Kevin’s Meandering Mind

 

Lost Songs of Paradise

Tales from Mac’s Music Shack

By Kevin Hodgson

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Alec MacAdam sat still on the wooden stool, his legs dangling down and his toes not quite touching the floor. When he had been a boy, on this same stool, he had often imagined the day when his body would grow big enough for his feet to at least hit the floor. Strange how nature works. He was all grown up yet still couldn’t reach the floor in his father’s music shop. Here he was, 25, feeling like a kid all over again as he watched his father’s intense gaze at a broken saxophone. His father’s finger moved gingerly over the keys. A pair of spy-like glasses hung around his neck which he pulled up to his face every now and then to check his work.

All above Alec was a carnival of bent, deformed and dented musical instruments. Hung by copper wire, the trombones with bent slides, saxophones with mangled horns and guitars with broken guts seemed to Alec like puppets waiting for their moment of light on the stage. Directly over Alec hung a huge white Sousaphone, such as are used in parades, with a gaping hole pounded out of its shell when the player had been struck by an oncoming float truck. With the horn pointed downward, Alec often imagined an earthquake coming and the Sousaphone falling on him, his head becoming jammed inside the white shell like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The image brought a smile to his face as the Sousaphone hung silently, confident in its mutation as ceiling decoration and dust collector in Mac’s Music Shack.

A bell rang out and the front door to the music store opened. It was 8:30 a..m. and the store had been open for an hour. Michael MacAdam, Alec’s father, never looked up from his work as Jumpin’ Jack Dupree limped across the floor and headed straight for the repair room. Jack walked leaning to one side like a street corner drunk, although he would never touch the stuff, Jack often told Alec.

“Makes fools out of people and we got enough to worry about in life without coming across like a dang-blamed fool,” Jack would say.

The old man was mumbling to himself, as if settling an argument, and then he gently placed an old saxophone case on the counter. To Alec, the gesture was comparable to a new father placing a newborn baby down for a nap. There was love in the touch. Jack coughed and the sound brought Alec’s father out of his tunnel vision. He looked up. Neither man smiled as Jack suddenly noticed Alec on the stool.

“Alec.”

“Jack.”

Jack Dupree coughed again. He turned to Mike MacAdam, known to everyone as Mac.

“Mac. Got some problems here.”

“Like what?” Alec’s father dispensed with propriety of manner quicker than any other person Alec had ever met. There was rarely even a hello, just a mere acknowledgment that a man whom he had known for a good 40 years was needing help with his instrument.

“Damn thing. She won’t play for me. Must be broken or something. I blow air into her and its like blowing into the tailpipe of a truck. I’m gettin’ little more than wind from her.”

Mac stood up slowly, opened the case and took out the saxophone. Jack’s saxophone was faded with the years, much as its owner was, but even Alec could tell it was special. The luster was gone but there was a natural beauty to its form. Alec’s father clicked the keys and even without air, they made a melody of sound. His father didn’t say a word. He pulled out a light wand from beneath the counter and shone the fluorescent light through the body of the saxophone. Alec used to brag to his friends that his father had a light saber, like Luke Skywalker, and he was still mesmerized by the bright light contained in the stick.

“Need some pads,” his father said.

“Yeah,” Jack answered matter-of-factly, as if admitting to being caught with an illicit lover. He had always been a faithful owner know to bring his saxophone in for a tune-up every year. But times were tough and money scarce for a musician these days. Too many weddings now with those Djs, he’d say to anyone who’d listen. No one wants real music anymore? Can’t believe people these days. Why, years ago, a musician could be playing out two or three times a week, maybe more. Every generation fades away, even Jack would admit that, but to be replaced by a boob with a stackful of Cds and a sound system that could loose your molars? That just didn’t seem fair to Jack and certainly was not fair to his bank account.

“And,” Mac continued, “she’s bent.”

“Bent?”

“Look it. Slight curve to the right.”

“Damn. Now, how’d that happen?” Jack asked himself.

“Can’t rightly say.”

“You fix it?”
“I can hammer it back.”

“What you mean, hammer? You don’t have a machine or something back there.”

