1. THE ANCHOR

It is one of those idiotically oppressive midsummer days where the mercury blows into the mid-nineties and the humidity follows on a leash. We call them ‘dog days’ for a reason.

Days like this are not meant for suffocating in cubicles or breaking balls on assembly lines, nor for squatting on collapsing front porches or swapping memories in the wasteland of alleys, but that is exactly how non-credible people spend them. In Detroit—once you’ve ticked off ‘rioting’—only two credible options are left for the sweltering blast furnace dog days of July: Working outside in the direct sun and feeling like an underpaid stud, or sitting in a dark bar drinking booze and trying to convince random women you’re an overpaid stud.

So let me tell you about one of these random women, because if she hadn’t told me to pound sand, this book would never have been written.

She is sitting midway down the bar of a local dive where newspaper people gather—where I used to gather when I was a newspaper people and where I still gather now that I no longer collect a paycheck from one (or both) of Detroit’s two dailies. Instead, I’m currently doing a podcast about the decay of my hometown, especially the decay of these two dailies, which have (by the way) lost any semblance of self-respect.

My podcast involves vignettes about local peeps who may be going down with the ship, but who still cling to a little self-respect.

The ship itself, incidentally, hit the reef long ago, and frankly, so did my podcast. These days I tend to put less work into it than I do into drinking bourbon and scamming on young writer groupies who—as I discovered on my one-and-only book tour—are a distinct and amazing subset of the female persuasion.

This one is sitting before an open lap top drinking Mexican beer, her eyes, wide-set Irish-looking, are a color I once described in some trailer-park Venus di Mopar as being ‘peppermint-aqua.’ Her nose freckles are a melanoma minefield; Cremora arms are tagged with jangling mess of tattoos like a derelict building in Corktown and her hair is dyed a shade of purple usually reserved for acid flashbacks. But she is instantly and eerily attractive in the same way I outline in the above-referenced essay ‘The Trailer Park Paradox’: Poor struggling white chicks of a certain age occasionally exude a maddeningly potent sexual musk, like Roseanna Arquette does in every movie she ever made about poor young struggling white chicks.

So I bring my drink over, sit beside her, and signal Lanita—a black woman in tarantula eyelashes and a Boyz in Da Hood t-shirt (an incongruity among the bar’s hockey paraphernalia)—to place another Mexican beer in front of my target audience.

“I’m Danny Ayres,” I say brightly, extending my hand, which she takes with fingers cool from the Negra Modella bottle from which she’d been compulsive peeling neck foil and making little balls to stack against the lip of the bar.

‘Trust me,’ I want to say—'I’ve made a few beer foil pyramids myself—it’s what people do who should be working but would rather be drinking.’

It’s a kick-ass opening line, so I file it to use later.

She introduced herself: “Chai…”

Fuckin’ perfect. The space-cadet eaglet has landed.

“…Flashner.”

Okay, maybe she’s Jewish instead of Irish, but it hardly matters—at fifty something, I tend to be a non-bigoted, equal-opportunity lech.

But, admirably or not, I am also playing a role: When someone like this sits dead center at a writer (and pseudo-writer) hangout, tip-tapping her keyboard, she’s looking to be noticed. And as you have surmised, I am a noticer. She’s never been here before, at least not on my watch, or else I’d have noticed her.

“You a writer?” I ask with a disingenuous smile, the closest I can come to being charming in a place as utterly devoid of charm as The Anchor Bar.

“I wish. I’m a marketing major at Wayne.”

“Doesn’t that involve a lot of writing?”

“It can, but it doesn’t have to—firms have people that do that kind of stuff and shit. They’re called copywriters. Actually, I want to develop my copywriting skills, because finding just the right words is key to any successful advertising blitz. That’s what my one professor is always saying—that’s who I’m doing this project for. He’s like this fifty year old dude who spent his career on Madison Avenue and his ideas are good, if a little dated. Not that there’s anything wrong with fifty year old guys,” she adds quickly, and I see that there might be a little chink in the breastplate of nubile tattoo-girl caution.

