“Yeah, I understand, but you need to check this one out before you take a nap.” He shows me a river. I can see Honey House in the background. “It’ll cost to put this in—dredging ain’t cheap—but it’ll be worth it. This is Moody River, like in the Pat Boone song?”
“Not one of my faves,” I tell him. “And I don’t think most people will even remember it.”
“We’ll have it playing on loudspeakers to refresh their memories,” he says. “On a constant loop. The customers can listen while they take the Moody River Ride of Death.”
The idea of “Moody River” on a constant loop chills my blood, but I keep my mouth shut.
“A quarter of a mile downstream,” he says, “we’re going to have a boy and a girl dressed up as Indians. Half a dozen times a day, we’ll see them swimming toward each other…and drowning! Do you get it, Stevie?”
“Yeah,” I say. I’m getting a headache. “Running Bear and Little White Dove.”
“Exactly!” he cries. “Gotta be live actors for that gig, of course. Can’t use audio-animatronic figures in water. All the circuits would short out. And see this?” He taps a bridge upstream, not all that far from Dead Man’s Curve. “Know what this is?”
“Um…no. But I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“The Tallahatchie Bridge! You know, the one Billy Joe McAllister jumped off of in the Bobbie Gentry song? We’ll have a guy…some Olympics wannabe who can do triple-gainers and stuff. Think of the photo-ops!”
“Gooch,” I say, “why would there be a Tallahatchie Bridge over the Moody River? Wouldn’t it be the Moody River Bridge?”
He looks at me sadly. “That’s only if you insist on narrative unity. Your problem is that you’ve written too many books.”
“Right,” I say. “That’s probably it. Gooch, you’ve really got something here, but I’m the wrong guy to back the project. For a dead zone theme park, you need somebody who’s more hip to the afterlife.”
A light starts to dawn in his eyes. “You mean…?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Let me give you Mitch Albom’s phone number.”
“Would you do that for me, Steve? Would you really?”
“You bet,” I say. Anything to get him out of here. “If you let me take a nap, that is.”
“Of course, I understand. You need your rest to think up more scary stories and gross-out stuff. I can respect that. But can I make myself another sandwich first?”
That’s the Gooch. I hope Mitch Albom’s fridge is fully stocked.
“Sure,” I say. “And Gooch?”
“Yeah?”
“Would you like a souvenir coffee cup?”
Robert Johnson’s Flat-Top
Hip-deep in cotton bolls and sweating like a sharecropper, Branch Davis stared at the Mississippi Delta mansion with a moon as bright as a National resonator hanging over it and waited for the owner’s guard dog to die. Branch had a pistol in his ankle holster, six melted tuning pegs in his pocket, and a Molotov cocktail in his left hand, but he still felt naked and vulnerable. Every few minutes he’d heard something slither or scuttle beneath the plants, and the mosquitoes were eating him alive. If this was what Southerners called “tall cotton,” Branch wanted none of it. He’d flown his two-million-dollar King Air all the way from Bangor to this nameless Dixie hell to steal something most men wouldn’t look twice at, but that proved only one thing beyond doubt: He was a true collector.
There were two kinds of collectors in the world, and Branch was the second kind. Both varieties had patience; both knew obsession; but the true line of demarcation was that some collectors had the ability (or weakness of character) to accept that certain prizes would remain forever beyond their reach, and could live with that aching emptiness. Others—the accursed few, if you listened to Branch’s ex-wife—refused to let anything stand between them and the objects of their desire.
So it was for Branch Davis.
He cocked his head and listened for the guard dog. Its whimpering had ceased ten minutes before, thanks to the poisoned meat Branch had tossed from his car back where the long driveway met Highway 61. But even in its weakened state, the dog had somehow staggered down the drive, climbed the steps, and taken up station before the front door.
The mansion glowed in the moonlight, like a tall ship moored in a white sea of cotton. With its tall white Doric columns, it looked more like a fraternity house than a residence, but, oh, what treasure it held inside. A planter named Percy Falkner had built this house in 1847, and his great great grandson (and namesake) was a collector of the first variety. The owner of several square miles of surrounding farmland, Falkner seemed immune to the power of money. Branch knew this because he’d offered Percy staggering sums for a certain piece in his collection, and Percy had calmly insisted that the object was not for sale.
