waved to the crowd, got into his old truck, turned the lights off, and drove into the night.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Purple Monsters . . . ” said Lucius, to wild applause, and Vinnie leaned into the mike, “and the Hellbenders,” more applause, then back to Lucius, “would like to welcome you to the first annual piss-off—I mean, singoff—between our own Bobby and the Bombers,” cheers, “and the challengers,” said Vinnie, “the Kool-Tones!” More applause.
“They’ll do two sets, folks,” said Lucius, “taking turns. And at the end, the unlucky group, gauged by your lack of applause, will win a prize!”
The crowd went wild.
The lights dimmed out. “And now,” came Vinnie’s voice from the still blackness of the loading dock, “for your listening pleasure, Bobby and the Bombers!”
“Yayyyyyyyyyy!”
The lights, virtually the only lights in the city except for those that were being run by emergency generators, came up, and there they were.
Imagine frosted, polished elegance being thrust on the unwilling shoulders of a sixteen-year-old.
They had on blue jackets, matching pants, ruffled shirts, black ties, cufflinks, tie tacks, shoes like obsidian mortar trowels. They were all black boys, and from the first note, you knew they were born to sing:
“Bah bah,” sang Letus the bassman, “doo-doo dah-du doo-ahh, dah-doo—dee-doot,” sang the two tenors, Lennie and Conk, and then Bobby and Fred began trading verses of the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” while the tenors wailed and Letus carried the whole with his bass.
Then the lights went down and came up again as Lucius said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Kool-Tones!”
It was magic of a grubby kind.
The Kool-Tones shuffled on, arms pumping in best Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers fashion, and they ran in place as the hand-clapping got louder and louder, and they leaned into the mikes.
They were dressed in waiters’ red-cloth jackets the Hellbenders had stolen from a laundry service for them that morning. They wore narrow black ties, except Leroy, who had on a big, thick, red bow tie he’d copped from his sister’s boyfriend.
Then Cornelius leaned over his mike and: “Doook doook doook doookov,” and Ray and Zoot joined with dook dook dook dookov, into Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl,” with Leroy smiling and doing all of Chandler’s hand moves. Slim chugged away the iiiiiiiiyiyiyiiii’s in the background in runs that made the crowd’s blood run cold, and the lights went down.
Then the Bombers were back, and in contrast to the up tempo ending of “The Duke of Earl” they started with a sweet tenor a cappella line and then: “woo-radad-da-dat, woo-radad—da-dat” of Shep and the Limelites’ “Daddy’s Home.”
The Kool-Tones jumped back into the light. This time Cornelius started off with “Bom-a-pa-bomp, bomp-pa-pa-bomp, dang-a-dang-dang, ding-a-dong-ding,” and into the Marcels’ “Blue Moon,” not just a mere hit but a monster back in 1961. And they ran through the song, Slim taking the lead, and the crowd began to yell like mad halfway through. And Leroy—smiling, singing, rocking back and forth, doing James Brown tantrum-steps in front of the mike—knew, could feel, that they had them; that no matter what, they were going to win. And he ended with his whining part and Cornelius went “Bomp-ba-ba-bomp-ba-bom,” and paused and then, deeper, “booo mooo.”
The lights came up and Bobby and the Bombers hit the stage. At first Leroy, sweating, didn’t realize what they were doing, because the Bombers, for the first few seconds, made this churning rinky-tink sound with the high voices. The bass, Letus, did this grindy sound with his throat. Then the Bombers did the only thing that could save them, a white boy’s song, Bobby launching into Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” with both feet hitting the stage at once. Leroy thought he could taste that urine already.
The other Kool-Tones were transfixed by what was about to happen.
“They can’t do that, man,” said Leroy. “They’re gonna cop out.”
“That’s impossible. Nobody can do it.”
But when the Bombers got to the break, this guy Fred stepped out to the mike and went: “Eee-de-ee-dee-eedle-eee-eee, eee-deee-eed le-deeee, eedle-dee-eed le-dee-dee-dee, eewheetle-eedle-dee-deedle-dee-eeeeee,” in a splitting falsetto, half mechanical, half Martian cattle call—the organ break of “Runaway,” done with the human voice.
The crowd was on its feet screaming, and the rest of the song was lost in stamping and cheers.
When the Kool-Tones jumped out for the last song of the first set, there were some boos and yells for the Bombers to come back, but then Zoot started talking about his girl putting him down because he couldn’t shake ’em down, but how now he was back, to let