The Lost Treasures of R&B

by Nelson George

  “That was awhile ago. I’d have to see my calendar.”

  “If you got Gmail it would be in Google Docs.” Mayfield was trying to sound helpful, D thought, but he detected a note of sarcasm in the detective’s voice. D could also feel some heat radiating off Detective Robinson, but clearly he was biding his time.

  “Have you ever done security work for Asya Roc?”

  “I’ve worked for A. Roc Productions a few times and, in so doing, had to put in some time with Asya Roc.”

  “So,” Mayfield pressed, “the answer is yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have eyewitnesses who put you at an illegal boxing match in Brownsville last night. You were there working for Asya Roc.”

  D didn’t say anything. He waited for the other shoe to drop.

  “You were there, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” D said, “as I see you already know. Sorry I wasn’t forthcoming on that. I didn’t wanna get involved or involve my client.”

  “So what happened?” Mayfield was talking like they were friends now. “We know you’re not a bad guy. A lot of people in the department and in the entertainment business vouch for you. But protecting these knuckleheads can put good people in bad positions.”

  In response D told a detailed but imprecise account of the evening’s events. He explained that Asya had rolled to Brownsville on the way to JFK. When the rapper needed to use the restroom, some minor league gangsta types tried to stick him up. D admitted to punching one robber before pulling the entertainer out of there. The car took Asya to the airport and off he went to England. End of story.

  D omitted the guns, being chased around Brownsville by two thugs, and the subsequent shoot-out. He anxiously waited for the two detectives to ask him about Livonia Avenue.

  “Someone mentioned a possible gun sale,” Mayfield said. He plopped a mug shot down on the table. “We suspect this guy was the salesman.” It was a photo of Ice.

  “I know Ice. I saw him there last night. But I didn’t see any transaction of that kind. In fact, the only thing I saw Ice do was bet on a couple of fights.”

  Mayfield looked at him quizzically. “Wasn’t he involved in some sort of altercation?”

  “When we came out of the restroom there was a beef among some of the bettors. That’s to be expected. If I’d had my way we would never have even gone in there. Anyway, I got Asya out of that spot as quick as I could. He’ll probably write a rhyme about how he shot his way out, but believe me, I grabbed the little motherfucker by his collar and carried his ass out the door.”

  The two detectives laughed. This was good, D thought. But they didn’t say anything about Ice getting shot. Did they know? Would they tell D if they did? Maybe Ice hadn’t gone to a hospital?

  “So you went with Mr. Roc to JFK?” Mayfield asked.

  This was a big, dangerous lie. He knew Asya and his people wouldn’t cop to buying guns in a restroom. He’d be cool on that. But Asya would have to lie for D. He’d have to rely on that young MC to protect him. The kid would have a nice negotiating chip to give the police if he needed one later—he could toss D on the gun possession charges if he had to. But if D didn’t get in the car to JFK, where was he? He would have been in Brownsville during the time of the Livonia shooting, a much more serious affair. If someone showed those two cops D’s photo he’d soon be answering questions in a small room alongside a lawyer.

  As casually as possible D said, “No.” The detectives looked at each other, trying not to act surprised. “I went back inside the fight club and caught a couple more bouts before heading home.”

  “Okay,” Mayfield said.

  D knew that JFK had cameras everywhere. They could easily go find shots of Asya Roc in the terminal sans his black-clad security guard. So he decided a small lie trumped a big one.

  “My spidey sense tells me you aren’t telling the whole truth, Mr. Hunter.” Robinson’s voice was soft, almost feminine, quite a contrast to his large body.

  “Well,” D said, “what makes you say that?”

  “Any number of reasons. Gun possession by your rapper client could cost him serious time. And you too, if you were there and do not cooperate with us. Something to think about, Mr. Bodyguard. But if Ice was there and you ID him being there with the guns, a lot can be forgiven. A lot.” Robinson slid his card out of jacket pocket and passed it across the table.

  “Keep us in mind,” Mayfield said as the two officers stood up.

  Robinson added, “Welcome home, D.”

  D watched them walk out the door, sighed, and ordered another chai latte.