“Exactly,” I concur. “For one thing, we can score better cocaine.”

That makes her laugh, widening the chink a further soupçon. She goes on: “Anyway, that’s what I am currently OCDing about: ‘How do I say exactly the things I want to express using the perfect terms’? I know I can do it; I’m just having writer’s block right now.”

“See, me? I don’t believe there’s such thing as writer’s block, Chai. It’s just an excuse people use to describe not having anything to say and trying to say it anyway.”

This miffs her, but cool—nothing wrong with a little well-placed miffery. Otherwise you become too obvious and they start reminding you where their peppermint-aqua eyes are.

“Cynical much?” she frowns.

“Yep, too much, no doubt. But I real-world all the time.”

“Are you a writer?” she asks, not entirely ready to write-off a real-world writer.

“I do dabble in the occasional letter,” I confess, passing her my podcast business card.

“Awesome,” she replies, revitalizing her attention. “’Rhapsodies in Rust.’ Love the name. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never heard of it, but I will definitely check it out.”

“You do that. Check out my book, too. Same name, ‘Rhapsodies in Rust’, published by Penguin Press in 2016.”

“That’s completely awesome!” she gushed. “I think of writing as an art form, don’t you?”

“I try not to use the word ‘art’ unless I’m writing about Garfunkel.”

“Who?”

“Never mind; before your time. I used to write music reviews for ‘Rolling Stone’ and ‘Vice.’ ‘Creem’, too, but again, before your time.”

“Whoa! For real? That’s also entirely awesome.”

“For about a minute. But you know what’s really awesome?” I say—having dangled the carrot, I now dust it sparkly white: “Good cocaine.”

“Maybe,” she says, looking forlornly at her computer screen. “I sort of wanted to get this project done.”

“What’s it on?” I asked. “Maybe I can toss out my two cents.”

“It’s about showing how famous sexist ad campaigns of the past could be re-written to target a modern flex-gender demographic living in non-binary spaces.”

Strike one. People who say ‘flex-gender’ and ‘non-binary spaces’ weird me out almost as much as people who say ‘art’.

Suddenly, slapping her brow and reddening in way that sets fire to her freckles, she burbles, “Duh! Simon Garfunkel. One of my professors made us read his poetry and it was really awesome. He should have won that Nobel prize instead of Dylan.”

“Do you have a summer job, Chai?” I ask.

“I deliver for Door Dash, but I’m taking this class which takes a lot of time since I want to ace it. Why?”

“I might have an internship going at ‘Rhapsodies in Rust.’”

“Really?” she says, sniffing the crawler as it squirms on the hook. “Would it involve any writing?”

“It might. Do you have a sample of anything you’ve written? I mean, between bouts of writer’s block?”

“I have this one piece that was published in a cat magazine right after Pebbles died last semester.”

“Let’s read it,” I say, and she navigates her laptop for a sec before unearthing an eight-hundred word editorial with her name on it from an online magazine called ‘Nine Lifetimes of Love’. She turns the computer my way, and as I scan through it, she steps up the pace of the foil-ball rolling.

Strike two. It’s godawful.

“I mean, feel free to critique it and shit,” she says. “I won’t be offended or anything. I didn’t run it by any real writers before I submitted it, I just wrote it stream of conscience, like Kerouacian.”

Make it or break it, I figured: “You won’t be offended by constructive commentary? Pinkie promise?”

She hooks her small finger into mine and that little electric skin contact sets the angle of my tack. Consenting to human touch is significant, even if it’s just a pinkie—I believe I might be en route to slipping a whole hand into the armor chink.

“Well, in the first sentence you say, ‘At 3 a.m. in the morning.’ That’s sort of redundant, Chai; ‘a.m.’ already signifies that it’s morning.”

