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.