Robert and Marzine

It wasn't easy finding Marzine. Robert Boyd and his crew were on a mission to flush Marzine Jacoby out of China, return her to the United States, and put her in front of a court marshal. She had taken this way too far. He'd read all about Marzine, from her dossier that documented her career as a leftist. Inside the manilla envelope were pictures of Marzine with Woody Guthrie and setlists played throughout Greenwich Village encouraging union involvement. This may have incensed J. Edgar Hoover more than the martyr campaign she was currently running throughout the streets of Shanghai.

Robert passed by another painted sign of "Red Ed" as his team had taken to call him, plastered as it was throughout the streets of Shanghai. There was the illegible Chinese writing below the picture, of Ed with his guitar pointed sharply downward, with his fist jetting forward as his wiry arm gave way to an enraged fist.

The writing, while only consisting of two characters supposedly meant "The Chords of Freedom Will Never Be Silenced". This from a conversation that was tapped by Robert's boys a few months back. In this conversation there were frequent mentions of a man named "Hershel" also called "Big Daddy". The authorities were unsure as to the significance of this person.

Robert had been in Shanghai for only a few weeks when he came across a different image with the same characteristics as "Chords of Freedom". It looked almost like a playbill for a musical event. The image featured the same layout as the other poster, only this time, Ed's face had been taken out, the guitar was still there, and in Ed's place a faint shadow of black spectacles and curly feminine hair.

At once he ripped the poster from off of the wall and immediately paid his translator a visit.

"I can't help you, not with this, you'll never be allowed in."

“Maybe as a communist I will...”

“But you don’t know anything about Chinese, let alone folk music”

“Just get me in to that gig, I’ll take care of the rest.”

The remaining five days were spent transforming Robert into an American Communist Sympathizer. The costume was complete, and Robert had picked up enough about Marzine from the Dossier. As for the political side of the mission, well.

Robert had tried hard to suppress the feelings he’d developed for Marzine, ever since he was in Quantico, VA researching her life, and what had led her to this juncture. He felt genuine pity for the way her husband had died. He admired her guts, the flat out gall it took to emigrate to China, immerse herself in the culture and become a true Communist.

He hated communism, thought it was a disease that had to be wiped out, else the domination of the west would crumble in the way the infamous domino theory was described. Each night Robert dreamed of bloody dominos falling all over the world, engulfing everything in lawlessness masked as solidarity.

He just wanted to meet her and to hear her sing.

He′d heard the tapes back at Quantico. He wasn’t to take them home, but he did. And over a tumbler full of whiskey and the clanging of ice cubes , he'd tip back his chair and fall into the spell of Marzine and the passion for her husband.

She sang in English, and could tell immediately that noone in the room understood what was said. And that, is when Robert realized the effectiveness he could have, by invading the show, seducing Marzine, and bringing her back to the light of Uncle Sam.

Announcing Rustic Round Up

All,

Thank you so much for your continued support of Kronski.com. I'd like to announce that the groundbreaking of my new MP3 blog site, Rustic Round Up, has been completed. The champagne was cheap but sparkling, and we didn't leave too much of a mess.

It will feature songs with a rustic leaning, or as I've described it in the byline: "Music that stares out at the bare shacks, corn fields and trailer parks from a Greyhound Bus."

So, without further ado, I present to you the URL for this site. Dig in and don't forget to bring a towel.

http://www.kronski.com/rustic/

For the first day I feature music by the Carter Family, Golden Smog and Paul Simon.

Listening is easy, just click on the .mp3 link, or right click and select "save target as."

I hope you will continue to support Kronski.com and music of all kinds.

Thanks,

Kronski

Marzine, Shanghai and J. Edgar Hoover.

She arrived in Shanghai late in the evening, 1960.

She exited the cargo plane, a ride secured by an importer of Maltese falcon statuettes in Greenwich Village, and into the foggy air. The mist off the streets smelled of fish, fear and opium.