“Okay, so that’s true. That’s minor, right? —as I said, the only person who proof-read it was my boyfriend.”

Strike thr… well, two-and-a-half; at her age, boyfriends are disposable commodities.

“What about the rest?”

“It’s pretty maudlin.”

“I mean, it’s a story about a dead cat.”

“No, no, on the podcast we do maudlin all the time. We bleed hard-hitting, edgy maudlin. Check out the story I did on a little dago gamine who fell under a train on the East side and lost both his legs—grew up to found the country’s biggest prosthetic corporation, a Fortune 500 company. Fuckin’ Mayor of Mauldinville, that little dude.”

“Is that a true story?”

“Of course it’s true. Google ‘Limbo to Limbs’.”

She’s frowning as she says, “Awesome title, anyway. So, how much do you pay your interns?”

“How about a dollar per hour for every time you say something is awesome in the next fifteen minutes? I’m kidding. Let’s discuss salary over dinner tonight and work on the writing chops as we move forward. Truth is, you have exactly the look I’m looking for.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We do a lot of street interviews. Buskers, taggers, junkie poets, underage hookerettes, people who tend to be kind of insular and non-social. You’re young, you’re gorgeous, you’re dynamic, you’re exceptionally female, and that gets us into a few places that are inaccessible to a card-carrying member of the patriarchy like moi. Plus, my cameraman is six-four with an American flag bandana and a Harley tattoo; enough said? Composition skills are hone-able; they’re like wine, they improve with age. Bone structure, you’re pretty much stuck with. Or, in your case, blessed with.”

“Dude, you dangle participles as much as I say ‘awesome.’”

“Yes, well, my evolution from a pencil-necked Jimmy Olson cub reporter to the macho anti-journalist you see before you began with the realization that we can make up the rules as we go along. Nothing is written in stone except ‘nothing is written in stone.’”

“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls,” she nods.

“Simon Garfunkel!” I say, hoping the acknowledgement will smooth any ruffled feathers.

It doesn’t. Her expression is now unabashedly Kevlar—gone is the ingenue’s interest in me as a bonafide writer, a bearer of summer jobs, a source for good cocaine or even another beer; the arc-welder known as ‘faux pas’ has sealed Chai’s armor tighter than Mother Theresa’s chastity belt.

“You’d hire me based on my looks instead of my abilities? What fucking century did you crawl out from under, dude?”

“The last one,” I shrug.

Honesty rules and damn the torpedoes! All three of my strikes came on the first pitch; Chai has sussed me out and good on her: Vive le rage against the man-chine. She thanks me for the beer, packs up her computer and leaves my business card next to her little arsenal of foil balls.

C’est la vie. I finish my Beam and water and lo and behold, as if by magic, another one appears. Lanita winks through her spider legs lashes.

I look around, squinting into several shadowy crannies that—like any self-respecting dive—the Anchor has in spades, where people can sit and observe without drawing much attention to themselves. In one, a Santa Claus-looking fellow sits. He holds up a chubby right hand in an arthritic approximation of a peace sign. It’s my old colleague D.L Crane, or ‘Rusty’ to friends like me who have known him when the little hair he has left was red instead of white.

“Christmas in July,” Rusty calls out with a lopsided smile.

2. RUSTY CRANE

I haul my fresh drink over to Rusty’s dismal den in the shadows and sit down heavily. ...and I wait for it.

“That was painful to watch,” he says.

“I’ll bet.”

“She told you to fuck off?”

“I’m sitting over here instead of calling my dope dealer, Rusty. This is me, fucking off.”

“Sign of the times, my friend. But you know that.”

“Still, I was this close,” I says, holding my index finger half an inch from my thumb to indicate just how close I’d been. “Snuffle, nibble, flick; I just couldn’t set the hook.”

“Just as well. You’d have to toss that one back. Statutory laws.”

