The Boy Who Cried Freebird (2 page)

A few years ago, I was in Los Angeles and found myself at a quiet bar in the middle of the afternoon. There were just two guys shooting pool and an older fellow drinking by himself.

The older fellow had long sideburns and wore a fringed leather jacket. He told me that he was a studio musician who'd played on a lot of recording sessions during the 1960s.

“Wow,” I said. “That sounds exciting. What instrument do you play?”

“Glockenspiel,” he answered.

“Glockenspiel?” I barely contained my sarcasm. “Man, you must have sat in on some pretty heavy sessions.”

The musician became stern, “Listen kid, you think you're smart? Let me tell you something, I worked on one of the greatest recording sessions of all time. Have you ever heard the song ‘River Deep, Mountain High,' produced by Phil Spector?”

“Sure,” I said. “Ike and Tina Turner recorded that one in 1966.”

The old guy laughed, “You're half right, son. Now let me tell you the
real
story.”

With that, he strolled over to the old-fashioned jukebox in the
corner, dropped in some quarters, pushed a few buttons, and returned to his seat. He said that his friends called him Harvey the K.

Then Harvey leaned back on his barstool and explained a few things, “Phil Spector was a young hotshot when he first saw Ike and Tina Turner perform in L.A. at the TAMI Show in 1964,” he said. “But two years later, at the age of twenty-six, Phil was a hugely successful record producer. He had a string of hit singles with all these different girl groups—like the Crystals singing ‘He's a Rebel' and ‘Be My Baby' by the Ronettes.

“It hardly mattered who was singing when Phil was in charge. He picked the groups, gave them their songs, and directed their every move in the studio. Before Spector, record producers rarely got any press, but Tom Wolfe wrote this big article about Phil in 1965 calling him ‘The First Tycoon of Teen.'

“Anyway,” Harvey said—talking faster as his tale progressed, “Phil had started his own record label, but the hits weren't coming like they used to. His last big record had been with the Righteous Brothers and even though he produced their number one hit, ‘You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling' a year earlier, the Righteous Brothers stopped working with Phil.

“Yeah, Spector was slipping, but he still had a few tricks up his sleeve. So, he contacts this little label called Loma Records and offers to buy Ike and Tina's recording contract for $20,000! And get this—the entire offer is just so he can produce one song with Tina Turner. But there's a catch, part of the deal is that Ike isn't allowed anywhere near the recording session—PHIL JUST WANTS TINA!

“They finally make the deal, and Tina starts rehearsing at Phil's L.A. mansion, just the two of them with no Ike in sight. They were working on this disjointed love song about a little girl and her rag doll that Phil had written with a couple of his cronies from Manhattan—Ellie
Greenwich and Jeff Barry. Phil had even convinced Ellie and Jeff to come out to L.A. hoping to recapture the magic of their days together at the Brill Building, when they'd collaborated on hits like ‘Da Doo Ron Ron' and ‘Baby, I Love You.'

“In a way, Phil took a big risk working with Tina. She and Ike weren't stars at that point—just another hard-core rhythm-and-blues revue doing endless one-nighters. Ike fronted a nine-piece road band and had Tina singing along with three Ikettes. Ike called all the shots back then and if you think about it, Tina's work with Phil was her first step away from Ike's domination.

“Finally, Phil got everyone together for ‘River Deep' and you had to see it to believe it—it was a huge scene with more than twenty musicians crammed into Studio A at Gold Star Sound in Hollywood. We're talking about the top session guys at the time, guitarists like Glen Campell and Barney Kessel, Leon Russell on piano, even Sonny Bono was there working for Phil.

“And there were just as many people hanging out, too. I remember Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was watching us the whole time and Mick Jagger kept walking in and out of the control booth. Would you believe Dennis Hopper was there, taking photos? It was a rock 'n' roll party, and Phil worked us harder than usual just to impress everyone.

“With so many musicians in the studio, Phil took his ‘wall of sound' to a whole new level. It was positively orchestral with four guitarists, four bassists, and three keyboards, all going over this killer arrangement written by Jack Nitzsche. Nitzsche was always in the studio with Phil, and so was engineer Larry Levine. Jack, Larry, and Phil fussed endlessly with the sound that day—adjusting each microphone and cranking up the echo and reverb beyond anything that I had ever heard before.