She was escorted into the basement of a warehouse, where she was placed on a cot and given a white tablet to help her sleep. Unbeknownst to her, the pill contained a potent combination of Opium and Tarot root. And while she slept that night, she had vivid dreams of her husband's murder, after which she dreamed she woke up and spoke to a bearded Chinamen, who smoked opium out of a large hukka three meters above the floorboards, which teemed with bubbling blood. He reached out his hand to Marzine, whose torso was by now covered by the rising blood tide and in his grasp passed on the knowledge of love that Hershel was proud of her, no matter what had happened, she felt the love like a rug burn course through her arms and into her chest, as she opened her mouth wide and breathed in the smoke from the hukka.

A large crash was heard, and she awoke in the basement, where an elderly woman dabbed a damp towel over Marzine's forehead, as light from the oncoming day passed over the front window. She was burning up with fever, tossed and turned and fell in and out of sleep for the next few days. When she did awake, paralyzed with fear, her cot, soaked with sweat, she'd tremble at the thought of where she was and what had happened. She was having trouble discerning what had really happened that afternoon in Greenwich village or whether or not the whole thing was spun by the same yarn that created the majority of her songbook.

She slowly became dependent on Opium, as it helped her sleep and keep her mind off the dirty blood of her husband. She relived that moment, with shattered glass and Ed's body lying still, a hole in his head , where his mind had once been, a penetrating mind that could single handedly breakdown the McCarthy Hearings, could have broken down the Committee for Unamerican Activities, and her ransformation from patriotic American to concerned communist had begun.

If she was going to be outraged, she would associate herself with the party whose involvement had led to the death of her husband. She hadn't been a communist before, but goddamned it, she'd be one now. It was ironic, she'd been a leftist, but not a communist. But this senseless paranoid act, and the lily-livered fear that sheepsih cowered behind it lead her to China, Opium and burning ideals to recreate her husband as an ideology. She'd write a whole new batch of songs, propping up her husband as legend, the way she had for her father all those years ago.

Word of her songs traveled across the communist country, where she would become a hero, a martyr for the Communist party. She'd work at night, working on the right slogan, and logo for her husband. Banners of her husband that would eventually appear in public squares all across Shanghai.

It was the US Justice Department who discovered the banner on a routine spy mission a few weeks later. When word traveled back to J. Edgar Hoover, he fumed with an all- encompassing rage that shook the entire office. He sent 4 hitmen to Shanghai later on that year, to flush out Marzine, the worst Communist, he'd ever known.

"How Much is That Epiphone in the Window?" Summer 1935

Summer 1935

Marzine stood, as she did most afternoons that summer, clutching her book sack that slouched at her left shoulder, as she leaned on her right foot. Teddy and Freddy were up in the trees, with a stolen pair of binoculars from the five and dime. They were looking into Francis Morotzki's rear window, where each afternoon she'd take off her skivvies and lie naked in her bedroom with the window cracked open. Ample foliage covered most of the angels around the window from the Kansas heat and the leering watch of teenage boys. Every angle, that is, except the one found up in the great sycamore.

Marzine took little to no interest in this, she was fascinated by the scratchy sound coming from the Victrola in Francis's parlor. Sometimes she'd become so entranced with the music, that she'd sing aloud, causing an acorn to be thrown from atop the tree, usually accompanied by the sound of muffled laughter and shushing .Fog from the railroads would come in around 4pm, which resulted in the boys climbing down, punching Marzine on the shoulder, as they exchanged barbs.

"You always do that, sheesh Marzine, didn't anyone tell you it's not ladylike for a girl to hang out with us?"

"It's a good thing your pop's so understanding."

"Yeah, if mama ever found out, I'd never be let out again."

If they weren't sneaking in to penny arcades, to drop a nickel for a short peep show, fogging up the viewer before they'd inevitably be found by the attendant, they'd be trying to kiss Marzine while she eyed the sunburst-finished Epiphone that hung in the music shop, mocking her as she'd pushed her glasses up, shoved the twins away and set upon the task of returning home.

Facing her mother for the two hours before her father was due home was like an enternity. She'd run to the door when Hershel would knock the door down to lift Marzie up in the air, spin her around smiling while singing his special song for her.

Marzie, Marzie, how did the earth go on?
Before you and your eyes were born?
Can we morn, can we morn,
for the time before sweet Marzie was born?

