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Nine Curzon Place: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Goin' down now

Don't ask me how far down

Don't ask a drowning man how far down

All I know's I'm goin' down.
—Harry Nilsson


Act I

The lights come up on Harry Nilsson, standing center stage with a suitcase in one hand. His newsboy cap is squashed down on his mess of blonde hair. His beard is scraggly and unkempt. His sensitive eyes shine with a mixture of good humor and immeasurable disquietude. The scene is a small London flat in the early nineteen seventies and the idiosyncratic American songwriter looks relieved to finally have a permanent place to sleep in this city. After crisscrossing the Atlantic one too many times, he finally decided to buy this flat, number twelve at nine Curzon Place, Mayfair. It's right in the heart of the city and essentially across the street from the Playboy Club, something which he is all too happy to point out to his friends.

Ringo Starr and his business partner Robin Cruikshank enter stage right. Their interior/furniture design company, ROR, has been hired by their friend Mr. Nilsson to decorate his new home. They take turns shaking his hand and then begin to dash about the place, quickly whipping it into shape with the hippest of seventies accoutrements.


Act II

A warm late July night in nineteen seventy-four. The flat a nine Curzon Place is filled with police, moving from room to room with jumbled purpose, like ants at a picnic. In the bedroom, a large shape lies under a white sheet on the bed. A ham sandwich sits on a plate on the nightstand.

The shape under the sheet is one Ellen Naomi Cohen, better known to the world as Mama Cass. Nilsson is back in L.A. for a bit and she had been staying in his flat while playing a number of solo shows on this side of the Atlantic. She had received standing ovations at her two Palladium appearances on recent nights and was thrilled by the prospect of her horizons broadening beyond the confines of her old band. She went to bed happy and filled with champaign and she never woke up.

Standing at the front of the stage, Dr. Anthony Greenburgh, the medical examiner, makes an unfortunate comment to the press about the ham sandwich, which fuels endless media speculation and decades of urban legend. The simple fact, though, is that Mama Cass didn't choke on the sandwich. She died of myocardial degeneration—basically her fluctuating weight had caused her heart to simply stop beating.

In L.A., projected in shadow on the curtain, Nilsson hangs his head.


Act III

A mild September morning in nineteen seventy-eight. The infamous wild man of The Who, Keith Moon, reclines in bed in the flat at nine Curzon Place. Once again, Nilsson is out of town and letting a friend stay at his home. Moon smokes cigarettes and watches the movie The Abominable Doctor Phibes, occasionally harassing his girlfriend, Annette Walter-Lax. When she objects to his demands for her to cook him steak and eggs, he yells, "If you don't like it, you can just fuck off!"

She storms out of the room, and perhaps in response, Moon downs thirty-two tablets of clomethiazole, a sedative he had been prescribed to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Unfortunately, six of this tablets are enough to be lethal and he soon loses consciousness. When Annette returns that afternoon, he is dead. The stage goes dark.

Spotlights now illuminate a sequence of brief scenes: Grief-stricken over the loss of his friend and disturbed by the seemingly cursed nature of that bedroom, Nilsson sells the flat to Pete Townsend. A series of residents come and go from the flat throughout the eighties as it grows more and more worn out looking. The nineties come and it sits vacant.

In L.A., projected in shadow on the curtain, Nilsson collapses to the floor and dies, both broke and broken.


--


Afterword

For anyone interested, I've posted three wonderful Nilsson tracks below, each one reflecting a different side to his often dark, yet oddly humorous and upbeat songwriting. All three tracks come from his penultimate release, Knnillssonn, which was the last album he put out while still the owner of the flat at nine Curzon Place. It's an absolutely brilliant attempt at a comeback album which, sadly, was completely eclipsed by the death of Elvis Presley shortly after it after it came out.

A true story, incidentally. Except the stage direction.

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San Jose, California:
Holy Mountain of Technology, Underdog of Art

San Jose, for those who don't know, lies about a 50 minute drive south of San Francisco and is the unofficial capital of Silicon Valley. With a population of almost a million it's actually quite a bit larger than it's famous neighbor to the north but you'd never know it to look at the place. Its downtown lies in the airport's flight path which means all the buildings have to be relatively low and it's the quintessential sprawling western American urban model—more like a gigantic suburb than a real city. It's also a very new city overall, partially because earthquakes keep knocking the old buildings down, but mostly because, before it was home to the likes of eBay, Adobe and Cisco, San Jose was largely farmland.

