The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

Frankie felt his whole body shiver. He slid off the chair and nervously approached, touching his teacher’s shoulder to let him know he was there.

  “Come now,” El Maestro whispered over the chords. “Take the other guitar and sing the song.”

  “But I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Yes. And you will be scared again. All your life. You must conquer this. Face them and pretend they aren’t there.”

  “Maestro—­”

  “You can do it. Always remember I said you can do it.”

  Frankie was petrified, but his trust in his teacher was complete. He picked up the guitar, put the strap over his shoulder, and began strumming the chords that he and El Maestro had practiced. Finally, after waiting through the intro, he sang his first song for an audience.

  I found my love in Avalon

  Beside the bay . . .

  The ­people glanced back and forth. He was singing in English!

  I left my love in Avalon

  And I sailed away . . .

  I will admit, I enjoyed watching their reactions. Frankie’s voice was so rich and true, they could not help but admire it (meaning, of course, they were admiring me). And he and El Maestro played their guitars in perfect balance, Frankie driving the rhythm, his teacher lacing solo notes, like sprinkling sugar atop a cookie. For one entire verse, the crowd marveled. For one entire verse, art overtook politics, and beauty overtook fright.

  I dream of her in Avalon

  From dusk till dawn

  So I think I’ll travel on

  To Avalon.

  Frankie’s voice, like a strong drink, had made the patrons momentarily forget their fear. But like a drink, it did not last. A man in a beige suit was the first. He banged his glass in protest. Once. Then again. Others followed. Soon the whole taberna was slamming its glasses or silverware. Fear pulled down the curtain. Frankie stopped singing. Tears formed in his eyes. He spun to his teacher, who, as if expecting this, stopped playing.

  “Help me up,” El Maestro said.

  He rose, holding Frankie’s hand. As the customers booed, El Maestro leaned toward Frankie and said, “Now we take a bow, like this.”

  He bent at the waist. Frankie did the same. The jeers grew louder. Someone yelled, “Traidor!”

  “Always thank your audience,” El Maestro whispered. He squeezed Frankie’s hand.

  “Now lead us out the back.”

  The rest, for Frankie, was a blur. He would remember Alberto, the conga player, waiting behind the wheel of a car in the alley. He would remember a long ride in the dark. He would remember crying much of the trip, thinking of how he made those ­people angry. He would remember El Maestro, the new guitar case between his knees, saying very little, until he felt the car bump and he asked Alberto, “How much longer?” and Alberto said, “Twenty minutes, my friend.”

  He would remember his teacher handing him a silver flask and telling him to drink, that they had a long journey ahead and Frankie needed to sleep. He would remember a sweet but stinging taste to the liquid. He would remember El Maestro handing him the guitar case.

  “This will be yours now, boy. It is a fine instrument, made of rosewood and spruce, with an ebony neck. The builder is from an old family of guitar makers. This is important. There should be history in whatever you play.”

  Frankie wanted to be happy. A new guitar. But too many emotions were swirling inside him.

  “Why did I have to sing, Maestro?”

  “One day, you will understand.”

  “But they banged their cups.”

  “And you showed courage. You will need that in life.”

  “Where are we going?”

  The blind man turned away.

  “Do you remember your first lesson?”

  “Yes, Maestro.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I listened.”

  “That is right. And where you are going, you will also have to listen. When you listen, you learn. Remember that. In music and in life.”

  “But, Maestro—­”

  “When you started to play, the first time, what do you remember?”

  “It hurt.”

  “Yes,” the blind man said. His voice choked. “And this will hurt as well.” He cleared his throat. “But you will form your calluses. And it will get easier.”

  The car bumped. The blind man rubbed his face.

  “Francisco.”

  “Yes, Maestro?”

  “There are strings inside this guitar case. You will put them on this guitar.”

  “All right, Maestro.”

  “They were very special to me.”

  “Why, Maestro?”

  “They were from my wife.”

  “You have a wife, Maestro?”

  “No longer.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “She went to heaven. The strings were a present. I never used them.”

  “Because she died?”

  “Yes, before she could give them to me. I found them in her purse.”

  Frankie tried to imagine what the woman looked like.

  “Were those her dresses in the closet?”

  “Her dresses. Her shoes. A bottle of her perfume. You don’t need much to remember someone, Francisco. Even one thing will do.”

  He reached over and patted the boy’s knee.

  “You have those strings from me. That is enough.”

  Frankie felt even more scared now.

  “Are we leaving our home, Maestro?”

  “It is just a flat.”

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “Above a laundry.”

  “Are you coming with me?”

  No answer.

  “Where are we going?”

  The blind man leaned over. “What do you see outside?”

  Frankie squinted against the windowpane. It was very dark. But as they came over a rise, Alberto slowed the car, and in the distance, small diamonds of moonlight glimmered to the horizon.

  “The sea,” Frankie whispered.

  Dizzy Gillespie, the jazz trumpet player, once said, “It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” He was one of my special ones. And he was quite correct. Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do.

