The Hitmen – Bates Motel

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Rory was one of those ridiculously talented guys who was seemingly born knowing how to do more than you could ever hope to learn in a lifetime. And, to top it all off, he was really nice and fun to be with, so you couldn’t even take any pleasure in being jealous of him. He had come to the Academy as a music major but, after he broke some girl’s arm playing volleyball (he had a brutal spike), somebody suggested he might want to take a dance class to help him blow off some of his energy. He thought that sounded like a good idea, enrolled in Level 1, and within two years had made it to the top of the heap, Level 4, where he was the undisputed best dancer in the school. That kind of rise isn’t just unlikely, it is impossible. Most dancers in Level 4 had been studying since they could walk and I took justifiable pride in gaining entrance to those hallowed classes after only three years of study, but I was nowhere near what Rory was able to achieve in only a few months and never would be. He took to dance like the proverbial watery fish and could seemingly master every combination on the first try. Pirouettes? How many do you want – four, five six? Double tour? No sweat – to the feet or to the knee? How about a triple? And, the mark of a true master, he made it all looked so maddeningly easy. It was as if gravity didn’t really apply to him in the same way, like he was on the moon and the rest of us were earthbound. He could sail across the stage like a kite and barely break a sweat. So effortless was his dancing, in fact, that only other dancers were truly impressed by it. It looked so easy that only those of us who beat ourselves to death trying to duplicate it could appreciate the stunning agility and technique he possessed.

One of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen him do was during a dress rehearsal. We were in Corson Auditorium, the main performance space on campus, and I was high up in the back of the hall, manning the lightboard and running through the pieces with the other techs, trying to get the music and the lights and the curtains and everything working together while the dancers tried to adjust to performing on a stage with a giant black pit in front of them instead of in the dance studio into a wall of mirrors. We got everything set up for the next piece, the dancers took their places, the stage manager barked her orders into the headsets, and we began. The music started, I pushed the lights up, and Rory came exploding out on stage, performing a complex and difficult combination full of leaps and spins that took him from one side of the stage to the other. Then we hit some sort of technical glitch, and had to stop and start again. I reset the lights and, in the booth next to me, the sound guy rewound the tape to the beginning, but he did it without turning the volume down, so you could hear the tape rolling backwards at double speed. Without missing a beat, Rory performed the opening sequence backwards in double time in order to get back to his starting position. It was just a little throwaway joke, but it was one of the most amazing physical feats I’ve ever witnessed. That was Rory in a nutshell.

He and I got to be fairly good friends, to the point that he invited me to stay with him for a couple of days in NYC that summer. I jumped at the chance – both to stay in touch with him and to get a chance to see the magical, mystical NYC for myself. I had been there a couple of times as a kid, but always under close supervision. I was anxious to see the city on my own terms, even if those terms were those of a green fifteen-year-old from the woods of northern Michigan.

Rory was very gracious and showed me around the city a bit. I’m not talking about the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, any rube with a tour book could find those things, I’m talking about taking me down into the Village (he lived on the east side in the 30s somewhere) and getting me a slice of the Original Ray’s pizza. He and his girlfriend Jane were dead broke, and spent what little money they had on taking dance classes, so our sightseeing consisted mostly of walking around the city for hours. Which, really, is the perfect thing to do in NYC, so varied and interesting are the goings on of that giant metropolis. He introduced me to the subway system, showed me roughly the areas you wanted to avoid (which, at that point, was anything south of Houston, anything north of Central Park, and all the other boroughs) and turned me loose. I’d walk around while they were in class and meet them for lunch, or wander the streets so they could have sex (it was a typically microscopic NY apartment – one room, with a tiny bathroom and a kitchenette).

I didn’t have much money, so I couldn’t really go shopping, but I did break down and buy myself a record at Sam Goody’s (years later, I would recoil at the idea of going into Sam Goody’s in the Village when I was so close to so many great record stores, but hey, what did I know?). Columbia Records was being unusually honorable at the time and offering a double-album sampler of some of their new bands and charging something insane like $2.99 for it. It’s really smart, but few record companies can bear the thought of selling something for close to the cost of making it, even though it inevitably leads to people buying full price, full-length releases from bands they otherwise wouldn’t get the chance to hear – that’s how it worked with me, and I’m sure that thousands of others did the exact same thing. The only companies I can think of in recent memory to offer such a great deal on a sampler are two of the most honorable and ethical labels around, Peter Gabriel’s Real World and Robert Fripp’s Disciplne Global Mobile. Anyway, Exposed, as it was called, was packed to the gills with new bands, many in the exciting new wave genre that was starting to heat up in the aftermath of punk. As is often the case with samplers – especially from large multinational corporations – there was a fair amount of dross from forgettable musicians that never went anywhere (Ian Gomm?, Harlequin?), and okay tracks from bands that had no right being on a purported new wave sampler (Loverboy? Judas Priest?). But if you dug through the chaff, there were a few germs of tasty goodness, and that purchase – and the subsequent Exposed II – got me to go into my wallet for full-length releases by The Psychedelic Furs (good call), Adam and the Ants (better call) and Jo-Jo Zep and the Falcons (not so much). But my favorite track on those early compilations was a spooky, noir-wave track called Bates Motel from some group of British unknowns called the Hitmen.