“You sure?”

“Yes. If we’re going to see the Rev’s fine and holy shit-show, I want to hear what you know about him first. Probably we should have had this conversation years ago.”

I thought that over. “Okay . . . but if you want to get, you have to give. A full and fair exchange of information.”

He laced his hands together on the not inconsiderable middle of his western-style shirt and rocked back in his chair. “It’s nothing I’m ashamed of, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just so . . . unbelievable.”

“I’ll believe it,” I said.

“Maybe so. Before you leave, tell me what that verse in Matthew says, and how you know it.”

“I can’t quote it exactly after so many years, but it’s something like, ‘As the lightning flashes from east to west, covering the sky, so shall be the coming of Jesus.’ It’s not about healing, it’s about the apocalypse. And I remember it because it was one of Reverend Jacobs’s favorites.”

I glanced at the clock. The long-legged country girl—Mandy something-or-other—was a chronic early bird, she was probably already sitting on the steps outside Studio 1 with her guitar propped up beside her, but there was one thing I had to know right then. “What did you mean when you said you doubted they were wedding rings?”

“Didn’t use the rings on you, huh? When he took care of your little drug problem?”

I thought of the abandoned auto body shop. “Nope. Headphones.”

“This was in what? 1992?”

“Yes.”

“My experience with the Rev was in 1983. He must have updated his MO in the time between. He probably went back to the rings because they seem more religious than headphones. But I bet he’s moved ahead with his work since my time . . . and yours. That’s the Rev, wouldn’t you say? Always trying to take it to the next level?”

“You call him the Rev. Was he preaching when you met him?”

“Yes and no. It’s complicated. Go on, get out of here, your girl will be waiting. Maybe she’ll be wearing a miniskirt. That’ll take your mind off Pastor Danny.”

As a matter of fact, she was wearing a mini, and those legs were definitely spectacular. I hardly noticed them, though, and I couldn’t tell you a thing she sang that day without checking the log. My mind was on Charles Daniel Jacobs, aka the Rev. Now known as Pastor Danny.

 • • •

Mookie McDonald bore his scolding about the soundboard quietly, head down, nodding, at the end promising he would do better. He would, too. For awhile. Then, a week or two from now, I’d come in and find the board on again in 1, 2, or both. I think the idea of putting people in jail for smoking the rope is ludicrous, but there’s no doubt in my mind that long-term daily use is a recipe for CRS, also known as Can’t Remember Shit.

He brightened up when I told him he’d be recording George Damon. “I always loved that guy!” the Mookster exclaimed. “Everything he sang sounded like—”

“Kate Smith singing ‘God Bless America.’ I know. Have a good time.”

 • • •

There was a pretty little picnic area in a grove of alders behind the big house. Georgia and a couple of the office girls were having their lunch there. Hugh led me to a table well away from theirs and took a couple of wrapped sandwiches and two cans of Dr Pepper from his capacious manpurse. “Got chicken salad and tuna salad from Tubby’s. You choose.”

I chose tuna. We ate in silence for awhile, there in the shadow of the big mountains, and then Hugh said, “I also used to play rhythm, you know, and I was quite a bit better than you.”

“Many are.”

“At the end of my career I was in a band out of Michigan called Johnson Cats.”

“From the seventies? The guys who wore those Army shirts and sounded like the Eagles?”

“It was actually the early eighties when we broke through, but yeah, that was us. Had four hit singles, all off the first album. And do you want to know what got that album noticed in the first place? The title and the jacket, both my idea. It was called Your Uncle Jack Plays All the Monster Hits, and it had my very own Uncle Jack Yates on the cover, sitting in his living room and strumming his ukulele. Inside, lots of heaviness and monster fuzz-tone. No wonder it didn’t win Best Album at the Grammys. That was the era of Toto. Fucking ‘Africa,’ what a piece of crap that was.”

He brooded.

“Anyway, I was in the Cats, had been for two years, and that’s me on the breakout record. Played the first two tour dates, then got let go.”

“Why?” Thinking, It must have been drugs. Back then it always was. But he surprised me.

“I went deaf.”

 • • •

The Johnson Cats tour started in Bloomington—Circus One—then moved on to the Congress Theater in Oak Park. Small venues, warmup gigs with local ax-whackers to open. Then to Detroit, where the big stuff was scheduled to start: thirty cities, with Johnson Cats as the opening act for Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Arena rock, the real deal. What you dream of.

The ringing in Hugh’s ears started in Bloomington. At first he dismissed it as just part of the price you paid when you sold your soul for rock and roll—what self-respecting player didn’t suffer tinnitus from time to time? Look at Pete Townshend. Eric Clapton, Neil Young. Then, in Oak Park, the vertigo and nausea started. Halfway through their set, Hugh reeled offstage and hurled into a bucket filled with sand.

“I still remember the sign on the post above it,” he told me. “USE FOR SMALL FIRES ONLY.”

He finished the gig—somehow—took his bows, and reeled offstage.

“What’s wrong with you?” Felix Granby asked. He was the lead guitarist and lead vocalist, which meant to the public at large—the portion of it that rocked, at least—he was Johnson Cats. “Are you drunk?”

“Stomach flu,” Hugh said. “It’s getting better.”

He thought it was true; with the amps off, the tinnitus did seem to be ebbing. But the next morning it was back, and other than the hellish ringing, he could hear almost nothing.

Two members of Johnson Cats fully grasped looming disaster: Felix Granby and Hugh himself. Only three days ahead was the Silverdome, in Pontiac. Capacity ninety thousand. With Detroit favorite Bob Seger headlining, it would be almost full. The JC was on the cusp of fame, and in rock and roll, such chances rarely come around a second time. So Felix Granby had done to Hugh what Kelly Van Dorn of White Lightning had done to me.

“I bore him no grudge,” Hugh said. “If our positions had been reversed, I might have done the same. He hired a session player out of L’Amour Studio in Detroit, and it was that guy who went onstage with them that night at the Dome.”

Granby did the firing in person, not by talking but by writing notes and holding them up for Hugh to read. He pointed out that while the other members of the JC came from middle-class families, Hugh was from real money. He could fly back to Colorado in a comfy seat at the front of the plane, and consult all the best doctors. Granby’s last note, written in capital letters, read: U WILL BE BACK WITH US BEFORE U KNOW IT.

“As if,” Hugh said as we sat in the shade, eating our sandwiches from Tubby’s.

“You still miss it, don’t you?” I asked.

“No.” Long pause. “Yes.”

 • • •

He did not go back to Colorado.

“If I had’ve, I sure wouldn’t have flown. I had an idea my head might explode once we got above twenty thousand feet. Besides, home wasn’t what I wanted. All I wanted to do was lick my wounds, which were still bleeding, and Detroit was as good a lickin place as any. That’s the story I told myself, anyway.”

The symptoms did not abate: vertigo, nausea ranging from moderate to severe, and always that hellish ringing, sometimes soft, sometimes so loud he thought his head would split open. On occasion all these symptoms would draw back like a tide going out, and then he would sleep for ten or even twelve hours at a stretch.