  COUNTRY BOY & CITY GIRL

  It was D’s last day in his Soho office. Most of the furniture was gone. The conference room was already empty. The table, the walkie-talkies, their chargers, the lockers filled with blue suits and T-shirts, had already been sent to storage or sold. The room was bare save two metal chairs, a couple of ancient platinum records leaned up against a wall, and a brown box that sat at his feet. Inside were twenty blue buttons with gold Ds shining in the middle. When D Security had record labels as clients, these buttons had graced the lapels of his many employees as a symbol of his company’s professionalism. Now they sat, useless as old tokens, in a box at his feet.

  The record business had been contracting since Napster introduced mass downloading at the turn of the century and had fallen off the cliff when iTunes disrupted the game a few years later. D had been forced to close D Security’s Soho office to cut overhead and scale back his staff, using only the most experienced folks, as competition for even the lowest security positions at drugstore gigs had become merciless, much less high-paying corporate jobs, which multinational paramilitary groups were scooping up.

  After 9/11, people really wanted security. But now there were so many off-duty cops looking for extra cash that the market was flooded with burly guys licensed to carry firearms. There was a glut of security people who themselves were financially insecure. Moreover, physical security, while useful, had become old-fashioned. Cybersecurity was where the money was. Could you detect and repel hackers? If the answer was no, you were just a big piece of meat in a suit. D barely understood his damn BlackBerry, a device that labeled him as ancient as his Earthlink address. D wasn’t just getting older—something he savored considering his brothers’ early deaths—but was becoming functionally obsolete.

  * * *

  D was fondling one of his old company buttons when Edgecombe Lenox entered his office like the ghost of rhythm & blues past. Edge (as he’d been known in music circles) was wearing a three-piece royal-blue pinstriped suit, an egg shell–colored shirt, a floppy white felt hat with a royal-blue ban, a fat periwinkle-blue tie, whisper-thin gold chains, and powder-blue, pointy-toed shoes with thin blue socks. It was an outfit Bobby “Blue” Bland would have sold his soul for. Edge’s gray facial hair had largely been dyed black and shaped into a sinister goatee. He also sported two defiant primo Walt “Clyde” Frazier circa 1973 muttonchop sideburns. A gold blue-faced watch adorned his left wrist and a gold bracelet hung from his right, while his fingers were filled with an assortment of rings, including a sparkling diamond on his left pinky that was bling-bling decades before Lil Wayne was conceived.

  D stood up, gazed at this vision of blaxploitation glamour, and said, “Whoa.”

  “Good to see you too, young blood.”

  Edge’s grip was firm, though his fingers were bony and flesh loose. Seventy-five was D’s best guess of his age.

  “When you said you were coming downtown to see me I was surprised, but damn, Edge, I wasn’t expecting this.”

  “Life is long, young blood,” Edge said, smiling. There were several teeth missing but the man’s mouth hung proudly open. “Until they toss that dirt on, things just keep on happening.”

  D had last seen Edge about two years earlier at the Bronx nursing home that had been the man’s residence for a decade. D had been looking into the murder of his mentor, the music historian Dwayne Robinson, and a
possible conspiracy to destroy and/or control hip hop. Edge had provided no material insight into Dwayne’s sad death, but the elder had related tales of paranoid government programs and deadly federal directives that lingered in the younger man’s mind and, to some degree, proved prophetic about the plot against hip hop. Today’s talk was not to be about black blood spilled or anti–civil rights espionage, however, but of music lost that D never knew existed.

  “I got a call from London about a month ago,” Edge began, his voice grainy as a dusty LP. “It was from a record collector I knew back when I was still an executive. The man would pay me two or three thousand dollars for acetates of records we’d released. It was, of course, against label policy, but dude was one of those passionate British soul music fans—the kind of guy who knew the order number of singles from the ’50s and who played second guitar on records made forty years ago in a Mississippi outhouse. So I hit him off every now and then and he warmed my pocket. I’d lost contact with him when I got downsized by Sony. Figured I’d never hear from him again. Thought he was downloading music from old-school sites in whatever cave he lived in in Liverpool or Leeds or one of them pale towns in England. Then he called me up at the center. Said he wanted my help finding the rarest soul record ever made.”