He'd finish off the song with a casual peck on Marzine's mom's cheek. Marge would dismiss the song, and the kiss by returning to the cauldron of overcooked corned beef and cabbage that stunk the neighborhood for at least twelve blocks in either direction.

In the Village Theater with Bob Dylan

Bob's in the process of writing “The Freewheeling Bob Dylan” and looking for ideas. He was still an outsider bugging the older generation for information. It was Ed who was the true ringleader of the movement. It was Ed who had organized the first folk musicians union, where meetings were held down the street on Bleeker, in the basement of the Red Lion Folk Club.

Dylan would go on to write “Hard Rain’s Gonna fall” in the basement of that building a few years later but tonight with to the muffled tone of Fast Bubba Phelp’s “jumping jitter in the hot pants red suit” Marzine and Ed are dancing and making out on the couch. People move in and out of the apartment, a bellicose little place on McDougal street, gaudy in its decorations and spirit, a few blocks from the Village Theater. They had just returned from visiting Woody Guthrie in New Jersey. Ed was to be the torchbearer of the folkie political movement.

It was 1958 and the world looked bright, Kennedy was on the horizon, a mere two years away. There was a strong folkie movement, who tapped into the anti- Eisenhower/Nixon feelings that were rampant all over the liberal boroughs of the United States. There remained, the distant leftovers of the beats, a hangover that kept the beats, with Ginsburg , Burroughs and Kerouac a big deal in the village. But a new horizon was brewing, a new generation who took the apathy of the previous generation and turned it on its ear.

It wasn’t just the start of the American counterculture, with the eventual explosion of LSD and Cocaine, these were more innocent times, the Kingston trio was a big act, and it would take years for the entire youth counter cultural movement to take root in their generation. By that time, Marzine would find herself without a career. But that night, with Ed at her side and a grand sense of future endeavors, the two set to write the new American songbook, filled with protests that would pave the way for the hippies to come.

None of them realized this of course; this was just before Ed proposed to Marizine. An event that took place outside one of the many coffee shops by Washington Square, the whole folk scene was there. Even Woody Guthrie found his way out of the hospital for one day to hang an ear and have a beer with everyone else.

A few months later, the Red Scare movement would assassinate Ed. But for now, they were young, Dylan hadn’t yet blown folk out of the water, not without Marzine & Ed’s help he wouldn’t, there wasn’t any way he could have written a single note of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” without them.

Marzine, Hershel, and the bunker that revived her career

Marzine found an old bunker out in the fields one day, while staring out at the oncoming sunset; the dagger of fire, that the Indians must've found inspiring. Across the plains, she spied a slight shimmer, a reflection of brazen metal in the middle of the peaceful desolation of plains, buffalo and painted sunsets.

As she approached this reflection, clutching her elbows to stop the shaking, she found, to her surprise a door,one covered in moss and layers of rot.

It took a few minutes to clear away the detritus, but as she wiped away the last layer of decay away, she found an inverted handle. With a quick pull, and some great resistance, the door slid open, and looking back at her for the first time in probably 30 years, was a blackness not found anywhere but the subterranean nooks and crannies that dotted the landscape of the great Southwest. She could make out the top step, and beyond that an inviting cool nothingness that would envelop her as she traversed the first stair, lighting a cigarette and using the finely pointed light of the cherry on her smoke as a light source, walking down the stairs, and taking in the vast emptiness of the place.

It comforted her, to be down in this cold place. New Mexico was hot that year, and nowhere else could she find the solitude that would eventually yield to new material.

She brought out her acoustic guitar, charcoal, candles and a scratchy but warm blanket out the next night. After exploring the bunker, she lit the candles, and began to cry.

For there once again, was Hershel's fatherly command, his matriarchal presence. Her heart sprinkled with his illumine, as patience returned to her soul once again and almost immediately words to the song she’d sung to herself, the one that helped her sleep at night, gave comfort to her in the middle of the night on the cot in the day-room, when she'd first been taken in, so overcome with grief and loss that she'd wander into the empty recesses of her heart and construct a bridge from which to rebuild herself again.

