why I Cry

  The Dog Mustn’t Speak!

  The Second Pear Tree

  Noon in June

  Chapter Titles

  Acknowledgments

  The Songs and Lyrics

  About the Author

  ‘And every one said, ‘If we only live,

  We too will go to sea in a Sieve,—’”

  —EDWARD LEAR

  1

  “Thank you. If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.”

  BLAKE LEAR KNEW ALL THE GUITAR CHORDS HE’D EVER KNOW by the age of twelve.

  He first picked up a tennis racket when he was ten. The Eureka moment: alone in the house, everyone else at church (a sore throat his excuse), listening to his sister’s copy of the Beach Boys’ 20 Golden Greats, on the cover of which a ghostly silver surfer danced on sparkling aquamarine waves. Admiring himself in the mirror as he mimed the words to “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” he spied his father’s racket, picked it up, and pretended he was riding that surfboard, miraculously playing the guitar: a Donnay Allwood, the Borg model, black frame and rainbow flag stripes. People said they lip-synced on Top of the Pops anyway, so what was the difference? Was it essential to make noise? Did he actually need a real guitar? (This would remain his attitude for much of his professional career.)

  As 20 Golden Greats played on—“Fun Fun Fun,” “I Get Around”—Blake became a guitar player. By the stately choral fade-out of “Break Away,” the last song on side two, Blake was feeling the vibrations in his ears, the sensations at his fingertips, and . . . he needed a real guitar. Only a fictional sore throat and the absence of any hard cash held him back.

  The next day, he walked home from school via the High Street so he could window-shop G&D Keyboards. There wasn’t a dedicated guitar store in town, but G&D, despite its keyboard allegiance, had a whole wall full. On impulse, Blake popped in, ostensibly to leaf through the music books, desperate to model one of the guitars that hung like jackets, ready to try on. But he didn’t find himself drawn to the gaudy electrics. He wanted an acoustic, although not one of the ones with elastic strings that you plucked
in the lonely corner of a Spanish restaurant.

  The owner of G&D, eagle eye trained to spot a fledgling musician, could distinguish a wannabe guitarist; keyboard players never looked that haunted. He first tried to foist an unwanted classical guitar on the boy (“easier on the fingers”) but was wholly ignored. An instrument finally negotiated (a beginner’s model with tortoiseshell pickguard), it became clear that Blake couldn’t actually play at all, He could strum the open strings, head thrown back, and move his fingers nimbly up and down the fret-board, but not both at the same time, and to zero musical effect. Mr. G&D hovered ever closer, coaxing the guitar away after its strings were given a brutal twanging workout.

  “Just seeing what it can do,” Blake remarked, but what he really wanted was to see how good he looked; unfortunately G&D Keyboards didn’t have a full-length mirror. All the guitars were too big, but a scale model was out of the question: Blake wanted the real one that he’d always have. He was looking for something to grow into.

  “Maybe you want to bring your mum in some time.” Always easier to deal with the parents, given that the kid didn’t have fifty quid in his back pocket. Or a checkbook.

  “My grandmother or my dad,” said Blake.

  “And you know we can always fix you up with lessons.”

  Blake’s eyes fell upon a lustrous black Eko twelve-string. He had never heard of a twelve-string, never known that double the strings was an option (though the advantages were obvious), was unaware of Lead Belly and the Byrds, but felt instantaneously drawn to the massive headstock with its glittering silver tuning pegs, all twelve of them: twice what everybody else had. He was in love.

  “You don’t want that,” said Mr. G&D, reluctantly getting it down. He didn’t want the kid’s fingerprints all over it either. “Very specific, a twelve-string. Not really a good starter guitar.”

  “How much?” It looked good on Blake. Even Mr. G&D could see that.

  “Forty pounds. But you really don’t want it.”

  “Why not?” It was shiny.

  “Hard to play. Because of the twelve strings.”

  “Can’t you take six of them off, and then it’s like a normal one?”

  “Well . . .” Mr. G&D was reluctant. “The necks are somewhat wider so it would still be hard to play.”

  “Adaptable, though,” said the ten-year-old. The guitar was as good as his.

  Back home, Blake concocted a story in which he had somehow haggled the man down and the guitar represented the deal of the century: a deal that would disappear unless seized upon immediately. His grandmother gave in and bought it for him, while his father, Barry, moaned about the lack of use of the ancient upright piano; in his imagination, both sons—Blake and his brother, Jack—had shown promise. Now no more than a picture shelf, the piano had hardly been played since their mother had gone.

  Blake graduated from air guitar to real guitar, via the Donnay, in a week. Jack, being two years older, also wanted a guitar and got one for his birthday: a cheaper electric, a bright red Canora, with the tiniest, tinniest amplifier in the world.

  Blake wasn’t Blake then. His name was James, therefore Jimmy, but only Jack and his father called him Jimmy. They never graduated to Blake, even after he changed it. And Jack’s name wasn’t actually Jack; it was Jeremy, but no one ever called him Jeremy except his father. Jack was short for Ejaculation, a name given to him as a pubert by (of course) Blake.

  At school, the brothers kept their distance. They walked there separately; never acknowledged each other on the playground; showed no outward signs of being related. Inasmuch as they behaved fraternally at home, they did so mainly to please their parent and their bedridden grandmother. But the sudden appearance of these two guitars brought them together and led them to discover music, rather than the other way round.

  Blake was slight for his age and full of quirks: he was given to bursting into song, making up gibberish, and even, in moments that initially caused his father some worry, exclaiming exuberantly in a manner suggestive of Tourette’s. It wasn’t. It wasn’t even a tic. He was just the oddball who occasionally yelled “Quack!”

