He never got his dream job at his favorite record store in Madison, but he regularly met musicians through his shifts at a Subway sandwich shop. By neglecting his studies, he was able to soldier his way upward through the hierarchy of the university radio station until he had a two-hour show on Monday mornings, shocking people awake with the Residents and Halo of Flies.
He had come to New York with $800 in savings expressly dedicated to the release of the seven-inch single that would put Daniel Svoboda on the map. Not as a musician. He wanted to found a record label.
By dint of his radio experience and strategic mail-ordering from ads in Forced Exposure and Maximum Rocknroll, he knew his single didn’t have to be so great musically. What it needed was reverb on the vocals, chorus on the guitar, and compression on everything else. The sound would be “warm” and “punchy.” The au courant midwestern sound was grunge with vocals lowered by an octave. The band posters showed nitrogen funny cars shooting flames. What he had in mind was something different: breathy female vocals over propulsive guitar drones, like My Bloody Valentine, only faster. The key element was the breathless woman-girl-child singer—a delicate, tight-throated slip of a thing, aspirating her lines like Jane Birkin on “Je t’aime … moi non plus” but buried under a mass of guitar noise. In terms of artistic lineage, she was somewhere between Goethe’s Mignon and André Breton’s Nadia. He was eager to know whether Pam could sing.
AT HIS SUGGESTION, PAM AND JOE MET HIM AT NOON ON A SATURDAY IN FRONT OF THE Music Palace, a large cinema on Bowery. It was getting close to Christmas. The streets were full of shoppers looking for bargains on the latest Chinese-manufactured goods, such as dish towels and those little plastic rakes and buckets kids take to the beach in summer. They bought a six of Michelob at the grocery store next door and hid it in Pam’s backpack. The theater was almost empty. A few men were sleeping toward the back and milling around the bathrooms behind the screen, recent Asian arrivals with nowhere else to go.
The double feature paired an action movie set in Mexico with a kung fu fantasy about medieval China. It ran all day and night. The action movie had already started, so they didn’t get to talking until the intermission. Pam, hoping to arouse Daniel’s curiosity, said how much she was dreading practice.
He said, “What kind of practice?”
Joe said, “She’s in this hard-sucking power duo that has no songs.”
“Like I always say, if you gotta suck, suck loud,” Pam said. “The Diaphragms have rehearsal space, a drum machine, and no pride. I’d make a speech tomorrow at practice and say it’s all over, but the bass player happens to be my roommate.”
“Ooh,” Daniel said.
“It’s hellish. And the worst part is we really do suck. I use so much distortion that all I have to do is look at the guitar and it feeds back. I loop it through a delay and play along with myself. Does it sound dumb yet?”
“Potentially. Can you play bar chords?”
“Are you asking can I play guitar? Yeah, sure. I can even sing. But there’s something about this band. I don’t want it to be good. I want it to suck, so Simon’s band will suck. It’s the most self-destructive thing I’ve ever done, and that’s saying a lot. I need to quit.”
Daniel hesitated. “I don’t want to be in a band,” he ventured, not sure he would be believed. “I truly don’t. You could say I’m more the camp-follower type. I like a certain kind of music, and I want to get people listening to it. I had a radio show in college. I want to start a label.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Joe interrupted them, saying, “Let’s have a band! We’ll call it Marmalade Sky. It’s me on bass, Pam on guitar, and you on keyboards. We all sing. We have three-part harmonies. We practice at your house. I write the songs. Prepare to rock!”
Daniel said, “You’re barking up the wrong tree, man. I can’t play keyboards. Maybe I could fake drums.”
“There’s too much drums in songs all the time,” Joe said. “You play keyboards.”
“I’m in,” Pam said. “Next stop Marmalade Sky.”
“So what’s my label called?” Daniel asked Joe.
“Lion’s Den, because of Daniel in the lion’s den.”
“That sounds like reggae, when ‘Marmalade Sky’ sounds like bad British psychedelia.”
“Together they fit how we’re going to sound, which is free dub-rock fusion.”
“He could be right,” Pam said. “He did without an amp for so long, he’s the Charlie Haden of punk rock. I mean, relatively speaking.”
“Pam’s the worst lead guitar player in the universe,” Joe said. “Her fingers move like it’s freezing out and she lost her mittens. But in Marmalade Sky, she plays massive power chords she knows how to play, and I play the tunes.”
“I play like I’m wearing the mittens,” she corrected him. “It’s the evil influence of Simon. He wants everything to sound like it’s been dragged through candied heroin.”
“He’s your roommate and in your band?” Daniel asked. “You must be close friends.”
“We’re extremely intimate.” She rolled her eyes.
“It sounds to me like you should cut him off and never look back. I mean, as a disinterested third party.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that he’s on drugs. There are more things at the bottom of the barrel than drugs.”
“Can you please play keyboards?” Joe asked Daniel.
“You truly don’t want to hear me try.”
“You have to,” he insisted. “We can’t have a band unless we’re all in it!”
“I want to put out the band on my label, not play in it.”
“It will be absolutely no fun being rock stars and getting laid and everything like that if you aren’t in the band. You have to play something!”
“It’s better money,” Pam pointed out. “A manager gets twenty percent, but as a band member you’d get a third.”
“Twenty off the top plus a third puts me at forty-seven percent,” Daniel said.
“And we make it all back from record sales and touring!” Joe said.
“I have a day job already,” Pam said.
“Me too,” Joe said. “I mean touring in the city.”
“What I have is more like a night job,” Daniel said. “But fine, let’s talk about how I’m going to hang it up because I’m raking it in with art for art’s sake.”
“We’re going to be rolling in it,” Joe said, as though reminding him of an established fact, “because I’m writing the songs.”
Daniel and Pam exchanged a look that said the band would fail no matter what, if only because Joe was writing the songs. There was a shared bemused affection for him in the look already. “You’re going to be the next Neil Diamond,” Daniel said.
“Hasil Adkins,” Pam said.
“Roy Orbison!” Joe said.
WHEN THE KUNG FU MOVIE WAS OVER, THEY GOT TAKE-OUT PIZZAS AND WALKED TO Daniel’s place to eat and listen to records. The first track he put on was “Suspect Device”