Percy Falkner wasn’t like true collectors, who fixated on one particular thing. Stamps, say—or coins, or cars, or Fabergé eggs. Percy bought whatever caught his fancy, and once he acquired something, he never sold it again. This sentimental, haphazard method of acquisition had filled a large room in this faux-Greek pile with one of the most varied agglomerations of Southern Americana imaginable. Percy owned, for example, a baseball cap worn by Cool Papa Bell (a Starkville boy) during his days playing for the St. Louis Stars in the Negro leagues. Percy also owned a piano that had been set on fire by Jerry Lee Lewis during a 1957 show in Memphis. And Percy particularly prized an antediluvian road sign that read “Mounds Landing,” which had been the site of the levee crevasse that triggered the worst scourge of the great 1927 flood. That wooden sign had floated across a hundred tumultuous miles of biblical destruction to settle on Percy’s uncle’s barn roof. But these unique items paled in comparison to the jewel of Percy’s hoard: for Percy Falkner owned something that Branch Davis had spent more than seventeen years of his life hunting: the flat-top guitar of blues legend Robert Johnson.
No true analogy could be made to this situation. Owning Robert Johnson’s guitar was like possessing daVinci’s personal paintbrushes, Galileo’s telescope, Michelangelo’s chisels. The ignorant might question such comparisons, but Branch Davis never wasted breath arguing with fools. Robert Johnson had been a bona fide genius, and his life an American enigma. More was known about daVinci, Galileo, and Michelangelo than about the poor black Mississippi boy who’d died at age twenty-seven after being given a bottle of poisoned whiskey by a jealous husband. In truth, Johnson existed primarily on vinyl 78 rpm records; almost nothing else about his life could be verified. Only three photographs had been discovered, the most famous showing the young Johnson dressed in a suit and playing a Gibson L1 guitar. But fellow bluesman Honeyboy Edwards had testified that Johnson never owned such an expensive instrument. The Gibson in the iconic Memphis photo had been a studio prop. On the road, Johnson had played either a Stella or a Kalamazoo (a cheap Gibson manufactured during the Great Depression), whichever he could acquire after pawning the last one for ready money.
The guitar that most interested Branch was the one Johnson had supposedly carried down to the crossroads when he made his legendary “pact with the devil.” According to the legend, Johnson had been a novice guitar player when he made that journey. At the Highway 61 crossroads—at midnight, of course—he’d found a large black man who took his guitar, tuned it to a unique scale, played several songs on the instrument, then handed it back to him. When Robert Johnson walked away from that crossroads, he was walking toward immortality. But in exchange, he’d left the promise of his soul behind.
While this story was almost surely apocryphal, the fact that Johnson’s unique musical power was somehow tied up with the guitar itself had always tantalized Branch. The most likely guitar for a poor boy like Robert Johnson to have carried to such a rendezvous was the Kalamazoo, which had sold for $12.50 at a time when even the cheapest Gibsons and Martins cost ten times as much. This fascination had led Branch on an epic quest across fourteen states and four foreign countries. He’d pursued tales of
Johnson’s guitar with all the zeal of Kasper Gutman hunting the Maltese Falcon to Istanbul. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Fat Man, Branch had found his share of fakes, had even paid to have one stolen, then watched the thieves steal it for themselves. After he finally tracked them down, the guitar for which one man had died turned out to be yet another Gibson L1, the studio prop that Johnson could never have afforded.
The guitar inside Percy Falkner’s mansion, on the other hand, was a battered Kalamazoo dating from the 1930s. Moreover, the letters “R. L. JOHNSON” had been crudely carved into its back with a knifepoint. (The “L” stood for “Leroy.”) Obviously, any con man could have carved Johnson’s name into some old Kalamazoo. But Percy Falkner had supplied a provenance that convinced even Branch Davis that this guitar might be the genuine article. Percy’s father had taken the guitar as payment on back rent from a sharecropper he’d eventually been forced to evict from his plantation. While desperately down on his luck, Robert Johnson had supposedly traded the Kalamazoo to that cropper for a hot meal, a sack of cornbread, and a jug of shine. It didn’t hurt that the Falkner mansion stood only six miles from the crossroads believed to be the most likely spot of Johnson’s midnight meeting with “the devil.” But before being fully persuaded, Branch had visited this house a year ago and actually played the guitar in question. And from the moment he’d picked up the six-string and played “Hellhounds on My Trail,” he’d known that he’d discovered the Holy Grail of lost guitars.