“Nonsense, Chai is a college kid from Wayne State. Lessenberry fodder. There’s a million more where she came from. They all want to be writers, but none of them need to be writers in the way that Bobby Sands needed a fucking cheeseburger. They’ll self-destruct soon enough. What’s wrong with me sweeping up a few ashes in the meantime?”

“What’s wrong with it? That’s the crux of your problem, Danny—you don’t get what’s wrong with it. You keep getting older and college girls stay the same age.”

Whatever. Rusty is in his eighties, thirty-odd years older than me. If his libido has cooled to ambient, that’s his problem. I can dish it out as well as I can take it: “At some stage, I’m sure sex becomes an albatross around the neck. For now, Chai bits remains squab under glass.”

“You’ll find that the glass keeps getting thicker and thicker,” he sighs. “But her loss is my gain. It’s you who I was looking for, actually. Had you vanished into the steam with a co-ed on your arm, it would have been a wasted afternoon.”

“By coincidence, I am intending to get wasted this afternoon, so it still will be. What gives?”

“I have a proposition for your consideration.”

Rusty and I had once worked together at ‘Creem Magazine’ when I was a fledging critic and he was the art director, and later at ‘Hour Detroit’ where I briefly wrote human interest pieces and he did my layouts. I grew disillusioned with Hour before he did—human interest stories are supposed to contain interesting humans, and Hour would rather I wrote about millionaire dentists from Bloomfield Hills because that was their revenue base; I wanted to write about millionaire drug dealers on Cass and Holcomb and legless Italian kids who grew up to be millionaires. Rusty got, and, I think, respected my decision to leave Hour: Of course, by then, he was cresting; he’d cut his teeth in the 1960’s, ‘70s and ‘80s, having done hundreds of posters, record sleeves and album covers for legendary acts like the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead. Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane. He’d written famous linear notes for famous albums in the days when there was such thing as linear notes and albums—he is the real deal. When it comes to rock and roll history, Rusty is the local go-to sage, an elder spokesman for art and music, and he counts among his friends people in the most rarified atmosphere of superstardom.

So if he has a proposition, I assume it will be gold-star. “I’m listening,” I say. “Closely, depending on the number of dollar signs attached.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you talk like a gumshoe detective from a ‘40s noir novel?”

“Do I?”

“Affirmative. You write that way too. You never met a cliché you didn’t love.”

“It’s a style,” I shrug. “My style. Tongue-in-cheek, maybe, but with the other cheek empty in case I trip over any insight or greater cosmic purpose beneath the churning tableau of humanity. It’s also known as honesty. It used to be a valued commodity in this fucked-up profession.”

“I know. And I think it still is. You didn’t fool the young lady at the bar and you don’t fool me: Beneath all the cynicism and sarcasm and dystopian smack-talking, you never stop looking for a ray of Suzi Creamcheese, a pot of gold at the bottom of the shit-bow. And that’s not only an admirable trait, for a journalist, it’s non-negotiable.”

“Anti-journalist,” I remind him.

“Whatever you need to call yourself. I know better. When everyone else thinks they’re done, Danny, you knock on that one last door and find out whodunit. You’re Philip Marlowe, only you drink more and work less.”

“That private dick from ‘The Big Sleep’?”

“Exactly—and true to form, you refer to private investigators as slang for male genitalia. In real life, nobody does that. My dude, you stepped out of pages that Chandler could have written but decided not to.”

“Writer’s block is a bitch. Except that I don’t believe in it.”

“So when was the last time you wrote anything substantial?”

“The last time I had something substantial to write.”

“Bingo. I hate to, but I’m gonna say it anyway: That’s why you’re perfect.”

“Perfect for what?”

He has a shoulder bag on the seat next to him, and now he withdraws a yellow folder. He looks at me quizzically, and the North Pole twinkle in his eye suggests that even bad little boys sometimes score on Christmas morning:

“How would feel about interviewing Janis Joplin?”