She wrote on the walls, the black shade of the charcoal darker than the corrugated steel that comprised the bunker's walls.

Words flowed out of her, the way Hershel left her that night, inspired, and with the knowledge that love can be a transient, temporary thing.

And I'll never know,
If my heart's the melted snow
Is that all that's left
From the love I used to know?

The way you were taken from me,
Seems so very, vilified,
But the hope of you springs eternal,
Could It be true?

That the man I loved,
Was torn and crushed
By the very god who made me?

Marzine forges her comeback

It frightened her that day, in court with her heart in her hands, singing to the skies above, as reality drifted away and she was back on the plains in Juarez, NM after the breakdown.

Staring at the cattle, after being let out by the rickety gate. She'd spent the past few years here, after her time on opium in China, after her legacy was all but destroyed by the Committee.

After the court case she came here for solace, to suffer the loss of her husband and her career. The Committee for Un-American activities found Marzine guilty of being a communist conspirator, and she was forged in the grip of fear and paranoia that swept across the nation. The fear and misunderstanding led to the burning of her band's records. The stinging harangues in the op ed pieces of the local paper meant she had to lay low. Other folkies were seeing the backlash. Woody Guthrie was dead; She'd seen her influence ignored in the way Dylan was created seemingly out of thin air. She knew of him once, as a teenager in Greenwich Village on the run from Hibbing, MN. Marzine's cultural legacy was destroyed the moment the Committee For Un-American Activities convened their first meeting, slammed the gavel down, and began to hollow out the lives of creative Americans everywhere.

The record company destroyed her masters. All of her life lived on slate acetate wiped clean from the public record. Hershel no longer visited, the medication saw to that. The doctors didn't want any distractions, and thought that the visions were clear signs of schizophrenia anyway.

Then one day the letter came. They were doing a documentary on the creation of folk music. Hershel had been mentioned right along with the carter family, for it was he who'd yodel out Carter Family tunes while hanging suspended from the rear throttlerod of the last caboose, swaying his hat in his right arm, singing "Who will keep my grave clean, MaryLOUUUUUUU." and it was said that the off-key singing could be heard from several counties away.

Hershel spread these songs across the railroad circuit, and was a key factor in the Carter Family's success. They would have never made it to radio if thousands hadn't have heard Hershel belt out their songs while hurtling across the continental divide, albeit in the worse off-key Kansan drawl you've ever heard.

In the letter, the writer, a one Campbell Ketchum of Duluth, MN wrote to inquire on the current availability of the single "If you go away".

Marzine had been hacking away at a series of 15 songs for the past five years. Each night she'd work by candlelight, in the hope that Hershel might come back and return her once again to the loving arms of fatherly love.

She'd been single since her husband was killed by the unruly mob. She was too old for Absynthe, and too old to haphazardly seduce a wayward ranch hand. It didn't take long before the notebook came out again, and using the same charcoal pencil shed used in the days of her band, began the process of her comeback.

Cotton Club 1952

The jazz band had just finished when Marzine strode through the backstage area of the Cotton Club. Tonight's show was sold out, and it was easy to see from where she stood why. The boys in the band seemed to take up the whole room with their chatter. They spoke differently than the rest of the folks in the joint. They shouted out in staccatoed half sentences, and seemed to be broadcasting on an alternate frequency, one that only the most carefree could follow.

To Marzine it was like another language entirely, the way they'd inhale their cigarettes backwards, pausing a moment before exhaling like they had all the time in the world.

The crowd was a wealthy conglomeration of white folks with a few blacks thrown in the mix for good measure. Marzine always felt at home in their speech. She found comfort in the familiarity by which they shared each others' lives. They seemed to exist as a whole, the community a lot more supportive that her own family, save for the tender spirit of her father.

She lit a cigarette and yakked with Spenser Collins, the horn player. Spenser had just kicked the juice, and was filled with a gentle exuberance that shouted out to an unsuspecting beatnick, grabbed hold of you, and passionately kissed you until you fell into his arms.

