Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All

by King, Stephen

  The blinding epiphany in that Beaumont music store had lasted only a minute, but it had started Branch down the tortuous road that led him back to Mississippi. In all the years since that day, maybe a dozen axes had triggered the same rush, and still could, with the right mix of chemicals in his blood. Recalling that day, Branch popped an oxycodone tablet into his mouth and bit down on the bitter disk. Dutch courage? he wondered. He’d bought at least a dozen stolen guitars over the years, but he’d never actually ripped one off himself. But tonight he had no choice. This prize was special. Priceless. Irreplaceable. Even Jimmy Page and Paul McCartney would have to move aside for Robert Johnson.

  That old hound’s got to be dead, Branch thought, staring up at the house. So much for the canine burglar alarm.

  He knew Percy Falkner might have installed an electronic security system since his last visit, but that wouldn’t matter. This was a smash-and-grab job. Once Branch had battered his way inside, he’d simply snatch the Kalamazoo off the wall, set the place on fire, and leave the rest of the collection behind to burn. The nearest fire station was nine miles away. The mansion would be gutted long before a pump truck arrived. If old Percy Falkner survived his latest round of chemotherapy, he would return from Memphis to find his entire collection destroyed, along with his family home.

  The fire would seem suspicious, of course, and while the fire marshal searched for signs of arson, Percy would sift the ashes for remnants of his lost treasures, as any shattered collector must. And because Percy had looked into Branch’s eyes as he played the Kalamazoo during his visit last summer, a bundle of fibers deep in his memory would twitch, and he would suspect the truth.

  But here Branch’s true genius came into play. Percy Falkner would be searching for guitar parts that could survive a fire. On a flat-top acoustic, that meant the machine heads (the tuning pegs, most people called them) and the truss rod inside the neck. The budget-built Kalamazoo had no metal truss rod, so its pegs and their hardware were all that could endure a fire. If Percy didn’t find the tuners from the Kalamazoo, he would know the fire had been only a diversion and that Branch Davis had stolen his guitar. But when Percy combed through the ashes, he would find the hardware he was looking for. Because Branch had spent five thousand dollars hunting down an identical Kalamazoo. And once he’d found it (in dump of a Brooklyn pawnshop), he’d paid a street kid to go in and purchase the instrument. Back home, he’d burned the guitar in his backyard and salvaged what remained. The actual tuning pegs had melted, but the flat hardware and gears had survived. Those gears and ruined pegs now lay snugly in his front pants pocket. And their existence would allow him to keep the magical instrument once he’d claimed it.

  Branch had stood so long in the cotton that the sweat had formed a river down his back. Even the front of his shirt was soaked and clung to his round belly. Though he’d visited this place once before, he hadn’t really grasped the fecund nature of it. He’d been raised on the rocky earth of Maine, where God’s bounty was measured in inches—or a few feet, if you were lucky. But tonight he was standing on alluvial soil so deep, you’d have to dig a hundred and fifty feet to hit bedrock. This was the richest earth in the world, fertilized by the bones of Indians, watered by the sweat of slaves, and sanctified by their blood. A biblical haze hovered over this land, where the sea of cotton washed right up to the front porch of the big house, like surf, and at noon the sun burned down with the same relentless fury that Moses and his Jews had known in Egypt. Even now, in the moist bosom of the night, Branch felt that if he stood here long enough, his feet might take root in the soil and the life that thrummed through it might claim his pale Northern body as its own. Percy Falkner might return from Memphis to find a new scarecrow standing in his field, buried to the waist in cotton.

  This image shook Branch so deeply that he finally jerked into motion, like a standing horse startled from sleep. He took one slow step forward, then another, then, with frantic urgency began, to run toward the mansion. He averted his eyes from the motionless dog and quickly assessed the door. Getting through it proved far easier than he’d imagined in his fantasies. He simply smashed one of the small windows beside the door frame, then reached in and flipped the dead bolt. One hard kick was all it took to break the knob lock, and he was inside.

