Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

“Right on. So after Jester’s first album ran up the charts, he moved back to Boston and did all of his future recordings at Vagabond Sound on the Cape. Don’t ask me why. Maybe he felt like the place was a good-luck charm for him or something. Who the hell knows with musicians? His first two albums did great guns and then he recorded this classic,” Roscoe said, pointing at the studio speakers. “But his fourth album was uninspired. His fifth was downright awful. Suddenly all the adulation, the comparisons to Dylan and Donovan, vanished. Then, so did he. Stopped touring. Stopped recording. Pretty much became a recluse. There were all sorts of rumors about his disappearance from the scene: bad acid trips, a sailing accident, a smack OD, schizophrenia, a pilgrimage to India to study meditation with some nutty guru. One rumor, my personal favorite, is that he was a passenger in the car when Paul McCartney bought the ranch. Man, I miss those days. You could say anything, crazy things, and people believed it.”

Jesse tapped his watch crystal. “Sometime today, Roscoe. Remember, the stuff of legend.”

“My bad. Sorry, man. So flash-forward to 1974 and there are new rumors, only these are positive ones. Word is that Jester was back in the studio recording an album that was more mature, deeper, more intense and poetic than his old stuff. That it was going to blow everybody’s mind. By the next year, word had leaked from the record-label people about the album’s title—”

“The Hangman’s Sonnet.”

“You should have been a detective.”

“Wiseass.”

“According to my ex, my ass is the only part of me that ever had any brains. Otherwise I would’ve been in a business where I made some real scratch.”

“So...”

“So the deal was that the album was thematically based on a sonnet written in like 1882 in Wyoming or some such place by an anonymous guy who was about to be hanged for murdering the woman who done him wrong.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Doesn’t it, though?”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming on.”

Niles guzzled some scotch and laughed. “Funny, I think I’m one of a very few people who’s ever heard it. Back when we were friends, Stan White invited me to the studio to hear the master before they turned it over to the record label.”

Jesse was losing his patience. “But...”

“The master tape disappeared.”

“It’s been my experience that things don’t just disappear.”

“Okay. Stolen, then. Kind of beside the point, because one way or the other that tape did an Elvis and left the building and it’s never been recovered.”

“I’m no expert, but why not remix the album from the other tapes.”

“There, my friend, is the rub.” Niles took a sip of his drink. “They didn’t remix it because there was only ever just one master tape. They brought the musicians for one day of rehearsals and then recorded the album live on tape, twelve songs straight through over two days. The only editing done was to be the countdowns and the banter between songs. The version I heard still had those things on it.”

Jesse asked, “But why not rerecord it?”

“I guess part of the answer to that is the roster of musicians who played on the album. They were like an all-star who’s-who band of people who were admirers of Jester, people who had rearranged their schedules for this onetime deal. There’s some argument about who was really there, but I’m pretty sure Stephen Stills and Glen Campbell were on guitar, Booker T. on the organ, Leon Russell on piano, Jim Keltner on drums, Charlie Daniels on the fiddle, Earl Scruggs on banjo, and, get this, Paul McCartney on bass. The backup singers were James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Mavis Staples, and Linda Ronstadt. But here’s the best part: None of them has ever admitted to taking part in the sessions. Very mysterious, like they signed nondisclosure forms or something, or maybe none of them has wanted to be associated with a musician’s worst nightmare. Bad karma and mojo.

“But I suppose the better answer is that, unlike the rumors in the sixties, Jester did actually go flip city when the tape walked out the door. He couldn’t bring himself to remake the album, couldn’t even get out of bed. I hear he was catatonic for a spell. When he came out of it, he went into total seclusion, and I do mean total. Greta Garbo had nothing on him. And the lawsuits!” Roscoe threw up his hands. “Everybody was suing everybody else — Jester the recording studio, the record label Jester, Jester the record company. It was a free-for-all.”

“What happened?”