  But it is not the same with words. What you do not say can haunt you. El Maestro was an artist (his soul was surely mine), but his instincts were too musical for this life. He left out words as he left out notes.

  And so that night, as they sat at the Valencia harbor, he let Frankie fall asleep without telling him everything. And an hour later, when they got the signal, he carried the boy in his arms, walking up a long ramp to a ship, following behind Alberto, who held the bag and the guitar and whispered, “Straight ahead, Maestro . . . watch this plank, Maestro . . .” Many times the blind man lifted the child’s head to his face, rubbing his cheeks against Frankie’s nose and chin, as if memorizing its shape.

  He hadn’t told him so many things. That they were not making this journey together. That the boy would awaken, somewhere in the belly of this ship, in the company of men who had been bribed to ensure his passage. That he would find, in his guitar case, a roll of money, traveling documents, a piece of fabric with an American address, and a note that read, in the wiggly letters of a blind man’s penmanship:

  Francisco—­

  It is time for you to leave. It is too dangerous here. This is your papa’s wish. He loves you and will find you one day. I am sorry that I cannot continue to teach you. But you can teach yourself now. Find your aunt in America. When you need money, play your guitar. If you miss me, as I will miss you, close your eyes and play the strings that I gave you. I will be in your music always.

  ??
?­Maestro

  He did not tell him anything else—­not the details of the prison visit, not the length of Baffa’s sentence, not the answers to any of Frankie’s many questions, including the one about El Maestro ever being able to see. The truth was, yes, his teacher once had sight. He lost it fighting early in his country’s civil war, protecting his wife’s younger brother, who had raced off to fight with the Republic. He followed the brother into battle. During a violent attack, he saved the young man from a grenade, which exploded, instead, near El Maestro, containing a poison gas that smelled like mustard. In the days that followed, his skin grew blotchy and his eyesight slowly disappeared, like a curtain lowering on his life.

  The brother, ashamed, fled the country. El Maestro returned home a blind man.

  “We have arrived, my friend,” Alberto said.

  “Where are our contacts?”

  “Right in front of us,” he answered, nodding at two unshaven sailors from the engine room.

  “Is he blind?” one sailor asked.

  “He is a great artist,” Alberto said.

  “You know what to do with this boy?” El Maestro said.

  “Yes, yes. England, then America. Hurry up.”

  “Alberto? Can they be trusted?”

  “They can be trusted, Maestro.”

  “We’ve done this many times,” the sailor said. “Where is the money?”

  “In my pocket. Take the child. Careful.”

  El Maestro held out the sleeping Frankie, and felt his arms being relieved of their burden. Suddenly, he gasped. He was not prepared for the emptiness that overwhelmed him.

  “Wait. Where is he? Where is he?”

  “Right here, for God’s sake.”

  “Francisco!”

  “Calm down! We have him. See?” The sailor took El Maestro’s hand and tapped it against Frankie’s face. “All right? Keep your voice low.”

  “Yes. Forgive me.”

  “He’ll be safe.”

  “Good.”

  “This is hard for him,” Alberto interjected.

  “The money. Now.” The sailor spat. “It’s not my fault the man can’t see.”

  Of course, had El Maestro been able to see, our story would be different, for long before handing over the boy in the moonlight, he would have recognized something in Frankie’s dark grape hair and deep blue eyes and the curl of his lips. He would have seen in the boy’s face the unmistakable reflection of his wife, Carmencita. He would have somehow realized she was Frankie’s mother, and the burned corpse left behind in the church was only half the murder he had thought.

  He would have realized, when Baffa confessed to not being the child’s father, that he, El Maestro, was. That for years he had been teaching the very child he had been mourning.

  But this is the note that fate chose to leave out, shading the melody by making it heartbreaking. Instead, the blind man unknowingly handed his only son to two sailors from the engine room. He gave them ten rolls of pesetas from the velvet sack in his jacket pocket. They took the boy, his bag, and the guitar, which contained the gifted strings and the traveling papers signed by a Carlos Andrés Presto, listing the boy not as a Rubio but as Francisco Presto.

  In losing his father, Frankie regained his name.

  Minutes later, the boat pulled away from the harbor. El Maestro heard the croaking engine, the splash of waves against the hull, all the sounds of disengagement. He remained there on the ramp, high above the water, until the sounds were gone and the ship was far away. He took off his dark glasses and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands. Suddenly, he could not stop his tears.

  “Why do you cry, Maestro?” Alberto asked.

  He had no words to answer. Only that he felt as hollow as the inside of his guitar. He held out his arm until he found the conga player’s shoulder.

  “My friend . . . Thank you for helping me.”

  He could not see the blank expression on Alberto’s face. He could not see his eyes get smaller or his jaw set. He only felt the man’s hand slip quickly inside his pocket and steal the velvet sack of money.

  “You’re welcome,” Alberto said. “Good-­bye.”

  He pushed the blind man over the ledge, dropping him twenty feet into the water, where his tears and the sea became one.

  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.’’

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; 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?