  One of his favorite pastimes was to conduct, which he did at the top of the grass verge behind the cafeteria during break. The massed ranks of the orchestra waited for him to tap his music stand and raise his hand; they then played extremely beautifully under his direction, as any passerby could judge from the pained facial expressions of their conductor and the exquisitely felt movements of his baton. There was no orchestra, but Blake did carry an actual baton in his top blazer pocket.

  More than once, Blake’s unconsciously brazen parading of his rich fantasy life caused the baton to be stolen, lobbed beyond his flailing grasp. One morning, Jack stepped in; the talisman and its owner were never parted again. This was shortly after the guitars arrived—as if, by their purchase alone, the brothers had formed a band. And you didn’t let outsiders mess with your bandmates. They were brothers-in-arms.

  Blake didn’t want formal musical lessons, particularly at school. Besides, when he was fronting the band, would he actually need a guitar at all? Wouldn’t he just strut around? Swing his microphone? Set his hat on fire? Or wear one covered with mirrors? He’d seen it all on Top of the Pops—surely being a lead singer was the best job in the world. He bought songbooks with picture chords, often ineptly transcribed, though the Gs and the Cs, the Ds and the E minors were generally in the right place. Those were the only chords he ever learned, and one of them fit more or less anything, particularly when, under Jack’s guidance, he started attempting to annex the neck of his guitar with a capo. And he played a lot of chords he didn’t need to know the names for, because he only hit a couple of the strings. When there finally was a band, he left them to work out the details. He brought the words, sometimes the tunes. Jack was in charge of the rest.

  Jack, on the other hand, was a natural student, a born sideman. He took lessons with a Mr. Stagg, whose qualification was that he had once been, and may still have been, in a band. Stagg had some outré theories about the connection between scales (what he called “the five-chord cycle”) and man’s emergence from the slime, which if made public might have earned him a severe reprimand from the headmaster. Though he taught Jack nothing musical whatsoever, he helped him master the fingering of every scale—that was all Jack needed, at least according to Stagg. The rest came from within.

  Jack and Blake watched Top of the Pops together, but they were seeing two different shows. Blake watched the singer. Jack’s eyes were on the guy with the big gear, who could blend into the background for a breather, then dart out at an opportune moment, and, while the front man was otherwise occupied delivering the song, play to the girls in the front row, occasionally singing a harmony to remind them all that it was, in fact, mostly his band; that true authority was quiet authority; that, unlike someone else, he didn’t need to be front and center all the time. Learning the guitar was easy for Jack: he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t do it . . . then he could. At which point he’d pick another thing he couldn’t do.

  As the school year went on, imaginary orchestra was suspended, and the brothers were regularly having “rehearsals” at break in the cricket pavilion (unless Judo kept them out, in which case they’d climb a tree; unless it was raining, in which case they’d stay in the classroom). They didn’t really play music, except inasmuch as Jack practiced scales. What they did was make plans. As a result, two became four, and they had a nameless band. Pete and Steven were drafted: neither could play an instrument, but both had access to one—Pete knew “Chopsticks” on the piano and Steven’s older brother was a drummer. They all liked the Beatles—everyone liked the Beatles—so they decided on some songs they could introduce into their repertoire. “Lovely Rita” was at the top of the list. Very little music was made, but a name was finally decided upon: the Meetles, whose first album would be called Beat the Meetles. A singable manifesto was produced, ratified by the four members: “We will never play sport again / U
nless we are coerced / Band practice comes first.” Their time was mostly consumed with the design of “In Concert” posters, which, advertising notional rather than actual events, lacked dates and venues. One surviving example simply says “The Meetles In Concert,” and boasts an eye-catchingly Russian constructivist design, duplicated on the old machine in the school attic, then hand-colored.

  Eventually, music was made. The count-ins sounded authentic and promised much, but things got weird after 1,2,3,4. This was a new band—same members, but all options for the graphic design of the word Meetles having been exhausted, they were now the Brutles, a tribute to their two greatest musical influences: the Beatles, and Beatles parody band, the Rutles. Jack had picked up a copy of the Rutles’ soundtrack, All You Need Is Cash, at a market, and, though the whole thing was obviously a joke, the songs were in no way inferior to the Beatles’ blueprints, and had the distinct advantage of being funnier. The Beatles were odd, in part because (according to Blake’s father) they were “druggy,” but they weren’t actually funny like the Rutles or goofy like the Monkees. The brothers didn’t get all the Rutles jokes, but at least they knew when to laugh.

  And so the Brutles were born. Although there was still no specific repertoire, plans for a concert (involving the school tennis court and some lights from the drama department) were at an advanced stage. The poster for this gig in the sky surpassed even the Meetles’ most ambitious promotional campaigns.

  The Brutles needed a project. They also needed to learn to play together. Jack was getting good, and Blake had mastered the capo, which no longer flipped off like a tiddlywink, but Pete and Steven were lagging. There was no strife within the Brutles’ camp, however—the production of the occasional poster made everything official. It was now unavoidably time for songwriting, so Blake decided to write a modest rock opera. The obvious influences were Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and the spate of shorter song cycles (Holy Moses, Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo) that were choir practice staples. The recipe was straightforward: first, a biblical story—literally anything would do. Look up the best known, avoid Jesus, Joseph, Moses, and Noah, and you were made; amplify to include colorful extra characters; and then give each a number in the style of a well-loved musical genre. At the tender age of eleven, Blake had cracked the code.