The Boy Who Cried Freebird

by Mitch Myers

  Before Ross could volunteer to help there was a knock on the front door. Ross stood there while Kowalt quickly pressed some buttons on the disc player and then calmly opened the door.

  The suspects had been escorted separately to Alex Manning’s apartment but they all arrived at the exact same time. As Kowalt predicted, there was a great deal of confusion when the “four AMs” were herded into the front room.

  “What is the meaning of this, Detective?” Alesha Martinez demanded. “And what in the hell is he doing here?”

  “Aren’t you glad to see me, baby?” Ace MacKay said sarcastically. “Hey, why don’t you introduce me to your friend here? I’m Ace, pleased to meet you.”

  “I know who you are, Mr. MacKay,” Angie Madison said coldly. “So spare me the pleasantries.” Then Angie turned to the younger Manning and said, “Hello, Alex, I’m so sorry about your father.”

  “Thanks, Angie,” said Alex Jr. as he looked quizzically around the room. “But this is getting creepy. What are we here for? Is someone under arrest?”

  Jim Kowalt spoke in a loud voice over the music, which was playing at a fairly high volume. “Not yet,” he answered. “But that could change. Everyone just sit down and we’ll get this over with as soon as possible. I’m going to let my associate, Detective Ross Melboro, explain…”

  So, with the music building behind him, Ross stood in front of the four suspects and began solemnly. “Well,” said Ross. “One of you in this room is a murderer!”

  Immediately there was a howl of angry denials from the “four AMs.”

  “Quiet, please!” Ross demanded. “Thanks to evidence found in this apartment, we believe the initials of Alex Manning’s murderer are A.M.”

  Meanwhile, the music in the apartment grew louder.

  “And you, Alex Jr.,” Ross continued, “you hated your father, didn’t you? Besides that, you’re the only one mentioned in his will.”

  “This is bullshit, man,” said Alex Manning Jr.

  “If it’s bullshit, then how do you explain the Frank Zappa song, ‘My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama,’ which was on a mix-tape CD found in your father’s stereo? We know that the only thing that you and your father agreed on was Zappa.”

  The music was blasting and Frank Zappa’s voice snarled through the speakers.

  “A mix-tape?” yelled Alex. “Is it a mix-tape or is it a CD? I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a CD, dipshit,” hollered Ace MacKay. “That’s just what they call them, mix-tapes!”

  “Aha! I didn’t say it was a CD,” said Ross.

  “Yes, you did,” said Ace.

  “That may be true,” countered Ross. “But what are we to make of the fact that this ‘mix-tape’ also contained a Velvet Underground song called ‘The Murder Mystery,’ Mr. MacKay?”

  “‘The murder mystery, Mr. MacKay.’ That’s good,” said Ace. “But what does it have to do with me?”

  “Well, isn’t that a Velvet Underground T-shirt you’re wearing?” challenged Ross.

  “Yes,” answered Ace. “So?”

  Ross paused awkwardly, looking self-conscious as the music continued to blare. Then he turned his attention to Angie Madison and said, “Certainly you, Ms. Madison, cannot deny being a Beatles fan. Can you?”

  “No,” said Angie. “I like the Beatles. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Yes,” said Ross. “But not everybody was jilted and humiliated by Alex Manning. You even threatened him publicly. Isn’t that why the Beatles’ song ‘Helter Skelter’ is on the murderous mix-tape?”

  Angie Madison started to cry. “I don’t know. I’m really more of a John Lennon fan than a Beatles fan,” she wailed. “Is that a crime?”

  Then Ross whirled around, pointed with his finger, and said, “And you, Alesha Martinez. How do you explain your professional clashes with Alex Manning and your secret personal relationship with his rival, Ace MacKay? Even Ace can’t vouch for you. Perhaps that’s why the Snoop Dogg tune ‘Murder Was the Case’ is on the mix-tape.”

  The “four AMs” began protesting and arguing among themselves. Slightly overwhelmed, Ross thought that he had heard a phone ringing. Then he felt a wave of panic as he noticed that Detective Kowalt had disappeared from the room.