When she looked up again he was gone. He was always playing hard to get. A slower number came on, and the audience scraped their chairs against the floor in order to reach their dates. As they swayed together to the beat the way a sycamore tree would cling to a swinging wind, hugging close to the jagged coastline, praying it never ends.

Marzine spots the rat bastard at the back of the club, and she hurries out the door. He's been following her again recently, the one with the sequined grin and the tattoo on his shoulder, of sinister barbed wire on bronze skin. His pale face sticks out from the back of the club, a phantasmic presence, and she does not notice he's already in the back seat of the car when she arrives there panting, lighting another cigarette as he reaches around from the back seat and kisses her.

She trembles as he laughs, flashing a grin the way a cobra would spit venom.

"We've heard a lot about your friends, they've got a file on you, Hoover and his cronies. They know your a Communist Marzine, they know everything. I'f youll just hold still I have to check for something."

Marzine's squirming now, struggling to get this guy off of her, as her eyes jump around, staring at the gas pedal that's four inches from the ball of her foot.

"Your looking for the tattoo, right, the one he gave me after the gig? Is that what you want to hear?" She says between gasps, struggling to break free from his clamped grip.

His fingers are going limp, and letting go of her arm now, as she slams her foot onto the gas and the car leaps forward. She manages to squirm out of his repetetive grabs at her waist as the car slams into the dumpster in the alley, and he's pinned in between the two trying to chase her and she rounds the end and calls on Eddie as soon as she's in the club, and four boucers come out and drag him in the alley and in the morning there's a link between the mob, and the fear of Communism is spread over every piece of toast of every law-abiding citizen in the city.

A city wrapped in fear shudders as Marzine boards a train headed for Upstate NY with her bruised arm concealed in her torn black blouse.

Marzine in Helena MT. Winter, 1947

That winter, Marzine huddled up inside a small cabin on the outskirts of Helena Mt.

The snow and ice covered not only the aptly thatched roof, but her ability to love and trust. She stayed in this cocoon--warmed only by a small roaring fire and a replenished flask of brandy-- for the entirety of the winter months, until the first chirp of spring lit the cabin up like a cinemascope.

She wrote nothing for weeks, only thought about her shit kicker father, and tried to figure out which stories were true and which ones were false. When she thought about it long enough, she realized the difference between the two were negligible, and did not require any further thought.

She never felt more alone than before that period, and until the incident in China several years later, would never feel more sad. The owls at night cooed there way into her dreams, creating endearing sounds that Hershel would utter while rocking Marzine to sleep, in her little crib, while her mother scowled in the background, knitting small blue mittens in front of the licking fire. The embellishments were always over the top, always involved the loving touch of father, the way his hand on your newborn shoulder could fill you with the optimism of a thousand lifetimes, and how mother was always in the background.

She'd wake up in the middle of the night, the crisp silence ripping through her hearty dreams. These were her sustaining life events, the things that kept her alive that winter.

Once a week she'd venture outside of the cabin, and trudge a half mile to the general store. It was how she learned about how influential Hershel's exploits had become. All this time she was generally unaware of the celebrity Hershel carried throught the West. So when the sign for "The Great Jacoby Fish Hunt" announced it self on the rear wall of the store, above the canned molasses, Marzine dropped her glass jar of figs, shattering as it interrupted the background chatter in the store.

Montana was always filled with background chatter. Being outspoken in the middle of Helena was not the way one behaved in 1947, and Marzine found the glances and glares a little unnerving this morning. She raised her voice, and was surprised at how it didn't crack when it came flying out, unaware of the social morass. "What's the meaning of this, is this some sort of a joke, this fish hunt?"

All eyes in the store were now on Marzine. The owner, a frail Ichabod Crane look alike, stood up from the overturned apple basket, shifted his glasses and spoke up.

"Why that's the Jacoby fish hunt." His thin moustache twitched slightly.

Marzine's stare reached right through him, and he shifted a little bit, before responding.

"Hershel Jacoby, he died recently."

Plainly, without moving an eyelash, "I'm aware of that."

"They say that no fish have been found in the 20 mile radius where he supposedly drowned."

