Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

“Go for it, Pops! Right on, right on!” Mojo nodded and grinned at the crowd, accepting the ovation, drinking it in like a willow in a warm rain.

“Dammit, Gary,” LeVoy said, “they’re laughing at him. This is wrong, man. Now either get him off, or I will.”

“Thank you! I thank y’all!” Mojo swept off his fedora, bowed grandly, lurched and almost fell, a comic turn that brought a roar of approval from the crowd. He straightened slowly, his ebon face gleaming with perspiration in the spotlights. “I’m back,” he growled softly, as if to himself, “I come back from hell to jam one more time.” He tapped his foot slowly and began to pick, his guitar whining softly, like a woman crying in her sleep.

“What’s he doing?” Turco said desperately. “That’s not the song we rehearsed—”

“I think it’s the old intro to ‘Hard Luck Blues’,” LeVoy snapped. “My God, he’s on autopilot. He thinks he’s closing his old set.” LeVoy sprinted back onstage, grabbed his guitar, and whirled to face the band. “Key of E,” he said quietly, “blues changes, hard shuffle. Kick in when he hits the turnaround.” He gave them a silent count, three fingers and a clenched fist. They came in raggedly, but together, tightening up after two bars into a rock solid rhythm. Mojo picked up on it, nodding to the beat, melding with it, and began to cook harder, with more energy, playing like a man in a fever.

Four straight choruses, then five, the tempo gradually increasing, Mojo’s guitar growling fiercely with a familiar jubilation, freed from its cage. The audience didn’t respond at first, baffled by the turnabout. But the old man gradually won them over, blowing them away with his raw energy, his half-crazed passion. Gary Turco strode on stage, picked up his guitar, and joined in, playing rhythm with the band. The music was crude, unpolished, but it was the real thing, steelyard hard, irresistible.

Mojo sang a couple of verses, shouting into the lights, eyes closed, sweat streaming, burning off twenty years of frustration, a lifetime of rage. LeVoy and Gary moved forward, flanking Mojo at the mike, jamming in the background beneath the old man’s voice, dueling, a musical skirmish that broke into open warfare when Mojo came back in on guitar.

Three players, from different eras, different worlds, each playing at top form, forcing the others to raise the level of their games, to cook harder with every chorus or be blown out by the talent of the other two.

The song was pure energy now, art on another plane, transmuted, breathing on its own, a thirty chorus nonstop marathon, full tilt boogie on the edge of chaos. The audience was magnifying the electricity, on their feet, shouting, whistling, absorbing the intensity from the stage, reflecting it back five thousandfold. Twenty minutes thundered past, twenty-five, and then Mojo suddenly shattered the magic.

He quit in the middle of a chorus and stepped away from the mike, halting the backup musicians with a slashing motion across his throat, hammering on his guitar like a judge calling for order.

A moment’s stunned silence, LeVoy, Gary, Mojo, eyeing each other warily, panting, sweat-slick fighters between rounds, the crowd forgotten. Until the audience erupted in an ovation, a foot-stomping, howling roar for an encore. Mojo stood there in the lights, swaying in the noise like a willow in a gale. Then he slowly turned to Gary. “You warm yet, white boy? Show ’em what you got.”

Gary nodded gamely, took a ragged breath, and stepped forward. He began with the signature riff to the song, playing it slowly at first, then increasing the speed, bending it, dancing it all over the guitar neck, blurring it into a cascade of fingertapping heavy metal pyrotechnics. Ax had heard Turco before but never like this. He was playing so far over his head he should have been levitating. The audience responded with a roar of approval when he finished, but Gary didn’t seem to notice. He was watching Mojo. The old man met his stare eye to eye, then shook his head slowly.

“You don’t listen worth a damn, do ya? I told you that first day you usin’ too many notes. You don’t need all them notes, you just need a few, or maybe just one. The right one.”

Mojo struck a single note, a bell tone low on the neck, then turned away from the crowd to face the wall of amplifiers behind him, holding the note, letting it ring, sustaining it, letting feedback from the amps build it into a hum, then a howl. Eyes closed, his dark suit sweat-drenched, the old man slowly raised his battered guitar over his head with his numbed arm, shifting it gently, each movement altering the note, making it soar, swoop, even trill, the guitar singing in its own voice, a virtuoso display of talent and craft. Or magic.

Ax was as transfixed as anyone in the audience, perhaps more so since he understood the technical difficulty of what Mojo was doing. He scarcely noticed when Landau shouldered through the crowd to his side.

“The cops are here. They’ve got Pollack in custody, wanna talk to Mojo.”