“Phil used two drummers for the first time, as well as two percussionists. We were falling all over each other, but the sound was huge; there were saxophones, trumpets, and trombones. Phil threw them all together until the instruments reverberated into one giant roar. Later, he would add an entire string section and a battalion of backup singers.

“Of course, the whole thing was done in mono—and
nobody
made mono recordings like Phil Spector.

“Tina tried doing her vocals that day, but she just wasn't ready for the total Spector experience. So, Phil rehearsed Tina for another week before finally recording her vocal track. That day, there was hardly anyone in the studio—just Phil, Larry, and me. The lights were low and Tina was wearing headphones with Phil's tremendous sound booming in her ears.

“Spector was relentless, and he kept making Tina sing the song over and over until the sweat came right through her blouse. Finally, she said, ‘Okay Phil, one more time.' Then she pulled off her shirt, stood there in her bra, and nailed it. She matched Phil's majestic production punch for punch. It was fantastic.

“We all figured ‘River Deep' was headed straight for number one but a funny thing happened…the record bombed. Some said it was overproduced, others thought it was just too far ahead of its time. Besides, Phil had alienated a lot of people in the music industry and many of them were happy to see him fail.

“In any case, ‘River Deep, Mountain High' flopped, and Phil took it real hard. He became reclusive and hardly made any records at all for about three years. Of course, he rebounded in the '70s, producing albums like George Harrison's
All Things Must Pass
and John Lennon's
Imagine
.

When the song on the jukebox ended, Harvey the K stood up and
said that he had to get going. As we said good-bye, I noticed a button on his jacket that read, “Back to Mono.” Then he was gone.

I was so intrigued by Harvey's story about Phil Spector that I contacted the American Federation of Musicians Local Union 47 on Vine Street in Hollywood. Sure enough, they had a contract listing for a recording session using twenty-three musicians on March 7, 1966, working on a song entitled “River Deep.”

The funny thing is, no one named Harvey was listed on that recording session. Not only that, there was absolutely no mention of anyone playing a glockenspiel.

It all started out innocently enough. I was trying to get some work done while listening to
Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings
.

To tell the truth, I was well into the second CD before I started writing. I'd been unproductive that day and spent hours on the phone before typing a single word. By the time I'd finally gotten into a decent work groove the music on disc 2 had ended and I wrote in silence for about twenty minutes.

I'd forgotten all about the music when suddenly, Robert Johnson's blues-ridden wail started coming out of the speakers again. “That's funny,” I thought. “The disc player isn't on auto-repeat and there aren't supposed to be any bonus cuts on this CD.”

I went into the living room and looked at the digital display on my disc player. The machine read
TRACK
30 but when I checked, the CD box listed only twenty-one tracks. The song ended, so I programmed the machine to play track 30 again. No such luck. The song seemed to have vanished.

I examined the entire CD, track by track, but it only went up to twenty-one. I went backward and forward, but there was nothing else
to be found. I even plugged the damned thing into my computer and read all the existing data. Still no go.

Feeling confused, I called some people who I thought might have the Robert Johnson collection. After a few conversations, I found an old friend who owned the two-disc set.

“Have you listened to disc 2 all the way through?” I asked him. “I think I've listened to it,” he said. “Come on, Jim,” I pressed. “You're no blues fanatic. Are you absolutely sure that you've listened to both CDs all the way through to the very end?”

“Well, actually,” Jim confessed, “I only remember playing the song ‘Crossroads' to see how it compared with the version by Cream with Eric Clapton.”

“Well, don't put it on now!” I yelled. “Just wait for me to get over to your place and I'll tell you all about it. I'll be there in twenty minutes!”

I hustled over to Jim's house and explained the situation. After telling him what had happened, we agreed to play disc 2 in its entirety rather than searching for a phantom track. As a backup, I suggested that we use his old tape recorder to make a copy of the song if it appeared.

According to plan, we sat through all twenty-one tracks on disc 2 and then turned on the tape recorder. Sure enough, the CD kept going rather than stopping after track 21. Exactly sixteen minutes and thirty seconds later, track 30, the ghostly, angst-ridden blues that I'd heard in my apartment, was emanating from Jim's stereo.

I must admit that I was a little freaked out. It was definitely Robert Johnson, but neither Jim nor I recognized the song, and it wasn't listed
anywhere
on the CD package. As I predicted, the song ended and we couldn't get the disc to play track 30 again. Still, the meters on Jim's tape recorder had been moving while the tune played, so we were confident that we'd captured the elusive song.