  “This whole thing is completely insane,” screamed Alesha Martinez.

  “Is it?” Ross continued desperately. “Is it insane to imagine a conspiracy to kill Alex Manning? Is it insane to envision a kinky ménage à trois between you, Ace MacKay, and Angie Madison—a twisted tryst of hot sex and revenge that turned deadly?”

  All four suspects jumped to their feet. They began yelling at Ross and hurling wild accusations at one another. The mix-tape murder music had reached a fever pitch and it felt like utter pandemonium as Ross searched for a sign of Jim Kowalt.

  Suddenly, the lights went out in the apartment. It was pitch-black in the front room, but the music was still blaring. Then there was a struggle with even more yelling and screaming and somebody finally being slammed to the floor.

  When the lights came back on Detective Jim Kowalt was in the middle of the room, sitting on top of the struggling form of Thomas Wolley.

  “The upstairs neighbor!” Ross exclaimed. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Well, it’s quite simple,” Kowalt said triumphantly. “The phone records show that old Tom here had been constantly calling his downstairs neighbor every night for months. I assume it had something to do with the noise and the repeated playing of a certain mix-tape. Isn’t that right, Mr. Wolley?”

  “Yes, yes! That’s it!” blubbered Wolley. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. He kept playing the same four songs over and over at top volume from ten at night until four in the morning! It was driving me crazy! I begged him to stop but he just laughed at me. So I killed him! I’m glad I did it! He was like the devil!”

  “But all of your evidence was circumstantial. How did you know for sure that you could lure Wolley back down here with the loud music?” Ross asked.

  “Well, it was the mix-tape,” answered Kowalt, “and the clue on the ‘jewel case.’”

  “So, what clue was that?” Ross asked impatiently.

  “Well, the ‘4-AM,’” said Kowalt. “Manning lived in apartment 3-A, remember? Mr. Wolley lived right above him in 4-A.”

  “But that’s just ‘4-A,’ not ‘4-AM,’” insisted Ross. “What does the ‘M’ stand for?”

  Jim Kowalt squinted at Ross Melboro, looked around the room slowly, and said, “Don’t you know your Alfred Hitchcock, kid? ‘M’ is for Murder, of course.”

  WAITING ON A TRAIN

  Once I was in New York City attending a jazz conference. On the second morning of the conference I walked over to the subway station on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue to take the F train up to Rockefeller Center.

  Although I had no appointments, I was still in a hurry. And as I stood down in the subway waiting for a train, I became preoccupied with getting to where the action was. I wanted to be among my peers. I wanted to know what was going on.

  For some reason, I felt that I was missing out on something. I kept shifting my weight from one foot to the other and staring into the dark tunnel, eager for any sign of an oncoming train that would take me where I wanted to go.

  It took awhile, but I slowly became aware of a musician performing on the subway platform. The first thing I noticed was a distinctive guitar sound—the crisp acoustic picking reminded me of Neil Young in his early days. Then I focused on the voice and realized that it was a woman singing. I listened to the lyrics of her song, which mirrored the feelings I’d been having that morning.

  She was singing about being in a rush and waiting on a train.

  I was transfixed. The singer’s words expressed my experience to a T. Her rich voice cut through the subway sounds and I forgot about my imagined lateness. I was caught up in the moment and walked closer, throwing a dollar into her guitar case.

  Right then, I felt the F train approaching. There was the
sudden draft, a distant rumble, and a light down in the tunnel—just as she had described in her song.

  The train came to a stop and opened its doors. I boarded, hesitating for a moment before stepping onto the subway car. The doors closed sharply behind me and I turned to face the musician, who was still singing as she gave me a smile.

  But the train didn’t pull out of the station right away and I just stood there in the subway car, looking at her through the glass and listening to her sing.

  As soon as we finally started moving, I realized that I was completely haunted by the troubadour’s song. And as the train hurtled uptown, I got more depressed with every stop. Here I’d been in such a hurry to attend some music conference that I’d abandoned a real live experience that actually touched my soul.

