It was your every-now-and-again noon-after sleep-in, around the time shadows were drooling and eyelids — fat with all that short-term memory had pushed out of its banks — were just starting to force apart the crust which held them safely blind. The patient breathing of a needle stroking the end of Fun! with Sun! was wafting in from the room which probably had a technical, architectural name, but was known to current tenants (rent-payers or otherwise) only as “The Commons” (shortened from its initial “Sun! Creative Commons for Musical Lewdness and Psychedelic Fervor.”)

The man with the fur vest and nothing else is Cal Marks — he’s heard them all — and the woman walking into his bedroom in a sundress is Penny Stanton, though she has the face of an Emma and the hair of an Alison, the legs of a, well no she’s got the legs of a Penny, but certainly the torso of a June. Cal Marks who looks like himself inspects a mirror and comes up from it with an impending nose bleed, stuffing the spoon too small for soup and too early for much else into jeans that he’s putting on for the sake of Penny, who moves her squinted eyes from his evening wood to the ream in her hands.

“Sales are down in the south.”

“Penny not a morning goes by that I don’t hope to wake and find you lying in this bed next to me.”

“It’s almost night and I like girls, Paul Seaworth needs a release date for the album in an hour or he’s making one up.”

“Neil Young told me that I’m more than capable of accessing my feminie side and tell Paul Seaworth that I quit music.”

“And after that?”

“Tell him late December.”

“June or July.”

“July. Next?”

“We can go through the rest of this after.”

“After what?” “After you clean up wherever the throw up is, jack off, shower, shave, jack off, and eat some toast.”

“You can help me with — what? I was going to say finding the vomit!”

Cal Marks first came through car radios last summer, and with the next one peeking its brow over the horizon the good folks at Cherry Pickin’ Records  —  headed by the human rhinoceros Paul Seaworth — saw ample opportunity for a one-hit-wonder to metamorph himself into a safer investment: the up-and-comer. What with Gene Parsons leaving the Byrds, Jo Jo Gunne trekking through a creative slump, the Beach Boys on European tour, the Mamas and the Papas taking what they were calling (with giggles) a “summer trip,” and with Poco being, well Poco, there was — shall Seaworth say — a “monetary and cultural responsibility” to deliver to the people of California that perfect summer album.

The usual beach bunnies, blunts, and blowouts weren’t doing it for Cal this time around, and he found himself in what the uncreatives call a “creative slump.” He meant “creative slump,” if that’s what we’re calling it, in every sense of the term. He couldn’t get hard, high, or hammered, and when he did sit down to finger ivory or strum acoustics he hated what he heard.

Lyrics usually evaded him, but the normal fog of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll was lifted, meaning that words were coming to him without musical accompaniment. He could tell a few songs, he just couldn’t sing them. Last summer Cal was writing songs about blondes in convertibles and catching a perfect wave. Now incoherent ramblings of words either half-remembered or without definition came to him late at night, only clear in their begging to be transcribed. Help me, I’m inside Raz’s terminus of jelly-flesh, I’m screamin’ for a soda, creamin’ to be loaded.

Cal often found himself coming out of a fever, having written utter nonsense but sure of its accuracy. It was organized garbage that he couldn’t find a tune for. Sun! had other bandmates, but they often rotated out with whoever wasn’t, on that particular day, fed up with Cal’s “artistic demands”.

On an eleven-inch strip of toilet paper he’d written the lyrics for “Softly Dying, Sweetly Crying,” and the only music he could think to set it to was an old toothpaste radio ad he’d gotten stuck in his head around eleven and had never quite shaken. Good for your teeth, grow ‘em big and strong replaced with I’m calling to the stars, hit me with your ooh-rah.

Cal sat down at his typewriter instead of his Steinway baby grand or his D-45 and thought for all of seventy-six seconds about music until he resigned to hit Del’s for an evening cocktail of equal psychosomatic parts egotism (at the hands of the fans who camped out at the dive bar for the one rockstar known to frequent it, yours truly) and insecurity (at the hands of what Cal assumed were probably the “real rockers” of the next generation, the glossy-eyed and hard-dicked 20 year olds who were fresh out of their nobody-gives-a-shit hometowns and ready to give one-hundred-and-ten percent to the musical craft).

Cal was at the Del drinking that cocktail when he got the idea for the song, and this time he didn’t experience it auditorily or lyrically like he’d been used to at some point or another, but through like a lens, or something that slid between he and the sleek brunette whispering in his ear (mistaking him for Stephen Stills), or between he and the scrawny boy who looked fourteen, holding his guitar suggestively in his lap, staring treble clefs at him.

It was nothing that he knew to be musical, nor a sudden realization or clarity or like an epiphany or general love for humankind and Life and the Universe or anything like that. It was blue, and then sort’ve a purplish/pink, and whatever over the course of Cal’s life had manifested into an amorphous yet singular and, fortunate for the musician, finite representation of the color was the song. It shifted and eluded definition in a musical way that makes sense when you’re in it but is indescribable after the fact. Cal was no rookie, he knew the spark of an idea had to be fanned immediately, otherwise lost in the darkness. So while maintaining the bare minimum conversation the sleek brunette required to go on talking without revealing himself to be anyone other than Stills, he started splitting up the nebulous airwaves hanging in the room.

