The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto (29 page)

“No,” Frankie said. “I’ve never been to England.”

“We leave in three weeks.

“I still have songs to record.”

“After the movie.”

“What about the next album?”

Tappy looked at the director. He looked back at Frankie.

“We’re gonna make the movie first, kid. It’ll be good for you. Fun.”

Frankie said nothing, but he felt a burning in his stomach. He took a comb from his back pocket to fix his hair.

“Leave it,” Tappy said. “It looks better that way.”

Frankie put the comb back, the burning growing hotter.

Roger McGuinn

Guitarist, singer, founding member of the Byrds; inductee, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

MY BEST FRANKIE PRESTO STORY? WELL.
I introduced him to the Beatles. That’s a pretty good story.

It was the summer of 1965. The Byrds were on our first tour of London, and Frankie was there shooting a movie. He saw one of our shows. Afterward he came backstage to ask about my twelve-string Rickenbacker. I had seen him in concert when I was in high school. I thought his hair was cool. I had no idea he was such a great guitar player. But I was about to find out.

The Byrds were really popular in ’65. Our record “Mr. Tambourine Man” was number one on the British charts, which is why we went to London. But it wasn’t a great tour. They were billing us as “America’s answer to the Beatles,” and that’s hard to live up to. The press was out to get us.

Anyhow, the night after Frankie came backstage, the real Beatles came to see us play. Our publicist, Derek Taylor, used to be their publicist, so he arranged the whole thing, and afterward, we were supposed to all meet in a room upstairs from the club.

We were really nervous. Our bass player had broken a string during the show—that almost never happens. He must have been hitting it so hard he didn’t realize it.

Anyhow, we go into the room and John Lennon and George Harrison are there, and John says, “That was a great show,” and I felt like I had to apologize. I said, no, it wasn’t very good, and he mocked me a little. Then he said, “What’s with your tiny specs?” meaning my round glasses. He tried them on. And as everyone knows, he started wearing glasses like that and made them pretty famous.

At one point, I mentioned that Frankie Presto had come around the night before, and John sang a little of “Our Secret” and said it was one of the coolest ballads he’d ever heard. He also said that Frankie Presto hadn’t made a good record since.

The next night, I met with Paul McCartney at this private club, and he took me for a ride around London in his new Aston Martin DB5. I mentioned Frankie to Paul and he got all excited and said somebody told him Frankie had been in Elvis Presley’s band. There was a party later that week at one of the Rolling Stones’ houses—at that time, all the big British bands hung out together—and Paul said I should bring Frankie so he could ask if it was true. Everyone looked up to the Beatles, but the Beatles still looked up to Elvis.

So the next day I found out where they were shooting Frankie’s movie, and I dropped by. It was a warehouse off Carnaby Street, where we got our clothes back then—you know, the stretch jeans and the black zipper boots? I found Frankie just sitting by himself in one of those director chairs, sort of half asleep. He perked up when he saw me. He introduced me to his wife, Delores Ray, who was a big TV star in America.

I told Frankie about what Paul McCartney said, and Delores seemed really surprised. “When did you play with Elvis?” she asked, and Frankie said it was just a stupid rumor. When I invited him to the party, Delores got excited. She said, “The Beatles
and
the Rolling Stones? We’re coming!” But later, when she was shooting a scene, Frankie said he didn’t think it was such a good idea. I got the feeling his wife embarrassed him.

We talked more about guitars and I asked if he wanted to come by that night and jam at the hotel. He showed up a half hour early. He had this really old case and he pulled out a beat-up acoustic—I don’t even know what make it was, the label was covered—and we started playing. I noticed his hands were huge. A lot of great players have big hands, you know, like Jimi Hendrix, the way he could get his thumb over the neck? It gives you great control.

Anyhow, up to that moment, I thought I was a decent guitarist. But after twenty minutes, I didn’t even want to play. Frankie took these solos and created these really unique voicings and when I’d ask him, “What was that?” he’d mention some classical composer—Giuliani, Haydn—and then I’d say, “What was that?” and it would be Antonio Carlos Jobim or Wes Montgomery. And he wasn’t trying to show off. He was just so good, he couldn’t hide it.

We did the basic stuff you jam on, like “Midnight Special” and Jimmy Reed’s “You Got Me Dizzy.” And we played some Beatles songs. He had their arrangements down cold. At one point, he started smiling and I said, “What’s so funny?” and he said, “Nothing, I just haven’t really played guitar in a while.” And again, I wanted to crawl in a hole, because if this was how he sounded when he
hadn’t
played, you know? But I got the impression that he felt he’d sold out. I’m sure a lot of early rock and rollers felt that way, because in those days, everyone wanted you to do the same thing, over and over.

Frankie said he missed being in a band and I joked that he could join the Byrds if he promised not to break a string when the Beatles were in the audience. He looked at his guitar and he said, “Roger, do you know how old these top three strings are?” I said no. “Twenty years,” he said. No way, I said. They hadn’t broken? That’s not possible. And he shook his head and said, “I know. But it’s true.”