  “And that would that be . . . ?”

  “Well, I’d heard tell of it. I’m not sure it really happened, that it really existed,” Edge said. “Seemed like a tall tale told by two niggas in a bar. But niggas don’t always lie.”

  “Sounds like a good story coming. If I had some bourbon I’d pour it, my man. But as you see, I’m all packed up including the complimentary booze.”

  “You youngsters just don’t have any sense of hospitality,” Edge said, shaking his head. “Anyway, the record is called ‘Country Boy & City Girl.’ That was the A-side. On the B-side was an instrumental jam called ‘Detroit/Memphis.’”

  “Who were the artists?”

  “Country Boy and City Girl.”

  “Country Boy and City Girl?”

  “Otis Redding and Diana Ross.”

  “What? That’s a crazy combo.”

  “Yeah, so the story goes that in the summer of ’66, the Stax/Volt Revue played the Fox Theatre in downtown Detroit. Sam and Dave. Carla Thomas. Booker T. & the MGs. Otis was the headliner. So a lot of the Funk Brothers—”

  “The Motown session cats?”

  “Yes, James Jamerson, Earl Van Dyke, and all those guys who cut for Motown went to the Fox gig. Now, because the Stax guys were Memphis born and bred, the Detroit cats didn’t know them but had great admiration for their playing. The Detroit cats were mostly jazz trained. Very sophisticated players cause Detroit was a serious jazz town in the ’40s and ’50s. Black folks had jobs up there and supported that good music. The Memphis players, mostly youngsters, weren’t as musically versed as the Detroit guys, but them country niggers and crackers locked into a groove like a motherfucker.

  “After the second show of the night, the Funk Brothers and the MGs hung out, cracked open some bottles, and traded stories. I mean the Detroiters were actually a little jealous of the Memphis musicians cause they got to have a band name—the MGs, the Bar-Kays, and what have you—and the Funk Brothers had no publicity, no press pictures, no photos. The only people who knew they were called the Funk Brothers were folks around Motown. Different companies, different dynamics—you know?

  “First everyone went over to the Hotel Pontchartrain and hung at the bar there. Some other Detroit people came over. Marvin Gaye, who drummed some, really wanted to meet Al Jackson, the drummer of the MGs. And it was Marvin’s idea that everyone go over to Hitsville on West Grand and jam. Some of the Funk Brothers thought Berry Gordy and the management wouldn’t like that. Besides, that night they were supposed to be cutting tracks for Little Stevie Wonder. But Marvin knew Berry and the other higher-ups were in Hollywood negotiating a deal for a TV special, so the henhouse was unguarded.

  “Once Marvin rolled off to Hitsville with Al Jackson and fine-ass Tammi Terrell, a convoy of cars followed them over. Harvey Fuqua was running the session and Stevie, who shouldn’t even have been up, was laying down harmonica when Marvin and Al barged in followed by the MGs and the Funk Brothers.

  “Guitars got pulled from cases. A second trap drum was set up. Bourbon and Black Label got poured into paper cups. A local businessman provided reefer. Stevie’s session got hijacked. My British friend says it was Al Jackson and Benny Benjamin on drums, Jamerson on bass, Steve Cropper and a bunch of guys on guitars, Earl Van Dyke on piano, Booker T. on organ, Little Stevie on harp, Marvin, Tammi, and Otis wailing on vocals.”

  “Whoa, that’s a damn soul all-star team,” D said.

  “Hell yeah, but it gets better. The Supremes had just got in that night from a gig in Philly. Diana Ross had her driver stop by the studio to pick up lyric sheets for a session the next day. So La Ross sees Carla Thomas sipping a can of Coke on the Hitsville steps and chatting with Gladys Knight, so she knew something was up.

  “She goes down into the studio and sees this incredible Motown-meets-Memphis scene, and at the center of it she sees Otis, a big, husky country boy. Not necessarily her type, but the man had sex appeal. Between Harvey, Marvin, and Otis, the idea for something like ‘Tramp’ is concocted and, after playing coy for a while, Ross agrees to participate. The combined band bashes it out a couple of times with Otis laughing his way through it and Diana enjoying it too.

