And the Music, Well, Dig That Crazy Beat

—1—

Seven

Mojo Man

Charlie called himself Mojo Man. He was both a prophet and a joke. In the name of rock ’n’ roll he took outrageous liberties with the language. He was audacious and he knew it. He was to bring down upon us cops, congressmen, crooks, and cowards, all interchangeable in their duplicity. But he never saw his own conduct as corrupt, while I closed my eyes to it and counted the cash. He took to the air with a new breed of deejay show, the kind few audiences in the fifties had ever heard. Some listeners loved him and all he stood for, while others hated him for the same reason. But such exuberance…

And the music, well, dig that crazy beat.

“Hey rug-cutters, time to howl at the moon. The lights are dim, the door’s wide open, the rug’s rolled against the wall, and everything’s copacetic. Your ole Mojo Man, Mister Big hisself, the boss of rock ’n’ roll, Charlie Speed, has the platters y’all like best. Baby, if’n you don’t hear what you wanna hear, drop a dime and call me to make a ree-quest, ’cause I ain’t tel-lee-pathic. Everything the old Mojo Man spins is dy-no-mite too-night. And, gals, if you’re on a date, just to be on the safe side, make sure Mr. Happy’s wearin’ his business suit. Now, it’s time to plug the mug and cut a rug. Let’s roll, let’s rock. Let’s rock ’n’ roll. Here’s an eighteen-karat platter by Cool Mama Caruthers and her Flesh Tones as she sings, ‘Keep It Inside, Baby.’”

Charlie, his microphone hot, pounded on the Yellow Pages, rapping in time to the beat while the single, seemingly endless groove of the record circumnavigated the turntable. He kept the studio monitor at top decibel to feel the thunder, and also because his hearing hadn’t improved since his radium days. He rang a cowbell for emphasis while he whooped and shouted and stomped, and near at hand was his requisite bottle of Iron City, faithfully refreshed by me so his mouth never got dry and his enthusiasm never waned. For Charlie, alcohol would become as indispensable as sex, nicotine, and rock ’n’ roll, but he wasn’t quite there yet.

He’d almost called himself Mau Mau Man because Mau Mau was a derisive term—“damned Mau Mau music”—and it would have been satisfying to turn the slur to his advantage. But when he heard a recording by Muddy Waters that went, “I got my mojo workin’ but it just don’t work on you,” he was hooked, not only on the music but the word. He played it on the air and off, practically without stop, so in time the music and the clicks and scratches on the disc became one and the same, as if it had been planned that way.

“Just listen to that Muddy Waters side, Spencer. I get a hard-on every time I hear it. ‘I wanna love you so bad, child, but I don’t know what to do.’ Wanda Jean says if I play it around her one more time she’s whacking me with separation papers.”

“So what’s it mean, ‘I got my mojo workin’?”

“Hey, old son, I don’t mean to sound snide, but you’re a man of the world. When you’re not listening to the radio you’re off in a corner reading some damned book, so you oughta know how to get your mojo working, and if you don’t…” Buddy-buddy, he poked my shoulder. “Look it up.”

Charlie, a Smoky City boy with ash in his blood and soot on his skin, fancied the word and its undercurrent of voodoo, hoodoo, smoodoo, but he wasn’t to find out what it actually meant until the night he was confronted by a shriveled gypsy woman with nails like claws.

Charlie faked his ignorance well—like my father. As a kid, I’d ask Dad the meanings of elusive words, but dismissively he’d order me to look ’em up in that damned Webster’s that props up the damned sofa with the damned broken leg I’m gonna fix if I ever get thedamned time. But his intention wasn’t to make me dictionary-conscious. Dad not only didn’t know the definitions, he didn’t want to know. He wasn’t an educated man, nor did he pretend to be, but he had his pride. However, his advice proved to be more profound that he knew, and it helped me to become more aware of why he disliked me so much. I was fat and awkward and wore glasses, and he was ashamed, even embarrassed, to call me his son.

Ashamed, adj., seven-letter word meaning to feel shame or guilt.

But by the time Charlie and I bonded as partners, I no longer cared about what my father felt.

Now, at WFUC, the teens who were glued to their radios took to our Mojo Man’s Mau Mau music like candy, the cotton kind and otherwise. Charlie knew what he was doing.

“Spencer, no one up north plays R and B but me, except maybe that guy Alan Freed in Cleveland. But I’m the true first. Most of the other rock ’n’ roll jocks work out of jerkwater places like Shreveport and Birmingham. And mostly they’rewhite, although they give themselves highfalutin names like Daddy, Big Daddy, Poppa, which means they talk down to their listeners. But I don’t. That’s why I not only have a black audience but a white one, and the music rocks, baby. It’s copacetic. And the record distributors love me because the kids who hear my show are the ones who buy the forty-fives.”

My role in this tableau was minimal, and might even be considered demeaning. I gathered the platters Charlie played, answered the phone when the requests came in, replied to his mail, negotiated with the record merchandisers, lined up his sock hops, kept a full bottle of Iron City by his side, and was the buffer between Charlie and Irving Meier, chief honcho of WFUC.

