I need to get this off my chest. You’ll understand why.
First off, despite all the rumors which have surrounded my discoveries in the pianowork of Wolfgang “Whiskey Pete” M’Cloud, I did NOT use some kind of computer magic on his recordings. I lack the skill even to come up with some of his amazing fingerings, and, in any case, this story goes back to before the days when such alterations were not within the budget of mild-mannered music collectors.
It was 1976 when I went to that auction and bought that big box of piano rolls. I’ve told that story before. I the early days of recorded music, the machinery was simply not able to cope with percussion instruments: drums, chimes, pianos. Your piano men who could would record their work for piano rolls, which could be played back on a piano and not on the primitive disc or cylinder machines. Everyone wants to find a previously unknown Scott Joplin or Jelly Roll Morton piece.
I was a little excited to find I had reproducing rolls, the piano roll’s sophisticated cousin, which could record more flourishes and tricks than a basic player piano: dynamics, especially. Unfortunately, these came from the files of a defunct piano company and consisted mainly of the performances of one Wolfgang M’Cloud. These were drab, dull, and included not a single song unrecorded elsewhere: mass-produced songs written for mass consumption, middle of the road hymns and songs of the generation before his. The only thing mildly interesting was that these were the original rolls. The paper had been cut and pasted, as was common in the studio, to correct the occasional missed note. This generally matters only if the song or the performer matters to somebody. And Wolfgang M’Cloud mattered to nobody living.
That did NOT mean they did not matter. The night after I had closed up the box again, to be added to my other unnecessary purchases, I slept with difficulty, waking over and again from dreams where a hand reached to me out of the ground as someone called “Help me!”
The seventh or eighth time, I just got out of bed and went into my study. Maybe making a list of the songs on the rolls would put me to sleep. And the box of piano rolls said “Help me!”
I sat down in the old kitchen chair I used at my desk, thought it over, and decided the only way to figure out whether I was awake was to open the box. I did this, and from among the musical scrolls rose a head with tousled grey hair, followed by a body in a tousled grey suit.
“W-Wolfgang M’Cloud,” I said. I had seen his face about six times on advertising flyers in the box.
“Yes.” His voice was deep and echoed with gloom. “You must help me. You CAN help me. I am denied entry to Heaven while people believe the lie. You can help me.”
I pulled a piece of paper and pencil over. “How can I help?” I hoped this wasn’t going to be expensive. The hollow-eyed specter didn’t look like anybody I wanted hanging around.
“You must correct the lie.”
I raised the pencil to the paper in what I hoped was an encouraging way. “The lie?”
He fixed me with those deep, grieving eyes. “ I am NOT the brilliant piano player people think me.”
As far as I ever knew (or have learned since), no one ever listened to a commercial M’Cloud piano roll and thought “What a genius of technique!” But I had never argued with a ghost before and didn’t plan to start now.
“By day, I played piano for our theater, and when the movie was bad, there was always the music. A local businessman started a company which built reproducing pianos.” The ghost sobbed, and ran his hands through his hair. “I played like an angel for the audiences in the theater, but…this mechanical piano frightened me. I could not…could not face it without help.”
I continued to brandish a cheerful pencil while he broke off, face buried in his hands. From between his fingers, he went on, “Everyone at the company knew how much I had to drink before I could sit up to the keyboard. When they thought I could not her, they called me…Whiskey Pete.”
He straightened suddenly, his face one massive scowl, causing me to squeak my chair back along the floorboards to put a little distance between us. “You must show people the sodden fool I was. Let the piano rolls be played as I really played them. Show the world my shame, that I may no longer wait under the shadow of the genius they believe my recordings represent.”
Of course, that was not the end of our association. Each night at midnight, he would reappear, and I would take up the task of painstakingly removing every correction, every edit the piano roll company had made. He was able to tell me where they had cut new notes, so these could be covered. He showed where even the tempo had had to be changed.
Paper, scissors, and glue were not expensive, but to make his repentance complete, I had to locate a reasonable facsimile of that obscure brand of piano. I found one already restored or I might be at it today. It even came with half a dozen of the published Wolfgang M’Cloud rolls, to the ghost’s great pain.
But that pain was nothing compared to that in his face when the old piano was set up in my living room and I put in the first of the rolls we had worked on. “Oh!”
He shuddered. The cacophony made him shrink toward the box of piano rolls. “Oh! Make them public. Let my shame be known. Let me rest.” I have never seen that ghost again.
I sat there and listened to the rest of the roll. I rewound it and tried another. His whiskey-tempered performance struck me as unrestrained, improvisatory. The cacophony held together. And so I, to some slight degree, invented the jazz genius Whiskey Pete M’Cloud, a tortured soul who slaved away at an uninspiring theater job by day and indulged his genius by night. That’s all I needed to do: touch up the story a bit. The wild errors Wolfgang made under the effects of the bottle have been studied and analyzed by musicologists ever since.
Why tell anyone now? Well, the doctor says I’ll be lucky to make it another month, the way my health is going. And you see that chair? My deck chair, the one Wolfgang leaned on as he looked over my shoulder as we consulted and fussed over those old piano rolls.
Damaged? Yeah. Those burn marks are where his fingers sat. Just taking out a little…insurance, let’s say.
Blogsy Babbles 