"Well that's ridiculous, what kind of person would travel two states to go fishing?" Clearing her throat, she paused for a moment, out of a sudden respect for the local decorum.

"I'd like that poster off of the wall this minute if you please, Hershel was my father, and I'd like not to dishonor him in this way."

The narrow-nosed little man hopped off of this basket, and stuttered a bit, his eyes on Marzine's feet, slowing moving up to her head.

"Why, your Marzine, after the candy, It's an honor--"

"I want that poster down, Daddy didn't die so people could catch fish!" almost revealing her grief out to the store patrons, with her voice hitting a slight high note.

And with that the door suddenly shut with the added padding of snow and ice, as the wet footprints stared the store owner down. For the next hour no one dared say a word.

July 6th 1947

Marzine returned from a month on the road when she heard the news of her father's passing. This information betrayed her, because Hershel had died while she was on the road, and she could not sense his loss telepathically. It disappointed her in the way that our natural abilites often times do, she thought she was more in touch with her father's legacy than she actually was.

She returned home to an empty house with a bank note attached to it. Seemed that the Marzine candy company had folded and the bank had now taken possession of the Jacoby house, a small shack just shy of the wrong side of the tracks. At the diner down the street, Marzine was filled in on all of the details of her father's passing. Abe the short order cook told Marzine how the financial woes of the Marzine candy company had forced Hershel to take to the rails once again. How the legend of Hershel would now once again rise up was shattered when he was missing/assumed drowned on a strech of track hovering over a treacherous track of the Columbia River Gorge. The authorities were still searching for a body, but the local fisherman were complaining of "the Jacoby curse", caused by the death of Hershel and creating a lack of fish to be found anywhere near the 20 mile radius where Hershel's train intersected the bulge of land that jetted out above the river.

It was said that the fish themselves bowed out of life out of respect for someone who reignited the American Myth.

Marzine was devastated. She had just completed her first tour with her new "Moonstruck Band" and couldn't wait to tell her father the news. With no place to go, her home and parents now dead, she head out in search of herself, playing a series of solo gigs across the Pacific Northwest, hot on the heels of Hershel's legend. It was her goal to gather up all the tales and put them all into her songs. For someone that had just lost everything, Marzine found a way to channel her grief into the only thing she could, her music. Hershel would live eternally as legend in the American concious, in her folk stories. His name would ring out loud in the confabulated tradition of Huck Finn, Honest Abe, Johnny Appleseed, and Paul Bunyan.

Marzine's first stop was Helena, MT.

When Marzine sings, by Hank Ketchum, MN 1975

It was way beyond compare, hearing the record for the first time. The moment Hank handed over his sentimentality to the spinning 45rpm disc that was now spinning in his office, he felt freed from the daily grind at the record that displayed episodic backsflips of falsettos and three part harmonies that staccatoed their way into the well-worn fabric of the American legend.

There was nothing else he could compare it to as he set to writing the Sunday Features edition, and as he let the record skip he read the liner notes and was now aware of a much bigger story, one that would incorporate the very fabric of popular culture into a true flowing narrative. He didn't have to stretch the truth like he did for those other yellow tabloid affairs, and by now he was obsessed with Eva and the fall of Bob Dylan and everything else that mattered in 1975 when society tried hard to forget Nixon and he met Sharon later on that summer.

It was high time for a man in his situation to rekindle something in his loins, give him an extra straddle to his stride, let the melody carry him across counter revolutions, as Marzine's life had done in so many historical uprisings: The Red Scare, The Yippies, the Hippies, the rise of the Union, the Communists, the Maharishis, The Marxists Lenninists. Hell, even the Dadaists were familiar with Marzine's work at one time.

Was is it something in the way that Marzine'd would carry a tune, that had men befallen with her vocal chords? How many men had become ensared in her rare tenor, entertwined in the melancoloy, like sirens to the ancient Greeks, to becomne so enmeshed in the rapture of the aural beauty, that they do not see the eminent danger present in losing oneself to such a degree.

Did her death marches inspire a greater being in us all, making us aware at how human we were?

