A COOL SOUND OUT OF GREER

It started with Greer.

   He was anxious, he said, to prove once and for all that talent - true talent - is no longer recognised.  He was fed up, he insisted, with what was being palmed off on the public as Art, in all its forms and through every medium; he felt that this was less a reflection on the dearth of real talent than on the lowered state of public taste.

   The four of us were at our regular Friday night get-together in a King's Road espresso bar when Greer first propounded his theory.  His sentiments were nothing new; we had all expressed them at one time or another, usually when we were on the down-swing of a manic-depressive cycle - the latest rejection slip having been received.  This time, however, Greer took it a stage further.

   "What we should do," he said, "is to prove to ourselves conclusively that the only way to achieve success is by jettisoning our artistic integrity."

   "You mean commercialise?" Porky Witherspoon invested the word with all the distaste he could muster.

   "And why not, laddie?" asked Greer.  "Don't make it sound so dirty.  While you are starving over your post-impressionist canvases, others are getting rich by cycling over theirs on lacquer-coated tyres."

   "Or stamping on them with one-coat daubed, canvas-soled gumboots?" Nosey Pinkerton ventured.

   "Precisely," agreed Greer.

   "But I can't afford a bicycle," complained Porky.

   "Laddie, oh, laddie!"  Greer's tone was pained.  "Where's your imagination? What about those empty beer-bottle cartons you use for cleaning your paint brushes?  Cut them up, embellish them slightly, and take them to your dealer - art, that is, not liquor - as examples of your tacheist period."

   We all sat up a bit straighter on the spindle-legged milking stools that passed for chairs.  When Greer got started in this way there was no telling where the flights of his fertile fancy might lead.

   "What about me?" asked Nosey, who had never quite got over Betjeman's success.

   "Ah!  For you, laddie, there is only one course to follow.  Forget about your poetic saga of the Trojan War - which, in any case, I feel sure has been done before.  Concentrate instead on the Dirge of the Detergent, or the Sonnet of the Shampoo.  In other words: doggerelise!  There's a whole new vista spread before you thanks to commercial television, and with your gift for finding obscure rhymes you're a made man."  His eyes grew misty and a dream-like quality crept into his voice.  "What wonders of imaginative delight are not conjured up by: Spreadnot the Wonder Diet, or Smellnot the Chlorophyll Deodorant?"

   "Or even Gurgito the Miracle Indigestion Tablet," I suggested.

   "Why not," demurred Greer.

   The faraway look left his eyes which were now turned in my direction.  "As for you, dear laddie, the path is clear.  Forget about your Chronicle of a Happy Young Man in Search of Anger, and discard your Dog in a Lukewarm Collar in three acts, or whatever feats of prosaic versatility you may be currently exploring.  That is not the way to economic salvation.  The days of the artistic best-seller may not be lost, but they have certainly found a good hiding place.

   "No, laddie, what the public wants now are paperbacks with lurid covers.  Half-naked females in the grasp of a drape-suited thug holding a knife to their throats; half-naked females in the grasp of a space-suited galactite, with antennae protruding from its helmet; horse-riding cowpokes with blazing forty-fives . . . "

   "Dragging lassoed half-naked females behind them?" interjected Porky.

   "Precisely," conceded Greer.

   "But how do I write such trash?" I wanted to know.

   "You don't, laddie.  That's the beauty of it.  The writing has already been done for you; you merely adapt."

   "You mean plagiarise?"  I was, I confess, a little shocked.

   "Tut, tut, dear laddie.  Plagiarism implies theft; theft implies ownership; ownership implies originality.  I defy you to find an original plot in a pulp magazine. Come to that, I defy you to find an original plot in anything that's been written in the past 2000 years.  All I'm suggesting is that you remove from your artistic sensibilities the onerous, not to say painful, task of composing such trash.  You take a Western, say, and by altering the names and the setting, but retaining the situation, you achieve a science fiction story.  Similarly a detective story may be transformed into a Western.  The possibilities are limitless and no-one can accuse you of theft since they were all stolen, so to speak, to begin with."

   Greer sat back, clearly delighted with the confusion into which his suggestions had thrown us.  It was several seconds before anybody spoke, then Nosey asked: "But what about you, Gregory?  You've suggested our recipes for success, but what about your own?"

   "Ahah, laddies one and all, I have already taken the first sacrificial plunge into the maelstrom of commercialism.  Gone are my concertos and sonatas . . . " he paused thoughtfully, "or should that be concerti and sonati?  Never mind, they have been consigned to their respective Valhallas . . .   Valhalli?  And the core of each, the heart, the nucleus, now forms the basis of my excursion into the realm of POPULAR MUSIC."  I swear he spoke the words in capital letters.  "Pop songs," he continued, "as they are known to the cognoscenti . . . "  He paused again, seemingly considering the word, then shook his head and continued speaking.  "Tomorrow morning at ten a.m. I shall be presenting myself at the offices of those well-known music impressarios Rummy, Eagle and Chaser when, I have little doubt, these germs of my fruitful intellect will achieve their merited recognition.  If you will kindly pardon my few cliches and mixed metaphors."