So why on earth would I choose to write about this place in terms of music? Well, I lived there for a while a few years ago and you know how, once you've owned a certain kind of car you can't help noticing that make and model every time you're near one? That's a little like my experience with music from San Jose. Before I lived there I couldn't name a single band from that city. Afterwards I kept noticing them. I make no claims about quality here, I'm just going to throw the names out there.

The bigger artists from the city are an odd hodgepodge of styles really. Smashmouth and Papa Roach are two of the more well-known examples—not exactly a strong selling point but something you might expect from a sprawling California quasi-suburban metropolis. On the other hand, weirdo experimentalists Xui Xui call the city home as well. Garage rockers The Count 5 were also from there and were the first band from San Jose to have a hit—with their song "Psychotic Reaction". The Doobie Brothers and Chocolate Watchband popped up not long after. Peanut Butter Wolf grew up there, and during my stint in old SJ I even had the pleasure of seeing him do a DJ set at a bar right across the street from my apartment. Mathcore goofballs Heavy Heavy Low Low hail from there as well, as do doom metal legends Sleep.

These last two bands I mentioned lead me to my personal experience with the San Jose music scene: loud music. As a person who spent considerable time perusing the "musicians" section of craigslist while I lived there, I can tell you there are a hell of a lot of metal bands there as well as a good amount of punk. This was further demonstrated to me both in hearing the other bands at the practice space I wound up at, as well as from the sounds emanating from the clubs downtown, such as Voodoo Lounge (now closed), Caravan Lounge and Blank Club. Caravan Lounge in particular was a wonderful, slightly seedy spot for local metal.

I assume it isn't the beautiful Mediterranean climate and sunny skies of San Jose that made people want to kick up such a ruckus. I assume it also isn't all the technology and wealth. Maybe it's those countless miles of suburbia that were so often traffic-clogged that you would frequently get to say, Guitar Center, only to have to wait for a parking space to free up in the lot. Or maybe, just maybe, it's a kind of second city primal scream. Maybe, like a couple other cities I've lived in, it was the bellow of the overlooked, a demand to be acknowledged. Maybe it was even a sort of first cry of a newborn, for a new city whose artistic zenith has yet to come.

Hey Janszoon, thx for the Mento stuff at the beginning... always glad to find some HAPPY music, you know, tunes you can play when having guests or to put on a sampler for someone you like :)

But the Vanessa van Basten stuff is impressive also. keep it on!

Thanks! And welcome to MB! :)

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Double Parking in the 90s

When I was in my early twenties I worked as medical supply delivery driver. I got the job through my roommate's previous roommate, and the interview, such as it was, consisted of one question: "Can you drive stick?" I could indeed so I was quickly brought in to drive for this struggling, dysfunctional family business. It was run by a manic, greasy-haired, middle-aged former nurse and her geriatric, deaf, cranky Chinese doctor husband who called everyone in their life, including me, an asshole. Also part of the equation was their mildly retarded son, who drove the van like a lunatic, broke everything he touched and fought constantly with his parents. On the bad days, I was out on deliveries with the son—or worse, stuck answering phones in the office with his two perpetually bickering parents—but on the good days I was out on deliveries by myself.

This was in 1997 and 1998, an odd, sort of forgotten era jammed in between the death of grunge and the rise of nu-metal. It was the time of electronica's brief moment in the sun, the last gasp of britpop and the short flash of swing revivalism. In many ways it was an interesting, underrated time period on the fringes of the dial, when music seemed to be cross-pollenating at a frantic rate in anticipation of the end of the millennium, and I was stuck behind the wheel of a car all day with little else to do but listen to the radio. My deliveries took me all over the place, from projects and group homes in forgotten parts of the city to high rises and blue-blooded neighborhoods where, in one case, I had a regular delivery of adult diapers for some brahmin's fucking dogs. In between, during long journeys and time-consuming traffic, it was radio time.

