Marsha Hunt - Joy

Sebastian and the other musicians always went on before the girls and did a couple songs to warm theyselves up and gee the audience up, and then Sebastian would yell to them other three players ‘Jump for Joy’, which was the title of the song he wrote that they played to bring the girls out. I used to stand by and watch ’cause didn’t matter how hot it was, I enjoyed seeing them fans get excited when Bang Bang Bang hit the stage. Sebastian always had a Camel cigarette lit, perched on the edge of the electric keyboards he played, and I never knew why he bothered to light it. Maybe just to give him some honky tonk atmosphere, so he could see the smoke drift up in front of his eyes ’cause with all that dancing his fingers did ’cross them keys, there wasn’t no time for him to smoke, he had that piano burning up so. When his fingers hopped around them keys like they was hot to the touch, Brenda used to laugh and come off and say, ‘You had that piano smoking again white boy.’

It always surprised me that Sebastian’s hands wasn’t nothing special to look at. Long as the rest of his body was, his hands was smallish for a man’s, and fingers maybe even on the short side.

I agreed with Joy that I didn’t know what all them little white girls was screaming at everytime Sebastian stepped out on the stage, ’cause wasn’t nothing manly about him but his manners and them fans wasn’t to know that. He had a girl’s face and looked too soft. Except for that square chin of his that had a dimple in it, wasn’t much sign of man, and from off stage there was no way they could of seen them long black eyelashes he had that I always teased him I wanted to borrow when he finished with them.

There was two numbers that Sebastian got to play trumpet on and when he stepped from behind his keyboards and synthesizer that was always lined up in a ‘L’ shape at the far side of the band left of the drummer to walk over and take over and take centre stage with Brenda, them girls used to get theyselves in a frenzy like somebody sanctified that had caught the spirit, screaming ‘Seb! Seb! Seb -astian’ like they was calling God. I used to get to giggling till I couldn’t catch my breath at them simpleton girls acting so crazy.

Brenda said it near broke her heart to hear a white boy playing trumpet as good as Sebastian could and especially with him being so English at that. She used to say she had a good ear for trumpet solos and I believed it, since she had stayed partial to the trumpet from that time I took her and Joy to First Tabernacle and she heard Sister Hall’s brother Tommy playing. Anyway, she used to grab the mike in the middle of that second trumpet solo Sebastian played and yell, ‘The white boy’s got soul,’ and Brenda could really howl it like some preacher and get the crowd to chanting it too. And Sebastian, shy as he was, used to always flush pink and slip back behind his piano like he didn’t have them wild young white girls screaming to yank his drawers off him.

Then as part of their stage routine, he would give a loud count into the next number. ‘TWO – THREE – FOUR – JOY, JOY, JOY!’ he’d call across to them other musicians and Brenda would start in on a real pretty slow tune, sounded like a spiritual that Sebastian said he wrote special for Brenda, but any fool knew he wrote it for Miss Joy as well. And I thought he liked to play that one after his trumpet solo to show that however many of them girls in the audience that was hollering out his name, Joy was all that was on his mind. And I believe she was all that was in his heart. Yes indeedy. Sebastian Egerton was in love with the whole of Miss Joyce Clarissa Bang. Every fart. Every bruise. Every hangnail. Every period pain. Every dark mood. And I noticed she had more than a few when we was on the road … he loved her for all of what she was. Not like them boys she met down them places where the girls played who was only interested in the glamorous, smiling Joy; the one they figured had some money in the bank, which wasn’t nothing but a illusion ’cause that music business is a pot of gold with a hole in the bottom of it for most of them people struggling to get by in it. Though Sebastian, unbeknownst to Joy at the time, was one of them with better luck.

Joy said the love flowed so from Sebastian Egerton’s eyes when he looked at her, it was like staring into full beam headlights and she had to look away to keep him from blinding her. And at them rehearsals, I’d catch him sometimes staring so hard at Joy it’s wonder he didn’t bore a hole into her while her and Anndora’d be practicing their back-up steps.

One time when we was setting in a hotel bar by ourselves and there was a piano, he played me a instrumental he wrote for Joy called ‘Without You’. Way before it ever got recorded. Then later he showed me all the music that he wrote out for it. I couldn’t believe it.

‘You did this by yourself,’ I asked him. It looked as much Greek to me as them pages of Hebrew I see written in the front of Freddie B’s big Bible.

‘Yeah,’ said Sebastian holding them thirty or so music sheets like they wasn’t nothing. But every line was filled in so neat with music notes and dots and dashes and I don’t know what all. ‘It’s a concerto,’ he told me, and showed how all the parts was for different instruments, violins, violas, flutes and a harp, that he believed he would one day get to play it.

‘Child, you a genius! Did you let Joy see this here that you done?’ I asked ’cause I thought that seeing how smart he was might warm her to him a bit more.

‘No. It’s no big deal. I learned to do it at college. It passes the time,’ he said and sifted them all back in the big brown envelope they come out of. He wasn’t one to brag about nothing and the onliest time I heard him brass his buttons was the night that he come to sit in my room and told me about his two younger sisters that he raved about and who was still living in some place in England near Birmingham. He didn’t talk all that much about his folks and I didn’t get the feeling he had a lot of time for his daddy who was a retired physics professor.

I loved that boy like a son by the time we’d been out on the road a few months, ’cause I noticed he always made sure I wasn’t stuck nowhere by myself and got me anything that was handed out free. Course I realized part of it was to do with him knowing that I was closer to Joy than even Brenda and Anndora, and he probably figured that getting to me was a way of getting through to Joy. But for all that, the boy was special and I even respected him for leaving us when he did ’cause it showed he had heart.

It happened after our big show at the Buzz Club in Chicago. The next day we was driving fast out of south-side headed for a club we was playing in Rockford and our limo hit a dog. Joy told the driver to keep going which wasn’t like her ’cause she liked animals. But she liked being on time more. Then Sebastian chimed in and said he rather be late for a gig than to hit a dog and leave it in the middle of the road.

That poor limo driver that come with the car we was renting for that day didn’t know what to do when Sebastian pulled back the window separating driver from passengers and told the man to stop after Joy’d just told the man to keep going.

Only Sebastian, me and Joy was in the car, ’cause the rest of ’em had gone in another car with Danny Lagerfield who was managing the girls.

‘Stop the fucking car,’ Sebastian said like he wasn’t in no temper but was about to be. ‘I’ll get out and take care of the fucking dog and you can stuff your fucking gigs, Joy. See how well they’ll play tonight without me, you cold-hearted bitch, because I couldn’t play anyway if I had to think about that poor fucking animal we left in the road.’