The Lost Treasures of R&B. Nelson George

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      COUNTRY BOY & CITY GIRL

      It was D’s last day in his Soho office. Most of the furniture was gone. The conference room was already empty. The table, the walkie-talkies, their chargers, the lockers filled with blue suits and T-shirts, had already been sent to storage or sold. The room was bare save two metal chairs, a couple of ancient platinum records leaned up against a wall, and a brown box that sat at his feet. Inside were twenty blue buttons with gold Ds shining in the middle. When D Security had record labels as clients, these buttons had graced the lapels of his many employees as a symbol of his company’s professionalism. Now they sat, useless as old tokens, in a box at his feet.

      The record business had been contracting since Napster introduced mass downloading at the turn of the century and had fallen off the cliff when iTunes disrupted the game a few years later. D had been forced to close D Security’s Soho office to cut overhead and scale back his staff, using only the most experienced folks, as competition for even the lowest security positions at drugstore gigs had become merciless, much less high-paying corporate jobs, which multinational paramilitary groups were scooping up.

      After 9/11, people really wanted security. But now there were so many off-duty cops looking for extra cash that the market was flooded with burly guys licensed to carry firearms. There was a glut of security people who themselves were financially insecure. Moreover, physical security, while useful, had become old-fashioned. Cybersecurity was where the money was. Could you detect and repel hackers? If the answer was no, you were just a big piece of meat in a suit. D barely understood his damn BlackBerry, a device that labeled him as ancient as his Earthlink address. D wasn’t just getting older—something he savored considering his brothers’ early deaths—but was becoming functionally obsolete.

      * * *

      D was fondling one of his old company buttons when Edgecombe Lenox entered his office like the ghost of rhythm & blues past. Edge (as he’d been known in music circles) was wearing a three-piece royal-blue pinstriped suit, an egg shell–colored shirt, a floppy white felt hat with a royal-blue ban, a fat periwinkle-blue tie, whisper-thin gold chains, and powder-blue, pointy-toed shoes with thin blue socks. It was an outfit Bobby “Blue” Bland would have sold his soul for. Edge’s gray facial hair had largely been dyed black and shaped into a sinister goatee. He also sported two defiant primo Walt “Clyde” Frazier circa 1973 muttonchop sideburns. A gold blue-faced watch adorned his left wrist and a gold bracelet hung from his right, while his fingers were filled with an assortment of rings, including a sparkling diamond on his left pinky that was bling-bling decades before Lil Wayne was conceived.

      D stood up, gazed at this vision of blaxploitation glamour, and said, “Whoa.”

      “Good to see you too, young blood.”

      Edge’s grip was firm, though his fingers were bony and flesh loose. Seventy-five was D’s best guess of his age.

      “When you said you were coming downtown to see me I was surprised, but damn, Edge, I wasn’t expecting this.”

      “Life is long, young blood,” Edge said, smiling. There were several teeth missing but the man’s mouth hung proudly open. “Until they toss that dirt on, things just keep on happening.”

      D had last seen Edge about two years earlier at the Bronx nursing home that had been the man’s residence for a decade. D had been looking into the murder of his mentor, the music historian Dwayne Robinson, and a possible conspiracy to destroy and/or control hip hop. Edge had provided no material insight into Dwayne’s sad death, but the elder had related tales of paranoid government programs and deadly federal directives that lingered in the younger man’s mind and, to some degree, proved prophetic about the plot against hip hop. Today’s talk was not to be about black blood spilled or anti–civil rights espionage, however, but of music lost that D never knew existed.

      “I got a call from London about a month ago,” Edge began, his voice grainy as a dusty LP. “It was from a record collector I knew back when I was still an executive. The man would pay me two or three thousand dollars for acetates of records we’d released. It was, of course, against label policy, but dude was one of those passionate British soul music fans—the kind of guy who knew the order number of singles from the ’50s and who played second guitar on records made forty years ago in a Mississippi outhouse. So I hit him off every now and then and he warmed my pocket. I’d lost contact with him when I got downsized by Sony. Figured I’d never hear from him again. Thought he was downloading music from old-school sites in whatever cave he lived in in Liverpool or Leeds or one of them pale towns in England. Then he called me up at the center. Said he wanted my help finding the rarest soul record ever made.”

      “And that would that be . . . ?”

      “Well, I’d heard tell of it. I’m not sure it really happened, that it really existed,” Edge said. “Seemed like a tall tale told by two niggas in a bar. But niggas don’t always lie.”

      “Sounds like a good story coming. If I had some bourbon I’d pour it, my man. But as you see, I’m all packed up including the complimentary booze.”

      “You youngsters just don’t have any sense of hospitality,” Edge said, shaking his head. “Anyway, the record is called ‘Country Boy & City Girl.’ That was the A-side. On the B-side was an instrumental jam called ‘Detroit/Memphis.’”

      “Who were the artists?”

      “Country Boy and City Girl.”

      “Country Boy and City Girl?”

      “Otis Redding and Diana Ross.”

      “What? That’s a crazy combo.”

      “Yeah, so the story goes that in the summer of ’66, the Stax/Volt Revue played the Fox Theatre in downtown Detroit. Sam and Dave. Carla Thomas. Booker T. & the MGs. Otis was the headliner. So a lot of the Funk Brothers—”

      “The Motown session cats?”

      “Yes, James Jamerson, Earl Van Dyke, and all those guys who cut for Motown went to the Fox gig. Now, because the Stax guys were Memphis born and bred, the Detroit cats didn’t know them but had great admiration for their playing. The Detroit cats were mostly jazz trained. Very sophisticated players cause Detroit was a serious jazz town in the ’40s and ’50s. Black folks had jobs up there and supported that good music. The Memphis players, mostly youngsters, weren’t as musically versed as the Detroit guys, but them country niggers and crackers locked into a groove like a motherfucker.

      “After СКАЧАТЬ