The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto (16 page)

Niles Stango

Music historian, author

FRANKIE PRESTO HAD STAGE FRIGHT.

Did you know that? It’s true. He said it stemmed from his childhood, some performance he did here in Spain where the audience booed him. He never got over it. He had to kneel down and take deep breaths before every show. A lot of great ones suffer that way. Streisand. Adele. David Bowie. Carly Simon. They sweat. They vomit.

But as soon as Frankie Presto got onstage, you never saw nerves. He could sing and play—and he could dance. Really dance. I would rate him in my top-five performers of early rock and roll. Want to know the five? James Brown. Elvis. Chuck Berry. Frankie Presto. Little Richard. That’s my list. I keep a lot of lists.

The first time I saw him? The Buffalo Municipal Auditorium. I had just started writing for
LIFE
magazine, fresh out of college, and they assigned me to do a story about “The Twist”—the Chubby Checker dance, that’s right—so I went to Buffalo to interview Chubby, who was on the bill with a bunch of other acts, including Frankie Presto. And let me tell you, Presto stole the show. He did four songs—only played guitar on one of them—yet he was clearly the best musician on the stage. He took a solo on a fast version of “My Girl Josephine” that was stunning. He was bending the strings and accenting the upbeat—I think he threw a few jazz licks in there—and he did it all while he was
dancing
, sliding to the left and right, dipping and swinging the guitar like a sword. I saw the band look at each other and shake their heads. That’s how you know someone’s good, when even the
band
can’t believe it.

I asked him about it backstage that night. “How come you don’t play guitar all the time? You’re great.” He just laughed and said, “Oh, I have to be careful with that guitar. It’s mighty powerful.”

Now I remember those words, “mighty powerful,” because that’s something you’d say if you grew up in Mississippi, not Spain, right? But as we later found out—I wrote about this in my second book,
Profiles of Rock—
Frankie Presto grew up all over the place: England, Detroit, Nashville, Louisiana, California. I could never get the real story about his time in this country. He’d say, “I don’t remember much about Spain.” I always thought he was lying. Who doesn’t remember
something
?

But you wanted to know about his greatest hits? I have a list for that, too. Here’s my top three:

Number one, of course, is “I Want To Love You.” It sold two million copies—which in those days was just an unbelievable number. Nobody started records with a naked drumbeat back then. But Presto did. The pounding rhythm.
Ba-bump-bump.
Then that screaming guitar lick. Then he sings, “
Ah-ahhhh want to love you . . .”
Crowd goes wild. Oh, yeah. I’d put it as my top rock and roll song of 1960.

Number two, for me, would be “No, No, Honey,” which he wrote with Abby Cruz. That was a coy little song about a man begging a woman not to leave, despite his behavior. And of course it has that brief female vocal at the end, which is uncredited, where the woman sings, “Yes, yes, honey,” and takes him back. To this day, people are still guessing who that was. I thought Darlene Love, it sounded like her, but she denied it. Anyhow, “No, No, Honey” is my clear number two. And it sold a ton of copies.

And last—number three—I go with “Our Secret.” It’s sparse. It’s haunting. Burt Bacharach produced it, of all people. He put that reverb on Presto’s voice and it really sounds ghostly. That one didn’t sell as well as the other two, but it’s still his best ballad. I asked him once about the inspiration for “Our Secret” and he said, “You wouldn’t know her.’’

Friends? I can’t say we were friends. He was nice enough to me over the years, but let’s be honest; a reporter’s job is to pry into things. And Frankie Presto had a lot of secrets, so he wasn’t crazy to see me coming around, especially when I started working for
Rolling Stone
. He once said, “Niles, what I play, you can’t write, and what you write, I can’t play.”

I could never find any information about his parents, how he got to America, even what school he went to—if he went to school at all. He was like a ghost that suddenly materialized into a rock and roll star. The last time I interviewed him was maybe forty years ago, the late 1960s, before his long disappearance. He was into the drug thing, like all of us back then, and we were at some club in New York and he said something strange. He said, “Niles, I’ve got three strings left.” I assume he was referring to his age. . . .

Me? Seventy-two. Retired, for the most part. I live in Paris now and I’m working on a new book. When I heard that Presto had died—and how he died, lifting above the crowd like he was flying, then falling like some circus act—well, I jumped on a plane to Barcelona and drove down. I guess my old reporter’s instincts were kicking in. I thought I’d do a piece for somebody,
Newsweek
or
Time
—you know, “the life and death of a mysterious pop star”—but most places I’ve talked to just want to know if Presto was murdered, not about his career. That’s why your crew came, isn’t it? Death sells. Music, not so much.

I’ll tell you what, though. There’s a story here. Something weird. I’ve been asking around and a couple of people told me they saw Presto the morning of the day he died, near the statue of Francisco Tárrega, and he had his guitar and someone was with him.

I wish I could have heard him play again. He hadn’t made a record in decades—unless you believe in the legendary “unreleased” album, the one they call
The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
. Who knows if it’s him? There’re so many rumors. A writer once asked Frankie what his bravest performance was—ever—and he said the time he played alone in the bottom of a boat. I’m thinking, “Yeah, right.” Bottom of a boat? What is he, a pirate? It’s like that song from
The Sound of Music
. How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you tell a story like Frankie Presto? Who knows what to believe?

