Mesmerized by hope and her own chutzpah, she backed her way into Allegro Music, jangling the bells on the door.
“Glory, baby!”
The guy behind the counter reflexively thrust his hand out for high-fiving purposes but didn’t lift his head: he was engrossed in some kind of delicate surgery. His anarchic gray-streaked black hair was restrained by a pair of goggles pushed back up on his broad, sweating forehead, and a variety of little tools were scattered around a prone, partially dismembered Alvarez acoustic guitar. Solder and sawdust perfumed the air.
She peered down at the patient.
“What happened to her?” she asked on a hush. The guitar looked like her. Something about the abalone inlay on her poor currently detached neck.
“Stolen from a guy’s car in Placerville,” Dion Espinoza said. “He finally found it on Craigslist—some other guy had bought it from some other guy, you know how it goes. When he finally got it back, it was in this shape. When I told him how much it would cost to repair it, he sold it to me cheap. Original tuning pegs had been switched out to these cheap things, the bridge plate has practically been pulled off, and I need to re-bore the holes since the headstock had a crack.” He shook his head. “It’s a beaut. Or was. This was a classic, man. It’s criminal.”
Guitarists from all over California brought abused or aging instruments to Dion to be restored to their youthful sheen and vigor. Once or twice a year he built an extraordinary guitar on commission, and that’s what actually kept his lights on. He was a master craftsman.
Mainly he kept the little store here in Hellcat Canyon because he liked living in the sticks and he liked to talk to music geeks all day long. Most local kids got their first music lessons from some long-suffering low-paid teacher in the warren of little offices in the back. Glory could hear the muffled constipated blats of a saxophone now. She was mostly self-taught, given that her mom thought shoes for her kids were a more important investment than music lessons, but she’d learned a lot by loitering in Dion’s shop and pestering the good players who wandered in. Dion liked attitude and talent in anyone. He’d let her hang out as much as she wanted.
Dion delicately blew a particle of sawdust off the bridge plate. “I’ll take that Martin off your hands when you’re ready, Glory. It must besucha burden to you.”
“Aww. Your selflessness is an example for us all, Dion.”
He grinned. Glory’s fifty-year-old Martin was worth about four thousand dollars, something Dion had told her in confidence and which she’d never told a soul. She would in fact sell her soul, if there were any takers, before she sold that guitar.
She idly spun the little rack of trade magazines next to the door:Guitar Player,Rolling Stone,Mix,Spin. And there they were again—on the cover ofClang:
Wyatt “King” Congdon:
The Man with the Platinum Ear
Talks The Baby Owls, Future of Pop Music
Wyatt Congdon was the legend who’d founded Stellium Records, and he was still viewed as the ultimate star maker, even in an industry changing by the second. More than once she’d entertained herself (and bored Eli and Jonah) with daydreams of meeting him. She could justimaginewhat that moment had been like for The Baby Owls.
Next she peered down at the contents of the locked, glassed-in case below the counter where Dion displayed smaller instruments—a few Hohner and Lee Oskar harmonicas, a pair of maracas and a güiro, a kazoo, a couple of cowbells. Sometimes he had an autographed photo or some other ephemera or quirky collectables.
Today a flash of red made her sink to her knees as if she was about to kiss the pope’s ring.
“Dion... Is that... is that really an original forty-five of ‘Hey Hey What Can I Do’?”
Technically, it was the forty-five single of Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song,” and “Hey Hey What Can I Do” was its B side. Both were brilliant, both were still all over classic-rock radio, and both would probably still be streaming in flying cars on road trips to Pluto in the year 2050, but “Hey Hey What Can I Do” had never appeared on any Led Zeppelin album, ever. Pretty much every serious music freak eventually learned that in a desperate quest to find it and own it.
She’d caught Eli air-drumming to it on the steering wheel of his old Fiero when she was fourteen and he was sixteen. He was parked outside the Greenleaf house, waiting for Jonah to come out, and his eyes were closed, his head was bobbing, his whole torso was swaying—in other words, he was doing what any sane human ought to do when they heard that song. He had a decent tenor but couldn’t really keep it in key and his voice fractured into a honking bray on the high notes,murderingthem.
It was funny as hell and touching, too, because it was so rare to see Eli just let go like that.
He’d almost gotten to the last verse when he noticed her standing on the porch, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. Watching as raptly if she’d bought a ticket to do it.
He’d yelped and slapped the radio off.
“Like it’s the radio’s fault!” she hollered at him.
She’d had plans to never let him live that down.
YouTube wasn’t a thing yet. The Greenleaf household was pretty low-tech, given that shoes and the mortgage got priority over gadgets, but she attributed her own resourcefulness to years of selective spending. She didn’t even know what that song was called. So she’d sneaked Jonah’s old tape recorder out of his room and waited under her covers at night with a transistor radio until she finally managed to trap it on cassette. It was absolutely in her wheelhouse, voice-wise: a little folksy, a little bluesy, pretty but gritty. Sexy, but then all Led Zeppelin songs were sexy. She didn’t completely understand all the lyrics but she could wing it, she knew that she could let her voice flirt and lilt through the verse and she could really wail during the chorus.
A few weeks later she played that thirty-year-old song for Eli at his seventeenth birthday party. At twilight, beneath the huge liquidambar in the Greenleaf’s shambling three-quarter-acre backyard, which wasn’t much more than tamped dirt interspersed with lots of trees and a barbeque pit, she banged it out in front of about sixty teenagers. Which took balls. But then, she’d always had those.
As his friends tussled and flirted and danced and eddied around him, and Jonah pogoed around the backyard bellowing“Ahhhhhhh! Yeeeeeah Yeah!”—his Robert Plant imitation was definitely better than Eli’s—Eli remained absolutely still. And he listened. Hard. And a tide of scarlet washed him from his collarbone to his hairline. But as she sang (a song which she realized years later was basically about a guy who was futilely in love with a hooker), the blush gave way to something like awe. Something very close to pain. Like he was stoically withstanding some internal crisis.
Twilight was dimming into night when she rounded in on that last verse, and his expression was now strangely resolute and peaceful. Like a guy who’d accepted some sentence fate had handed down.