Crystal Passion Ch. 04

It's often assumed that because I've been cast as Crystal's best friend, I'm also the one who knows most about her childhood or at least about her life before she became a musician. That's just not true. Her husband Mark knew Crystal's family far better than I ever did.

Mark was never really a close friend. In fact, I regarded him rather more as a rival. Neither Crystal nor Mark were jealous lovers but that wasn't what it was like for me, although I accepted Crystal's sexual promiscuity much more easily than I could her almost uncritical emotional promiscuity.

I know that Crystal Passion was christened Christine Giordano, that her mother, Marianne, was Irish and her father, Giuseppe, Italian. And I know that her family home was an unremarkable semi-detached house in Harrow, North London. I'd also heard the rumour that Polly Tarantella makes such a big deal about which is that Crystal was the bastard daughter of a millionaire who was paying her some kind of an allowance. That would certainly explain why Crystal managed to live relatively comfortably when Giuseppe's income was never any more than what you'd expect for a middle-ranking civil engineer.

As to why she'd adopted the name Crystal Passion, I guess it was just as accidental as my stage name of Pebbles. And mine was entirely because of a supposed resemblance to a character in the Flintstones cartoon series.

All I know about the circumstances of Crystal's birth are what Polly discovered in her research for the biography. How she tells it was that there'd been an outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease that closed the local maternity ward in Carlisle where her parents were living at the time and the result was that Crystal was born instead in a Lake District cottage, but I don't attach nearly as much significance to this accident of birth as Polly does. I think the theory hinted in the chapter of her biography about Crystal's birth that her father was a man who wasn't her mother's husband is entirely speculative. Marianne was an old hippy and she gave birth to her daughter during that time in the 1960s when the practice of free love was flaunted as a statement of identity. It'd almost be more incredible if Crystal's parentagecouldbe verified without DNA analysis and that wasn't available in those days. It's even more unlikely that this alleged real father would agree to take responsibility for an unplanned pregnancy.

I've met some of Marianne's friends from the time of Crystal's birth. They're all very nice people who're rather bemused and even dismayed that the fashions of their age, which appeared to herald a long-lasting—even permanent—change, turned out to be as ephemeral as every other fashion. And I can see where Crystal might have picked up her attitude regarding habitual nudity and polyamory.

I once spent a few days with Crystal in a New Forest farm house where her parents previously used to live. It had been a kind of hippy commune from the late 1960s to nearly the 1980s. It was now wholly owned by Zack and Liz who'd lived there for all of that time. They were real old hippies in every sense. Long greying hair, ethnic clothes and always smoking hash and weed. I really enjoyed their company, so it was pretty much inevitable that Crystal and I should join the two elderly hippies in bed. I'd never had sex before with people old enough to be my parents, so this was a first experience for me but not one I made a habit of until I was pretty much that age myself. I can't imagine Zack and Liz would be up to such a vigorous foursome nowadays, especially as, being the only man, Zack had to invest a disproportionate amount of his energy.

I also met their son, John Aaronson, but not at the farm house nor indeed with either of his parents. He's rather better known as John River, of course: lead singer with the River Bank. In the early days of Crystal's musical career, when she was a History undergraduate, she and John were an acoustic duo prosaically known as John & Crystal. It could have been called Aaronson & Giordano, but that was too much of a mouthful. Polly Tarantella dedicates a whole chapter to this early partnership. She believes Crystal is the natural successor to the River Bank's legacy, but I don't think there's much in common between John's music and Crystal's. Nothing was recorded from the time they performed together, but Crystal told me they mostly sang other people's tunes. And a weird selection it was too. Songs by Bob Dylan and Nick Drake, of course, but also songs made famous by Billy Holliday, Everything But the Girl, Abbey Lincoln and an acoustic version ofBig Funby Inner City.

John and Crystal guested on each other's gigs later on, but this was before the River Bank did the music for that weird ballet with the Hereford Salon Ensemble that was infamous for its depiction of violence, nudity and explicit sex on stage. It was that rather than the River Bank's version of Al Green'sTake Me to the River ortheir ownThunder in the Skythat is most in tune with Crystal's music.