17

1969

“CAN I HELP YOU?” THE MAN BEHIND THE COUNTER ASKED.

“Eggs,” Frankie whispered.

The man put a finger to his ear. “Can’t hear you, fella.”

Frankie was unshaven, his eyes glassy behind aviator sunglasses. As he leaned in, his long black hair fell over his angular cheekbones and you could barely see his face at all.

“I need to buy . . . some eggs.”

A grinning teenager suddenly pushed up to the counter, jostling Frankie’s shoulder. He wore a floppy green hat.

“Hey, man, you sell beer?”

“The eggs are over there,” the man said, ignoring the teen, pointing at a refrigerated shelf behind a crowd of young people, men with scruffy beards and headbands, alongside women in print dresses or blue denim shorts, many of them shoeless. The store’s floor was covered in muddy footprints.

“Sixty cents for the eggs.” The man pushed up his glasses. “Do you have sixty cents, fella?”

Someone screamed, “I’m so high!” and others roared in approval. A ceiling fan spun overhead. Frankie reached into his pocket and went wobbly on his heels. He could feel his guitar in its soft case on his back, but he couldn’t see the man in front of him anymore. He felt as if he were in the middle of a balloon being squeezed from the outside.

“Here,” Frankie mumbled, fingering a twenty-dollar bill off a wad in his hands.

“Can I have one?” the teen asked.

Frankie let another bill drop.

“I’ll take twenty beers!” the teen announced.

Frankie found a carton of eggs and stumbled away. The man yelled after him, “You want your change?” but Frankie was pushing out the screen door into the sticky summer air.

This was America, the calendar year 1969, the month of August, the state of New York, during the three-day music festival known as Woodstock, where half a million people gathered on a six-hundred-acre dairy farm. Frankie, now thirty-three years old, was tall and lanky, with deep blue eyes, high shoulders, large hands, and dark stubble on his chin and cheeks. His life at this precise moment was, in musical terms,
lontano—
distant, or from a distance—and in such erratic time signatures it is impossible for me to notate. This was due to something he drank or swallowed behind the festival stage. I cannot tell you what it was. I doubt Frankie knew himself.

In a moment, I will explain why we have advanced our story so far, and why Frankie’s journey at Woodstock would mark a major turning point in his life, his music, and his love affair with Aurora York, the little girl in the tree whom he would spend much of his youth pursuing.

But first, I wish to say something about being in an altered state, like the one Frankie was in now. It does not bring you closer to me.

It just makes me dizzy.

For centuries, musicians have sought to find me at the end of a needle or the bottom of a drink. It is an illusion. And it often ends badly.

Take my cherished Russian disciple, Modest Mussorgsky. In 1881, he lay facedown in a St. Petersburg tavern. This man once composed marvelous works,
Pictures at an Exhibition
and
Night on Bald Mountain
(later made famous through an animated film called
Fantasia
). He composed nothing on that barroom floor, believing alcohol made him an artist. He died at forty-two.

I was there to collect his talent.

I was there at the hospital deathbed of my beloved Billie Holiday, just forty-four, her liver destroyed by drinking; I was there inside the hotel room of Charlie Parker, my singular jazz saxophonist, who died in his midthirties, but whose body was so ravaged by drugs the coroners thought he was sixty.

Tommy Dorsey, the bandleader, choked in his sleep when he was fifty-one, too deep in pills to awaken. Johnny Allen Hendrix (you called him Jimi) swallowed a handful of barbiturates and expired. He was twenty-seven.

It is not new, this idea that a purer art awaits you in a substance. But it is naive. I existed before the first grapes were fermented. Before the first whiskey was distilled. Be it opium or absinthe, marijuana or heroin, cocaine or ecstasy or whatever will follow, you may alter your state, but you will not alter this truth: I am Music. I am here inside you. Why would I hide behind a powder or a vapor?

Do you think me so petty?

But let us return to Frankie’s dazed journey through a muddy dairy farm, carrying a guitar and a dozen eggs. A band named Santana was on a stage far from view, and the lead singer’s voice seemed to come out of the sky:

You’ve got to change your evil ways . . . baby

Frankie was lost. The chemicals in his system, which he’d ingested just before sunrise, had led him to wander far from the musicians’ area. This is all he remembered:

He had been with Aurora York, who was now his wife, and she was sleeping on a cotton blanket, pregnant with their first child. He did not want to wake her, but he did.

“Francisco?”

“Aurora,” he whispered.

“It means dawn.”

“I know.”

“I’m hungry, Francisco. If you love me, you’ll get me breakfast.”

She crinkled her eyes and smiled. Frankie told her to wait there, he would get some eggs and cook them for her. But after that, things got foggy. And now, outside the grocery store, he was not sure how long ago that was.

“Was she a fairy?”

“I don’t think so, Maestro.”

“Did she have strange eyes?”

“Yes.”

“Was she kind and helpful?”

“Yes.”

“She was a fairy.”

He shook his head to clear El Maestro’s voice, which often popped into his brain. He tried to locate the stage area where he’d left Aurora, but could see only an ocean of spectators, some of whom appeared to have comet tails as they moved. He stepped awkwardly over sleeping bags and blankets.