When we tried to play it back, the tape came up blank. Then Jim started to get nervous. “I don't know, man,” he whined. “It's just too weird, this whole legend about Robert Johnson having a hellhound on his trail and selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads? Think about it, the liner notes say that Johnson was only known to have recorded twenty-nine compositions in his short life. The rest of the tracks on these two discs are just alternate versions of those same songs. Twenty-nine songs…Track 30? Come on. This one piece of unidentified music
just happens
to disappear from two different compact discs on two different stereos and can't be recorded onto tape? It's just too weird!”

We fiddled with Jim's stereo a little more, but there was no trace of the song. It became clear that Jim was uncomfortable with our discovery, and he wanted me (and Robert Johnson) to get the hell out of his house. “Let it go, man, it's just too weird!” he shouted after me as I walked to my car.

The next day, I began my search for unopened copies of
Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings
. I started by talking with some employees at Sony Records to see if I could get any information that would explain this phenomenon. The Sony folks seemed sympathetic, but I got the sense that they thought I was crazy.

I also got the impression that one guy I spoke to, one who actually participated in the production of
The Complete Recordings
, was hiding something. When I asked him about the existence of a track 30, he said that he'd have to call me back. I never heard from him or anyone else at Sony again.

Meanwhile, my search for unopened copies of
Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings
was going poorly. None of the record stores I called had the box set in stock and neither did any of the online retailers. One friend in the music business told me that while the Johnson
collection was supposedly still in print, Sony had been showing the item on back order for the last eighteen months.

By this time I was convinced that there was some kind of cosmic blues conspiracy going on. No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to remember the slightest thing about the phantom Robert Johnson song. The lyrics and the melody were lost in my memory like a drunken dream. The song was hiding somewhere in my subconscious, but I was unable to summon it into my thoughts.

On top of that, my friend Jim stopped talking to me. Then, he moved out of town.

After more research, I determined that there
were
a few Johnson compositions that (supposedly) had never been recorded by the bluesman himself. Could the song have been “Little Boy Blue” or “Take a Little Walk with Me,” both alleged Johnson compositions recorded by Robert Jr. Lockwood, a surrogate stepson to the legendary blues singer? No clue. The late Johnny Shines sang Johnson's little-known “Tell Me Mama” back in 1972, but the Shines version didn't jog my memory in the least.

There was only one answer: I had to hear that song again.

Desperate, I found a high-priced broker whose specialty was locating hard-to-find blues and jazz recordings. “Listen,” I told him. “I'm looking for a double-CD box set called
Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings
on Sony. I'm only looking for new copies but I'll pay top dollar for as many as you can find.”

The broker laughed and said, “Kid, you're out of your league here and let me tell you why. I already have a standing order direct from Eric Clapton's business manager for every copy of
The Complete Recordings
that I can get my hands on. You don't even want to know how much he's paying; it would make you
sick
. Now, I don't know what it is about these Johnson discs that you guys are so hyped up
about and the more I hear, the less I want to know. I can tell you that I'm not the only one who's been contacted by people like Clapton—all of the guys in my business have had similar requests for two years running. Every once in a while somebody comes across a few of these box sets and makes enough money to buy a new house. My advice is to just scour the record bins and leave the high-end dealing to folks who can afford it.”

In the following months, I spent my time calling vintage record stores and noted blues historians. I even located an old Robert Johnson crony in Chicago, bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards. Edwards was nice enough, but as soon as I asked him about the chance recording of a thirtieth Robert Johnson song, he hung up the phone.

Music authorities like Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick ignored my queries, perhaps unwilling to share such forbidding information with a stranger. I found one copy of
The Complete Recordings
in a suburban CD shop, but it had already been played and there were some strange markings carved onto the cover.

Then, one night, after spending hours looking through Internet auctions and other online music sites, I turned off my computer in a state of complete exhaustion. It was late, nearly midnight, and a wave of discouragement swept over me.

“Damn,” I said out loud. “I'd do anything for another listen to that song.”

Immediately, there was a knock at my front door. Startled, I went to see who could be stopping by at such a late hour. As I approached the doorway, I felt an extreme heat coming from the outer hall. The smell of sulfur filled the air.

At that exact moment, I realized that I had made a big mistake.