We paused outside the Grafton post office, where records were sometimes shipped to eager buyers, and the Hotel Grafton, where musicians may or may not have stayed while recording for Paramount. (In a 1965 interview, Son House said, “There was a hotel, small hotel, two-story, that was special for all the recorders,” but it seems more likely that visiting blues singers stayed in comparably diverse Milwaukee.) We finally reached the Paramount Walk of Fame, a deserted stone plaza with a walkway that resembles a piano keyboard. Different keys are dedicated to different Paramount performers, and the whole thing is anchored by a fountain featuring three bronzed musicians standing back to back to back. Mack told me that the village couldn’t afford to pay for the rights to the likenesses of actual Paramount performers, so the statues are bizarre approximations. A few feet from me, a rendering of a small man with an acoustic guitar, a mustache, and a wide-brimmed hat (Son House?) stared blissfully at the clouds while thin beams of water squirted into the air and splashed at his feet.
I was glad that the village was acknowledging its history—and really, it was a noble salute—but something about the Paramount Walk of Fame also felt vaguely tragic. The commercial presentation of “the blues” is often disastrously corny, wholly divorced from—even antithetical to—the grimness of the songs themselves. It’s a young woman at an open mic night, oversinging “Chain of Fools” with her hands in the air. It’s a guy with a T-shirt tucked into his shorts, nodding appreciatively at a bar band with three shrieking electric guitars. It’s bright colors and branded guitar slides and old, pinkish-white guys bellowing about women. It’s three squat, wonky statues in a fountain in Wisconsin.
We finished the tour at Photography by Michael, an unremarkable two-story white house with an old-timey sign and a small brown awning. Joseph Cramer, a Civil War veteran, had purchased the lot in 1872 for eleven dollars and opened a daguerreotype studio sometime thereafter. The business changed ownership many times, but it’s always been a photo studio of one sort or another. In 2002, John Tefteller, convinced that his Patton portrait had likely been staged and shot there, pestered the current owner into letting him spend a day clawing through boxes of glass negatives in the basement and attic. Unfortunately, as Tefteller ultimately learned, all the nitrate negatives once stored in the building—photographers stopped using breakable glass negatives around 1924—had been destroyed in 1975 by then-owner Walter Burhop, who rightfully believed they were a fire hazard; the spontaneous combustion of deteriorated nitrate film has been documented at temperatures as low as 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Most portrait subjects were shot from twelve different angles or poses, but Tefteller’s hope of churning up more Patton pictures promptly fizzled. I can almost see him dropping his heavy head into two dusty palms. I can almost hear his exasperated sigh.
Mack invited me back to her home for a cold drink on her porch. She jokingly admitted she’d initially found Tefteller’s postcard “creepy.” She brought out a few of her scrapbooks of Grafton and Paramount-related material, which were both comprehensive and fascinating: the story of a clean town reckoning with its dirty past. I sheepishly told her about my half-baked scuba aspirations, and she was sympathetic, even supportive. “I bet you’ll find something,” she smiled. “Call me if you have to.” I wanted to hug her.
Instead I spent the rest of the day trawling every antique store in greater Milwaukee, including one that doubled as a paintball studio, looking for Paramount labels—that black-and-gold circle, that eagle with its mighty wings outstretched, clutching the earth in its talons. I didn’t find shit.
The morning of the dive, I woke up thinking about Jeff Buckley, who drowned in a placid slack-water stretch of the Mississippi River in 1997; his death is one of those morbid rock ’n’ roll mysteries that’s periodically trotted out and dissected on VH1 clip shows. If I die in a river today, I thought, it won’t be mysterious at all. It will be so, so stupid.
I tried to psych myself up by reading passages from an autographed copy of Bill Rancic’s You’re Hired: How to Succeed in Business and Life, an inspirational tome someone had plucked from the hotel library and left on the nightstand in our room. Rancic looked so confident on the dust jacket: his pointer finger was massaging one temple, his other hand was resting casually on his thigh, and his grin was as white and as wide as his shirt collar. He was mostly selling platitudes, which I committed to memory. Reject conventional wisdom. Look back to look ahead. Do what you can. Seal the deal. Be reasonable.
Bret brewed us a tiny pot of coffee, and I tied on my swimsuit, brushed my hair back into a ponytail, and swallowed two big multivitamins. Neither of us was very interested in breakfast, so we shoved our gear into the trunk and drove north to Thiensville, arriving at the shop by 7:45 A.M. While New York City summers test the human capacity for swelter, late July in Wisconsin is crisp and clean. It was sixty degrees and sunny. I was wearing a sweater and jeans over my bikini.