There were several good stations in Boston at that time, all but one of them belonging to colleges. WMBR, the MIT station, played pretty good punk and hardcore in the mornings on their Late Risers Club show. WHRB, from Harvard, played classical during the day (surprise, surprise) and electronica in the evenings. The only downside to these two was the fact that their signals were pretty weak so I could only pick them up in certain parts of the city. But Emerson College's station, WERS, had a surprisingly strong signal and easily the most varied programming I've ever heard on the radio—folk in the mornings, latin and world music during the day, children's music and a cappella music in the afternoons, hip hop and reggae in the evenings, jazz late at night, metal and electronica on the weekends. I listened to all of them quite a bit, but my go-to station was WFNX, a non-college station which was nevertheless one of the only independently owned and operated radio stations in the entire country at the time.

My recollections of certain songs that they played on that station at that time are all tied to these little driving vignettes, tiny memories that shuffle and fan out through my brain like a deck of playing cards in the hands of some Vegas croupier. Thrown face up on the felt of my mind I can examine them one by one. I can clearly recall, for example, listening to The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" in the early darkness of one December evening, lost on side streets in Brighton, struggling to spot addresses through the cold-fogged windows of the the car. Or winding my way down Enneking Parkway surrounded by the sunny, springtime greenery of Stony Brook Reservation while listening to the Foo Fighters' "Monkey Wrench". Or victorious expert-level parallel parking on the crowded streets of Allston to the tune of Everclear's "Everything to Everyone". Or rolling into the projects just off of Melnea Cass blasting the Chemical Brothers' "Block Rockin' Beats". Or battling traffic by the aquarium with the Squirrel Nut Zippers' "Suits Are Picking up the Bill" on the speakers. You get the picture.

Eventually, after one too many bounced paychecks and hysterical freak-outs from my boss, I quit and went on to get my first, and only, design internship at a tiny little studio on the opposite side of the city from the medical supply company. That was a calmer, more stable work environment of which I have fond memories, but still, to this day, I sometimes miss those days as a driver, meeting people from all walks of life, cruising through the city, listening to music. It was probably the last time in my life that I listened to the radio on a consistent basis. Sadly, WFNX was bought out this past summer and turned into some kind of Clear Channel "adult hits" bullshit station, but in my head, for as long as I live, there is always going to be a playlist of songs they once played, back when they were the soundtrack to breast pump, catheter, wheelchair and hospital bed deliveries in 1997 and 1998. Below is a little YouTube mix I've come up with that reflects just a bit of that mental playlist from that time. Hope you enjoy it.

I enjoyed reading your new journal which wasn't about album reviews. I've gathered from previous posts, that you've lived in quite a few different parts of the USA, so it's good to hear something about them.

BTW Suzi Quatro was popular in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was probably the most popular female rocker at the time, then she just seemed to disappear, before popping up on quiz shows and the like before totally disappearing.

I can relate to driving for a living, especially in and around the Boston area.
I used to drive for a courier company, based in Massachusetts, servicing the New England area. I spent 10 hours a day for 7 years, driving and listening to the radio while making pickups & deliveries as far north as Maine and as far south as New Jersey (mostly in and around Boston, though.)
I spent countless hours listening to the radio stations you mentioned.
I remember WFNX when it was WLYN in Lynn, before Stephen Mindich, owner of The Boston Phoenix, bought it.
And you can't talk about Boston radio without mentioning WZBC 90.3 in Newton (still going strong and my favorite of the bunch.)
North of Boston, WJUL 91.5 in Lowell (my choice when I was too far north to receive the Boston stations) another great station at the time and to this day.

It's been many years since I spent so much time behind the wheel, outdoors and free from an office building or plant/warehouse, earning a living in constant movement on the road.
This quote by you echoes my sentiments about that time...
"I sometimes miss those days as a driver, meeting people from all walks of life, cruising through the city, listening to music. It was probably the last time in my life that I listened to the radio on a consistent basis".
I couldn't have put it any better.

Thanks! I may do a couple more of entries at some point that relate to places I've lived as well.

Heh. It's nice to hear from someone who drove those same streets! :) Believe it or not, I'm not familiar with WZBC though. Not sure why since it sounds like something would have liked back then, maybe the signal wasn't as strong in a lot of the place I delivered in or something.

I didn't even know you had this journal.

You know what your problem is, you're just too damn prolific ;)