The freaky aura of Beatnik Manor had spread to the tree-arcaded neighborhood, where a coffeehouse, a head shop, and other signs of incipient bohemia had begun to appear. Inside the house, thanks to my sprung psyche, I had difficulty in distinguishing between the natural and supernatural beings; I ran a gauntlet of gorgons and magi and even a North Main Street matron in a shirtwaist and patch wig before the band came into focus sitting around their smoke-filled parlor. They were jamming with a one-legged old blues legend named Bunky Foote. In keeping with their ethnological mission, the band had resurrected the gin-soaked Bunky from a North Mississippi swamp, redeeming his flat-topped “ax” from a Beale Street pawnshop along the way. He sat in a ladder-back rocker as he played his guitar, his prosthetic limb — which he’d detached to further his relaxation — leaning against the wall behind him. (In departing he would strap on the limb, lift the cap from his woolly tonsure, and declare, “Now y’all can call me Bunky Feetes.”) Beside him Jimmy Pryor with his Prince Valiant do alternated scratching his washboard with blowing into a ceramic jug. Between sets he would dart into his basement shop to work on his puppets, returning with caricature effigies of friends and historical figures, sometimes combining them with eerie effects. The fair-haired Ira Kisco fingered his prized twelve-string guitar, a joint stuck in the capo and a Claude Lévi-Strauss paperback folded over his knee. Sandy Eubank, the curly-locked chanteuse in a loose-fitting smock whose translucency left little to the imagination, improvised dance steps she called the Eubanky Stomp. Meanwhile assorted hipsters came and went. They got stoned and added, between trips to a nefarious upstairs, lurid colors to the surreal images that lined the interior walls. Beyond those walls Moloch and the military-industrial complex ruled the day, but the scene at Beatnik Manor remained a bulwark against their incursions.
They generally greeted me as one of their own: “Candy Man Lenny!” “Twenty-Three Sklarew!” “Breath ’n’ Britches,” this from Elder Lincoln, de facto leader of the band. Even their groupies would seem pleased to see me, at least until I’d made a few typically churlish advances, after which their eyes glazed over. I didn’t mind, having lately conceived a fidelity to Rachel Ostrofsky.
Taking my place on the floor among the other devotees, I listened as the band sang in fiendish harmony along with Bunky: Jelly roll done killed my pappy, drove my mama stone blind … They played a song that itemized all the things Mr. Crump, the deceased political sachem who’d run the city of Memphis for decades, didn’t ’low, which included easy riders and “protonihilistic boogie blues.” Their traditional instruments — fiddle, Dobro, mouth harp — mingled in an unholy alliance with Cholly Jolly’s electric guitar, its sound the snarl of a tomcat in rut. Then the band took a recess, and, snapped back into an awareness of why I’d come, I broke out the contraband, for which they passed the hat. My gentleman landlord, Lamar Fontaine, self-appointed benefactor to the Psychopimps, was content with whatever token donations they made.
The band members then began to talk shop, and I was impressed as always with their musical sophistication, having none of my own. Sometimes I thought they spoke a secret language. Sweet-scented hash pipes floated from hand to hand while Cholly Jolly, his sorrel eyebrows thick as his walrus mustache, praised Bunky Foote to his face. Bunky’s broad grin contracted, however, as Cholly included such rivals as Furry Lewis, Sleepy John, and Mi’sippi Fred in his canon. The grin expanded again when Cholly, in a burst of muggle-tueled fellowship, insisted, “Everything comes from you guys. You say more in a bent note than Clapton can in the whole twelve-bar scheme. The inside stuff, Cap’m, the shades of light and dark in your sliding chords, that’s where the sweet spots lie.”
The classically trained Ira Kisco seconded Cholly’s assertion. “I thought I knew my way round a blues progression pretty good, but I didn’t know diddly ’bout the structures: the thirteen and a half bars and the whole gonzo cabala of modal tunings and turnarounds—”
“Show-off,” from Sandy Eubank, her loose limbs displayed to good advantage in a beanbag pouf.
Having returned from the basement with an odd new puppet, Jimmy Pryor recalled the first time they’d had Bunky over to the manor. “We threw you a banquet like the one Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein made for Henri Rousseau. That one was a sham soiree, really, which they intended to rag the old naïf, but the Douanier received the honor with such courtly dignity that he turned the tables on his hosts. The Bunk, he did the same with us.”
By now Bunky Foote, without losing his grin, had begun to writhe in embarrassment. Elder Lincoln, silent so far behind his keyboard, his mahogany jaw set and tense, finally spoke up. “Yeah, y’all white folks sure been good to us ’sploited coloreds.”
There was a moment when the room seemed duly chastised. Elder, by dint of his golden throat and expertise with a range of instruments, was the Psychopimp’s front man; he was respected as well for his hard-won street creds, and commanded an authority whenever he spoke. Given to radical mood swings, he had ample reason to be moody lately. The week before, out walking in the neighborhood with the lily-white Sandy — a decidedly provocative act — he was stomped by the cops. The bruises and a royal goose egg on his brow still bore witness to the assault. But Cholly seemed to suspect there was another cause of Elder’s flare-up.
“What’s eating you, man?”
“Man,” said Elder acidly, “I’m sick of this chickenshit town. The mayor and his stooges squat in their counting house, refuse to even negotiate with the union, while the garbageman,” he struck a sour note on the keyboard behind him for emphasis, “he still qualifies for welfare on a fulltime salary.”
Though the strike was on everyone’s mind, I was surprised to hear the issue noised about at Beatnik Manor. The Psychopimps were notorious for their grand schemes, their projected Dada events and dream carnivals, some of which even materialized. Cosmic revolutions they might entertain, but local politics seemed too pedestrian a topic to cross their radar.
Of course nobody was inclined to argue with Elder. “Mayor Loeb ain’t about to give a inch,” affirmed Sandy.
“‘Just like a tree that’s standing by the water,’” Elder bitterly intoned.
“Chandler and James and them on the city council,” submitted Jimmy Pryor, dandling the little puppet on his knee: it was a miniature bald-headed monk in a saffron robe, “they think,” lifting the puppet with its stick legs dangling, speaking ventriloquially through its beak-shaped mouth, “strike is part of worldwide Commie plot. Reds are inspiring peasants to revolt.” The Oriental singsong of Jimmy’s pitched voice had an unsettling effect on his audience.
Ira Kisco, ever the diplomat, tried to strike an optimistic chord. “The union’s bringing in some pretty big guns. Roy Wilkins turned a lot of heads the other night with his speech at the Mason Temple.”
“I know all about it,” Elder harrumphed. “He warned folks not to foul their own nest. Tell that to the local chapter of the Invaders: Black Power, baby; them young bucks are ready to burn the city down.”