  He remembered exactly where Percy kept his collection: a display room tacked on to the back of the mansion, filled with shelves, cheap display cases, and all other manner of junk. The man had no pride, no principle of organization. He was more a hoarder than a collector. Branch felt no guilt at the prospect of burning Percy’s house. Falkner’s wealth had been earned upon the backs of exploited Negroes since at least the 1840s. Desperately yearning young black men like Robert Johnson. If any man had cosmic payback coming, it was Percy Falkner, despite his genteel voice and aristocratic manner.

  As Branch made his way swiftly to the display room, he froze. It wasn’t a burglar alarm that stopped him, or an unexpected dog.

  It was music.

  Somebody was playing guitar in the back of the house.

  Impossible. Percy’s wife was dead and his kids lived in Atlanta. Besides, Percy Falkner hadn’t played an instrument since the trombone in his high school marching band. And this wasn’t just any old noodling. The flurry of notes ringing from the back room had the incisive edge that could only be imparted by a bottleneck manipulated by a very talented finger. And the finger Branch was hearing now sounded like it belonged to…Robert Johnson.

  The song was “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil).”

  Is that a vinyl record? Branch wondered. An old 78? Or the later 33 1/3 reissue that had so moved Bob Dylan? No. Branch hadn’t heard a single crackle or pop. Yet the music he was hearing damn sure wasn’t digital. The physical world was analog, the most analog thing in it was music, and the most analog of all music was the blues played by black musicians. All that added up to only one conclusion: There’s a black man playing guitar in the back room of this “empty” house.

  Branch had stopped dead in the hallway, but probably too late, because the music had also stopped. He could feel the player listening from the other room, hypersensitive ears tuned to the tread of an interloper. Branch prayed the floor wouldn’t creak beneath his Reeboks. Just as he considered bending down and pulling his pistol from his ankle holster, the music started up again: “Hellhounds on My Trail.”

  Branch’s heart began to pound.

  After a few seconds of indecision, he padded forward and paused outside the display room door, which was cracked open about six inches. Bending only his knees, he set the Molotov cocktail beside the jamb, just out of sight, then pushed open the door.

  Twenty feet across the cluttered room, a black man of indeterminate age sat on a stool, playing the scarred old Kalamazoo. He played with his eyes closed, smiling with preternatural intensity that appeared to be some variation of joy. Dressed all in black, he wore a frock coat, an old string tie, and a stovepipe hat that looked less like the one Abraham Lincoln wore and more like the chimney pot that had crowned the head of the voodoo priest in Live and Let Die. A diamond ring flashed from the finger of his picking hand, and a dark glass cylinder gleamed on his fretting hand, gently curved like the neck of a beer bottle.

  Branch hesitated only a moment, because the music drew him forward, pulling him like a subtle alteration in the gravitational field between himself and the guitar. When he was about ten feet away, the black man’s eyes opened. They were large and bright, with yellowed sclera shot with blood. The guitar player smiled without a trace of surprise, revealing a mouthful of square teeth. He nodded a greeting, then began nodding in time to the music emanating from the strings beneath his fingers. “Hellhounds on My Trail” became “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom.”

  Branch felt a strange buzzing in his head. The guitar player was older than he’d first thought—maybe a lot older—yet he possessed an undeniable vitality, like a boasting old blues musician who could still satisfy a “sweet young thing.
” His frock coat hadn’t been cut by any machine, and it was so black it seemed to suck the light from the surrounding air, then redirect it outward from the old man’s eyes. But it was the way he played that hypnotized Branch. The otherworldly music ringing from that old Kalamazoo sounded like Robert Johnson high on pharmaceutical cocaine.

  He doesn’t look anything like Robert Johnson, Branch thought, recalling the famous Hooks Brothers portrait. Besides, Johnson had died at twenty-seven. This man had to be seventy-five, at least. Could he be Johnson’s son?

  As he entered the home stretch of “Dust My Broom,” the old man turned on his stool and faced the near corner of the display room, simultaneously multiplying the volume and altering the timbre of the guitar. Now the incisive notes clashed and crisscrossed each other at new angles, propagating in ways no computer could predict, stirring Branch’s soul to pulsing new life. This technique had been christened “corner-loading” by modern players, but the man who’d made it famous was Robert Johnson—the bluesman who’d played with his back to the room.