It seemed I’d found my calling, a living anyway, but the best part was that Charlie and I were together again, just as when we were kids playing radio in the living room, broadcasting to nowhere, except to my dying mother puttering bravely in the kitchen, and pretending she was going to survive—even as Charlie intuitively provided her with the solicitude she craved.

“Sorry you’re not feeling so hot, Mrs. S.” “Mrs. S, you go and lie down. I’ll make sure Spencer doesn’t disturb you.” “How long do you think you’ll be in the hospital, Mrs. S?” “I’m rootin’ for you, Mrs. S.”

I yapped through the intercom.

“Charlie, we have another request for ‘Yellow Rose of Texas.’”

“Tell ’em they got us mixed up with that other station.”

“Which one?”

“The one run by Ralph Fuckin’ Pittaro. And let ’em know if I get a request for any more of Mitch Miller’s pablum I’m gonna puke, and everyone’s gonna hear it ’cause I’ve already got my finger down my throat.”

The vociferous campaign against rock ’n’ roll by Mitch Miller, Columbia Record’s artist-and-repertoire man, had become personal to Charlie. Miller denouncedthe music as trash, accusing the teens of liking it only because everybody else hated it. Charlie, on the other hand, despised sappy music, pretentious violins, turgid love ballads, and fluff about doggies in the window, pawn shops on the corner, and dunes on old Cape Cod. He grooved on unrestrained harmonies with throbbing beats that conjured up carnal ecstasy and slashed through the pretense, drawing out the most fundamental of appetites.

Passion scored higher than technical expertise, and it didn’t matter to Charlie if the music had been spawned in some acoustically-challenged basement, which it often was. He was amiably rebellious—although to such pop czars as Miller he was little more than a heretic. Which actually gave me still another reason to revere my childhood pal, whose zeal I admired, even envied. In secret, however, I tended to side with Miller. Hush. There are certain matters in life you can never admit. Charlie’sfather and mother, one a violinist, the other a pianist, considered his infatuation with rock ’n’ roll a benign betrayal, but the solution to this parental malady was beyond repair. His jive-ass, g-droppin’ delivery made him sound black. His listeners assumed he was, and he didn’t try to correct the impression.

He’d discovered black was gold.

“This one’s for all you cha-chas and honey pots out there. Gang, y’all are gonna throw a beat when you hear this next platter. And, baby, if you got Mr. Winkie standing up close, why, you just grab him and get goin’, ’cause it’s time to make the bald man cry. And guys do yourself and her a favor and give that monkey of yours a well-deserved banana. It’s copacetic. Rug-cutters, we gonna rock tonight. We gonna roll. Let’s roll ’n’ rock. Let’s rock ’n’ roll. Yessir, your ole Mojo Man’s got a brand new single by Wee Little Willie and his Willies called ‘Back Door Daddy.’ It’s dy-no-mite.”

I encountered Irving Meier just as I was about to deliver the plastic cooler I’d refilled with fresh Iron Cities for the Mojo Man. Red-faced, the boss shuffled to go around me, but I shifted my wide, yet gradually slimming, torso so as to block the door to the studio, although I made it seem fat-man clumsy rather than planned. Meier didn’t like me much, and I knew he felt Charlie had foisted me on him, although Charlie paid half my salary. Irving never said so to my face, but he considered me a corpulent, no-talent hanger-on and lackey, which I was, and there was no way I could prove otherwise, not even to myself.

“I gotta talk to Charlie, and you’re in my way, Summers.”

“He’s on the air right now, Irving. Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”

“I couldn’t catch him before the show so I stayed late to talk to him.”

“You know Charlie doesn’t like distractions while he’s on the air.”

“What the hell, Summers, whose station is this? Mine or his? Okay, dammit, I’ll explain it to you, but you better get it straight.” He poked a cantankerous finger into my chest. “Charlie can’t use that phrase rock ’n’ roll on the air no more. Rhythm and blues is okay but no rock ’n’ roll.”

“Why not?”

“On account of it’s colored slang for fucking, that’s why.”

“What makes you think that?”

“On account of I ain’t stupid. Besides, my wife told me.”

“Irving, what do you expect him to say? Half the songs he plays have rock or roll in the title: ‘My Daddy Rocks Me With One Steady Roll,’ ‘Rock That Thing,’ ‘Rock Me Mama,’ ‘Rockin’ Rhythm, ‘Lick That Jelly Roll.’ Shall I go on? The same naughty stuff you sell everyday in your record shop.”

“What I sell and what I play on my station is two different things. When you replace the word rock with fuck what do you got?”

“Only dirty minds, Irving…”

Meier lit his signature El Producto and exhaled, engulfing my head in carbonaceous contempt.

“Summers, there’s this low IQ congressman from Mississippi, some guy named Parnell, who tried to get all the stations to ban Cole Porter’s ‘Love for Sale’ on account of he thought it was about a hooker. Jesus, if a moron like him hears Charlie, anything could happen to my license.”

“Irving, even if rock ’n’ roll means what you say it does, who’s going to figure it out, aside from a few purists like you and the lovely Mrs. Meier?”