From what I've been told, there was nothing very special about Crystal's school life. She was a bright pupil and excelled at school, but not so much that she was ever the star pupil. She was a sort of geek that no one could imagine was destined for a career as a sexually promiscuous musician. Although she excelled at Music Studies, she didn't pursue it as an academic subject. She played guitar with a school folk group that mostly played covers of Top Thirty songs. The photos of her at the time show a pretty girl dressed unremarkably for a 1980s teenager. There are no pictures of her in the nude. Indeed, there are no nude photos of her at all until Christine Giordano became Crystal Passion. Even so, I'm sure she was just as habitually naked in the family home with her hippy parents and their hippy friends as she was in later life. And, despite Polly's lurid conjectures, I have no reason to believe she'd ever been exposed to inappropriate sexual behaviour from within the family circle.

Crystal's parents were separated by the time we set off on our American tour but they hadn't yet divorced. I think they were waiting for Crystal's brother, Justin, to finish university before making it official. I don't know why they split. Marianne always seemed to get on just fine with her husband, although Crystal hinted that another man was involved. And I got the impression that the extramarital relationship this other man had was with Crystal's father rather than with her mother.

Although Crystal had never been on holiday to America as a child, it was to San Francisco that Marianne chose to move when she separated from her husband and where she lived with some English friends who'd settled there in the 1970s. It was a natural destination I suppose, since San Francisco had once been the beating heart of the hippy movement. And so she should see her daughter perform on the Crystal Passion American tour, Marianne was staying at the time with some other friends who lived in the Pennsylvania countryside. She was scheduled to meet us at our hotel when we arrived in the City of Philadelphia for our second official gig on the tour.

Although I'd made love with Zack and Liz, I've never had sex with anyone other than Crystal in her immediate family. I don't think Justin would want to have sex with one of his sister's friends and Marianne quite simply wasn't a potential partner. I'm sure Crystal's mother had dabbled in Sapphic pleasure in her younger days, but it was obvious to my now expert eye that she wasn't truly attracted to other women. And so I again disagree with Polly who says that Crystal inherited her sexual proclivities from her mother and that Marianne split up from Giuseppe so she could shack up with her friend Marcia in San Francisco. Marcia wasn't gay either. In fact, I don't think she's ever been in a permanent relation. She was far more devoted to her three young children than she was to any lover.

Before we set off from New York to Philadelphia, we had the opportunity to perform in the Big Apple as the full band—albeit at the last minute—in front of a very small audience in a basement club somewhere in Brooklyn. Homeland Security had finally released our equipment and Kai Pharrel, or his boyfriend Pedro, arranged a last-minute gig to support a Math Rock group with the suitably dull name of Attenuated Dissonance. The MF Club could hold at most a hundred people, but the number of people who bothered to come and watch us play was barely a quarter of that.

It was a real treat to have my Rolands back and even better to perform as part of a full band with Crystal at the front of the stage with Thelma, the Harlot, Andrea, Philippa and Judy gathered around her. At the back, and constantly being bumped into on the small crowded stage, was the rhythm section of Jane and Jacquie and me. The set was mostly based around material from our third album,Seventy Doctors, and from the unreleased album,The Last Word, although nobody in America would know what was new material and what wasn't.

As always, the audience was totally bemused by what they heard. There was really nothing in common between a nerdy three-piece rock band and a ten-piece ensemble of diversely attired women. And, in Crystal's case and very nearly Judy's, not really attired at all. I was wearing a pretty flowery dress I'd spotted in the window of a Brooklyn charity shop, so with my shaved head and blood-red lipstick I definitely looked the part of a Riot Grrrl, as did Thelma and Philippa. In their tight tank tops and shorts, Jane and Jacquie looked ready for a real work-out. And for some reason Andrea wore a check shirt with jeans so with her violin and bushy hair she more resembled a Country & Western fiddler than whatever else the audience might have expected.