At that, Mac smiled for the first time, turned his head and even let loose a little laugh.

“Naw. This is a low-tech trade. I just pound her back into shape. It’s a matter of knowing where to hit her and by how much. ‘Course, most people don’t wanna be around here to watch it happen. Makes ‘em squeamish to see a man pounding on their saxophone with a hammer.”

“Got that right. When can you do it?”

Mac pulled out a brown appointment book and scanned through the pages.

“Get to it ‘morrow, most likely.”

“All right. Be back here in the afternoon tomorrow. That OK?”
“Sure.”

The transaction complete, Jack limped towards the door.

“See ya, Alec.”

“Bye Jack. Don’t worry. My dad knows what he’s doing.”

“I hope so,” and then he was gone, out the door, where he stood for a few seconds to fish out a cigarette and a lighter, looking left before moving towards the right. He waved again to Alec from outside and then he was gone.

(end of audio introduction)

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listen to chapter sax

 

The Saxophonist’s Tale

(A Night at Dante’s)

 

Many years ago, Alec had asked Jack about the limp and a story unfolded from the old musician that still haunted Alec to this day.

“Well,” Jumpin’ Jack Dupree had begun, as he did all of his stories, “don’ like to talk about it all that much, to be honest. Kind of painful. What happened was a damn tragedy that didn’t have to be. Lucky to be alive, I am. So I try not to harp on my ol’ limp too much and just accept it as part of me.

You see, this was many years ago, and I was playing in a whole lot of bands back then. Any given week, I’d be playing the blues, soul, jazz, you name it and I’d be playing it. One night, I was sitting in with this soul band called The Crazy Knights at this club called Dante’s — down near where the Burger King is on 10th and Winter? You know that area? — and it was a packed house that night, near about 300 people, I’d say. I knew most of the guys in the band, except the drummer. Back in those days, the clubs were these wooden places that owners cared little about. They just wanted profits and didn’t put much money back into the places.

Anyways, this drummer dude apparently got it in his head to light off a sparkler during our finale. ‘Course, he didn’t bother to ask anyone if this was a bright idea in a club full of drunken people. I caught a flash out of the corner of my eye, but didn’t think much about it. Coulda been a flashlight or something. Next thing I knew, the curtains above us were flaming. Just like that, the fire was raging and the place was out of control. The lights went out. Smoke was so thick you couldn’t see barely a few feet in front of your face. You could feel panic in the air. You ever been in the middle of a mob where everyone is scared? It’s like a caged animal just realizing its predicament.

I grabbed hold of my saxophone and hightailed it towards the nearest door that I could find. I wasn’t fast enough, I guess, because the next think I know, this drummer — the same guy who started this mess — is running over me. He was a big guy and when he landed on my leg. Bam. It got all twisted out of shape. Bent the wrong way. Could see some bone sticking out, so bad. Kinda like some of those instruments your dad has hanging from the rafters. I knew pain in that moment of time. I crawled towards the door and someone, an angel of mercy by the name of Mac — that’s right, your daddy – yanked me up and shoved me through the door. But not before I got a glimpse of our drummer, who had been pulled aside by one of the club’s bouncers — this guy was about 300 pounds of muscle — and the fire starter was getting the beating of his life.

Anyways, I got out the door finally, and not long after, the whole roof collapsed down and there were some 50 people killed that night. Your daddy got hurt, too, by a falling rafter from the roof. Slammed him right in the mouth and ruined his lip so’s he never could play that sweet trombone of his anymore. I still feel guilty about that, even feel a bit guilty about that drummer, although seems like what happened to him was justice of a sort. Still, that guy died in there, plain fact of life, and as I get older, I wonder if I could have done something to help get more people out. Maybe I could have even saved the drummer. I think God would have wanted that. Or, maybe not. Some folks think that a vengeful God would have seen what happened to that drummer as righteousness — the sinner being punished by his own sin. Not sure how I feel about that, even to this day. ‘Stead, I’m left here to live with this here bum leg that reminds me every day of the foolishness of people. We’re all fools, I suppose, but some of us are more foolish than others.

