BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, You have to start somewhere, somehow.

I wasn’t sure how to be ‘invited’ into the world of music, nor had any idea what that would look like, until my senior year at Ballard High.

Bill, my friend from high school, was playing guitar for sports events, parties, dances, and grand openings. A classmate as well as a neighborhood friend, Bill Chism played guitar exceptionally well for a kid. One day while I happened to be hanging around at his home, he played “The Girl from Ipanema.” I mindlessly sang along, and at the end he said that I had “a pretty good voice.” I thought he was jiving me, but he wasn’t really the type who jived girls. Maybe he might possibly have had a slight crush on me, and I chose to ignore that. He was a serious, dedicated guitar player.

We goofed around with me singing to his accompaniment, some of the top hits of the day. “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”  “Girl from Ipanema” “A Taste of Honey” and “Never Can Say Good-Bye”  which would eventually be our nightly closer. Not taking his compliment too seriously, I began to find music a stimulating, more colorful way to express emotions I had no idea how to express, and to let people know me, without over committing myself to any real involvement. This was a new, more interesting form of interaction; possibly the beginning of the new Julie.  

Bill arranged my first professional gig at a grand opening of a new beauty parlor in Bellevue, an up and coming wealthy suburb across Lake Washington in Seattle! He owned a sound system, microphone, and a car, so he generously paved the way with all the difficult minutiae. Plus, he was reliable, respectful, and a good driver. Bill was an only child, with a swinging stepfather as well as a real father who was Native American and quite the Bohemian, living in a big old house near Green Lake.

Bill and I were good friends without romantic entanglements. I introduced him to my best friend Petula, and while in high school they had some kind of starry-eyed liaison, which included making out while drunk overlooking the Sunset Hill Bluff, and occasionally going to the drive-in movies. The three of us had some classes together at Ballard High and were kind of like a benevolent gang. One, “Contemporary Problems,” was taught by a really cool teacher, Dan Logan, who insisted we call him Dan. We mainly chatted and pretended to be doing our school work. School was a socializing necessity.

Musically, I was ready to roll before I realized I could sing.  It was easy and fun to sing all those familiar songs my parents had played for years, and through osmosis, I had memorized and built a large repertoire without even knowing it! “Please Release Me”, “Make The World Go Away”, and one of my favorites “How Are Things In Glocca Mora?”

Since Bill informed me that I sang well, I ran with it. At that point in my life, my brother had never complimented me on my voice, so I imagined I wasn’t any good. I enjoyed learning new good things about myself through others’ observations, rather from my family.

During my last year of high school, my family’s current listening hit list included the double album, Judy Garland live at Carnegie Hall, which they all loved! I loved the big band arrangements that were specifically built around highlighting Judy to be the great star she was! (I wished someone would do that for me.) Bill good-naturedly tried, and learned these unusually strange songs to him, on guitar. His accompaniment felt sparse, but my acting ability and the desire to sing and captivate listeners with the panache of the sophisticated songs got me going! Slowly but surely, we turned into a musical duo, which was a popular thing in the late ‘70s.

We were both nineteen during the summer when Bill invited me to join him in Redwood City, California—a small town outside of San Francisco. He had been visiting a rich uncle down there, and eventually he got his own apartment with a swimming pool. Bill’s goal was to get us gigs in cocktail lounges. Our musical lives were beginning. And having gigs was an important part of the plan.

I took the Greyhound Bus to Redwood City, California, and was willing to participate in this professional singing adventure. Not sure if my parents really had any idea what I was getting into. They knew Bill and thought he was a nice enough kid.  At that point I had spent one fabulous year at a state college in Ellensburg, having spent Winter quarter in a travel-study program in Mexico, I had begun to develop a taste for adventure, with unpredictable experiences.  

I agreed to this new escapade of singing in bars and touring through that area of California, which included San Francisco. We wanted to work at little cocktail lounges and restaurants. In Seattle, Bill and I would be underage for working in bars. But in California, the age for drinking and hanging out in “dens of inequity” was nineteen!

Bill’s apartment was off Camino Real in Redwood City. The local bar in his neighborhood, the Orange Duck, also located on Camino Real, served as our very first, authentic nightclub experience. The outside of the building resembled a vivid yellow shoebox with several supersized, brightly painted, perky, orange ducks dancing about. But inside it was dark and mysterious, and I found it somewhat alluring. It reeked of spilled alcohol, nervous sweat, and gun powder. It was an authentic sleazy, cocktail lounge. I felt, in some way, since it was California, I had ‘arrived’ into a brighter paradigm.

