Pagan Starshine (real name: Hillary Katz) would have fed the horses two hours ago, but I went down the double line of stalls anyway, giving them apple slices and pieces of carrots. Most were big and beautiful—I sometimes thought of them as Cadillac limos on four feet. My favorite, however, was more of a beat-up Chevrolet. Bartleby, a dapple gray with no bloodline to speak of, had been at Wolfjaw when I arrived with nothing but a guitar, a duffel bag, and a bad case of nerves, and he hadn’t been young then. Most of his teeth had gone the way of the blue suede shoe years ago, but he chewed his apple slice with the few he had left, jaws ruminating lazily from side to side. His mild dark eyes never left my face.

“You good business, Bart,” I said, stroking his muzzle. “And I just love good business.”

He nodded as if to say he knew it.

Pagan Starshine—Paig, to her friends—was feeding the chickens out of her apron. She couldn’t wave, so she gave me a big rusty halloo, followed by the first two lines of “Mashed Potato Time.” I joined her on the next two: it’s the latest, it’s the greatest, etc., etc. Pagan used to sing backup, and when she was in her prime, she sounded like one of the Pointer Sisters. She also smoked like a chimney, and by the age of forty, she sounded more like Joe Cocker at Woodstock.

Studio 1 was closed and dark. I lit it up and checked the bulletin board for that day’s sessions. There were four: one at ten, one at two, one at six, and one at nine that would probably go on until past midnight. Studio 2 would be just as stacked. Nederland is a tiny burg nestled up on the Western Slope where the air is rare—less than fifteen hundred full-time residents—but it has a vital musical presence out of all proportion to its size; the bumper stickers reading NEDERLAND! WHERE NASHVILLE GETS HIGH! aren’t a total exaggeration. Joe Walsh recorded his first album in Wolfjaw 1, when Hugh Yates’s father ran the place, and John Denver recorded his last in Wolfjaw 2. Hugh once played me outtakes of Denver talking to his band about an experimental plane he’d just bought, something called a Long-EZ. Listening to it gave me the creeps.

There were nine downtown bars where you could hear live music any night of the week, and three recording operations besides ours. Wolfjaw Ranch was the biggest and best, though. On the day I stepped timidly into Hugh’s office and told him Charles Jacobs had sent me, there were at least two dozen pictures on his walls, including Eddie Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Axl Rose (in his prime), and U2. Yet the one he was proudest of—and the only one he was in himself—was of the Staple Singers. “Mavis Staples is a goddess,” he told me. “The best woman singer in America. No one else even comes close.”

I had recorded on my share of cheap singles and bad indie albums during my dues-paying years on the road, but never heard myself on a major label until I filled in at a Neil Diamond session for a rhythm guitarist who had come down with mono. I was terrified that day—sure I would just lean over and puke on my SG—but since then I’d played on lots of sessions, mostly as a fill-in but sometimes by request. The money wasn’t great, but it was far from terrible. Weekends I played with the house band at a local bar called Comstock Lode, and had been known to filch gigs on the side in Denver. I also gave music lessons to aspiring high school players at a summer program Hugh inaugurated after his father died. It was called Rock-Atomic.

“I can’t do that,” I protested to Hugh when he suggested adding this to my duties. “I can’t read music!”

“You can’t read notes is what you mean,” he said. “You can read tablature just fine, and that’s all these kids want. Fortunately for us and them, it’s all most of them need. You ain’t going to find Segovia up here in the hills, my man.”

He was right about that, and once my fright wore off, I enjoyed the lessons. They brought back memories of Chrome Roses, for one thing. For another . . . maybe I should be ashamed to say this, but the pleasure I felt working with the Rock-Atomic teenagers was similar to the pleasure I got from feeding Bartleby his morning apple slice and stroking his nose. Those kids just wanted to rock, and most of them discovered they could . . . once they mastered a bar E, that was.

Studio 2 was also dark, but Mookie McDonald had left the soundboard on. I shut everything down and made a note to talk to him about it. He was a good board guy, but forty years of smoking rope had made him forgetful. My Gibson SG was propped up with the rest of the instruments, because later that day I was going to play on a demo with a local rockabilly combo called Gotta Wanna. I sat on a stool and played tennis-racket style for ten minutes or so, stuff like “Hi-Heel Sneakers” and “Got My Mojo Working,” just limbering up. I was better now than in my years on the road, much better, but I was still never going to be Clapton.

The phone rang—although in the studios, it didn’t actually ring, just lit up blue around the edges. I put my guitar down and answered it. “Studio Two, Curtis Mayfield speaking.”

“How’s the afterlife, Curtis?” Hugh Yates asked.

“Dark. The good side is that I’m no longer paralyzed.”

“Glad to hear it. Come on up here to the big house. I have something you should see.”

“Jeez, man, we’ve got somebody recording a half an hour from now. I think that c&w chick with the long legs.”

“Mookie will get her set up.”

“No, he won’t. He’s not here yet. Also, he left the board on in Two. Again.”

Hugh sighed. “I’ll talk to him. Just come on up.”

“Okay, but Hugh? I’ll talk to the Mookster. My job, right?”

He laughed. “I sometimes wonder what happened to the wouldn’t-say-shit-if-he-had-a-mouthful sad sack I hired,” he said. “Come on. This’ll blow your mind.”

 • • •

The big house was a sprawling ranch with Hugh’s vintage Continental parked in the turnaround. The man was a fool for anything that slurped hi-test, and he could afford the indulgence. Although Wolfjaw did only a little better than break-even, there was a lot of elderly Yates family dough in blue chip investments, and Hugh—twice divorced, prenups in both, no children from either—was the last sprig on the Yates family tree. He kept horses, chickens, sheep, and a few pigs, but that was little more than a hobby. The same was true of his cars and collection of big-engine pickup trucks. What he cared about was music, and about that he cared deeply. He claimed to have once been a player himself, although I’d never seen him pick up a horn or a guitar.

“Music matters,” he told me once. “Pop fiction goes away, TV shows go away, and I defy you to tell me what you saw at the movies two years ago. But music lasts, even pop music. Especially pop music. Sneer at ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ if you want to, but people will still be listening to that silly piece of shit fifty years from now.”

 • • •

It was easy enough to remember the day I met him, because Wolfjaw looked the same, right down to the midnight-blue Connie with the opera windows parked in front. Only I had changed. He met me at the door on that day in the fall of 1992, shook my hand, and showed me into his office. There he plopped into a high-backed chair behind a desk that looked big enough to land a Piper Cub on. I was nervous following him in; when I saw all those famous faces looking down from the walls, what little saliva remaining in my mouth dried up entirely.

He looked me up and down—a visitor wearing a dirty AC/DC tee and even dirtier jeans—and said, “Charlie Jacobs called me. I’ve owed the Rev a large favor for quite a few years now. It’s larger than I could ever repay, but he tells me you square it.”

I stood there in front of the desk, tongue-tied. I knew how to audition for a band, but this was something different.