Branch Davis collected guitars, only guitars, and his single-minded persistence had allowed him—a car dealer worth a mere twenty million dollars—to compete successfully with billionaires and even soulless corporations like the Hard Rock Cafe. You wouldn’t find Paul fucking Allen standing hip-deep in Mississippi cotton with a firebomb in his hand. Allen would prance through the front door with his checkbook; Percy Falkner would offer him iced tea and then, in his genteel voice, explain that Robert Johnson’s guitar wasn’t for sale—never would be, in fact, and would pass down to Percy’s children upon his eventual demise. Allen would leave his offer open, of course, then politely make his exit and be chauffeured back to his Bombardier Global and flown back to his Mercer Island compound.
Not Branch Davis.
By hook and by crook, Branch had gotten hold of guitars that dilettantes like Allen would have paid six or even seven figures for, and he’d had the exquisite pleasure of refusing to sell them to far richer men. Branch owned the actual Fender Stratocaster that Jimi Hendrix had set on fire in 1967 at the concert at the Astoria in Finsbury Park, London—not the fake that had sold to a gullible Brit for $497,000 in 2008. Branch also owned a Silvertone that Hank Williams had played on the Louisiana Hayride shows, before he switched to the 1941 Martin D-28 now owned (and played on every tour) by Neil Young. He prized the old Weymann with the white fretboard (mother-of-toilet-seat) that Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, had played until it was stolen off a train; and even the lesser lights of his collection were envied by most enthusiasts: the third “cigar box” guitar built by Bo Diddley (the Hard Rock Cafe got Bo’s first one, circa 1945); a ’53 Les Paul Gold Top used by Carl Perkins during the Sun Sessions; and a hollow-body ES355 “Louise” owned by B.B King in the 1960s.
Branch’s most treasured guitars, however, resided in a secret room that no other human had ever entered. Branch had built the room himself, a veritable vault for one-of-a-kind pieces. These fabled instruments could never be shown, for they had been stolen—not by Branch, but by desperate roadies who’d sold their swag without ever realizing how valuable it would become. Who could blame them? What 1960s hippie craving his next heroin fix could have known that by 1985 manic Japanese collectors would be paying more for rare guitars than the richest rock star of his day earned in a year? Taking pride of place in Branch’s secret vault were two icons of rock history: the 1960 Gibson Black Beauty that Jimmy Page had used for most of his 1960s session work (stolen by an airport worker) and Paul McCartney’s violin-shaped ’61 Hofner bass, which had been nicked during the Let It Be sessions. If put up for auction, those two axes would have shattered all previous price records. But Branch would never sell them, not for any amount of money. His reason made him unique among his peers, and could best be explained in terms of one particular acquisition.
Branch owned a Rickenbacker twelve-string that Pete Townshend had smashed to bits long before guitar destruction became a standard feature of The Who’s concerts. Most collectors would have left that guitar a wreck and sealed it inside a glass case, its twisted innards and gleaming lacquer skin posed beside a photo of young Pete windmilling away on the thing (showing off the trashed guitar like some torn gown worn by a glassy-eyed Marilyn Monroe as she stumbled through a Hollywood B-movie). Not Branch Davis. Branch had paid a renowned luthier to repair the Rickenbacker with as much dedication as a surgeon reconstructing a woman’s shattered spine. He’d done this because he actually fell into a third category of collector. This was a lonely club, because the ticket to membership was the kind of obsession that ultimately cost a man everything else in his life. Like a ravenous cancer crowding out all other cells, his compulsion killed every other emotion and desire until there was nothing left but the hunger. Yet Branch had willingly given himself over to this disease. Because his secret passion was not merely owning legendary guitars—it was playing them.