If I had a real job, not playing music, I guess I could have gotten my sorry ass to a hospital and gotten myself all fixed up right. I didn’t have no money, though — funny how some things never change — and I had to go down to Big Ralph for some help. You ever hear of Big Ralph? No? Big Ralph dropped out of Med School, the story goes, and worked as a sound man for bands. When you got sick but had only a bit of cash, Big Ralph could fix you up right. Big Ralph bent my leg back, though I suppose it was set all wrong — what do you expect from a doc named Big Ralph, right? — and healed all wrong, too. That why I limp. Just part of me now, son.

You live with the breaks in life and go on as best as you can.”

When Jack had finished his story, Alec had stood there stunned. He was ten years old at the time and the visions of burning roofs and beatings of death engulfed his imagination for years to come. And there, in the midst of all that chaos, he saw his father, dragging a friend out of the danger to safety, only to get hurt himself and losing everything that he loved about music.

Visions of getting caught in crowds fueled Alec’s nightmare visions and to this day, Alec would make sure that he knew exactly where each fire exit was in a club and how to get out in an emergency. You never knew when your life might count on such information. You may live with the breaks of life, Alec concluded, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take precautions against them.

 

“Dad, you want coffee?”

Mac looked up from his workbench, rubbed his eyes and stretched his fingers. A set of screwdrivers sat open next to his left hand and pieces of the saxophone were spread out on the table. Alex was always amazed by the artistry of his father. How Mac ever remembered where the pieces went back together was beyond him. Alec had trouble changing the tubes on popped bicycle tires when he was young.

“Cream, a bit of sugar,” Mac commanded, and then returned to work.

It was still early in the day, and the shop was empty of any customers. A few regulars would stop by at lunchtime and then in the afternoon, students from the local public and private schools would wander about the store, trying a guitar here and drooling over a trumpet over there. There was always a regular business in sheet music, reeds and guitar strings, too.

Mac had bought the shop not long after the fire that changed his life forever. Playing music was no longer an option, and his lip still showed the long scar running diagonal across his bottom lip. Realizing that he could no longer play out, and that he had to raise his young son alone — given that his wife had passed to cancer a few years before at a young age — Mac set out to learn a trade. He had always been good with his hands and so the work came naturally to him. He enjoyed fixing something that was broken. Too much in his life, the broken things, were beyond his command. Here, in his shop, he had absolute power to repair the world. He was blessed with an intuitive sense of instruments, as if they were a wounded animal able to converse with him.

Mac had used some meager savings, and insurance money, to buy the store and used his connections to the musical world to bring in customers. Since there was very little extra cash for Mac and his son, the boy spent much of his childhood here in the store, perched on that stool or playing in the corner where Mac had set up a little area for him.

“Back in a minute,” Alec called out, and then left for the coffee.

Mac stopped what he was doing and watched the figure of his son, now a grown man, leave. His love for the boy never ceased to amaze him, nor did his loss of words to express it. Even with the mistakes made by Alec — and that selling of the song to that girl, Eve, was a doozy that took Mac a while to get over — the boy was still the center of Mac’s world. He wished he could fix his relationship as easily as he could repair this broken saxophone in front of him. Oh well. We’re only human, Mac said, and then got back to work.

 

In college, Alec had taken a course in English Literature that constituted his first taste of the classics. Although troubled by the archaic language and often put off by the strange patterns of words, Alec soon became enraptured by the themes of the great writers — love, war, fate. These themes echoed out across time and which, following the death of his mother, had always haunted the young boy. He read what he could and gathered the knowledge left behind by the masters, seeking to bring new perspectives to his life.

Thinking now of Jumpin’ Jack and the whole menagerie of musicians who stumbled into the music store on a regular basis, Alec realized that the music store was a modern day pilgrimage site for travelers such as found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. These stragglers brought with them their own tales of glory, of lost love, of fate’s fickle fingers, of adventure and of morality. These stories were like lost songs of paradise, where regular people were put in situations bigger than themselves. A place of words and music where lessons were transferred down from one generation to next.

Alex smiled at this idea, thinking that one day he should pick up a pen and begin writing what he had been told over the years. He recollected one story told to him by Sallie Mere, a huge black woman with the most beautiful eyes and soft voice that Alec ever remembered encountering.

