The Girl in the Fred Slatten Shoes

I was in Halfnelson with a pair of brothers I knew from university until they suggested I join a band other than theirs either because I was an awful drummer or because I was vocal about my distaste for their cuteness, as exemplified by the singer’s mock-operatic falsetto and their intention to perform little skits between songs, or even during them. I formed my own band. We and Halfnelson attended each other’s ultra-sporadic gigs, and were sometimes each other’s whole audiences. Their changing their name to Sparks (because they reminded their manager, Albert Grossman, of the Marx brothers!) hadn’t made them much more popular.

Four years after they banished me from their band, the brothers relocated to England and became the flavour of the month. Their breakthrough UK hit, featuring the singer’s frantic falsetto, got lots of airplay on the West Coast. The new, improved, 60-percent British Sparks was booked to headline at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, at which I’d dreamed of playing since the summer of 1966, when the Inrhodes, composed in significant part of former members of my own first band, opened shows for the Yardbirds and other notables. I wasn’t pleased that the brothers had beaten me to it, and as headliners, and hoped to hate their performance. 

I didn’t. They were terrific.

I was standing in the Civic’s entrance, gnashing my teeth, grumbling, trying to decide whether or not to subject myself to the humiliation of their after-party at — cuteness alert! — Marie Callender Pies up on the Miracle Mile, when a tall (very) young woman introduced herself as Olivia R— and made clear that she might be interested in a private guitar lesson. I don’t actually play the guitar, and her height owed to her remarkable Fred Slatten shoes, platform skyscrapers of the sort favoured by the jailbaitettes of Rodney’s English Disco. Saved by the belle, whose name was Olivia R—!

I drove us back to my apartment on actual Sunset Blvd. Waiting for the elevator on my building’s garage level, Olivia removed her shoes. I encouraged her to put them back on. I’ve always found high heels arousing. I had faint (these were very different times) misgivings about her age, but then learned that she’d been seeing a lot of a celebrated Hollywood photographer a lot older than I. How could I be reasonably accused of depriving her of her innocence? Did I note that these were very different times?

I didn’t see her as a replacement for She Who’d Broken My Heart six months before, but was pretty sure I’d made the right choice in not attending the Sparks after-party. We made plans for her to visit again, and to be sure to wear her Fred Slattens and hold-up (by garters!) stockings. 

In the meantime, I discovered that a woman with a remarkable honey-coloured Afro I’d lusted after at work reciprocated my interest. I encountered her upstairs at the famous Rainbow Bar and Grill, and danced with her to Sparks’ breakthrough hit. Lust can inspire great feats of graciousness. She left her husband and effectively moved in with me almost immediately.

Such was my delight that I’d forgotten my and Olivia’s plans to reconvene. A few days after The Nib, she of the remarkable hair, had brought her toothbrush over,  Olivia phoned to say she was in the lobby, in the attire I’’d requested, and I had to tell her my heart had been claimed by another. Having come all the way from some godforsaken corner of the San Fernando Valley, Olivia wasn’t delighted with me.

I have owed her an apology for 47 years. 

Here it is.