That not only comes from left field, it comes from Minute Maid Park, which has the longest left field in major league baseball. Janis Joplin? —the Lone Star lodestar and a reference point for every honkey blues singer in the past fifty years while her handful of hits still sops up airplay on every classic rock station in the country. The Monterey Pop Festival had been a watershed for blues-infused rock in this country, and Janis Joplin had been the diva that everyone else copied—she was the first female luminary in the genre.

And then, inexplicably, around the time I was born, she’d dropped out of the public eye and had neither released an album nor courted publicity in all the years since. Why she might suddenly wanted to emote a lifetime’s worth to some nobody from Detroit, I didn’t have a clue but I did know that Rusty had worked closely with Jim Gurley from Big Brother and the Holding Company and was still tight buddies with Stanley Mouse, a well-known Detroit ex-pat artist living in Berkeley and who had done the cover art for Joplin’s studio album, ‘Little Girl Blue.’ If the opportunity came through one of them, it was legitimate.

And if it is legit, Rusty is right—for me, it is ungodly good timing, a big-time break that is long overdue. My podcast is deep in the red, my car note unpaid and I keep five gallons of water by the stove in case the city turns my spigots off.

Janis Joplin? Criminently. A founding member of The 27 Club—that so-called group of rock stars who, for reasons mostly unknown, dropped out of the public eye at the high-point of their careers. Something about twenty-seven revolutions around the sun apparently—27 is an age of introspection, during which you might have a sudden epiphany that all the trappings of fame you’ve striven for so voraciously are little more than a paper tiger and that, in the end, the scramble up the sheer cliff of celebrityhood is the challenge in and of itself and standing at the pinnacle is a self-deflating anticlimax.

At least, this is theory: Nobody can put a ribbon around it because none of The 27 Club has hitherto been willing to talk. From what I’ve read, the members have returned to private lives, and in the intervening years, not one of them has granted so much as a Chai-quality ‘fuck off’ to the media, let alone an interview.

Meanwhile, so peculiar and persuasive is the phenomenon in American musical culture that a unique phrase has grown up around it: To say that someone ‘pulled a 27’ meant that they’ve left a dream career midstream and never looked back. In order to ‘pull a 27’, you didn’t necessarily have to be 27 or a musician, but every officially-recognized member of The 27 Club had been a pop star exactly that age when they decided to chuck it all in and slip back beneath the tides. Far too many of them had done it at the same point in their lives for The Club to be nothing but coincidence.

And Janis had been one of the first to jump ship. In her day, she had been one of the few legitimate blues singers to have arisen from that brief, doomed, counter-culture musical morass, and certainly she was the only one whose skin was as white as a mainsail, even one that was generally three-sheets to the wind. From what I recall reading about her heroin-fueled, drink-soused escapades, had Elton John written a song about her instead of Marylin Monroe, he would have called it ‘Dumpster Fire in the Wind.’

Still, in terms of raw talent, she was one of a kind; the guttural, heart-wrenching vocals that blew out of that thick white Texas throat could blast holes through mountains, like Vavoom from those old Felix the Cat cartoons.

Now, if Janis Joplin is really ready to break ranks with The Club and talk to a reporter, it will be something of a cultural bombshell—at least, it will sew a missing page into the musical bible.

But the bigger question looms: Why me?

Rusty goes on: “I know, right? Let me put it indelicately, Danny. Every time you do something I like, you do something else that makes me hate your guts. And just when I hate your guts, you do something else that I like. You’re the endless enigma. But when Jorma told me that Janis had finally decided she owed her fans an explanation, he asked me if I could recommend somebody to handle an interview...”

Now, this makes sense. I knew he was friends with Jorma Kaukonen, who had produced Joplin’s infamously bootlegged ‘Typewriter Tape’ in 1964—so-called because the random sound of Kaukonen’s wife typing a letter can be heard behind Janis’ vocals.