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Listen to Singer’s Tale Singer

 

The Singer’s Tale

(The Battle with The Green Knight)

 

“I ever tell you about the time jazz kicked the shit out of rock and roll,” Sal started one day, while Mac was out to lunch and Alec, 13, was minding the counter. There was no one else around, although Sal would not have cared one bit. She was going to tell her story to Alec, no matter what he said. She adjusted her brassiere a bit, accidentally giving Alec an eyeful of what lay beneath. He absent-mindedly wondered what kind of mother she might make for someone. She seemed to be full of love and passion. Sal had been a highly-respected singer during her day, Mac had told him once.

“Was in the mid-50s, something like that, can’t remember my dates anymore, not that it matters, hon, and us jazz folks were pretty much the talk of the world. Jazz is an all-American art form - You know that? You do? Good — and we were the proud bearers of it. Being a jazz musician in them days meant the world was yer oyster. ‘Cept some place in the south, where the color of your skin still caused a heap of trouble. Thas another story, though, Hon, and one I’d like to forget.

I was with this band down in the Memphis area — the Hot Dogs we was called — and I was singing my heart out night after night in all sorts of honky-tonk places, just loving life and doing my thing. One night, we got ourselves booked at the biggest club in that town — called The Barn. If you were a band, you wanted to play The Barn because it meant you had arrived. You were somebody.

Down in Memphis at that time, there was talk of this new music coming up, this rock and roll thing. To me, it sounded like a cheap imitation of the blues, just riffed up a bit. Only three chords. Simple. I laughed myself silly when I heard my first rock and roll song. Turns out this local group — call themselves The Hawks — were making their name the same time we were, and along the same circuit, too. One night, we’d play a place and the next, they’d be there. Or we’d be following them. It was awfully strange, but there it was.

On the night we were scheduled to play The Barn, we got there plenty early, to get a few drinks and check the place out. Oh, hon, it was wonderful. Great big stage, lights overhead and just a fine sound in that room. Next thing you know, here comes this other group of musicians and they introduce themselves as The Hawks. Turns out the manager of The Barn accidentally booked both of our bands for the same night, and as you can imagine, neither of us was gonna back down. The manager didn’t know what to do.

Now in the birthing days of jazz, out in New Orleans, musicians used to duke it out on street corners, not with fists like they do nowadays, but with notes. They’d stand face to face, play themselves crazy, until one of them would concede the superiority of the other and back down. Kind of like a cock fight. Cuttin’ Heads, they’d call it. Knowing how good we were, I suggested that we battle it out on the stage that night and let the audience decide who would stay and who would go. To make it interesting, I suggested the loser would not only not get paid a cent, but they would have to pick up the bar tab of the winning band. That was a wager no real musician — less they a teetotaler — could argue with. The manager agreed, figuring that two hot bands would bring in more paying customers.

Now I like to think of myself as the star — and why not, baby, I had the voice — but in this band, the real star was this youngster we had named Guy Rane, ‘though we called him Sir Guy. That boy could play, and I figured that if we put him up against anyone, we damn near was sure to win. ‘Course, we didn’t know much about The Hawks. Turns out they had a fine saxman themselves, name of Tim Greene, and he could wail, too, over those three-chord rock and roll. He always wore green shirts, so he was known thereabouts as the Green Knight. That he was good on his sax became evident soon enough.

First, one band would play a song and the manager and three other judges would get the crowd to cheer, and then the other band would go through the gauntlet, and whoever got more whooping out of the people scored some points. After a few songs, it was clear that we were heading for a tie. The Hawks were pretty good, I give them that. They played some nasty, low-down blues that people just liked.

Now our guys had run up a pretty hefty tab at the bar at this point and we all knew we were empty pockets, so the pressure was on. That’s when I told Sir Guy to crank it up a notch and show this crowd what he was made of. That boy began hitting notes, Hon, like I haven’t heard again. He could make you laugh, cry and sigh all in the course of a single song. Something magical about that boy.