I'd like to say the gig was a success. In fact, it was almost the highlight of our tour but at the time we thought it was just a warm-up for the gig we were due to do at the folk rock venue Mary Jane's in Philadelphia. So we were buoyed up with fresh enthusiasm as we squeezed into the twenty year old Volkswagen camper van loaned to us by a friend of Kai's which was festooned with a fading psychedelic mural and the wordsGrateful Deademblazoned amongst other lesser tributes to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. The drive from Manhattan to Philadelphia took nearly four hours, which was rather longer than we'd expected, but more time was spent getting lost on the roads out of Manhattan and those into Philadelphia than on the nearly one hundred miles of interstate highway between.

The hotel in Philadelphia was better than the one in Manhattan, but that's not saying much. We still had to share three to a room and our only view through the hotel windows was of a disused car factory. As band leader, Crystal was assigned a room to herself but she almost immediately offered to share it with me.

And so it was that when Crystal's mother came to visit her daughter, she found me sprawled across the hotel room bed reading a copy ofThe Philadelphia Inquirerin more hope than expectation of finding something that alluded to our upcoming gig at Mary Jane's.

"Is Chrissie not here, Simone dear?" Marianne asked after she knocked on the door and we'd greeted each other. Her blue jeans were a tight fit on her matronly hips. She was wearing a red tee-shirt that celebrated the Philadelphia Phillies. Her bushy grey hair was as wild and unruly as ever,

"She's out with Tomiko and Jenny," I said. "They're doing a recce of the venue we're playing tonight."

"She knew I was coming, didn't she?" said Marianne. "I left her a phone message at reception."

In those days, when very few people had cell phones, even in the United States, you couldn't normally phone someone unless they were in.

"Yeah, sure," I said. "She'll be back soon. Take a seat. D'you wanna share a spliff?"

"I don't mind if I do, dear," said Marianne. "I have to tell you, I'm real freaked out by the roads in this city. I don't like to drive, but you just can't rely on public transport in America. How's the tour been so far?"

"Not so good," I confessed as I skinned up a concoction of half tobacco and half weed. I told Crystal's mother about our trials so far.

"It's as if the yanks have got it in for us," I said.

"Don't be silly, dear," Marianne said. "I don't think anyone pays attention to what's written in theNew York Post." At this stage we didn't know about Samuel Hedrick's rant on talk radio. "Anyway, you have to expect a bit of the rough with the smooth. If nothing else that's what Chrissie learnt when she used to go backpacking."

"Backpacking?"

"Yes," Marianne said. "It was after she'd graduated and before she surprised us all by marrying her university boyfriend, Mark. Almost unannounced she boarded a ferry from Folkestone and went hitch-hiking round Europe and Asia. And if that wasn't bad enough, despite having so many friends who'd have joined her if she'd asked, she decided to go all the way by herself. And she was away for very nearly a whole year."

"Crystal's mentioned her travels but I thought they were spread out over several years."

"Chrissie's always liked traveling. We visited places like Morocco, Kenya and Jamaica when she was a little girl. And she stayed with us at our friends' homes in France and Holland. But it's one thing to go on holiday for a couple of weeks. It's another to be away for a year in one stretch."

"No, I didn't know she'd done that," I said as Marianne passed the half-finished joint back to me. "But there's a lot about Crystal's life I don't know about."

"That's the same for me also, dear," Marianne admitted. "And for Giuseppe as well. Whatever I might have got up to when I was younger is absolutely nothing compared with my renegade daughter. We had no idea she was gonna become a folk singer or rock singer or whatever she is. I didn't really take her folk duo with John very seriously. I couldn't see the two of them doing that for very long, and he's done rather better for himself with his group, the River Bank, than he ever could have done with Chrissie. I think her musical ambition is more a result of her year of independent travel than her time with John."

"You don't think Crystal was simply inspired by John's example?"

"In the sense that she'd learnt a lot by playing with him, I guess she was. But I don't think they ever wrote any songs together, did they? And you can't hear much of the River Bank in Chrissie's music either. John's much more mainstream than Chrissie. I think she got more out of listening to Moroccan gnawa and those Steve Reich and Iannis Xenakis albums that Giuseppe bought during the time he was into contemporary classical music. But it's good that Chrissie got John's blessing. I don't think she'd have got signed to a record label or found a manager if it hadn't been for him. And it doesn't do her any harm to be associated with a famous rock band."

