The Life and Times of Grace Flick

by David Barber

iteration 1
I’ve got pictures of that girl with the fringe and the eyes and a voice that revved like a motorcycle. Here’s the album cover I mean. That’s her at the back. Rare to find vinyl this old still in its sleeve; and look, here in the sleeve notes, “For the inspiration, thanks to,” is my name.

iteration 2
Just went back to 1965 and fed the band their own songs before they wrote them. Like you read our minds man, they said. It’s the zeitgeist, I told them, I’ve got my hands round the throat of the zeitgeist. And get rid of your singer; the future belongs to that hippy chick, Grace Flick.

iteration 5
She sang with such disdain for bread and for the Man. Haight Ashbury days. Things would never be so cool again.

iteration 6
It was never about the money. Making the music, being young, being on stage was almost enough. They played as if there wasn’t a crowd. You felt lucky to be part of it. Yet in time they grew less indifferent to fame. In every iteration, the band always splits, squabbling over who gets the name.

iteration 9
When Grace went solo, I went back to watch. Small venues and small crowds. Middle-aged hippies with pony-tails and jobs in the Valley, relaxing with some nostalgia and a recreational joint at the weekend. They just shouted for the old songs. The Eighties were a bad time for us all.

iteration 11
Hard to stand by and see her wasting her talent on the power ballads and soft rock penned by the second-rate bands she fronted. Tried to defib her career with Poker Face and Wannabe and Rehab pulled from decades long after, but no one took them seriously.

iteration 14
She loses herself in years of big hair and fierce glamour, sometimes too drunk to go on stage. I meddled so much that I met myself on tour once and saw what I’d look like in middle age. After that it got harder not to harbour doubts. Perhaps she wasn’t the person I imagined. Did she ever think she would end up matronly and grey? Ask her if she is content. Ask me if I’m content. The past was not supposed to be this way.

iteration 16
Always one more iteration. Just wipe the blot of booze and pills and she could still be great. Downtime, an older self recalled he’d tried exactly that in younger days, when I was him. Just nod politely I thought. He was fogged with history that happened now in different ways.

Note
Avoid all meetings with my older selves. This one didn’t even seem shamed by what he’d become. That future isn’t mine, because I won’t let it happen. The bloating and the veins on his cheeks. Only needed to hear him speak to know he’d lost his way.

iteration 17
This is the one where she gave up on music and settled down in Palo Alto with her cats, swollen with disillusion, numb from Prozac and TV.

iteration 20
A singer who never quite fulfils her promise seems the best we can hope for. So many variables, so many complications, always spiralling out of control. In later years, she takes up photography, glossy black-and-white portraits of the musicians she knew back in the day. What became of us? the wary expressions on their faces seem to say.

She gives the occasional interview, maintains a certain dignity, and none of us interfere. If she gets this far, we give up tinkering with her life. She looks like her own mother. It was only in that young flesh we saw so much. Her end is her own affair.

iteration 23
My others have tried beginnings before; now it seems it’s my turn. They should have listened to me while California was still dreaming, before the draft blew them away, before the Sixties became a joke and the truth was found to be lies.

iteration 25
I’ve heard my younger selves complain that Flick guy was never right for her, that they married way too young. And privately we all know who would have treated her better. It’s always an older self who eases Sonny Flick out of the picture, followed by the same shameful declaration. There’s no forgetting the distaste on her face. Imagine the desperation, the self-delusion of old men.

iteration 30
Mostly her life gets altered without her knowing, which is the purest way. The young though, always insist on a relationship of some sort. I’ve been her agent and, briefly, her manager. She yelled at me once to leave her alone, unaware we’d tangled her life so completely it was a knot impossible to undo. And in all those iterations she never even seemed to like us much.

iteration 34
Perhaps it was a time and a place. The music, that voice, her face. I wish that I knew now what I knew then.

iteration 35
Impossible to convince our younger selves it was an obsession, that the real Grace Flick always eluded us. The faces of the young are like mirrors. I see their disgust at my trembling hands and rheumy eyes.

Note
More rumours of a Causal Correction Event. A unique pivot point that resets everything back to the way it was. Can’t wait. The young deserve it, the shits.

iteration 0
Sure, Grace Flick could sing but, without the original sleeve, the vinyl’s not worth much.