The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

by Mitch Albom

But first, I wish to say something about being in an altered state, like the one Frankie was in now. It does not bring you closer to me. It just makes me dizzy. For centuries, musicians have sought to find me at the end of a needle or the bottom of a drink. It is an illusion. And it often ends badly. Take my cherished Russian disciple, Modest Mussorgsky. In 1881, he lay facedown in a St. Petersburg tavern. This man once composed marvelous works, Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain (later made famous through an animated film called Fantasia). He composed nothing on that barroom floor, believing alcohol made him an artist. He died at forty-two. I was there to collect his talent. I was there at the hospital deathbed of my beloved Billie Holiday, just forty-four, her liver destroyed by drinking; I was there inside the hotel room of Charlie Parker, my singular jazz saxophonist, who died in his midthirties, but whose body was so ravaged by drugs the coroners thought he was sixty. Tommy Dorsey, the bandleader, choked in his sleep when he was fifty-one, too deep in pills to awaken. Johnny Allen Hendrix (you called him Jimi) swallowed a handful of barbiturates and expired. He was twenty-seven. It is not new, this idea that a purer art awaits you in a substance. But it is naive. I existed before the first grapes were fermented. Before the first whiskey was distilled. Be it opium or absinthe, marijuana or heroin, cocaine or ecstasy or whatever will follow, you may al...