"So where did Crystal go travelling?"

"Well, India was the most important part of her journey, though she also sent us postcards from Thailand, Burma, Nepal and Indonesia. She'd probably have gone to a lot more countries if she could, but there are so many places that aren't easy to enter even now the Berlin Wall's come down. We were out of communication for well over a month when Chrissie got stuck in a really out of the way place in the Himalayas, but I get the idea that this was the episode in her travels that had the biggest effect on her: you know, being totally out of touch with anyone who could speak much English. I imagine you discover a lot about yourself in that situation."

"So, what was Crystal like when she eventually got home?"

"Terribly thin, dear. Very thin. I don't think the climate and the diet did her any favours. She had terrible diarrhoea and sickness while she was away, but thankfully she didn't get hepatitis. We've got her habits of good hygiene and of not sharing soggy roaches to be thankful for there. And of course she was very enthusiastic about the cities, the deserts and the mountains she'd got to see: all of them much more impressive than anything in Europe."

"And then Crystal got onto a record label, found a manager and recorded her first album," I speculated.

"The way you put it makes it sound so easy, dear," said Marianne. "I really don't know how Chrissie managed to persuade that record label to put out her first record. It doesn't sound much like anything else that was on the market and I have no idea who buys her records. But Chrissie can be very persuasive. And I'm sure her association with John helped her no end. But yes dear. That's almost exactly what happened. My darling daughter returned from travelling round the world, got married to a boyfriend she'd not seen for over a year and started a career as a singer-songwriter in the early 1990s when that kind of music was probably about the least fashionable it's ever been. That takes extraordinary courage. I have nothing but admiration for everything Chrissie's done. And even if it all ends in tears, I think the experience will have made it all worthwhile."

It was after another joint—this time using Marianne's stash—when Crystal returned to her room to find her mother in a decidedly mellow mood. She pulled her clothes off with no ceremony and hugged Marianne close to her bosom. As always I was fascinated by Crystal's openness in front of her mother. My parents would never be at ease if they saw me in the nude. In fact, they weren't remotely comfortable with even a single aspect of my career or love-life, however much they were sure it was just a phase I was going through.

"Mum!" Crystal exclaimed with her chin over Marianne's shoulder and her arms around her. "I tried to get here as soon as I could, but the hotel's nowhere near the subway and it wasn't an easy job to work out the best way back. But I'm glad to see that Pebbles has been keeping you company."

"She has. She's been very good to me," said Marianne languidly as she proffered the last hit to her daughter. "D'you wanna toke?"

"No thanks Mum," said Crystal firmly. "I'm fine just as I am."

"You know, Chrissie dear," continued Marianne as she stubbed out the roach in the ash tray, "Simone and I were chatting about how you gave up everything and took up a career as a singer songwriter. Didn't you once tell me that when you were in India you met a guru who told you that you were destined for great things? Is that why you became Crystal Passion?"

"There are lots of reasons, Mum," said Crystal sitting down on the edge of the bed beside her mother. "But yes, you're right. I did meet an Indian guy who predicted that one day I'd become world famous and that my dream of musical success would live beyond me. But how much of a guru this guy was, I can't say. India's a weird place when it comes to religion and there are loads of these sadhus and holy men everywhere. It's no big deal, Mum. They're all naked with long hair and bushy beards. I guess that's why he liked me. But he knew nothing about the international music scene. And you can never be sure with these mystics whether they're talking metaphorically or literally."

"So, Crystal. What did this sadhu have to say?" I asked intrigued, as this wasn't a story I'd heard before, though inevitably it's got a prominent place in Polly Tarantella's biography.

"Oh, the usual nonsense," she said dismissively. "There was something to do with former lives and predestination. And how my music would bring light into the darkness and life after death."

"Those are bold claims, Chrissie dear," said Marianne. "You don't believe any of it, do you?"

"Of course not," said Crystal. "It doesn't make sense. There's always something you have to sacrifice or repent for a prophecy to be fulfilled, isn't there? And I haven't given up or repented anything."