Bill had been playing solo at the Orange Duck for a few months, and he realized it wasn’t that fun without someone else there. So, Bill made the arrangements and sent for me. We fit the time-slot that was available then. As “boy on guitar and a pretty girl in a sort of sexy dress singing”, we were part of the perfectly ridiculous zeitgeist of the time 1973. Since it was our initial foray into the ‘professional’ world of music, I was a little shy about giving us name. Did we really have any kind of branding or personality warranting a special name? We were simply doing songs I knew, and a few that Bill suggested. Considering that other duos had a name I threw around the idea, mainly as a joke, “Beauty and the Beast”. Bill being the strong stoic type with a beard, resembling a ‘beasty kind a guy’ and beauty, well, that was me! Bill humored me and never took offense at my off the cuff absurdities.

Bill sat on a stool, so he could hold his guitar in his lap, and work the amplifier. I always stood so I could move around, dance a little, create some energy, plus it’s not easy to sing sitting down. If I got tired of singing, I suggested Bill play one of his virtuoso solo numbers which included, a show stopping version of Malagenia on his acoustic guitar. Everything was new to us,  made it up as we went along. I often wore turbans on my head as they had been popular in the 40’s with glamorous movie stars. Unfortunately, the ‘retro-vintage’ look wasn’t quite happening yet, I was always a bit ahead of the curve, and I think I ended up looking a bit odd when I wore them. I remember audience members asking me why I wore them and suggested I take them off, since I had a beautiful head of hair, long and wavy.  I think I was trying to create a unique style, which I hadn’t quite figured out yet and it wasn’t working.

    We got paid $10.00 per hour each, plus regular tips, and people bought us drinks—which led me to wonder if this was “Getting to be A Habit With Me?” I always accepted a drink with “Thanks I’ll have Scotch.” To refuse an offer of a drink almost felt like it would be rude. I wanted to say, “No thanks, but, you can put the money you were going to spend on the drink in our tip jar!” But, again, I didn’t know if that was considered rude? One night, I remember that Bill actually passed out, face first, on stage! That took the cake. He quickly revived and slightly embarrassed took a break, as did I.

But at the time, it felt as if Bill and I were successful and on a roll—everything was possible!

We easily “graduated” to better places, which wasn’t hard, since the Orange Duck was about as low as you can go. The Villa Roma, still in the same neighborhood, was slightly more upscale, an Italian bar and restaurant. It was hard to take the gig seriously since the club normally had a piano player and a singer, so we were forced to share the stage with a large piano, that no one was playing. We had to situate ourselves around the piano, where we kept the music, our drinks and my lipstick, and mararacas which I’d pretend to play when we did Besame Mucho.  Villa Roma with a slightly higher-class clientele opened a few new doors for me.  In fact, I developed a slight crush on an older Italian man, a regular, Jimmy, who reminded me of my father. (I was homesick.) He finally asked me on a date and planned to take me to dinner. I was really looking forward to that. At the beginning of our date while driving to the restaurant,  I wished he would have mentioned that he had heart trouble. It sounded slightly clichéd, but it was honestly an innocent wardrobe malfunction, the zipper up the back of my dress suddenly broke, and I was mortified. I felt like this must be the worst thing that could ever happen to a woman on a date!

I told him, “The zipper on my dress just broke!” (As if he would know what to do!) I wasn’t wearing a coat because in California it was warm and the nights were balmy and casual and people didn’t need coats, especially if you were young, and didn’t have a coat for going on dates.

He immediately pulled over by the local fire station and explained calmly to me he was having a heart attack!  

I always dressed a bit more provocatively than was appropriate for a date, not really having the sense of decorum needed by a young woman my age. Plus, I only had two kinds of clothes: everyday jeans and shirts, and my night-clubby, halter tops and flirtatious/risque evening gowns!

Somehow firemen appeared out of nowhere. He had one of those bracelets that alerted the nearest fire station, I assume.  They put him on a stretcher as he hobbled out of the car. I got out of the passenger to watch, dumbfounded. And Jimmy, bless his heart, had the where with all to take out a wad of leafy green cash and told me to take a cab home.