  “Now, Motown being Motown, somebody calls Berry Gordy out on the coast and drops a dime. Berry doesn’t make them stop the session, but orders the engineer to embargo the tapes. So after the fun is over, the Stax musicians head back to their hotel. They have a show at the Regal in Chicago the next night and need some sleep before hitting the road. But Otis and Cropper, who are savvy about songwriting and publishing, hang around cause they want a copy of the tapes.

  “Harvey Fuqua is now in a tough spot. The engineer has told them Berry’s edict and he wants to follow orders. But he feels they should have a copy. So he calls Berry and Berry tells Harvey to put Otis on the phone.”

  “Shit,” D said, “that must have been one interesting phone call.”

  “Hell yeah. No one really knows what was said. Harvey told people later that Otis laughed a lot and wrote something on a piece of paper. After Otis hung up he pulled Cropper aside, whispered something, and they left.”

  “I assume the tapes never surfaced?”

  “Somehow ten copies got pressed up on the Soul label—Berry had been smart enough to actually copyright the word soul—so the copies were on that label,” Edge explained. “It was where Berry put out records like Shorty Long’s ‘Function at the Junction’ and shit that didn’t fit the Motown formula. Somebody with a sense of humor up in Detroit put the words Country Boy & City Girl on the label. So there was some conversation about putting the record out, but I guess the lawyers between the two labels couldn’t reach an agreement. Besides, end of the day, I’m sure the Motown people didn’t think it was the right fit for the Queen of Pop.”

  “This was 1966? She hadn’t left the Supremes yet, huh?” D said.

  “She broke out in 1970.”

  “They had big plans for her.”

  “Yup. And Otis didn’t have his pop hit until ‘Dock of the Bay’ after he died in a plane crash. So, inside Motown and the world of R&B, that record became a collector’s item, then a footnote, and then a rumor.”

  “So you’re looking for a copy?” D asked.

  “And now so are you.” Edge reached into his pinstriped suit and pulled out a stack of euros that he handed to D. “That’s the equivalent of $5,000 American dollars.”

  “Why me?”

  “Cause you know a lot of people and you were close to Dwayne Robinson, who knew the history. He actually mentions the record in his footnotes in The Relentless Beat.”

  “Dwayne is dead,” D said softly, “and wrote that book a long time ago.”

  “I’m told there’s another
10K in it for you.”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “Made money in the ’90s doing something with computers. R&B is his passion. He wants to complete his collection. I also think there’s some kind of competition involved, but I’m hazy on the details.”

  “Okay. As you can see, I need the money. This millionaire British soul fan give you any clues? Also, does he have a name?”

  “No name. Cool?”

  “Cool.”

  “Some people say there might be a copy buried under the Apollo Theater.”

  “Shit,” D said, “that would be a hell of a place to dig.”

  INNER CITY BLUES

  D was riding the C train across Brooklyn, an experience that brought him back to his childhood in Brownsville and reminded him how many of his friends had gone wrong. For them it hadn’t been about food, shelter, and clothing, it had been about diamonds, brands, and ghetto-fab. They wanted to be envied. They wanted to be sweated and jocked and talked about. Green-tinted paper was the ticket. So D resented money because it had played him and everyone else he knew for a fool. But how else did Americans keep score?

  When D was a kid he thought a lot about this on the subway whenever it got crowded. He’d look at all the people around him, crushed against each other, breathing into each other’s faces, trying not to look into each other’s eyes. What the fuck was this all about? Money, of course. And judging by all the Bibles, Watchtowers, and Korans D saw people hunched over and moving their mouths to read, religion was a damn good business.

  It was about fucking too. There were babies everywhere, usually pushed by young girls who seemed either too ill-tempered or casual in their caregiving duties.

  D had been one of those crying subway babies. His mother had one of those too-loud, high-pitched black girl voices that cut through the rumble of steel wheels. He had been the fourth of four boys. The murders of his three older brothers had beaten his mother down. His father? Long gone. She’d remade her life and was living down South with her devout new husband, seeking spiritual salvation in the rituals of domesticity she’d been denied as a younger woman.