  Branch felt more astonishment than fear. Then curiosity overwhelmed his astonishment. Who the hell is this guy? Just as his compulsion to know the answer reached an unbearable pitch, the man finished his song and sat listening to the echoes fade into silence.

  “Who are you?” Branch asked. “A friend of Percy’s?”

  The old man spun slowly on the stool and smiled. “Percy and I do a little business now and then.”

  A fillip of fear shot through Branch’s belly. “You’re not a…a collector?”

  The man seemed to mull this over with some pleasure. “Well, now. I don’t think of myself as such. I’ve been called a collector, that’s true enough. But I think of myself more as a facilitator.”

  “Facilitator,” Branch echoed, far from reassured. “What is exactly is that?”

  “I help people get what they want. I try to put ’em in a particular place at a particular time and then let them do their thing. That’s all success really is, after all. Ain’t it?”

  Branch thought about this. “Except for talent,” he pointed out.

  “Talent!” cried the old man, giving a dismissive wave of his hand. “Talent’s everywhere, son. You don’t hardly have to look for it. Talent’s a glut on the market. It’s gettin’ people to pay attention that’s the trick.”

  Branch tilted his head and shrugged in partial agreement.

  “Why, I’ll bet you’ve got all kind of talent,” said the black man. “I can see you just itchin’ to try out this here guitar. I can feel it. And it takes a confident man to try on Robert Johnson’s guitar. That’s like takin’ target practice with Wyatt Earp’s pistol or blowing Dizzy Gillespie’s horn.”

  “I already played it once,” Branch said. “Last year.”

  The old man’s eyes gleamed. “I know you did.”

  “How’s that? Percy tell you?”

  Another enigmatic smile. “He mentioned it.”

  Branch took a step forward. “So…have you got a name?”

  The old man shrugged. “I been called lots of things in my time. Some good, others bad. Like most men who’ve led a full life, I reckon.”

  “I’m—I’m Bill Denning,” Branch said awkwardly.

  “Is that right? Well…my name’s Legby. My old gamblin’ buddies call me Lucky.”

  “Where you from, Lucky?” Branch asked, encouraged by the man’s forthrightness. “Did you grow up around here?”

  “Oh, everywhere, nowhere. Spent about all my life on the road.”

  “Are you a preacher? You kind of look like a traveling preacher.”

  The man’s smile broadened. “I’ve done some preaching. Tent revivals and such. I’ve sold Bibles, and patent medicines too. Dr. Rabbitfoot’s Enchanted Elixir of Youth. Cures the rheumatism, boils, piles, the grippe, headaches, eases ladies complain’ts and just about any other affliction. Works about as well as grain alcohol, which is what they call the active ingredient nowadays. Sold like hot cakes in dry counties like this one.”

  Branch laughed, imagining the hard-shell Baptist hypocrites lining up for their snort disguised as syrupy medicine.

  “You’ve done some sellin’ in your time, I’m guessing,” said the old man.

  Branch nodded. “And a little trading. More good than bad, thank the Lord.” Branch pointed at the guitar. “I haven’t heard anybody play like you just did in a long time. How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  The smile vanished, but it seemed to hover on the point of returning. “How old you think I am?”

  “Well…I don’t know. I’m usually pretty good at reading that kind of thing. You have to be, when you sell cars. But with you, I can’t tell.”

  “Don’t feel bad. You know the old saying, ‘Black don’t crack.’”

  Branch gave a forced laugh and looked at the floor.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Branch looked up. He didn’t want to stare, but he was transfixed by the man’s eyes, which seemed ancient and yet ageless and yellower than any he’d ever seen.

  “What is it?” Lucky asked again.

  “Your—your eyes,” Branch said, almost involuntarily. “They look…yellow.”

  The old man chuckled. “Oh, that. That’s just my liver actin’ up. Jaundice, from too much whiskey. Doc says if I take another drink, it’ll be my last.”