There was the intro: a mundane repetition that was either comforting or suffocating, represented in this scene as the Del itself, home to everything known and yet to be known, opening up into that particular and fleeting sense of rediscovering beauty. Waking up next to the same partner year after year and one day looking over to see the face you first were too nervous to lean into, the smile that shook you to your core, the indefinable within the recognizable that needs reminder every so often.

A drop off, the comfort into which Cal was enveloped as he’d sat down at the Del turned into the squeezed-heart and clenched-asshole excited expectation of change. For the better or worse, the world entered that looked no different was, of course, populated with an entirely new roster of players. The same characters but new actors: leather jackets smoking in corners and desperate wrinkles and drags and beauty queens and the occasional rockstar and the frequent poser and the wide-eyed fool keeping their wits about them as they take in this foreign land that smiles as it thrusts its calloused hands deep inside and wrenches out what’s beautiful. For better, for worse, the stepping off point, to here knows when, parts unknown, out of the comfort zone, leap before looking, you’ll never know if you don’t try.

And after having thrown himself off a plane without checking for a parachute, Cal fell into the warm embrace of rewarded trust. Not always the case, as belief in something good can so easily be brutally raped and left on the side of a dirt road, spit upon by passersby as something that got what it deserved. But against most odds, Cal felt the harsh but for-his-own-good tug at his shoulders as the always-underserved relief of fulfilled optimism unfurled its affirmation in the childish wonderful things in the world like love and beauty and he was floating back down to earth.

The brunette’s capacity for loyalty, telling a story of the time her schizophrenic sister tried to drag a serrated knife across the brunette’s neck and all the brunette had done was cry and say over and over again “I love you, you’re my sister, I love you, you’re my sister, I love you Nanette, you’re my sister.”

The scrawny boy who looked fourteen, dropping his menacing glare in Cal’s direction as something came to him and he rushed outside, already throwing his guitar strap over his shoulder, a tune or a lick or rhythm had gripped him in the way five second little dilly’s used to grab Cal as a kid.

Whether they all wanted him dead or rich or castrated or fucking them or paying for his fame or earning it or selling out or sticking it to the man or shutting the fuck up, he was in it, he was here at the Del, with them, and it was bad and it was good but mostly it was just that blue, or that purplish/pink, hanging over everything, ambivalent but somehow grossly invested in all the bullshit and its purported meaning. It wasn’t much of anything, really, in the way that a good song isn’t much of anything outside of what it means to you, like a song that really does it for you over and over again, revealing some other side of itself each time you crank it up until it’s more than just new or exciting or even a comfort. It’s a part of one’s personal zeitgeist, it becomes one of the synapses in your brain that all information must now pass through, it earns a place in the Cerebral Hall of Fame, and it’s sometimes a deep green, or whatever color you’d call an oak tree, or all the different subclauses for white, or it’s blue, or purplish/pink.

So anyway Cal gathered all that up and said goodbye to Vanessa the brunette and mentally nodded to the kid who’d ran out with his guitar and went back home to write that music. Having already written plenty of lyrics it was atmosphere, the ecosystem in which the music lived that he had to find. In the end (and in time for a July release-date) it was an album called Oh to be the Cream, and Paul Seaworth really, fucking, like really hated it. Cal had to sever ties with Cherry Pickin’ Records so that he could find a label that dug it, and eventually this small joint called Management Entertainment put it out and Seaworth was right, no one really liked it, and that was the end of Cal’s career.

About a year later, when the money had run out, he was going through the Sun! Creative Commons for Musical Lewdness and Psychadelic Fervor when the hard yet elusively sexy sound of a woman’s heels clicked into the room.

“It’s a shame they didn’t get it,” Penny said.

“There was nothing to be gat.”

“I haven’t stopped listening to it since you released it.” He figured she was being kind, so he smiled.

“Y’know they haven’t taken the bed yet.”

“They took it this morning and I still like girls, Cal.”

“You really like the album?”

She walked over to the window and he joined her. The sun was setting on Laurel Canyon and the sky looked like how it looks sometimes when the sun goes down. You know.

“Penny,” Cal said, “I don’t feel so good.”

“You’re not getting out that easy,” she didn’t take her eyes off the sky. “You’re fine, Cal. You’ll be fine.”

It was that where-did-the-day-go time when one starts to see stretched shadows and tries to remember what they’ve done for the past twelve hours. Cal had packed up his house and played other peoples’ songs on his guitar at the beach by himself and had picked up smoking again. He’d also cried. He’d cried when Penny, still not taking her eyes away from that sunset, took his hand in her own and didn’t rub it or squeeze it or really even hold it. She just rested her fingers within his and that sort’ve lens came back. It was different, of course, not in a good way or a bad way, but in like an air that settled over everything, or a lens between he and Penny or them and the sky, doing that thing it does sometimes when the sun goes down. You know.