And so found hank hungover and partaking in the morning ritual of caffeine and the morning paper, rereading last night's transcript, and how he couldn't shake how indispensable we are, how our lives are so brief that any disease, and how madness or affliction could make the music fade away forever.

Marzine's Moonstruck Record, "If you ever come back" sent Hank back to square one, reanamoured him with life through one song and he was ready to be vindicated, but he didn't know it would end with her funeral.

He celebrated the completion of the feature at a bar, just down the road from 6th street. The Sun had been defeated for yet another 12 hours, and had suddenly given up, it was evident in the droopy way it carried itself.

It was a day when all things in ones mind died and it was then up to the individual to crawl up off of the floor and start again, find a new muse, and further ingratiate oneself into the general slipstream of popular culture. For Hank would have a heart attack the day he was to turn in his master stroke, and 15 years later, after his son would accidentally set fire to his place, and blamed it on an old girlfriend, thus leaving the historical clues of Marzine and Hershel buried in the ground where it would take years for her songs to take a new life onto CD in the early 1990s.

"Hank" Ketchum and the Moonstruck Band

March 10, 1975

Monday morning brought clouds and a slight twinge of despair to Henry's morning commute. As a rising star at the star tribune, Henry "Hank" Ketchum had a knack for reconstructing mysterious pasts of those on the edge of stardom. His work appeared in the features section on Sunday. He'd resurrected the careers of many a lost musician, and his latest project had him driving through the mild Minneapolis traffic
an hour earlier than usual, to respond to a message left on a bright yellow post it note, when he returned from lunch on Friday. "Jasmine from the museum. Moonstruck record found."

Hank had been following the career of Marzine Jacoby ever since he discovered the clipping in his grandfather's chest. He discovered Hershel was a distant cousin, bore a child, a daughter, Marzine, who was frequently mentioned in certain circles of folk aficionados. The connections were unbelievable, Guthrie, Dylan, McCarthy and the Red Scare, Presidents Eisenhower and Coolidge.

How could one woman connected, albeit indirectly, to the core of American popular culture simply slip by. Marzine's music, when he found mention of it, was usually found in a compendium of another folk pioneer, the Carter Family. A stray handbill in a Missoula newspaper in 1947 had Marzine's Moonstruck Band sharing a venue with an odd sort of characters, a motley crew of contortionists, jugglers and gypsies.

Each attempt at folding back a layer of truth would only yield another dozen offshoots of mystery. Once while going over medical records for the Union Pacific Railroad company, he found an old insurance claim for Marzine Jacoby, only to find a demolished home, now property of the railroad. How fitting, he thought, for the property to fall once again into the hands of the railroad. The industry that had recently fell upon hard times had seen fit to annex the entire Jacoby home. The fire of 1960 destroyed most of the records, but all along this medical record of Marzine acted as the lone symbol that kindled the fire in Hank's brain.

So it was quite a surprise when he returned from lunch to find the post it note. He instantly dropped his sandwich and flicked the holes in the phone until the pulses yielded the accurate number. With a dab of mustard dripping from his chin, he barked into the receiver.

“Out to lunch, whaddaya mean, she just called, and its 3 oclock”

“I said three o clock, no, theres nothing wrong with me, Im from Brooklyn.”

“Look it’s a long story, do you know anything about the Moonstruck Band?”

“Monday, look, I cant wait until Monday, I have a deadline to meet… “

“Ok, ok, Monday it is then, unless you can provide a home number.”

“Yeah, yeah, thanks”

He slammed the phone down, staring at his Editor.

“Librarian’s out until Monday. Can you believe it? Now that I finally have confirmation that she did indeed record a single at sun studios. I don’t know about the rest of the rumors, but we have a confirmation. Now if only I can hear it…”

His editor was by now used to the histrionics of Hank’s ways.
“I’ll believe it when I have your story in my hands. And what the hell are we going to run this Sunday?”

“I’ve already got it taken care of.” Hank said, stretching out his hands, containing a 8 by 10 glossy of a four armed bearded man. “They call him Ogden the four-armed monkey boy, he was on Dr. Demento’s first show.”

“Get the hell out of my office until you come back with a story containing your little ghost.”

“Ah what the Christ?”