But their boy, that Green Knight, was good, too, and his playing was filled with fire, knocking everyone out. Still, Sir Guy didn’t back down and soon, they were standing head to head, blowing out notes like some giants armwrestling over a princess. When Tim stopped to take a breath, Sir Guy snuck right in there, and blew a line that topped everything that night. That Green Knight yanked off his mouthpiece and walked off the stage, leaving Sir Guy to finish up. Boy, did that crowd whoop it up then!

Yep, that was the night jazz kicked the shit out of rock and roll. We had a party that night, Hon. You think about it, though, and you know rock and roll was not going to be down long. Nope. It came roaring back at us jazz folks, all mad, and pulled the rug right out from under us for the longest time. I don’t think jazz ever recovered. Sure, we play clubs and get some recording gigs, but it ain’t the same. Rock and roll became the king. At least ‘til this hip-hop creature came along.

I still think, though, that jazz is art. Rock and roll isn’t. Jazz brings you the complexities of life. Rock and roll is all about the surface. Jazz digs down deep beneath. Maybe someday people will see that again. Maybe someday.”

Sal finished her story with a sigh and Alec nodded in agreement, although he wasn’t sure he agreed. At that age, he loved everything about rock and roll, and he often rejected the jazz music that floated in the air of his father’s store as nothing more than empty fluff.

“Yeah,” Sal said, as she began to leave the store, “we really kicked the shit out of rock and roll that night.”

 

Everything changed for Alec the day Eve entered his life. She was like that, a whirlwind of activity that swept up everyone and everything in her path, and then could cast you off just as quickly. This fact was something he realized only later. Alec had had a few girlfriends, those schoolyard sweethearts that you find an empty stairwell to slip some tongue or to feel some breasts over shirts. He was not, as they say, very understanding of women. He barely understood himself.

It was not surprising then that nothing had ever had an immediate impact on him as Eve had, although he never touched or kissed her, and she came into his life only by chance alone.

Although Alec had grown up in the music shop, he had never taken up an instrument. Mac had tried time and again to get his son interested. Somehow, to Mac, it seemed that Alec was more interested in the goings-on of the store, not with the music itself. Mac was not completely right in this assessment. It’s true that Alec did not play any of the devices scattered about the shop.

However, his ear was tuned not only to the stories of the musicians but also to the sounds they made in trying their horns, drums and stringed guitars. Sometimes he would hide outside the practice rooms near the air duct and just listen to the sweet melodies coming forth from inside. The notes scattered about his brain until he reached the age where he could detect some patterns to the sounds. Songs began to swim inside his head, day and night, and he was afraid that no one instrument could capture what was inside him, so he never took a chance on any of them.

To voice this to Mac would have been impossible, so Alec shrugged off his father’s suggestions and wandered away.

Then Joey “Bones” Jones came in one day, slinging a blue guitar over his back and cracking jokes about being a streetcorner troubadour. Alec, who was 16 at the time, was taken at once by the guitar, a deep blue indigo that seemed to absorb light from everything around it. Energy seemed to pulse through the stringed frets that were worn away from years of use. A large ornamental “F” was carved artistically into the body.

Bones played a few chords in a style that was all his own, positioning the palm of his large hand over the fretboard in a way that allowed all five fingers, even his thumb, to be used at one. The fingers on the man were powerful, rippling with small muscles, rock hard with calluses and Alec listened to a rainbow of sound flutter from the guitar. Chords, yes, but also melodies of single notes pushing their way up to the surface. It was like no other sound he had heard before and he knew, at that moment, that the guitar would be his instrument, if only he could figure out how Bones did it.

Every time old man Bones came into the shop, Alec would stop whatever he was doing and stand near the guitar player. Bones didn’t seem to mind. After hours on the busy streets hustling for coins, he seemed to revel in the attention given to him by the boy and rambled on endlessly about anything that struck his fancy. Alec listened to the stories, although he was more focused on the man’s hands as Bones absentmindedly strummed through tunes while he talked. It often seemed to Alec that the man’s hands were disconnected from his brain during these times, as if the music were some subliminal messaging service that didn’t need Bones at all. His hands and fingers, Alec used to think, were like live animals taking its master out for a walk.

 

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