One August night in 1965, I parked in the driveway of my best friend Derf Marko’s house and let myself in the back door. As I entered, I could see to the bottom of the basement stairs, where I observed a loud pulsing darkness with plumes of agreeably acrid smoke floating up through the stairwell. Back in the darkness, I heard Fred and another person making declarative statements in loud unintelligible bursts. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, Marko’s basement rec room looked like a trashed-out tiki bar illuminated by a single red Christmas light hanging just above a Dual turntable. The room was dark to a point where it was impossible to walk without stepping on records or to make out who was there and what was going on. I slouched on a couch, closed my eyes, and let my mind follow the sounds of rock drummers wailing like angry cats.
Soon it was obvious: Marko was frantically playing one drum solo after another while some crazy old dude kept hollering for the next solo before the last one finished. The revved-up stranger kept slapping his knees, muttering, and drumming along with each different drummer. Stacks of unsleeved LPs littered the linoleum floor and pink wool couch I was slumping on. But unbelievably, Marko adeptly—without cursing, fumbling, or hesitation—located every solo he wanted.
I found out later that the crazed “old guy” was Ginger Baker, which means that Marko was tripping out, putting on his best blues shaman deejay show, an act he’d been perfecting since he started working at his dad’s Chess Records outlet.1 Every Sunday, Fred’s job at his dad’s store was to play records, keep an eye out for shoplifters, and scrutinize the bin browsers in order to play records he thought they might buy. He called that “casting baits,” and that’s how he met Ginger Baker.
Not counting speed-typing and getting arrested, Marko’s best skill was playing records for people with a thirst for far-out blues and gospel.
Another summer night, at about 2 in the morning, I was sitting on the sidewalk next to a motel door when Fred appeared carrying a professional-looking battery-powered reel-to-reel recorder. Before he