So, okay . . . the Beatles story. The party was in one of the Stones’ houses, maybe Keith Richards’s, sort of a fancy brownstone, three stories. I remember they showed us how the butlers would roll joints for them and leave them on the steps in the morning. There were a lot of drugs at that party—at
any
party during those years.

About an hour into it, Frankie showed up. I said, “I thought you couldn’t make it,” and he said, “I can’t stay long.” So I introduced him around and everyone was pretty cool. I remember me, Frankie, George Harrison, and Eric Clapton got into a discussion about Leadbelly, the old blues player, and Frankie knew all about him because he’d lived in Louisiana. He said that Leadbelly was so good he got pardoned from prison
twice
after the wardens heard him sing—once for killing a man! We laughed and said we should try that if we ever got busted.

I remember Frankie met Paul and Ringo, and they got along fine, even though Paul was disappointed when Frankie denied playing with Elvis. But when Frankie met John, John made some remark about his hair, because he was wearing it kind of mop top. John laughed and said, “The great Frankie Presto. Are you trying to look like us now?” I don’t think he meant anything, but it bothered Frankie, you know? He left soon after that.

I saw him a few days later and he still seemed upset and I told him to forget what John said, he was just that way. I said he should really get back into his guitar playing, he was so good, and if he ever wanted to jam on our records, we’d be lucky to have him.

We went back to America that week. I don’t know what happened with the movie Frankie was doing. I heard he walked out. I also heard he split up with his manager. The next time I saw him was the last time I saw him, maybe four years later, in a club in Greenwich Village. He was with this rock band, just standing in the back, playing rhythm. He didn’t sing. He had on dark sunglasses. I wasn’t even sure it was him until after the show. I went up and said, “Frankie?” and at first he seemed happy to see me, but after talking for a few minutes and remembering that party, he sort of clammed up. I asked if he wanted to jam sometime, but he said he couldn’t, he had a lot going on, his wife was expecting a baby. Maybe he was embarrassed to be playing in such a dive. I really don’t know. He asked if the Byrds were going to play at Woodstock and I told him no, we’d done enough festivals for a while. Then he excused himself to go to the bathroom and he never came back.

I felt awful when I heard he died. I was touring in France and I thought I owed it to him to come to his funeral, because he made me a better guitarist. He really did. That first night we played, I realized how far I had to go. Music can be competitive that way. Iron sharpens iron, like the proverb says.

Someone told me he made it to Woodstock, but I never found out for sure. . . . We would have known about that by now, right?

41

ALLOW ME TO ANSWER MR. MCGUINN’S QUESTION.
Frankie did indeed make it to Woodstock. He would even play. But it was not the way anyone imagined it. He was not invited. No one asked him to be there. He went in the deluded hopes of recapturing what he once had, large crowds cheering his music. But no bands needed him, and, as you are about to hear, things went terribly wrong. His attendance became a sad chapter for a man who lost his way—and the end of a major movement in his symphony with Aurora York.

It was the
minuet/scherzo
, conducted in 3/4 time. If you tap your fingers to illustrate—1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3—you sense an almost giddy rhythm. Indeed, the word
scherzo
translates to “joke.”

It was a word Frankie had begun to apply to himself in the mid-1960s, “A sad joke.” (Is there sharper counterpoint than that?) He felt his music was no longer taken seriously. He felt his desires were not being heard. That burning feeling he’d experienced in Tappy Fishman’s office had intensified and the comments John Lennon made about him being an imitation had heated it to an angry boil. In its bubbly wake, these are the things Frankie Presto did in the remaining months of 1965:

He walked away from the movie in London. That destroyed his film opportunities.

He walked away from Tappy Fishman. That destroyed his business opportunities.

He walked away from Delores Ray. That destroyed his marriage, and left him entangled in legal and financial complexities, most of which, to his detriment, he ignored.

He cut his hair.

Like Samson pulling the pillars down around him, Frankie crumbled all the things he’d become attached to in an effort to be free of them. Then, in the years that followed, he lost himself in the rubble. He fell into substances, believing, as I have lamented, that my truer powers might be discovered inside them.

He took up residence in New York City, in a dimly lit, ground-floor apartment on West Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village. He kept odd hours. He slept badly. He practiced incessantly, and when not practicing, was often in an altered state. He worked for whatever group would pay him, played in whatever studio session would use him, took cash for leaving his name out of royalty reporting, and if they didn’t have money, he accepted pills, smoke, alcohol.

He found himself thinking about his childhood.

“Why do you drink so much, Maestro?”

“This is not a music question.”

“Are you sad, Maestro?”

“Again, not a music question.”

“I am sad sometimes, Maestro.”

“Practice more. Speak less. You’ll be happier.”

“Yes, Maestro.”

Everyone joins a band in this life.

Sometimes, they are the wrong ones.

42

1968

BUT BACK TO THE LOVE STORY. THE
MINUET
. A SHORT DANCE.
One December day, Frankie answered his door in Greenwich Village, half dressed, bleary-eyed, and there she was, Aurora York, wearing a scarf and gloves, her blond hair tucked under a hat.

“Are you done with that actress?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Paperwork finished?”

“Yes.”

“We can get married now?”