The firemen looked up at me, briefly between pounding on Jimmy’s chest. I was in awe. I had never seen someone being given life support.  

“Is there anything I can do to help? I asked, hoping they wouldn’t think of anything. I wasn’t about to explain to a group of firemen why my inexpensive , dress had a broken zipper! I took the money and beelined it to a nearby cocktail lounge to call Bill.

 After the summer, we were landing higher-class gigs. But I decided to go back to college—this time[  in Bellingham—and major in Theater. Bill was sad and disappointed.

 “Why would you want to leave this great situation we’re finding? You’re working a lot, and you’re meeting a lot of interesting guys!” He must have been distraught, because he asked me that over and over again.

I ignored his pleas. I innately knew I had to get out of there.

Perhaps I felt a fear of the unknown.  When you’re young, you make decisions and do things that make all the difference when you’re older. I don’t know why I had a deep desire to get a degree and be in the cocoon of college up in Bellingham, away from Seattle and California. Maybe I felt I wasn’t prepared to face the music industry or the realities of life. I did not feel there was much potential for growth in music as a duo. And Bill didn’t mention any specific aspirations other than playing in cocktail lounges, drinking, and meeting pretty girls who were readily available to him once they learned we were not a couple.

It’s funny how audiences often assume you’re married to the person who accompanies you. It often is a sort of musical marriage, but we were definitely on different tracks in the romance area.

However, I was proud of my successful experience that when I returned home to Seattle, I boasted to my father how much money I was making! I had heard my parents talk finances, and often my father wasn’t even making that much money! Ten dollars an hour was good money at the time, in 1972-73. I didn’t realize my boasting may have hurt my father’s feelings, but it was unimaginable that I, his hopeless unmarried daughter, made more money than he did!

    Bill had a reel to reel tape recorder, and we had rehearsed a lot in our little apartment. We attempted to make a semi-professional recording in the living room with selections of our current repertoire. That was one brilliant step that Bill took in the direction of musical growth.

More than anything it was an earnest attempt to document what we had done all summer, and it was not too bad. I had not recorded my singing before this experience.

When I returned to Seattle, I played it for my mother and my older, musically trained  brother Norton in our family’s living room. Soon after the first song was almost finished, Norton started laughing because apparently, I was behind the beat, or Bill was ahead of the beat, some kind of technical musical faux pas. I hadn’t noticed before, but now, as Norton pointed it out, with contagious laughter even more so in the second song, all the flaws I began listening carefully with a critical ear as well, to what it was, and I too, began giggling, more and more until it was a form of humorous, hysterical,frenzy. His laughter ignited my ability to laugh at myself as well. We were laughing, so hard tears were rolling down our faces, but my mother wasn’t laughing, she was listening. As was often the case, Norton pointed out to me how funny I was, something I wasn’t trying to be. I hadn’t noticed, those flaws at the time. It made Norton wild with emotional frenzy and sarcastic deriding comments, to the point where I laughed so hard I cried.  Norton often made me laugh till I cried that was part of our dynamic. This time was different, we were laughing at how preposterous my efforts at trying to be professional in music actually sounded.

I hid the tape in my closet for years, never listening to it again. I’d look at sometimes in it’s bright blue box it was in when I first bought it. Since reel to reel tape players were becoming obsolete, I figured I’d ever have a chance to play it again. Norton’s tape deck was no longer working.  So why keep it? Little did I know how technology would change the world, and how tapes could be converted to other kinds of listening data.  One day, while packing to go back to college, getting rid of things I was positive I would never want to revisit that memory again, I threw it out. Hating the fact that I had ever made something so ‘worthless’. Planning on doing something much, much better, someday.

 Today, I painfully long to listen to that recording. I would cherish hearing my younger self, who had had very little training, and even less encouragement yet, audaciously stepped into the unknown world of music and making a major attempt at it. To hear the innocence of that voice, the energy of raw expression of a 19- year- old ‘wannabe’ night club singer. I laid down the singing dream and went to college and study with some wonderful teachers. I slowed down, and took some time to find out what I needed to know in music. I didn’t take the laughter as an insult, but I often wonder what it might have been like if my brother, had instead of laughing at me, took me under his musical wing, showed me something. Apparently, that was not my destiny. I learned other ways of asking for guidance, and eventually, I came a long way from that day.

We’re often encouraged to be rid of old things, to make room for the new. No one ever talked to me about posterity.

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