Steve met us at the door. Because I was so jumpy, I asked him approximately nine hundred questions about golf-ball diving, which he patiently answered (he collects five hundred to seven hundred per hour, he rarely wears gloves, and black walnuts feel an awful lot like golf balls). After filling out some paperwork, Steve sized us up for full-body wet suits (there’s only a small window of time each year in which Wisconsin-based divers are not required to wear dry suits, the expensive, insulated outfits that protect against cold water and require additional training to use) and collected the rest of our equipment from the back of the store, testing our air tanks and regulators. I told Steve about my three primary concerns—the current, visibility, wildlife—and he nodded. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Bret, being the reasonable sort, decided not to actually dive but to snorkel next to me, making sure that I didn’t get caught in any rocks or riptides. (If you get stuck on something and lose your oxygen regulator in zero visibility, and then don’t have the space or wherewithal to perform a proper sweep, you’ll drown, even in a just a foot or two of water.) Following advice from Mack, we’d brought a small shovel and gloves, and when he wasn’t acting as my own personal lifeguard, Bret planned on snorkeling near the banks, digging around for buried goods. Steve was mercifully nonjudgmental about my lack of preparedness—a real archaeological exploration would have required methodically relocating all the rocks from the bottom of a section of the river, blocking it off, and slowly sifting through the silt, repeating the process while moving downriver, as opposed to my plan of blindly clawing through the muck, then doing it again somewhere else. We decided to look for deep pockets, paying special attention to the banks, where errant artifacts may have gotten wedged. Steve got in his van, we got back into the Toyota, and we all headed north to Grafton, pulling over and parking near the chair-factory marker.
Changing into a wet suit on the side of a busy road in a residential community in suburban Wisconsin is a uniquely humiliating experience. While I was frantically trying to yank mine up and over my hip bones, a man from a nearby construction crew trotted over, his striped orange vest lustrous in the sun. I was afraid he was going to tell us we couldn’t dive here or place all three of us under citizen’s arrest, but instead he just grinned, held up his hands, and said, “Okay, I gotta ask.” I reluctantly recited my spiel while staring at the ground. The man hooted and wished us luck.
A few minutes later, while I was zipping up my booties, a young kid in a black T-shirt came running out of the building across the street—the yellow brick house on the land where the old recording studio had been. He seemed to know what we were there for. “You guys looking for records?” he shouted. We nodded. “Go north. They blasted the dam so you need to look north.” We waved. “Good luck!” he yelled.
I heard the river before I saw it. We had planned to enter the water at a particularly knotty stretch just south of the pressing-plant foundation, and it was hard, at first, to even figure out which way the water was tugging us. Although the river is shallow here—anyone over five-and-a-half-feet tall could probably amble from
bank to bank without getting their hair wet—the current was aggressive, and I hollered at Bret to stop pushing me before I realized he was standing a foot and a half away. Accidentally lunge into the wrong spot and the river will knock you down; if you drop something, you’ll see it rocket downstream before you can wave a helpless good-bye. We trudged under and past the Falls Road bridge, trying to situate ourselves a good distance from where the first dam was removed in 2000. Steve loaded my buoyancy-control device with extra weight to compensate for the current, and while the added pounds made it awkward to walk—I kept losing my balance and banging my air cylinder on rocks, then waiting for Steve to help wrench me upright again—it had a grounding effect once I stopped moving. Staying in one place felt like a victory.
The current may have been strong, but the river was also shallow enough that all my dramatic posturing had started to feel silly. I was probably not going to die here, I conceded, and it is possible that I had been acting like a bit of a baby regarding scuba diving in general. I waddled back and forth between the banks as best I could. I was trying to locate the deepest pockets, which I discovered by falling into them. Eventually, I settled on a small area near the west bank, popped my regulator into my mouth, signaled to Bret, and sank into a dark hole. It felt like a baptism.
Lying flat on my belly, I could barely see more than six inches in front of me, and my visibility became more compromised each time I turned over a rock and started pawing through silt: I was blind and flailing, splayed in a green, blurry abyss. I repeated this as often as I could, moving north, finding cavities, checking for snapping turtles, digging, flicking crayfish off my wet suit, resurfacing when I ran into rocks. Several times I spotted a flash of silver—a master?—and my stomach lurched, but more digging would just reveal another pearled bit of shell, or a piece of a tossed CB radio (with a few exceptions, I found the Milwaukee River to be curiously free of garbage, which was either a testament to Wisconsin’s citizens or an indication of just how quickly the water moved). Bret, raking through the trees on the west bank, was pulling up rusty, ancient-looking bits of machinery that may or may not have been parts from the pressing plant, but my hands were still empty. After a few hours, I noticed Steve giving me sympathetic looks. I was tired, and running out of ideas.
I surfaced and scanned the shore for Bret, who was still picking through mounds of dirt near the riverbank. While trying to get his attention, I had a brief out-of-body experience: it is incredibly strange to see someone wearing a full wet suit and a pair of leather-and-canvas gardening gloves, with a yellow mask and snorkel perched atop his head, digging through dead branches with a tiny shovel, looking for possibly nonexistent records on the side of a river in Wisconsin. I spit my regulator out, cocked my head, and pushed my mask back: he looked like a gangly, neoprene-clad insect scavenging for grubs.