  “Oh,” said Branch, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

  Lucky waved his hand. “Ain’t nothing between friends.”

  Friends? Branch couldn’t remember the last friend he’d spoken to with this kind of ease. One by one, his old friendships had become casualties of his obsession.

  “I sure do miss my sippin’ whiskey,” Lucky said wistfully. “Robert would drink anything, you know. That boy drank shine that would draw blisters on a rawhide boot. I like my whiskey smooth. I want to taste the feet of the gal what hoed the corn it was made out of.”

  Again Branch looked closely at the man’s skin. Surely he couldn’t be old enough to have drunk moonshine with Robert Johnson. Branch tried to do the math in his head, but his usual facility with numbers had deserted him.

  “Would you mind playing something else?” he asked.

  The old man smiled and broke into “Come on in My Kitchen.”

  As he played, his eyes shut tight, Branch suddenly noticed his hands. They were huge, with thick fingers displaying almost inhuman reach along the neck, forming chords Branch could never have played. He wondered where the old man had found a bottleneck wide enough to fit over his finger. Then he realized that Lucky wore the slide on his pinky—the same finger that Robert Johnson had used. Branch was trying to think of how to explain his presence here—and possibly a way to get the guitar from this amazing old man—when he noticed the fingernails on Lucky’s picking hand. They were so long that they curved at the ends and tapered to points.

  “I can’t believe the clarity of that guitar,” Branch said, still looking at the fingernails. “It’s incredible. The balance and sustain.”

  “That’s the bone saddle and nut,” said the old man, still working the strings. “Bone inlay and pins, too.”

  “No way!” Branch said with genuine shock. “That’s a twelve-dollar guitar—or it was when they made it.”

  The old man shook his head. “No, man. This here axe been customized.” He leaned forward, still picking masterfully. “Feel the profile on that neck.”

  Branch reached under the neck and ran his fingers along the shallow convex curve. The feel of the aged wood in his hand quickened his blood.

  “Ain’t that sweet?” said the old man. “And fast. You feel it, don’t you? Smooth and strong as the forearm of a virgin raised on beefsteak and buttermilk.”

  “Is that saddle really bone?”

  The yellow eyes flickered. “Would I lie to you?”

  “Ox? Steer?”

  “Neither. This here be fine, fine bone.”

  Branch wasn’t sure whether to push this line of in
quiry. “I always heard West African ivory gives the best sustain. But you can’t kill those elephants now.”

  “Ivory’s good, yeah. But bone’s better, if….”

  “If what?”

  “If you get the right supply. Bone’s denser than most everything else, and some is denser than others. Bone’s got a grain, just like wood and ivory. It’s just harder to see. Only your true connoisseur knows that.”

  “I knew it.”

  The old man grinned again. “’Course you did! I knew it when you walked in. I said, ‘Here comes a man who knows his bidness.’”

  The old man stopped playing in mid-song and hung his picking hand over the curve of the box. Then he took a pouch from his coat, and while Branch watched in amazement, he rolled a cigarette with a magician’s dexterity, then lit it and took a long drag.

  “Want one?” he asked, blowing sweet blue smoke at Branch.

  “No, thanks.”

  The old man raised a skeptical eyebrow, but he didn’t push.

  Emboldened by the man’s courtesy, Branch said, “Do you keep your fingernails like that for the sound?”

  “That’s right. Just my pickin’ hand. I keep the others filed close, see?”

  He turned up his left hand, revealing manicured nails. “Good thing I’m left-handed when it comes to pleasin’ a woman.”

  The room echoed with rich laughter while Branch’s face flushed. He felt about fifteen years old in the presence of this enigmatic musician.

  “Most people,” said Lucky, “will tell you that in the end, a guitar’s just a tool. That it’s the hands and the soul playing it that make the difference.”

  “That’s what they say, all right.”

  “But I’m not so sure about that. Some axes are special.” Lucky rolled his sharp nails along the face of the guitar, making a sound like castanets. “And this here’s one of them. This here’s the sockdolager.”