Rusty continues, “…I ran through a mental short-list and concluded that most of the music writers I know are dead, Lester Bangs, Ralph Gleason and among the few left alive—Marcus, Marsh, Landau—I wouldn’t trust a-one of ‘em to write ‘fuck’ on a shithouse wall. Except one, if only I could convince him to leave the shithouse. Anyway, I sent Jorma a copy of ‘Rhapsodies in Rust’ and he handed it to Janis. Guess which one of your slice-of-living-death vignettes sealed the deal?”

“ ‘A Farewell to Legs’? No, how about the one about the guy who catches giant salamanders in the Detroit River and sells them to Chinese restaurants?”

“Don’t be an idiot. ‘The Casals of Cass Corridor’ where you profiled a genius cellist who plays for quarters during rush hour. She’s into discovering geniuses living in the gutter.”

“That dude wound up being run over by an MDOT bus. Did you know that?”

“It doesn’t matter, that’s not the point. Believe it or don’t, she digs your M.O. where you launch yourself into the streets and take no prisoners. Go figure —she likes your Chandler schtick, your thug persona. And she loves the term ‘anti-journalist’—like an edgier version of ‘counterculture.’ She called you a pen-poker, and apparently, that’s a compliment. Detroit still has a dystopian cachet of raw reality, even out in Texas. All the scaly journalists he talked to couldn’t see straight for the stars in their eyes; I told him that you don’t approach your subjects with awe, even when you’re in awe of them.”

“Awesome!” I say, my voice gone a few octaves higher.

“The thing is, there are two stipulations you’ll have to agree to before any of this moves forward. First, it’s immediate radio silence—Janis does not want anybody else to know she’s finally agreed to speak to someone on the record, and afterward she won’t authorize the release until she reads what you write. And that’s the second catch: She has to retain rights of refusal if she doesn’t like how you handle her story and you’ll have to sign a contract stating that you cannot publish without her written approval. It’s iron-clad and frankly, you won’t have the financial means to fight it and no magazine will want to. Her own photographer will be on hand, but there will be no tape recorders or video cameras. You’ll have to do it from notes. If any of that is a deal breaker, you can finish your drink and go back to trawling for jailbait.”

“Deal-breaker? Pshaw. Detroit is more a place than a state of mind—I yam who I yam; not big on contracts, but I’m also not big on anything less than Brobdingnagian, hypnotic self-confidence. Five seconds after meeting her, I’ll know exactly what I want to write and I’ll convince her that that’s what she want me to write. It’s my superpower. And let’s be honest; if she’s really after lip-smackin’, whip-crackin’, paddy-whackin’ dystopian raw reality, I’m untouchable in the genre. But you know that.”

The lopsided grin returns, but it is tinted with a fleck of foreboding: “It’s a golden opportunity, Danny, and it’s my reputation on the line as much as yours. So don’t turn it into ‘fuck’ on a shithouse wall.”

3. THE DOMINOES

Yours truly, Pen-Poker, once again: Ratchet forward...

So, the Joplin interview gets done and the sweet old doll loves it and there is a brief bidding war among a few prominent national magazines. I settle on the one I think most deserving—‘Rolling Stone’. For three times their going rate. I may be nostalgic, but I’m still a mercenary.

I pay off my grocery-getter, then trade it in for a brand-new used Carrera with 145,000 miles on it, but which at one time had been cherried-out with a hand-rubbed paint job—seventeen coats of lacquer with about five of them left, pearl-grey, in honor of Janis. Actually, it is sort of shitty of me: Magnanimously, Crane fronted me the dough to fly down to Texas for the Janis interview, and I have neglected to repay him from those proceeds. But I have a self-image, and I see myself as more Porsche than Pinto.

So, that should have been it, and this should be an epilogue instead of a prologue.

But a strange thing happened in the weeks before it actually saw print.

