The Boy Who Cried Freebird Read Free Page A

conversations, I found an old friend who owned the two-disc set.
    â€œHave you listened to disc 2 all the way through?” I asked him. “I think I’ve listened to it,” he said. “Come on, Jim,” I pressed. “You’re no blues fanatic. Are you absolutely sure that you’ve listened to both CDs all the way through to the very end?”
    â€œWell, actually,” Jim confessed, “I only remember playing the song ‘Crossroads’ to see how it compared with the version by Cream with Eric Clapton.”
    â€œWell, don’t put it on now!” I yelled. “Just wait for me to get over to your place and I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes!”
    I hustled over to Jim’s house and explained the situation. After telling him what had happened, we agreed to play disc 2 in its entirety rather than searching for a phantom track. As a backup, I suggested that we use his old tape recorder to make a copy of the song if it appeared.
    According to plan, we sat through all twenty-one tracks on disc 2 and then turned on the tape recorder. Sure enough, the CD kept going rather than stopping after track 21. Exactly sixteen minutes and thirty seconds later, track 30, the ghostly, angst-ridden blues that I’d heard in my apartment, was emanating from Jim’s stereo.
    I must admit that I was a little freaked out. It was definitely Robert Johnson, but neither Jim nor I recognized the song, and it wasn’t listed anywhere on the CD package. As I predicted, the song ended and we couldn’t get the disc to play track 30 again. Still, the meters on Jim’s tape recorder had been moving while the tune played, so we were confident that we’d captured the elusive song.
    When we tried to play it back, the tape came up blank. Then Jim started to get nervous. “I don’t know, man,” he whined. “It’s just too weird, this whole legend about Robert Johnson having a hellhound on his trail and selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads? Think about it, the liner notes say that Johnson was only known to have recorded twenty-nine compositions in his short life. The rest of the tracks on these two discs are just alternate versions of those same songs. Twenty-nine songs…Track 30? Come on. This one piece of unidentified music just happens to disappear from two different compact discs on two different stereos and can’t be recorded onto tape? It’s just too weird!”
    We fiddled with Jim’s stereo a little more, but there was no trace of the song. It became clear that Jim was uncomfortable with our discovery, and he wanted me (and Robert Johnson) to get the hell out of his house. “Let it go, man, it’s just too weird!” he shouted after me as I walked to my car.
    The next day, I began my search for unopened copies of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings . I started by talking with some employees at Sony Records to see if I could get any information that would explain this phenomenon. The Sony folks seemed sympathetic, but I got the sense that they thought I was crazy.
    I also got the impression that one guy I spoke to, one who actually participated in the production of The Complete Recordings , was hiding something. When I asked him about the existence of a track 30, he said that he’d have to call me back. I never heard from him or anyone else at Sony again.
    Meanwhile, my search for unopened copies of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings was going poorly. None of the record stores I called had the box set in stock and neither did any of the online retailers. One friend in the music business told me that while the Johnsoncollection was supposedly still in print, Sony had been showing the item on back order for the last eighteen months.
    By this time I was convinced that there was some kind of cosmic blues conspiracy going on. No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to remember the