He’d been humming it for days. I’d hear the track on repeat, the a cappella voice singing its threatening, melancholy lyric. A year earlier, that voice wouldn’t have had such an impact on him. It turned up just when he became receptive. All postwar music had vanished from his life. The electric guitars and thumping rhythms of the nineteen forties and fifties had faded into prewar blues recordings, lone guitarists playing strange abstract figures, scraping the strings with knives and bottlenecks and singing in cracked, elemental voices about trouble and loss. Lately, he’d set up a 78rpm turntable in his bedroom. He would sit on the floor close to the speakers. It was as if the chess player’s blues had risen up to meet him, as if he’d summoned it into his room.
A lot of people find early recordings unlistenable. I did too. The audio quality is so poor, instinctively my brain wants it cleaned up. Carter had explained that some of the records were so rare that only single copies were known. In some cases that lone copy was worn out. The pressings had been bad in the first place, companies skimping on shellac, using too much clay and cotton filler in the mix. Even in mint condition, some of them sounded as if they’d been scoured with sandpaper. I suppose it was inevitable that, sooner or later, Carter would run into those old singers. They were as far back in audio time as you could go. He’d been following their traces through downloads and vinyl compilations to a wooden box lined with green baize that he was gradually filling with expensive original 78’s. He had begun to talk about songs by referencing their catalog numbers, scouring want lists and dealer sites for work by musicians so obscure that even their real names were in doubt.
The rapper had been talking about his respect for The Last Poets, who he kept referring to as The Last Prophets. Carter cut across him and spoke directly to me.
—I can’t believe you’re not out looking for him.
—Looking for who?
—You met him at the chess tables, right? Maybe he plays there regularly.
I was thrown. It took me a moment to realize what he meant.
—Let’s talk about this later.
The executive asked if Carter needed anything. People always told me, said the rapper, with the air of a man trying to cut through bullshit to the realness within, they said pull up your pants and act white.
I said I understood.
—I spent hours with my notebook, just honing my skills. I went to parties way out in the hood.
Carter scowled. The executive tapped him on the knee and told him that his assistant would get him anything. Anything at all, double underscore. Somehow we stumbled through another fifteen minutes, but the meeting had essentially fallen apart. We left with a lot of hugs and complicated handshakes, but without a definitive agreement to do the record.
I knew we could make a killer album. I had a lot of unused material that I didn’t know what to do with. Because of Carter’s voracious and well-funded collecting, I was sitting on super-rare breaks that would lose their value the instant someone else ripped them off. We could make tracks that sounded like 1973 because we had tracks from 1973, hyper-rarities no one else possessed. Secret knowledge. Gnosis. I couldn’t understand why Carter wasn’t excited. Outside on the sidewalk, I confronted him.
—What the fuck was that? I asked. He lit a cigarette.
—He can kiss my ass.
—He’s huge. Everything he does charts.
—So? We’re doing him a favor even talking to him.
—Come on, man. Don’t screw this up. It’s what we’ve been dreaming about.
—This is our music, Seth. We live it. We feel it. He thinks he can just swan in and buy it off the shelf?
—Do you know how insane you sound?
He shrugged.
We stood around, awkwardly, smoking and shuffling our feet. Then he summoned a car on his phone, got in it and drove away.
I DIDN’T SEE CARTER AGAIN until the next morning. I had slept badly, so when he burst into my room, I was groggy and disoriented. He pulled the sheet off the bed and made an announcement: his brother Cornelius was having a weekend party at the family place in Virginia and we were going.
—Taking off from Teterboro in three hours, so pack a bag.
—What?
—Corny chartered a six-seater for his friends, and some of them dropped out. My God, you look disgusting. Were you drinking last night?
—No.
I sat up, yawning and picking gunk out of my eyes. I didn’t want to know why he was suddenly so charged up when he had been completely apathetic at our meeting. He was operating at an atypically high intensity, full of plans and designs, stalking around the apartment wearing a dress shirt and neat khaki slacks dug out from God knows what forgotten corner of his closet.
Put me under a man called Captain Jack, he sang. Wrote his name all down my back.
I padded into the kitchen and fumbled angrily with the coffee machine.
—Why are you dressed like a Mormon? I thought you hated your brother.
—I never said that, Seth. I would never say that.
—Pardon me for asking. Look, are you OK?
—Sure. Come on, hustle hustle, finish your cereal. One thing, the guys traveling with us are douchebags, but you can relax because Leonie is coming too.
Leonie. A wound in my side.