  When we arrived at the Fiftieth Street stop in Rockefeller Plaza, I got out. Then I ran up the stairs, crossed over the platform, ran down the stairs, took an F train all the way back to Fourteenth Street, got out, ran up the stairs, crossed over again, and ran back down to where I had begun.

  She was still there, singing and playing her guitar.

  So, I stood there for a good long while watching other people listen to the singer while they waited for their trains. I saw all sorts of different folks respond to her. One woman with a mink coat dropped a few dollars into her guitar case. A fellow street musician approached the singer, lingered a bit, and threw her some change.

  When she finished her set, I introduced myself and told her how much I enjoyed her performance. I said that I hoped that her music would find an audience someday.

  “I play for thousands of people every day,” she answered. Her name was Kathleen Mock.

  That’s all I can tell you. In the course of a New York minute I heard a song that should have stopped me in my tracks. Luckily, I was able to return to the source of my inspiration.

  Maybe something like that will happen to you someday—when you’re waiting on a train.

  Afterword

  HOW TO SUCCEED IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

  A few years ago I was in Chicago sorting through my late uncle’s belongings. My uncle, Shel Silverstein, was quite the Renaissance man, and among his many drawings, poems, songs, plays, scripts, notebooks, and ideas scrawled on napkins were hundreds of old audiotapes.

  Aside from Shel’s personal library of home recordings and studio demos, there was an odd batch of quarter-inch tapes on seven-inch reels. These tapes had no apparent link to his own musical works—it was just an arbitrary assortment of pop recordings collected by a friendly music publisher that Shel had once worked with.

  Anyway, I was examining each box to note the contents and see if there were any stray recordings made by Shel, when a couple of reels grabbed my attention. They had the words Graham Parsons—Demos scrawled on them.

  You see, Graham sounds similar to Gram. Gram is short for Ingram. And Ingram Cecil Parsons is one of my favorite country-rock artists.

  Ah yes, Gram Parsons. Gram cut a romantic figure in the late 1960s and for a time he played with the Byrds. Parsons helped push the Byrds toward country music, and he was a prime mover on the band’s Nashville album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. After that, Gram and fellow Byrd Chris Hillman formed the Flying Burrito Brothers. Gram even hung out with the Rolling Stones. He also introduced the world to a gifted young singer named Emmylou Harris.

  Parsons ultimately gained attention as a solo artist, but he died in 1973 at the age of twenty-six. That’s when his popularity really began to soar. Ironically, Gram’s rock-star mystique was enhanced when friend and road manager Phil Kaufman fulfilled a drunken promise and absconded with his dead body—cremating Parsons out in the desert of Joshua Tree, California.

  Since his death several biographies have been written about Gram, and several of his early recordings were released posthumously. There’ve been tribute concerts, lavish CD anthologies, a documentary, and even a feature film called Grand Theft Parsons, which dramatized Kaufman’s startling epilogue to Gram’s short life.

  If I had any doubts as to the identity of the “Graham” Parsons listed on the tapes, they vanished when I noticed the listing of a track entitled “Brass Buttons,” which is a classic Gram Parsons song if ever there was one.

  I was definitely onto something.

  So, I wrote down the song titles and took the list home. But even with all of my resources I was only able to identify about half of the songs. It soon occurred to me that these tapes might contain some extremely rare performances by Gram Parsons.

  Looking for help, I started calling people in the music business, ones who knew Gram’s story far better than I. And for the first time in my life, important record industry people actually took my calls.

  I confirmed that several of the songs were previously unknown to the Parsons discography. It was also ventured that the tapes might have been from the summer of 1964 when Gram and one of his earliest groups, the Shilohs, spent a month in New York City.

  The Shilohs had met folksinger Dick Weissman in Manhattan, and they all did some recordings together in a midtown studio. Supposedly, no one knew the whereabouts of the Weissman-Parsons tapes and the demos had never been heard or seen again.

  Would you believe that there was a Dick Weissman listed on the Gram Parsons tapes that I’d found?

