SUMTHIN’ SUMTHIN’

D always had a love affair with music that not only nurtured his soul but, in various ways, had paid his bills too. He’d never mastered an instrument (back when NYC public schools actually taught children exotic subjects like music) and he couldn’t sing (though he often lifted his voice to generate throaty sounds). Yet music was as much the through line of D’s life as his bulk, the HIV virus within him, and the black clothes he wore religiously.

D’s mother had loved R&B, particularly soul men like Teddy Pendergrass and more obscure performers like Adrian Dukes, whose “Green Lights” was her personal anthem. His three brothers had lived long enough to enjoy the prime years of the Time, Kurtis Blow, and Cameo circa “Word Up,” though never had to endure the reign of Waka Flocka Flame, Macklemore, and other twenty-first century “talents.”

But what D was encountering in Bushwick on this day was a culture of vinyl junkies more manic than anything he’d ever experienced. Unfortunately for D, the vinyl du jour was classic rock from the early ’80s. Hair bands like Whitesnake and Mötley Crüe filled bin after bin, with Japanese buyers moving between the aisles holding shopping bags and pushing laundry carts filled with albums. D wandered wide-eyed through this strange world until a sixty-ish white man in a light blue Stax Records T-shirt waved him over.

“You look like an R&B man to me,” the guy said.

“Not much R&B, soul, or funk in here.”

“It used to be a bigger business. There was a nice sweet spot where you could sell to both young DJs, who’d buy in bulk, and the old-school collectors who were looking for specific R&B, blues, or jazz LPs. But between Serato and age, those markets have dried up. If you wanna make real money in vinyl now, you have to sell ’70s or ’80s rock to buyers like these guys. If the band could have been inspired Spinal Tap, it has value now.” He shook his head.

“Well, I’m looking for something a lot older—a very obscure soul record. It’s called ‘Country Boy & City Girl.’”

“That’s interesting.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes indeed. I heard tell of it but never seen a copy myself. Suddenly it’s a hot record.”

“Other people asking for it?”

“Yeah. Had an inquiry just this morning asking about it,” the shop owner said. “By the way, my name’s Jerry Wexler, pleased to meet you.”

“Who was it?” D responded, staying focused on the business at hand.

“Well, they asked me to keep their interest confidential.”

“You good at keeping secrets?”

“I can be.”

D reached into his wallet and fished out a fifty-dollar bill.

“He said confidential,” Wexler said.

D pulled his wallet back out and dropped two more fifties on the counter.

The shop owner reached under the countertop and produced a card. D pulled out his cell phone and took a picture of it. It didn’t have a name, just an e-mail address at DONDA, Kanye West’s creative clearinghouse.

“I got another lead for you,” Wexler said anxiously. So D placed another fifty on the tabletop. The man wrote a name and telephone number on the back of the DONDA card. “Feel free to use my name.”

* * *

Two days later D was sitting in the Midtown Manhattan offices of Universal Records speaking to Lamont Holland, the man in charge of mining the company’s massive back catalog for reissues. Though the record industry had shrunk, catalogs were still a low-cost source of revenue. When D finished relating the tale of “Country Boy and City Girl”, Holland said, “I’ve definitely heard about this record.”

“Really? You think it’s in the Motown archives?”

“Maybe, but probably not under that name.”

“You think it was mislabeled?” D asked.

“Mislabeled, yes, but maybe on purpose.”

“Okay. Who would do that?”

“Someone who knew it was the rarest of the rare,” Holland said cryptically. “You see, these collectors are a devoted bunch. I mean their self-esteem, how they see themselves, is sometimes wrapped up in what they possess, especially if it’s a record no one else has and a lot of people want.”

“I hear that,” D said. “But why would someone go through the archives and mislabel such a rare record, especially if they could just grab it and bounce.”

“You don’t really understand what you’re dealing with, do you?”

“Is there some secret vinyl shit you’re not telling me about?”

“I’m not trying to patronize you, I’m just telling it’s not as simple as you think.”

“So school me.”

