AS IF IN A CARTOON

Albert Terrason, known as Albee, released Finishing School in 1980, with a cover photo that confused fans, who had never seen him wearing glasses, who would have been forgiven for wondering if the man pictured, not just bespectacled but older, thinner, and grayer, was even the same man, but the ten songs on the album drove back any doubts, so meticulous were they in their adherence to soul conventions, so magnificent were they in their ability to convey his hopes, fears, and dreams, all of which had poured out of him in a seemingly unending stream and were captured by the reel-to-reel tape recorder in the guest house of the palatial estate of his former bandmate and duet partner, Edward Foreman, known as Eddie. Albee and Eddie had started singing together in Baltimore in 1962. They had been joined then by an ampersand. “Firing Fast” was their first hit, regional, after which they reeled off a half-dozen that climbed higher and higher on the chart: “The Girl For Me,” “Never Without (Your Love)” “Home-Field Advantage.” Eddie had a word for the fame they suddenly felt: “Limousines,” he said, as if that explained it all, and maybe it did. Albee was more expansive in his thoughts but kept them to himself. Eddie jumped ship in 1971, when he discovered that he had a talent for trading stocks. An initial investment of ten thousand dollars doubled and then doubled again, often with him acting against the advice of his business manager. His small house had been traded in for a larger one, and then for his estate. His wife drove one of six cars. He announced the news with a shrug. “This is the direction I think I have to go,” he said. Without Eddie, Albee was not so lucky. Or rather, drugs were luckier: they forged a partnership with him that replaced and surpassed the one that and Eddie had enjoyed. Albee kept releasing records without Eddie, scored one massive hit with “The Love I Need To See (What’s Real),” filled halls on the strength of its success, but then started to falter, usually because his partner waylaid him, fogged his mind, made the case that he didn’t need to show up at the the theater if he wasn’t paid in advance or that the younger singer who was expressing admiration was really a snake who needed to be punched in the mouth. Albee sang sad songs and lived one, too—he lost his girl, his home, slept in a motel and then in his car in the motel’s parking lot. Driven to the edge, exhausted more days than not, incensed by the sight of his own face in the rearview mirror, he called Eddie and was offered use of the guest house, no questions asked. At first, he considered the arrangement a con in progress, or at the very least payback for the way Eddie had left the act, but within a day of moving into the guest house he felt its tonic powers coming through the wood panels, the leatherbound volumes, the oddly understated chandelier. He never opened the liquor cabinet. He wrote a song called “What Can’t Be Filled,” and another called “Burning Up and Burning Down.” He was the subject of both. He wrote other songs about people he had wronged, mostly women: “I Asked Too Much,” “You Gave Me Everything,” “Sitting Next To Me (So Far Away).” He kept a notebook next to the book of lyrics in which he documented his arrival at a kind of calm he had not previously felt. Eddie’s wife, coming out one day to bring him a sandwich, remarked upon it. “You seem different,” she said. “You haven’t hit on me or yelled at me once.” That became a song title, “You Haven’t Called My Name Once.” The album was recorded in a nearby studio on Eddie’s dime and released to wide acclaim. Albee was found dead in the guest house a week later. Eddie’s wife, who made the discovery, let the sandwich slip slowly off the plate as if in a cartoon. A commitment letter for a national tour sat signed on the desk. Next to it were lyrics for an eleventh song left unrecorded, “Limousines,” and atop the lyrics were his glasses. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas