need for in a city. The building sat atop the very edge of the Piedmont plateau. The landscape and the street dropped down sharply from there, with the downtown skyline, including the monuments, spread out below. The apartment was not plush in any way, and the neighborhood was what it was, but Strange had a million-dollar view.
That view was no secret, either. Consequently, the apartments in this building rarely turned over. When one had come up empty, Strange had gotten in over the other candidates when the landlord found out he was a cop. Strange had emphasized it on the application and told the man he would keep an eye out for any criminal activity around the building, though he had no plans to do so at all. Using his uniform to get the place he wanted, well, that was just another perk of having the job.
Except for the view from his window, Strange’s place was unremarkable, a bachelor’s crib that appeared to be furnished with one eye on economy and the other shut. His couch, eating table, and chairs were secondhand. He didn’t have an interest in that kind of thing anyway, and if he knew a woman was coming up, he could make the place look reasonably neat in a matter of minutes. For art and decor, he had hung a couple of posters. On one wall, the Man with No Name, wearing a poncho, that little cigar hanging out his mouth. On another, Jim Brown, grenades in hand, readying himself to make that run across the courtyard of the chateau in
The dominant feature of the living room was Strange’s sound system, purchased at Star Radio on Connecticut and Jefferson, and his music. He had sprung for the components, powered by a Marantz tube amplifier, the previous year, and he would be paying on them through ’68. The purchase was an extravagance, given his salary, but to Strange it made coming home every night worthwhile.
Around the stereo was his wax collection, stored in fruit crates, arranged alphabetically. From his father, Strange had gotten full-length albums by Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and others, along with some gospel recordings by groups whose members had gone on to careers in R amp;B. But Strange kept these records mainly because they were a gift from his father; these days he rarely pulled them from their sleeves. Strange was into the new soul thing. To be precise, he was a lover of southern soul. There were exceptions, like the Impressions, who were out of Chicago and making some beautiful, politically courageous music, and some of the artists recording for the Blue Rock and Loma labels, but generally he went for the southern sound.
Otis Redding, the greatest soul singer who ever lived, was his man and would be his man forever, wasn’t any question of that. But there were others. He especially liked James Carr, the personification of deep soul, a gut-wrenching, from-the-bottom vocalist who seemed to be intimate with heartache and pain. Also, O. V. Wright, the self-proclaimed Ace of Spades who brought muscle and real emotion to every track he cut, and Solomon Burke, a survivor who always surprised and could work up a head of steam like no other, his songs often climaxing in thrilling ways.
To find his bounty, Strange visited small record stores in Shaw and Petworth, and spent too much money at the Soul Shack, on 12th and G, and Super Music City, down on 7th. He only bought albums that he felt were keepers, those that he suspected he would still be listening to in thirty years:
But mainly Strange was a collector of singles. He would buy damn near any 45, unheard, if it carried one of “his” labels, because he had come to recognize that these labels had a certain sound. He’d been told by the counter clerk at the Soul Shack that it was session men from Booker T. amp; the MG’s who were doing most of the playing on the hottest songs, but he already knew, without having to be told, that Atlantic, Atco, Dial, Stax, and Volt shared musicians. You could hear the same rhythm and horn sections on cuts from Wilson Pickett, Otis, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Sam amp; Dave, Aretha, William Bell, Joe Tex, Johnnie Taylor, and others. You could hear this same kind of rough old sound on releases from smaller labels like Goldwax and Back Beat. Most of these recordings, he noticed, came out of Memphis or Muscle Shoals. James Brown was an exception. He recorded on King and Smash, and had a sound that was all his own, but JB, a man who seemed to have dropped down from another planet, was an exception to everything. But there was something about those southern singers and the cats who were backing them up that separated them from their counterparts coming out of Detroit. Some said that the Motown machine had purposely tried to take the sexuality and rawness out of their tracks so they could sell records to the masses in general and to white teenagers in particular. Some went even further and more to the point, saying that Motown got you thinking on kissing, while Stax/ Volt made you want to fuck. But that wasn’t exactly fair or right. True, the southerners’ vocals were wet with sex, but in them you could also hear the joy and hurt that came along with love. This combination of blues, country, gospel, R amp;B, and hard history could only have risen up from the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Whatever it was, it had gotten into Strange. He had even begun to catalogue the release numbers of each single he owned in a notebook he kept by the stereo. It was a sickness with him, almost an obsession, and he couldn’t talk about it or explain it, but what he did know was that when he listened to this music, it just about moved him to tears.
And here he was, feeling that way now. Sitting on the couch, his eyes closed, listening to James Carr singing his new one, “A Man Needs a Woman,” Goldwax number 332.
He heard a knock on his door and got up out of his seat. He looked through the rabbit hole and opened the door.
Dennis stood in the frame, wearing yesterday’s clothes. There was that smell coming off him, the sweetness of smoke and the cut of cheap wine, that Derek Strange had come to know as his brother’s since he’d been back from the service. He was always walking around with some book, and he had one in his hand now. Everything was like it always was, except his eyes, which looked different today, brighter somehow than they had in a while.
“Young D.”
“Dennis.”
“What, you gonna make a black man stand out in the hall?”
“Come on in,” said Derek.
Derek closed the door behind Dennis. Both had a seat on the couch.
“You want a Coke, somethin’?” said Derek.
“Nah, I’m good.”
Dennis commented on the stereo, how clean the sound was and how the speakers must have cost big money. Derek told him it was the tubes in the amplifier, not the speakers, that gave the sound its crispness, as it had been explained to him by the salesman, as he’d explained it to Dennis many times before.
“Gonna get me a box like that someday,” said Dennis.
“You should.”
“Gotta get my own place first, I guess.”
“You should do that, too.”
Dennis looked around the room and took it in. “You got it all, don’t you?”
Derek had heard this kind of remark from his brother before, usually said in a different way. But there was no jealousy or rancor in Dennis’s voice now.
“I don’t have a penny,” said Derek, downplaying the surroundings and also telling the truth. “Payin’ rent money’s like throwing your money out in the street. What I need to do is like Pop did. Invest in a house.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
A silence came between them. The music ended, and the silence was amplified. Derek didn’t know why his brother had stopped by or what they were supposed to talk about now. Lately, they’d had less and less to discuss.
