Spiral

the long blond hair?”
    ”The...? Oh, that was O’D.”
    ”Oh-Dee?”
    ”Tommy O’Dell. Original drummer in the band. Called him ‘O’D’ for short, because of his last name.” A cough that I realized stood for a grunted laugh. ”Or because of how he checked out. Always thought that’s how the stone should have read.”
    ”I don’t follow you, Mitch.”
    ”His tombstone. O’D died of an ‘OD,’ get it?”
    Beth’s own grave flashed behind my eyes as I said, O’Dell died from a drug overdose?”
    ”Yeah. Fucking would have killed the band, too, disco didn’t do them in first.”
    ”Why is that?”
    Eisen sized me up. ”You’re old enough, John, you would have been listening to their music in the early seventies, right?”
    ”I remember the name, anyway.”
    ”Okay. Spiral had a couple of hits, mainly songs that Spi and O’D wrote together—Spi on the music, O’D the lyrics, which is funny for a drummer, you think about it.”
    ”Funny?”
    ”Drummer, he’s got to keep the beat when they play a song, you don’t usually peg him as a word guy.”
    ”Got it.”
    ”Okay. Well, even with those couple of hits, Spiral as a band never had enough name recognition once they fell off CHR.”
    ”What’s CHR, Mitch?”
    ‘”Contemporary Hit Radio,’ top-40 tunes, follow?”
    ”I think so.”
    ”CHR is different from AOR.”
    ”Which is?”
    ”‘Album-Oriented Rock.’ Or ‘Radio,’ doesn’t matter. What matters is, groups like Pink Floyd or even Black Sabbath could make it without top-40 hits, because those bands got played on AOR”
    ”The album stations.”
    ”Right, right. A band like Spiral, though—with no superstar, only don’t let Spi know I said that—needs play on the CHR outlets to stay popular. Otherwise, it’s out of hearing, out of mind, follow?”
    ”And this O’Dell had a knack for writing lyrics that CHR stations liked.”
    ”Yeah. But once—look, John, how much do you really know about the music?”
    ”Like you said, I listened to it, but I never studied it”
    ”Okay ” Eisen settled deeper in his chair, like a kid visiting Dad’s office when the old man was attending a meeting-”The history of rock-’n’-roll, short course. Fast forward through Elvis, the Beach Boys, and the British Invasion. Stop at the late sixties, when you had the whole San Francisco scene. Jefferson Airplane with Gracie Slick—God, what a voice she had for the psychedelic sound. Then the second wave of Brits: Elton John, Peter Frampton—talk about a guy should have become a legend, but that’s another story. Weave in Carlos Santana and his salsa-rock, the Allman Brothers and their Southern-rock, the Eagles and their country—”
    ”How about Spiral, Mitch?”
    A pause and another lip purse, the hair plugs marching forward again. ”They had a kind of raunchy-rock sound. O’D was a genius at writing lyrics just this side of what a record company wouldn’t put on albums. Nice counterpoint to Fleetwood Mac and their romance-rock, E.L.O. — that’s Electric Light Orchestra—and their symphony-rock, etc., etc.”
    ”So Spiral found its own niche and filled it.”
    ”Right, right. But like I said, only CHR play, not the album stations.”
    ”And then Tommy O’Dell died.”
    ”Right, though he was getting so drugged out even before he took the big one, I don’t know how much longer he could have produced new lyrics. Didn’t really matter though, because in seventy-six, seventy-seven, along came... disco!”
    I had the feeling Eisen had delivered this speech before.
    ”Which...?”
    ”... fucking killed the CHR-driven rock groups like Spiral. I mean, all you heard was Donna Summer, Barry White, Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King—funny, a lot of the performers were black, but most of the fans weren’t. Even so, Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta gets released, and the ballgame was over for Spiral and twenty other bands like them.”
    ”What happened then?”
    ”Late seventies, we got punk-rock as a kind of a ‘death-to-disco’ protest. You had the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, not *o mention—”
    ”I meant more, what happened to Spiral.”
    ”Couldn’t get them gigs, man. Or only little store-front clubs. No decent promoter wanted their sound anymore. At most, the middle-road rock fans who couldn’t stand pu^ had migrated to corporate-rock, like Journey, Air Supply. Not too harsh, not too sweet, kind of Baby-Bear music, follow?” The fairy tale. ”Baby-Bear,