   In the incredulous silence that greeted this announcement, I found my voice to demand four more lemon teas of the boyish looking girl in tight black jeans behind the bar.  Or perhaps it was a girlish looking boy.

   "Thank you, laddie" said Greer.  "You know my weakness.  Although I'm not sure I should.  I usually get hoarse after three lemon teas."

   "You should worry," I consoled him, "it won't affect your piano-playing tomorrow morning."  And, after drinking our teas, we all left - to mull, no doubt, over Greer's words after our various fashions in our several abodes.

   "The following Friday we were clearly all eager to hear the latest developments in the saga of Gregory Greer, Songwriter, for the espresso bar found us all at our habitual table a good thirty minutes earlier than usual.  All, that is to say, save Greer and, as the minutes passed, all conversation between us ceased, while our eyes remained fixed on the door, awaiting his arrival.  Promptly at the usual hour, he appeared; but this was a Greer none of us had seen before.  Gone was his shaggy mane of hair and beard; gone were his roll-neck sweater, his khaki drill trousers, his open-toed sandals.  Instead we gazed at a smooth-cheeked, crew-cutted, midnight-blue-suited, and slim-Jim-tied fugitive from a rock'n roll dancehall.

   "Four lemon teas," he ordered in a husky voice as he sat at our table.  Then, looking at me he said, "I can see my appearance astonishes you, but it's you who are responsible."

   He paused, allowing his words to take effect, then continued: "Yes, dear laddies, it was that third lemon tea last Friday.  I awoke on Saturday with a mere croak where my voice used to be.  This, needless to say, did not unduly disturb me, since I am used to it.  That is until Rummy, or it may have been Eagle, or even Chaser asked me to sing my songs."

   "Oh, my God," I gasped.  "I guess that really put paid to your song-publishing hopes."

   He smiled benevolently.  "You could say that.  Actually, though, the songs would not have been published anyway.  Between us I think they were just a little bit too good.  But in any case it was my voice that interested them.  Chaser, or it may have been Rummy, said it had a certain something that was the answer to the teenagers' prayers.  And Rummy - or is it Eagle? -  has arranged for a recording session next week.  The clothes and hair style are their idea: it seems there's a recognised uniform for this sort of thing and my fans may not like it if I break any of the taboos.  Therefore I hope you will understand if I refrain from coming here in future - I feel my appearance will only embarrass you - but, you will understand, my Art must come first."

   There was the merest suggestion of a twinkle in his eyes as he drank his lemon tea, wished us all success in our own endeavours, and left the cafe.

   All that must have been about three years ago, since when success has graced all of us - after a fashion - and gradually we have grown apart, possibly because we might each feel a bit embarrassed at meeting the others.  Too much like a finger of conscience from the past.

   Porky Witherspoon is now quite well-known - in the circles that know of such people - as a design artist, and every one of you will have at least one article in your homes to which his hand has been laid, be it carpet, or curtains, or crockery.

   Nosey Pinkerton, alas, is less well-known.  But who has never heard:

                                        Mirror, mirror on the wall,

                                        Who is the fairest of us all?

                                        Be she short, or be she tall,

                                        It's she who uses Sunbleach oil.

   It doesn't scan too well, and the rhyme is even worse, but someone has put a very catchy little tune to it and it's a fairly typical example of the sort of thing that has given Nosey a mews flat in Chelsea and a Jaguar XK140.

   As for me?  Well I wonder how many of you have prepared for a train journey by purchasing from the station bookstall a western by Slade Slattery, or a detective story by Don Jerome, or a science fiction story by Buck MacMasters.  All in lurid covers, of course.  And very little difference in the story line of any of them.  Yes, they are all by me.

   And I suppose we all owe our success, one way or another, to Greer.  At least, he it was who first pointed us in the right direction.

   As for Gregory himself . . .  I last saw him about two years ago, when a sentimental whim - my last - carried me over the threshold of that Chelsea coffee bar.  He had reverted to his old style of dress and shaggy mane of hair and beard, and seemed to be on fairly intimate terms with three more budding "artists".  This was quite a shock to me, as I had believed him to be doing quite well.  You may recall his record "Give me a rocking horse, baby" which reached the top twenty, recorded, of course, under his stage name of Noah Hope.  I didn't want to pry, but I thought I ought to buy him a lemon tea for old time's sake.  In fact he told me what had happened without any prompting.

   "You see laddie, what appealed to the public was the particular timbre my voice took on after I had drunk three or more lemon teas.  The trouble began when I became really popular.  What with recording dates, stage appearances, and charity concerts, to say nothing of radio and television, I was singing more and more, and drinking more and more lemon tea.  Ultimately I developed an immunity to lemon tea, and then I was of no more use to them."

   "You mean . . . ?" I ventured.

   "Yes, laddie," he interrupted.  "I lost that certain something."  His face grew wistful.  "They could understand the words."