“The FCC, that’s who, and I don’t intend to lose my permit. It’s the only one I got except for my driver’s license. I got a lot invested here.”

“It’ll take more than rock ’n’ roll to make you lose your card, Irving. The FCC doesn’t know difference between B.B. King and Wayne King.”

“Summers, lemme tell you something that you better learn fast.” He put his two pudgy hands on my shoulders and spoke with the cheap cigar vibrating at the side of his mouth. “I gotta operate in the public interest, necessity, and convenience. The immoral words of J. Edgar Hoover.”

“To be accurate, Irving, it was another Hoover called Herbert, a man now transcended to that vast GOP mausoleum in the sky, right up there with such other great Republican Party thinkers as Harding and Coolidge. And little doubt more in their undistinguished lineage will follow.”

“Summers, I’m okay with the music Charlie plays. I turned him on to it, and it’s why I hired him. I know what sells. But it’s not the rock ’n’ roll I’m worried about so much. It’s them words he uses on the air, like cha-chas and honey pots. And who’s this Mr. Winkie? And what’s it mean when Charlie says it’s time to make the bald man cry?”

“You don’t want to know, Irving, trust me.”

“I know enough to tell a fuckin’ double entendre when I hear it.”

“Entendre?”

“Yeah, I ran across the word in the crossword in today’s Sun-Tele.”

“It’s just jive talk, Irving. The kids dig it. It’s cool. It’s hip. And it’s paying off. Charlie’s Hooper ratings are super for an indie like ours.”

The taut muscles in Meier’s neck visibly loosened, and I saw his fury lifting.

“Yeah, through the fuckin’ roof. Every kid from six to sixteen’s listening to him. I’m thinkin’ about putting him on earlier so his show don’t cut into his audience’s bedtime. It’s just his language…”

“If you’re happy, we’re happy, Irving. You are happy?”

“Well… I just hope he don’t get me into some kinda shit.” He flipped the ash from his El Producto, some of the powder floating onto my shoulder. “And why the hell am I talkin’ to you when I should be talkin’ to Charlie? I’m payin’ half your salary.”

A question best left unanswered. Meier stalked off leaving a plume of cigar smoke to mark his territory.

When Charlie and I left the studio on Smithfield Street after the show there was always a clutch of fans, teenagers, waiting by the door, screeching for autographs, as if he were a musician instead of a messenger. That night his admirers were noticeably ardent, and Charlie, wielding a leaky ballpoint, happily signed anything slapped in front of him. He adored his listeners.

“Can I touch your hand, Mojo Man?”

“We love you, Mojo Man.”

“You the man, Mojo Man.”

“We didn’t know you was white, Mojo Man.”

“How’s about playing more Elvis, Mojo Man?”

And from a teen, bottle-blonde, fifteen maybe, with splotchy purple eye shadow, “Want some company tonight, Mojo Man?”

I half dragged Charlie, Groucho-like leer on his face, to my Dodge.

“Hey, Spencer. That was grade-A prime back there, that little blond bitch with the purple whatever. She was white too.”

“Have you ever seen the inside of the Allegheny County Workhouse, Charlie?”

“You’re trying to tell me something.”

“To paraphrase your own words, grown men who feed bananas to prepubescent monkeys risk the zookeeper’s wrath. Need I add you have a wife with pending child?”

“You got a point there, old son. Still…”

As we were about to enter the car, a primordial, black crone sprang from the dark and clinched her bony hand around Charlie’s wrist like a trap. She was emaciated, her skin leathery.

“Is you de Mojo Man?”

Startled, Charlie tried to pull away but the woman’s grip was unyielding, her nails puncturing the sleeve into his flesh.

“I say, is you de Mojo Man I hears on the radio?”

“Yes, yes, I’m the Mojo Man, mother. Would you like an autograph?”

She squeezed his wrist even tighter and fixed her eyes, burning dots within her mummified face, into Charlie’s.

“Knew you wasn’t no Negro soul. Lemme see your mojo, Mojo Man.”

“See my…”

“Lemme see it.”

“I really can’t…”

“’Course you can’t. You don’t even know what a mojo is, does you?’

“I…”

“You think mojo’s all about your cock. But you’s mistaken. Mojo don’t have nothin’ to do with cock. You ain’t got no mojo. You just likes sayin’ so, ain’t that right?”

Charlie’s lips fluttered but nothing came out.

“So I gonna give you a mojo you can feel and smell and taste, which will beget the actual mojo in your soul.”

She pulled from her multifarious layers of dress a small bag made of crude, sewn cloth with a string attached like a loop. She draped the string over Charlie’s head and let the bag fall loosely on his chest.

“When I leaves this place you look inside this here mojo bag just to satisfy your natural curiosity, and then when you carry it you keeps it hidden out of sight. But you always got to carry it.”

“What’s in it, this mojo bag?”

She laughed, her mouth deep as a grotto.

“A little piece of copper, a bit of rat bone, some red flannel soaked in Evil Conditioning Oil, a few flax seeds, a badger tooth, a vial of cat urine, a four leaf clover, and a few other things you doesn’t wanna knows about. You keeps this mojo bag on you at all times, ’cause if you don’t…”

“If I don’t?”