The boy was maybe six, maybe seven when he found his father's perpetual-motion machine in the basement. It was in pieces, strange wooden blocks and wheels and chains, all heaped together in two bushel baskets. He fished the pieces out of the baskets one by one and started stacking them up high, like a skyscraper. Before he'd finished, he heard the front door open, heard the work boots on the cellar stairs, heard his father's silken bass, the pride of the Antioch Baptist Church choir.

"You know what that is?"

He didn't.

So his father explained it to him. He showed him how the pieces fit together to form a six-foot-tall tower. One wheel on the top, the other on the bottom, the chain wrapped around both of them. Some weights and counterweights. His father was good with his hands, made a living as a carpenter, but this machine didn't have anything to do with his work. He'd made it for himself, to see if he could, because people said you couldn't. Once the wheels started spinning, his father told him, they'd keep going for a long time. About six hours. But the friction would always win out in the end. The wheels would slow, and then they would stop.

Some years later, the boy tried to improve on his father's design. He set out to make his own perpetual-motion machine. His didn't work, either.

Friction.

The man is telling this story in the backseat of a coffee-colored Toyota Avalon. The car is in an alleyway behind a little club in St. Louis, Missouri. Sixty years ago, on the stages of some other little clubs in St. Louis, all of them gone now, he did go on to invent something eternal, something that didn't lose energy as it went but instead gained it. He watched it happen so many times. The energy he put out would come back at him a hundredfold. And he watched it spread, to other people, other stages. Eventually it was no longer in his control, and eventually he couldn't have stopped it even if he'd wanted to.

It's still going. You still hear it today...