Stories We Could Tell

‘You like the new bands?’ Skip said. ‘Not your thing, right?’

Ray smiled politely. He didn’t really have to explain anything to Skip. Skip understood.

‘I like them,’ Skip said. ‘Some of them. But what they’re doing, what they’re devoting their careers to, Eddie Cochran did in less than two minutes. Check it out, man. “Summertime Blues” – one minute fifty-nine. They want back to basics? Eddie Cochran did it first. And you can’t slag off the old guard when you’re stealing their riffs. I mean, where did the Clash lift the riff for “1977”?’

‘The Kinks,’ Ray said. ‘“You Really Got Me”.’

Skip smiled slyly. ‘So what are you into these days? Not Led Zeppelin?’

‘My brother liked all that. I liked – I don’t know – the folky stuff they did. You know, “Tangerine,” “White Summer/Black Mountain Side”’.

Ray didn’t say that his brother had died and the records were gathering dust in a bedroom that his parents had locked. He didn’t tell Skip Jones that. They didn’t talk about their lives. Every conversation they had was about music. Ray supposed that Skip must have a family somewhere. But he never mentioned them. Over the din of the music, what they talked about was music.

‘Big Joni Mitchell fans, Page and Plant,’ Skip said. ‘Everyone ignores that. But if you like that acoustic side of Led Zeppelin, you got to check out some of those folk boys. Davy Graham. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, the Pentangle boys. Leo Kottke. John Fahey – a mad genius, the acoustic Hendrix. And John Martyn. You know John Martyn? He’s our Dylan. Don’t be put off because the guy’s got a beard, man.’

‘Beards don’t bother me,’ Ray said, struggling to commit the names to memory. He had to listen to these people. There was great music out there that he had never even heard of.

‘And then you have to go back further,’ Skip was saying. ‘To the blues. To the music that’s behind our music – if you know what I mean.’

Somehow Ray knew what he meant.

‘Check out Son House.’ A shy, sideways glance. Ray nodded. He would definitely check out Son House. ‘Charley Patton,’ Skip said. ‘Asie Payton. The Delta Blues. It all comes from the same source. That’s what the special ones understand. The blood knot. Where it all gets mixed up – black and white, the city and the country. They get it. All music comes from the same place. Elvis understood it. And Dylan. And Lennon too.’

Ray took a breath.

‘I need to find him, Skip. John Lennon, I mean. He’s in town. White wants me to find him and interview him.’

That shy, sly smile, looking at a point on the ceiling. ‘A world exclusive? A scoop?’

‘That’s it. Yeah. You know – like proper journalism.’

Skip nodded. ‘They’re all in town tonight,’ he said. ‘John Lennon…Dag Wood. It’s a strange vibe, man.’ He smiled, peeking at Ray out of the corner of his eye. ‘Spirits are abroad.’

Ray remembered that Skip had once discovered Dag Wood turning blue in an empty bath in Detroit. Or maybe it was the other way round. It was a bad scene, anyway. Skip knew everything. He had met everyone.

‘Where should I go tonight, Skip?’ There was urgency in Ray’s voice now. He saw he still had a faint chance. ‘If you were me – where would you go?’

Skip considered. ‘If I were you, and I was going out tonight, then I’d try the Speakeasy. Or maybe the Roundhouse.’

Ray was doubtful. ‘You really think that Lennon will be in those places?’

Skip frowned. ‘John Lennon? I doubt it, man. But you’ll be able to buy some great gear in the toilets.’

Ray sighed. He couldn’t help himself. He remembered that although Skip had met everyone and knew everything, it was said he had trouble boiling a kettle. The banalities of life eluded Skip. He was operating on some higher astral plane.

‘Yes, but where will he be? John, I mean?’

But before Skip could hazard a guess, the door to the review room burst open. A small, indignant woman in glasses glared at the pair of them. Ray recognised her, she was from the magazine across the floor, Country Matters.

She bustled over to the turntable and angrily pulled the needle from Marquee Moon, making the vinyl screech in protest.

‘Have some consideration for others,’ she said, red-faced with fury. ‘You’re not the only ones working late, you know.’ She strode back across the review room, pausing at the door. ‘And get some fresh air!’

When she was gone, Ray and Skip looked at each other for a moment.

And then they laughed until it hurt.

‘Get some fresh air!’ Skip Jones said. ‘Wild!’

Misty drove them to the place where they spent their nights. Terry felt his heart pounding with joy. He loved it here. He thought that it looked like the end of the world.

The old Covent Garden flower market had been torn down and carted away. Almost nothing remained. Now the area reminded Terry of the bombsites he had seen as a kid, all ploughed mud and smashed buildings and gaping holes in the earth. But every night, something stirred among the rubble.

‘Here they come,’ Misty said.

Terry and Misty sat on the roof of her dad’s car in a scrappy piece of wasteland, watching men in dinner jackets and women in evening gowns emerge from the darkness and carefully pick their way through the ruins. The opera-goers.

Terry and Misty liked to watch this swanky crew on their way to the Royal Opera House on Bow Street – the men suave in their dinner jackets and bow ties, looking all David Niven and James Bond, the women holding up the hems of their long dresses, dripping jewels, every one a Princess Grace of Monaco, and laughing as if crossing the ruins of Covent Garden was a great game.

A woman in a red dress and pearls waved at them, and Terry and Misty waved back.

The opera crowd had a friendly relationship with the feral-looking young people who flocked to see bands play in a basement club on Neal Street. Terry thought that it was because they were all there for the same reason. They were all there for the music.

‘This was a garden once,’ Misty said. She liked to lecture him. But he didn’t mind. He liked it when she told him things. ‘Did you know that, Tel? They grew fruit and flowers here. That’s where the name comes from. Covent Garden. It really was a garden.’

‘And now it’s a bombsite,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and see if Dag’s arrived yet.’

‘It must have been so beautiful,’ she said.

Terry let loose a Kung Fu cry and jumped from the roof of the car. Before he hit the ground he lashed out at some imaginary enemy with the side of his foot, and chopped the air once-twice-three times.

‘Bruce Lee,’ he said proudly, and his girlfriend smiled at him in the darkness.

Then they looked up as the sky cracked, the heavens opened and the rains came down.

Within seconds they were both soaked. A jagged bolt of lightning snaked across the skyline. It was not the weather of summer. The sudden storm seemed to herald something momentous, some elemental force being unleashed, a change in the universe.

Terry and Misty held hands, laughed out loud and turned their faces to the sky, delirious with life.

And five thousand miles away, behind the gates of a great house in Memphis, Tennessee, a forty-two-year-old man was taking his dying breath.

Chapter Five

The noise – the incredible level of sound – that was what Terry noticed first. It roared out of the basement of the Western World, blasted through the open door where a large bald man in black stood guard, and seemed to rattle the night air, shaking the NHS fillings of the soaked and bedraggled queue waiting to be let inside. Someone was live on stage. And Terry was suddenly aware of the beat of his heart.

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