In early August I got a text from Rusty which was not (as I expected) a threat, unless the three-letter message—‘CBB’—stood for ‘Could Be Broken’, as in knee-caps. CBB was our private buzz code for ‘Could Be Big’. We’ve used it intermittently over the years when one of us had an exceptional idea—usually at the high-point of high-induced brainstorms, pharmaceutical or botanical. Frankly, in the cold light of a hungover dawn, most of our CBB ideas wound up being remarkably undersized. I’m sure you’ve been there.

Not this one, though.

Rusty is as delighted as he is relieved that I haven’t fubar-ed the Joplin piece, and according to him, who heard it through Jorma, Janis was shouting my praises from the rafters. Classic rock to my ears; ‘fess up time—most of my legendary arrogance is stagecraft and my self-esteem doesn’t extend beyond the last period I type.

But dig this: Brian Jones—who did his own vanishing act not long before Janis after a near-drowning mishap—has gotten wind of her interview (maybe from her) and is now considering doing one his own.

Whoa. It’s a sad fucking story, for sure: Jones, a founding member of the Rolling Stones—the Stone who’d not only named the band but hired Jagger and Richards, and in doing so, made himself superfluous—suffered irreversible brain damage since nearly drowning in his swimming pool in 1969. I didn’t even consider him an official member of The 27 Club since hadn’t dropped out of the public eye on his own volition, but on the advice of his medical team. Interviewing a vegetable is totally Jainist stoner.

“Getting Brian Jones to speak is a no-brainer. From what I’ve heard, his own handlers can’t get him to shut up. Problem is, nobody wants to listen to him anymore. It’s all crazy talk, the poor bastard, but it is arcana and it is posterity no matter what he gives you.”

“I mean, seriously, that’s a CBBigger.”

“And that’s not all. I might have a few strings left to pull. Score Jones and I can almost certainly tie a ribbon around Jim Morrison. That dude’s ego will not sit idly by and be the third man out.”

“You wanna be my road manager?”

“I’m getting a little long in the tooth for the road, my dude, but I’m going to be your partner. Fifty-fifty on a coffee table book you’ll write and I’ll design and illustrate. ‘The 27 Club Interviews’. ‘Un pour tous et tous pour un’, we Two Musketeers. Let ‘Rolling Stone’ cover our printing costs and write a seven figure advance check if they want to slap their logo on the front and I’m jiggy with it.”

“Draw the motherfuckers up, my friend. I’m still into you a few bills for Texas.”

“Oh, trust me, Danny, I never forget a favor or a debt. I’m having a contract finalized as we speak.

“Bring it on,” I say, tick-tocking like a bobblehead. “Fuckin’ aye,” I cry. “Joplin, Jones and Morrison would be the Trifecta to end all Trifectas. Or Trifecti or whatever.”

“Not quite all. Think with a bit more chutzpah, Danny; it’s your forte. Could Be Biggest: I believe that getting Cobain is within the realm.”

On that one, I wasn’t sure.

On the other hand, it would be unique. Rusty goes on:

“So I say we shoot for the moon. I don’t have any connections, but like the Monterey Pop Festival, these things begin to take on a life of their own. Since his wink-wink ‘accident’ Cobain’s been doing half-assed artwork but given the context, he might consent to talk if we stuck to his present endeavors and not all that bullshit grunge he wants to forget. And while we’re at it, let’s contact Amy Winehouse’s people. As far as I can tell, the only unreachable star is probably Hendrix. Nobody who knew him thinks he’s still alive.”

“Now that’s a shame. The music he’d be doing today? That alone would be worth the price of admission.

And as it happens, Morrison is the first domino to fall, and lo and behold, the others follow. I’d say ‘the rest is musical history’ but you’re holding it in your hands I’m really trying to cold-turkey the clichés, folks. And as any twelve-step program will tell you, the first rung on the ladder is admitting you have a problem.

What follows are The 27 Club interviews, and I don’t care if you put them on your marble-and-titanium coffee table or next to an overflowing ashtray on top of your toilet. Roll a fat doobie with the pages if you want to, just so long as in the meantime, you enjoy them.

- Danny Ayres