LITMIR.BIZ

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believed it was my time to go it alone.

      2.

      Take Your Hand Out of My Pocket

      BECAUSE NEITHER BEN NOR I KNOW LAS VEGAS, we don’t follow our usual pre-show routine of checking into the hotel and waiting for fans to find us. We’re touring Las Vegas Blvd, looking among casinos, hotels and family-friendly extravaganzas for the newest Jump and Jive Juke Joint, a chain with franchises in Columbus, Denver, Orlando and right next to the Mall of America. “Jump and Jive” reminds me of swing music, not the True Delta Blues, but the promotional literature promises you can eat “authentic Dixie-fried victuals” or “soak up the southern hospitality of our full bars” and, most of all, “stomp your foot to the best roots music.” And the owner, a former ad agency president from—get this—Hamilton, Ontario, simply cannot open the Las Vegas Jump and Jive Juke Joint without Brother Ben and me there to christen it. To the man he believed was only our manager, he said, “Brother Ben’s the only performer who can provide the genuine roots music experience we try to provide our customers.” In his guise as Wilton Mabry, Ben agreed, then told this fellow, Kent Bollinger, he’d see what he could do. The delay doubled our typical appearance fee and assured we’d be there to kick off the tour. Call Brother Ben a con man or a capitalist, Ole Br’er Rabbit and Ralph Ellison’s Rinehart have nothing on him.

      Ben parks the Brougham in walking distance of the miniature skyline of New York, New York and the mammoth MGM Grand, across from the Jump and Jive Juke Joint, which squats solidly on Las Vegas Boulevard South. When Ben and I get out, a man in gray slacks and a blue blazer walks forward, arms spread wide. “Brother Ben, Silent Sam,” he says. “Kent Bollinger.” Bald head shining, he shakes our hands. Mine hard, Ben’s gingerly. Then he steers Ben toward the wooden steps that lead to a porch so country I expect yawning hounds stretched out by their masters’ work-booted feet. “Buffalo, 1972,” Bollinger says. “That’s when I saw you with Bucketmouth. I liked Cream and Hendrix and the Stones then. But once I heard the real thing, I was hooked.”

      “Do tell,” Brother Ben says, interrupting himself with the broken, rusty cough he’s been experimenting with lately, the one that scared a thousand dollars away from Mr. Habib. Sounds like a lung just shut down, it’s so racked and wet, and Bollinger looks on as if what Ben’s got might be catching. Still, he’s doing a lot better meeting the legend than I did. I’d already met him at the audition as Wilton Mabry, but when I saw him in his plaid suit next to a Grand Prix the color of a bar of Irish Spring, I gasped, “You’re Brother Ben!” Today, it’s easy to see Ben in Mabry and Mabry in Ben, but that’s only because I, unlike nearly everybody else, know to look.

      Now Bollinger grips Ben by the arm, helping him up the steps. “Best concert I ever saw,” Bollinger says. “I mean, even though it was freezing outside, I could close my eyes and believe I was somewhere like this place.”

      Vegas? I want to say, but Sam’s no smartass. I wipe my hand over my mouth and mustache, which I’m still getting used to, as I only grow it for tours. Bollinger’s gold buttons clatter on his blazer as he turns, arms and open palms directing us to take in the surroundings. “You know, when Luther Johnson played the Minneapolis opening, he said it was too real. Gave him the chills.” Bollinger smiles, smoothes some stray hairs over his wide, bald head, a man pleased with his enterprise. And he’s met plenty of other bluesmen: Guess that’s why he’s relatively cool around Ben. Now he’s encouraging us to reply in kind with Houserocker Johnson. Or is it Guitar Junior he’s talking about? Lots of Luthers out there. Whoever it was, I suspect he might have been messing with this Canuck. Then again, I think everyone’s messing with someone in this world I live in. Sonny Boy never told a writer the same birthday twice. “They don’t know me,” he reputedly said.

      Ben steps away, winks swiftly at me with the eye farthest from Bollinger. He bends over slowly, as if inspecting the floor, then wearily straightens, only to stamp his heel against the yellow wooden planks. The thump resounds while Bollinger looks on astonished, unable to process just what the bluesman who changed his life is doing to his faux jook’s porch.