Not many people knew the godlike sensation of playing guitar for a hundred thousand enraptured listeners, but Branch did. As a young man, he had played the Fillmore East, the Fillmore West, and a thousand halls and clubs between. A month before he quit the music business forever, his band had played the Altamont Speedway only hours before the Rolling Stones took the stage. As Branch and the guys closed out their set, the crowd had swelled to nearly three hundred thousand, and the air crackled with manic energy unlike anything he’d ever known. Heady stuff for a kid who’d first picked up a guitar (a Silvertone owned by a spoiled cousin in Lewiston) at the age of twelve after seeing Carl Perkins perform on TV show called Ranch Party. After quickly picking out “Blue Suede Shoes,” Branch had traded that cousin his entire baseball card collection so that he could take the Silvertone back to Bangor with him. A year later, Branch formed his first group, and by twenty-two he was playing lead guitar for a name band and doing session work on the side.
In spite of this early success, however, happiness eluded him. Like Antonio Salieri, whom fate had brought into proximity with Mozart, Branch found himself sharing stages with the likes of Albert King, Eric Clapton, James Burton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, and even Jimi Hendrix. Yet he wasn’t playing with them, but just before them, usually as part of a warm-up act. He occupied the same space they did (or would, minutes later) and played to the same fans. He always moved those people to applaud, and sometimes even to scream with pleasure (or at least excitement). But Branch also saw what he failed to do. Unlike Hendrix, he did not transport those people to a higher plane where they shed their individuality and merged into a single massive, hypersensitive being that swayed and moved in response to soul-searing notes that cried and screamed from his overdriven amplifier, reaching as one for the peak and release that the black shaman would guide them to with ineffable, transformative power. No, Branch Davis had seen the evidence and read the verdict on himself.
He was a mere mortal.
And yet…two or three times in his career—on strangely blessed nights when he’d imbibed just the right mixture of cocaine and whiskey, and the right crowd stood before him—Branch had shut his eyes and somehow let go of his conscious mind. On those nights, he’d felt a sublime, almost electric energy take possession of his soul. Then the notes seemed to flow directly from his heart to his fingers, bypassing his brain altogether. On those rare nights, he somehow punched through the aqueous boundary between the mundane world and the transcendent one where the truly gifted played their instruments with the spontaneous mastery of angels, where every note was a perfect yet unpredictable bullseye shot from the bow of a blindfolded Zen
archer. Branch had glimpsed this blessed realm, yet he’d never managed to take up residence there.
It was this terrible knowledge that had brought him to this Delta cotton field, to the shadow of this empty house whose owner was dying in a Memphis hospital. For long after Branch stopped performing—years after he’d given up his dream—he had experienced that sublime energy once again. The first time it happened was in a music store in Beaumont, Texas. The owner had somehow acquired the guitar that Huddie Ledbetter, Leadbelly, had played while serving time for murder in Sugar Land Prison, near Houston. Leadbelly had written “Midnight Special” on that guitar. As soon as Branch picked up the big twelve-string, primal energy had begun coursing through his hands, then his arm, quickening his heartbeat as he began to play. The guitar’s back somehow mated with his chest and belly, uniting into a larger instrument that gave voice to his deepest pain and confusion. Before long, his whole body seemed to resonate with the notes chiming from the soundhole. The music store owner had stared at Branch as though Leadbelly himself had come to life in his shop. Then some fucking kid had started playing “Smoke on the Water,” and the spell was broken. But by then Branch was hooked. Since that day—that hour—he had been jonesing to rediscover that rush.
Day and night Branch thought about what had happened in that store. Only later had he come to realize the startling truth: It was the guitar. Some unknown magic in Leadbelly’s twelve-string had triggered his sudden and profound virtuosity. After a while, Branch began to wonder whether certain musical instruments might retain a spiritual trace of their owners, like the afterimage of a flashbulb on the retina. It sounded crazy, sure, but a lot of people believed that inanimate objects like cars or houses could hold the karmic residue of tragedies that had occurred inside them. People might scoff in public, but any real estate agent could tell you how hard it was to unload a house that had been the site of a heinous murder. And what about the Hope Diamond? No matter how many History Channel specials tried to debunk the famous curse, anyone given that storied gem would think more than once about its tragic provenance.
Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All Page 14