Shadowbahn(25)

I’m telling myself I don’t know what he’s talking about but I have a feeling in me as if, all of a sudden, my heart is a stone sinking not to my feet but something deeper. “What do you mean, ‘him’?” Saying it, my voice breaks, I barely can get it out.

Who knows? Maybe he hears the shudder in my words and it doesn’t make him exactly pleasant but he relaxes a bit, pulls out a smoke and lights up. Studies me and then says, “Forget it,” waving away the whole thing.

But I guess he knows I can’t forget it. “What do you mean, ‘him’?” I croak again.

He takes a drag and I figure he’s going to blow it in my face but he doesn’t. “Part of being great,” he finally says, “is being lucky, innit? You’re in the right place at the right time, they”—he nods his head out the bar door—“are ready for you. They been waiting all along for you. Billy O’Shakespeare comes along a century earlier, same bloke, all the same talent, and what’s it get him? The Black Death or smack in the middle of the War of the bleedin’ Roses, some King Henry and some King Richard at each other’s throats, yeah. Or he’s born in the middle of the Chinese countryside—fookin’ lot of sense anybody’s going to make of Hamlet. Instead fate plants him upstream from London, most elvis town in the world, Liz the First on the throne, Johannes bloody Krautberg’s printing press invented in time to run off all Bill’s plays so everyone can read ’em.” He says, “It’s a bit of conspiracy then, between the bloke who’s doing the telling or showing or singing, and that lot doing the listening or watching or dancing. And if one side or other isn’t in on the conspiracy, what good is it? Let’s be coconspirators then, that’s what you’re asking them, and you better bloody hope they’re, you know, in the fookin’ mood. So here’s how it is,” he says, putting out his smoke and leaning back over the table. “Paul and George and Pete and even bloody Stu, if he still fancies it, we’ll make our records just as you say, we’ll have ourselves a time, for a time. Maybe have a bit of tiny glory for a few months back home. But then it’ll be over, and the way it might have gone, that way where we might have changed the bloody world, that way where nothing would have been the same after us . . . isn’t going to happen. Because that’s by way of America, no getting around it, much as we’d like to. Doesn’t matter how much those of us over here resent it, it’s all about America if, like I did, you come out of the fookin’ sticks to take over the world—and there’s nothing in sodding America for us now, is there? Because you Yanks will never have a clue what to make of us, because he was the beginning. I mean, Lonnie Donegan is all well and good, right, but he was the Big Bang, and he never happened, he never gave anyone a glimpse of what it all might have been—and I’m not talking about the music, am I, since we’re all just stealing the music from the spades in the first place. What we’re talking about is the Moment, that’s what he was, we’re talking about how before him there was nothing, and we got bloody you instead, didn’t we, you who can’t sing a lick. So I’ll do this awhile and then go back to me pencils or brushes or teach art to the future me’s of the world, just like all me fookin’ teachers who never could do anything else and tried to teach me.” He gets down off his stool. “Three to get ready—that’s the next line of the song. But no one will get to number three because we needed him to get us there, and you, mate, there’s no bleedin’ point to you at all.”





Well there, Mr. Editor, maybe we just want to cut [Editor’s note: In this section of the original manuscript, the ink of the type is stained and the words smeared—perhaps, we can only speculate, from the tears of a sobbing author—in such a way as to be unreadable] this whole last part because [more streaked type] I surely don’t know what [unreadable] get into all this anyway, except I suppose it seems some enlightening part of the saga, like I said before, one of your dark preludes. I think maybe I’m done here. But you haven’t yet read the final testament of the God of Music Death. You haven’t yet heard the final crashing note of my calamitous Day of Reckoning. I’ve just begun. Because when there’s no point to a man who’s liberated of any dictate or purpose, when a man is not just born out of his own time and place but is one for whom there’s no time or place at all—that is a man truly unconfined, sir, a man on the loose. I will make my own point till there’s no song to be heard anymore by anyone. Till the world is deaf of the most distant descant and every last bird is throttled of its chirp, and the chiming of every passing breeze is asphyxiated, and no musical land exists free of what I map. I will make my own point, till not the land but the map itself is the point.

J. G. PRESLEY





tracks 03 and 04:


    “Wooly Bully” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”


One spring in the mid-1960s [writes Zema and Parker’s father in his log], twenty years after the twentieth century’s defining conflict, in which good and evil will be so incontestably delineated for the final time, the cover of an American newsmagazine poses in stark red letters against a black background the question IS GOD DEAD? having no way of knowing that time is a shadow-highway of successive roundabouts with After occasionally preceding Before, and that two responses five thousand miles apart already have been recorded within days of each other and within hours of the magazine hitting the newsstands. The first answer, a bilingual countdown (Uno! Dos! One two tres cuatro!) to American chaos by way of Texas (via Memphis), is: Who cares? The second, an atonal cosmic yowl recorded in a London studio—based in part on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and in part on the convulsions of the singer’s ego—with hybrid western/eastern percussion and a musique concrète sound design of loops and fragmented human voices, is: What does it matter? A leading cultural commentator of the time identifies the four musicians of the second song as “imaginary Americans,” America representing the source and fulfillment of their dreams and an idea big and rapacious enough to claim the musicians as Americans, in the same way that America claims anything it chooses to, including the demise of the divine.