      “Too firm,” Ben says, then fashions another tubercular cough. He stoops, hands on knees for a moment, then rises to his customary slouch. “Ever’ porch from Friar’s Point to Marianna so flimsy folks had to tiptoe.” The pantomime he then executes makes him cackle and smack his thigh with his porkpie hat, which establishes it’s time for me to smile, and I do, Jemima-big.

      “I think it was that night in Buffalo where I had the idea,” Bollinger says, reaching for Ben’s arm. “To build these clubs that gave people a chance to experience a real life juke joint.” He pauses, drags Ben along the porch and resumes. “With nothing to get in the way of their enjoyment.”

      I wonder if Bollinger’s made it to the Delta, been inside a real jook. Many a blues lover flies to Memphis, rents a car and drives down 61, though I hear now Tunica and its casinos sits there like a juggernaut, keeping most from even making it to Clarksdale, let alone Rolling Fork or Alligator, or across the river to Sonny Boy’s town, Helena. Truth is, though, Bollinger must have hired some good people to construct the building. Much study of old photographs and newsreels went into the work, maybe even a visit or two to Junior Kimbrough’s place near Holly Springs. I allow my eyes to follow Bollinger’s hand pointing to the Nehi, Jax and Falstaff signs, artificially rust-spotted and rakishly hung on the exterior walls, which are made of a material that looks as faded and ready to fall apart as the warped and rotted shingles of a genuine jook but is surely as sound as a dollar and will probably be around for hundreds of years. Bales of cottons are piled around the entry, with scythes and sickles and scales hung here and there. New laminated posters are tacked to the wall, advertising shows with Little Milton, Bobby Rush and Latimore, while reproductions feature Mud, Wolf and Little Walter. There’s even an empty sack of Sonny Boy corn meal next to the checkerboard atop an old wooden barrel. I try to jump a white piece with a black piece but they’re all lacquered in place.

      Bollinger’s holding open the door for Ben and going off on how the executive chef, though trained at Johnson and Wales, was born and raised in Nashville and fuses classical technique with southern staples. “But it’s still down-home cookin,” he says and rubs his paunch.

      In “No Tellin’ How Long,” Ben sings of how much he likes pig feet and did claim once, in a radio interview, that he’d made many a meal of Saltines and Vienner sausages, but in truth he’s one of the more rigid adherents to the food pyramid I know. Right now, for instance, the wrapper of a protein bar lies crumpled in the Brougham’s ashtray. Four years ago, along with red meat, he gave up coffee and soda—both of which I drink steady until nightfall—and started drinking green tea. However, as we all three step inside the Jump and Jive, the old fraud licks his lips and says, “I hopes we gets to sample some.”

      “Sure,” Bollinger says, his hand still clamped on Ben. “You too, Sam? You can order anything you want on us.”

      I nod, say, “ ‘Preciate you,” then add a “suh,” because after years of practice my Midwestern tongue has managed to shape that syllable with ease.

      The interior, as artificially rustic as the outside, smells somehow of creosote and spent tobacco juice, but located in the back of the first level is an elevated stage. In the two Arkansas jooks I visited—so Ben’s second harpist, Heywood “Razor” Sharp could teach me how to play harp without an amplifier—no stages existed. We took up space at the rear corner of the dance floor, near enough an exit in case some shit got started. No true jook would contain all the high-priced paraphernalia that covers the walls here either. Bollinger holds Ben by the arm, tolling the costs and telling the story of how he got this and that. Considering he’s been listening since as far as the Bucketmouth days, I guess it’s Ben’s ears alone he wants to fill. I slip off and view all the signed guitars, photos, album covers, trinkets, clothes, and other pieces of the blues as well as soul, bluegrass, folk and country memorabilia. I now read the small plaques authenticating this axe was played by T-Bone Walker, that one by Scotty Moore, this banjo by Grampa Jones. I’d kill for something of Sonny Boy’s, though I’m sure all his derbies, ventilated shoes and harps were tossed out in the Helena trash the day he died. I find nothing but smile at the

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