“If Otis Redding and Diana Ross really made a record together, that’s music history. I don’t know that a true fan would steal it—but they might mislabel it and wait for the right moment to reveal it.”

“Now you sound crazier than the people who hired me.”

“It is what it is, D. Between other archivists who worked here before me and staff at our warehouses, a lot of people could have gone in there and hidden it, waiting to be the one to discover it, or, and this is gonna sound crazy, misplacing it just so it wouldn’t be easily found, keeping it as a hidden gem for future generations, out of reach of collectors, people like whoever hired you.”

“Okay,” D said, growing irritated, “this feels like you’re fucking with me. So let’s cut the bullshit. Is there a copy of the record here or am I wasting my time?”

“You sure are blunt.”

D stood up and leaned over the table. “I’m not moved by all this mystical record mumbo-jumbo. Do you have the record or not?”

“Straight answer: I’m not sure.” Holland turned around and pulled two large black binders from a shelf. “There are so many vintage tracks in our archives that, even years after the Motown catalog was acquired, all of it hasn’t been digitized or properly inventoried. If this track was the Supremes or Marvin Gaye it would be easier to find. When you first called about this record, I looked under Little Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross’s solo work. Can’t find a reference to it. But maybe it’s under Earl Van Dyke, who cut an instrumental LP. I don’t know and neither do you. These binders have lists of miscellaneous tracks from 1966 when Hitsville was really cookin’. You can sit here, search through these binders, look for a session that sounds right, write it down, and pass it on to me.”

“Okay. If I find some sessions that work, how long would it take to find the actual tapes?”

“Couple of months is my guess,” Holland said. “You see, all the archival material was moved to California a few years back to a more secure warehouse with temperature control and all that stuff. I’ll send the numbers out there and, when they have time, they’ll dig them out, hope they’re not too brittle to play, and we will, hopefully, go from there.” Holland stood. “See you after lunch.”

* * *

Forty minutes later D was still there, combing through photocopies of handwritten and typed notes from 1966, a year when soul music thrived, Dr. King preached, and integration was the promised land. D felt lost in this past, so he was relieved when his BlackBerry buzzed. It was his old office building manager, Benito Benjamin, who he was tipping to take care of shutting down the Soho office.

“Yes, Benito. How are you, my man? Did I leave something in Soho?”

“No,” Benito replied hurriedly. “Some people came looking for you today.”

“Did they leave a business card?”

“No. Well, kind of. They wrote on your old office door.”

“What happened?”

“There were three of them.” Benito was suddenly whispering. “They were loud and caused a disturbance when they realized you no longer had an office there.”

“What did they look like?”

“Hip hop. They looked like hip hop. I didn’t call the police.”

For that D was thankful. Journalist Dwayne Robinson had died on his office doorstep, uttering his last words while holding a bloody cassette tape. Bringing in cops would have reopened that whole sad story.

“Benito, can you take a picture of the tag on the door?”

“Tag?”

“The markings they made.”

“Oh, I’m having someone erase them.”

“Please take a picture and text it to me,” D said, “and I promise you, Benito, they will not be back.”

Ten minutes later a photo popped up on his BlackBerry that was clearly a gang sign. It looked like the Asya Roc logo but with some scrawls on the edge different from the diamonds around the MC’s neck. D went over to Holland’s computer, got on YouTube, and typed in ARoc, the name of the MC’s record label, fashion line, and (reputed) gang affiliation.

Most of the videos were either promotional or live performances. Scrolling way down, he found some gang videos featuring young men (and a few women) who apparently were part of ARoc before it became a music brand. In one of them, three young fools around twenty, mouths and noses covered with red bandannas, each held up a gun for the camera, boasting about the seven bodies the weapons had murked. But then one of the masked men said, “Each gat got two bodies on them niggas,” which would be a total of six. So aside from their lack of remorse, this trio couldn’t count. No point in waiting for these fools to find him—D decided to take the offensive.

At that moment Holland walked in, clearly unhappy to see D on his computer. “You find anything useful?” he asked.

“Who knows?” D said. “I gotta go deal with the present of black music. Sorry about using your computer. Enjoy the videos in your history.”