  Now, I still hadn’t listened to the recordings. The reels were at least forty years old and extremely fragile. The proper thing to do was find a professional studio to transfer the music onto a more durable, digitized format.

  But I began negotiating with a small, independent record label that had released some other old Parsons recordings. The label’s owner was very interested, and if the tapes turned out to be authentic, he had the connections to release the music commercially.

  This was an exciting prospect. If the record guy released these recordings on his label, then I’d get a credit—like “Executive Producer.” Visions of writing the CD liner notes danced in my head and my future in the music business seemed bright.

  Even my NPR producer was interested. He wanted to follow me into the studio and document the unveiling of these old recordings. Somebody on his production team thought it would be funny if the tapes turned out to be blank—kind of like Geraldo Rivera’s much-hyped entry into Al Capone’s vaults—which was a huge bust for Geraldo.

  I declined my producer’s offer.

  Meanwhile, I was ready to visit the record label guy’s home studio on the East Coast. We were going to examine the tapes together and take up the business end after that. Then, the label guy heard a rumor that I’d been shopping the tapes around to other record label guys. He felt insulted and cut off all communication with me.

  I tried to explain to him that a friend of mine had merely mentioned the tapes to a few other folks in the music industry. The label guy ignored my plea. I wrote him a long, rambling letter apologizing for the mistake and imploring him to resume our excavation of these historic recordings.

  The record label guy never answered my rambling letter. I was back on my own.

  With my ascent in the record business disrupted, I decided to book some time at a local studio and find out exactly what was on these tapes. There’d be plenty of time for a cool record deal after I determined the nature of the music I was dealing with.

  I told my friend Ben Hunter that I was finally going to play the tapes. He insisted on documenting the event with his camcorder. I agreed, since by this time I was feeling certain that I alone possessed the lost 1964 recordings of Gram Parsons.

  Besides the old tapes marked “Graham Parsons—Demos,” I’d dug up two other important reels from the same batch of tapes. These two reels actually had Shel Silverstein’s name written on them. I figured that we could just digitize everything and I’d have enough rare recordings to keep me in the music business for quite some time.

  So, Ben and I finally went into the recording studio. We watched the sound engineer examine the tapes and connect an old reel-to-
reel tape player to his digital recording console.

  As the engineer threaded the Parsons reel into the old tape machine, Ben turned on his camcorder. Then the engineer pressed play, the tape started to roll—and music filled the air.

  But it wasn’t Gram Parsons; it was just old generic Muzak and some bad, forgotten pop.

  The engineer fast-forwarded the tape a bit. Still, no Gram. Soon, it became clear to me. Whoever had received the Parsons’s demos at the publishing company had simply recorded over the tapes.

  It was all too devastating. The engineer kept fast-forwarding and playing more Muzak and I was just sick about the whole thing. Meanwhile, Ben was recording the entire incident on video.

  “Dude, turn that thing off,” I said. “You’re killing me.”

  The engineer flipped the tape over, just in case. Nothing. Then he put the second “Parsons” demo on the old tape machine. The results were the same and Ben kept on filming.

  “Dude,” I pleaded. “Get that camera out of my face! I’m going down here.”

  Finally, I conceded that there was absolutely no Gram Parsons on either of the two reels. In hopes of salvaging our studio time, we turned our attention to the other two tapes, the ones with Shel Silverstein’s name marked on them.

  Did I mention that those two reels were from the same batch as the Parsons stuff? Well, guess what? The same thing happened. Shel’s demos had been taped over, too. There was just more of these common, boring pop tunes.

  I was totally dejected.

  Then, right near the end of our last reel, a voice emerged from the studio speakers that we recognized. It was a thin, reedy singing voice backed by a lone acoustic guitar.

  No, it wasn’t Shel Silverstein, and it wasn’t Gram Parsons, either. It was the godfather of American folk music—Woody Guthrie.

  Woody Guthrie, the outspoken singer-songwriter from Oklahoma whose dustbowl ballads and working-class anthems gave voice to so many local and national concerns and inspired the careers of countless musicians.