I could tell Bret and Steve were both waiting for me to say we could all go home now, that I’d tried my best and I was ready to spin the entire fiasco as a character-building experience, the kind Bill Rancic might consider transformative. I slowly pulled myself to shore and hobbled up the bank. I unhooked my BC and tank. I drank some water. I took a look at the rusted, mechanical-looking gears Bret had pulled out of the earth and snapped a few photographs to e-mail to Angela Mack and Alex van der Tuuk. I unzipped the top half of my wet suit and pulled on a sweatshirt. I talked for a while with Steve while he changed out of his gear and pulled a plaid button-down shirt on over his Speedo. With each passing car I became increasingly aware that to drivers, it almost certainly appeared that I was chatting casually with a man wearing no pants at all. Someone honked.
We were done.
The day after the dive I came down with a stomach flu, which I loudly and deliriously credited to “river sickness” when Bret tried to coax my bruised, exhausted body off the hotel room floor. I was convinced that the river was trying to kill me, and that whatever water I had accidentally ingested while diving for 78s was loaded with debilitating foreign bacteria (this part may have been true), and that my present ailment was something I deserved for my hubris, and also for my stupidity. It felt like a warning: stop, go home, who are you kidding. All night I whined to Bret about the river’s cruelty when I wasn’t demanding that he fetch me a cup of orange drink from McDonald’s, a beverage I had not consumed since I was seven years old. He patted my head. When I closed my eyes I saw spinning 78s, spiraling into oblivion, like the hypnotic black-and-white swirl from the Twilight Zone opening. I dreamed of unhinged turntables, soaring through the sky like Frisbees, high and free. I awoke and kicked all the blankets off.
The following morning I felt better, at least physically. I requested that we drive immediately to the closest Kopp’s Custard so I could soothe the sting of defeat with a giant cherry milkshake. The entire debacle was starting to seem funny.
A day later we steered the Toyota south to Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival, where I joked easily and endlessly to my fellow Pitchfork staffers about what I’d just done. I laughed. They laughed. I hollered along to No Age. I slept in a Hard Rock Hotel. I ate gooey deep-dish pizza at two thirty in the morning and drank several dozen free cups of Heineken. It was fine, I repeated. After all, I had given it a pretty good shot. I’d tried.
Later, at the airport, while reading a Wired article about the retrieval of black-box recorders from airplane crash sites (not the best preflight reading, maybe), I encountered a quote from Dave Gallo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a research-based nonprofit that often aids in the location of sunken wreckage. “You can find a needle in a haystack,” Gallo told the reporter. “But you have to find the haystack first.” I set the magazine down. I put my headphones on and took them off. I did an anxious lap around the terminal, fidgeting for a while in an empty Hudson News. In the search for rare 78s, there was no haystack. The whole world was the goddamn haystack.
What I had learned was how intoxicating—how overwhelming and how crushing—the search could be, even (or especially) when it didn’t yield any results. I hadn’t found a rare Paramount 78, but, just the act of looking had provided an instant remedy to the oversaturation of contemporary life. I could have it all whenever I wanted, but I couldn’t have this, or at least not right away, and I savored every moment of that ache—it was no longer about what I could do. It was about what I could find. It was about what I could own.
/ / Eight / /
All I’m Saying Is There’s No Way You Can Game This Kind of System
Marshall Wyatt, Blind Blake, the Man from Raleigh, Devastation
I hadn’t thought much about the Hillsville flea market since Chris King and I had rolled out of that dusty field, the acrid stench of junking still emanating from our overheated bodies. Then, one morning, I was idly scrolling through Facebook when I noticed a posting from a blues collector I’d talked to a few times. It concerned a previously undiscovered Paramount 78 that had turned up suddenly in North Carolina. I felt the contents of my stomach shift, then curdle. I clicked through to the website for Old Hat Records, a reissue label based out of Raleigh and operated by the collector Marshall Wyatt, where I found forty-five-second streams of Blind Blake’s “Miss Emma Liza” and its flip side, “Dissatisfied Blues.” Both songs had been recorded at Paramount’s Grafton studio in January 1932. I had never heard either one before—this was the last of Blind Blake’s forty-two 78s to be found, and, apparently, the only known copy in existence. Wyatt didn’t own it; he was just hosting the audio clips on his site. According to the few lines of text posted alongside the streams, the record was unearthed “at a flea market in Virginia in August of 2012 by a collector who wishes to remain anonymous.”
Shit, I thought.
My first phone call was to John Tefteller. He was in a rental car, en route to Florida for a record-scouting mission. He confirmed that he’d bought the record within a week of it being found. He wasn’t sure where it had come from, exactly, but he’d paid a lot of cash (“a silly amount”) for it. Whoever fou
nd it had known exactly what they had and who to call about it: “He just wanted to get it to the right person to get the most money for what he had, and of course that’s me,” Tefteller said.
The samples posted on Old Hat’s website were garbled, and it was hard to tell exactly what the songs were like, although the snippets were playful, jazzy, and almost improvised sounding. Tefteller had plans to release the tracks commercially, but not until the following year, on the CD that would accompany his annual Blues Calendar—just as he’d done with the missing King Solomon Hill sides. He admitted that the record was in pretty terrible shape. “You can hear it all the way through, it doesn’t skip, but it was basically played with a nail, and so it’s ground down to the point where it’s very hard to make out the lyrics because there’s so much distortion,” he said. Tefteller had already sent it to Richard Nevins for remastering. Only a handful of people had heard it in full.
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