Rock On (2 page)

The same with fantasy: prog rock could never have progged without it, Led Zeppelin must have smoked J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard still lives in heavy metal, H. P. Lovecraft has inspired numerous bands, and Alice Cooper was only the first to personify dark fantasy on stage with a backbeat. Hell, the roots of rock are tangled in fantasy: Robert Johnson supposedly met the devil at a crossroads and worried about a hellhound on his trail.

And no, I will not discuss “wrock.”

Track 6: “Don’t Get Me Wrong”

There are minor aspects to some of the older stories herein that demonstrate that speculation is just that: speculating. Who needs sockets in a wireless world? Digitized recording, downloads,
Guitar Hero,
Garage Band, iPods, and smartphones that can hold 28,000 songs, do-it-yourself distribution—who knew? Ultimately, old tech doesn’t affect the heart and soul of any of these stories and there’s still tech-yet-to-come (maybe) in many, in others the speculation has been at least somewhat fulfilled. Of course there’s supernatural doings in some stories—but rock itself is magical and transformative.

Track 7: “Are You Experienced?”

[Test . . . test . . . one, two, three . . . rock and rollll!]

Welcome to the first (and, so far, only) anthology ever of science fiction and fantasy stories about rock and roll . . . although
about
may not be the proper word. Some of the stories are certainly about rock, others are more
informed
by the music, but rock and roll is integral to them all. Like the music itself, some stories are nice and easy, but some of these go to eleven . . . or maybe twelve.

Horns up!

Paula Guran

June 2012

Flying Saucer Rock and Roll

Howard Waldrop

They could have been contenders.

Talk about Danny and the Juniors, talk about the Spaniels, the Contours, Sonny Till and the Orioles. They made it to the big time: records, tours, sock hops at $500 a night. Fame and glory.

But you never heard of the Kool-Tones, because they achieved their apotheosis and their apocalypse on the same night, and then they broke up. Some still talk about that night, but so much happened, the Kool-Tones get lost in the shuffle. And who’s going to believe a bunch of kids, anyway? The cops didn’t and their parents didn’t. It was only two years after the president had been shot in Dallas, and people were still scared. This, then, is the Kool-Tones’ story:

Leroy was smoking a cigar through a hole he’d cut in a pair of thick, red wax lips. Slim and Zoot were tooting away on Wowee whistles. It was a week after Halloween, and their pockets were still full of trick-or-treat candy they’d muscled off little kids in the projects. Ray, slim and nervous, was hanging back, “We shouldn’t be here, you know? I mean, this ain’t the Hellbenders’ territory, you know? I don’t know whose it is, but, like, Vinnie and the guys don’t come this far.” He looked around.

Zoot, who was white and had the beginnings of a mustache, took the yellow wax-candy kazoo from his mouth. He bit off and chewed up the big C pipe. “I mean, if you’re scared, Ray, you can go back home, you know?”

“Nah!” said Leroy. “We need Ray for the middle parts.” Leroy was twelve years old and about four feet tall. He was finishing his fourth cigar of the day. He looked like a small Stymie Beard from the old Our Gang comedies.

File still wore the cut-down coat he’d taken with him when he’d escaped from his foster home.

He was staying with his sister and her boyfriend. In each of his coat pockets he had a bottle: one Coke and one bourbon.

“We’ll be all right,” said Cornelius, who was big as a house and almost eighteen. He was shaped like a big ebony golf tee, narrow legs and waist blooming out to an A-bomb mushroom of arms and chest. He was a yard wide at the shoulders. He looked like he was always wearing football pads.

“That’s right,” said Leroy, taking out the wax lips and wedging the cigar back into the hole in them. “I mean, the kid who found this place didn’t say anything about it being somebody’s
spot,
man.”

“What’s that?” asked Ray.

They looked up. A small spot of light moved slowly across the sky. It was barely visible, along with a few stars, in the lights from the city.

“Maybe it’s one of them UFOs you’re always talking about, Leroy,” said Zoot.

“Flying saucer, my left ball,” said Cornelius. “That’s Telstar. You ought to read the papers.”

“Like your mama makes you?” asked Slim.

“Aww . . . ” said Cornelius.

They walked on through the alleys and the dark streets. They all walked like a man.

“This place is Oz,” said Leroy.

“Hey!” yelled Ray, and his voice filled the area, echoed back and forth in the darkness, rose in volume, died away.

“Wow.”

They were on what had been the loading dock of an old freight and storage company. It must have been closed sometime during the Korean War or maybe in the unimaginable eons before World War II. The building took up most of the block but the loading area on the back was sunken and surrounded by the stone wall they had climbed. If you stood with your back against the one good loading door, the place was a natural amphitheater.

Leroy chugged some Coke, then poured bourbon into the half-empty bottle. They all took a drink, except Cornelius, whose mother was a Foursquare Baptist and could smell liquor on his breath three blocks away.

Cornelius drank only when he was away from home two or three days.

“Okay, Kool-Tones,” said Leroy. “Let’s hit sonic notes.”

They stood in front of the door, Leroy to the fore, the others behind him in a semicircle: Cornelius, Ray, Slim, and Zoot.

“One, two, three,” said Leroy quietly, his face toward the bright city beyond the surrounding buildings.

He had seen all the movies with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in them and knew the moves backwards. He jumped in the air and came down, and Cornelius hit it: “
Bah-doo, bah-doo, bah-doo-uhh.”

It was a bass from the bottom of the ocean, from the Marianas Trench, a voice from Death Valley on a wet night, so far below sea level you could feel the absence of light in your mind. And then Zoot and Ray came in:
“Oooh-oooh, ooh-oooh,”
with Leroy humming under, and then Slim stepped out and began to lead the tenor part of “Sincerely,” by the Crows. And they went through that one perfectly, flawlessly, the dark night and the dock walls throwing their voices out to the whole breathing city.

“Wow,” said Ray, when they finished, but Leroy held up his hand, and Zoot leaned forward and took a deep breath and sang:
“Dee-dee-woo-oo, dee-eee-wooo-oo, dee-uhmm-doo-way.”

And Ray and Slim chanted:
“A-weem-wayy, a-wee,-wayyy.”

And then Leroy, who had a falsetto that could take hair off an opossum, hit the high notes from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and it was even better than the first song, and not even the Tokens on their number two hit had ever sounded greater.

Then they started clapping their hands, and at every clap the city seemed to jump with expectation, joining in their dance, and they went through a shaky-legged Skyliners-type routine and into:
“Hey-ahh-stah-huh, hey-ahh-stuh-uhh,”
of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ “Stay,” and when Leroy soared his
“Hoh-wahh-yuh?”
over Zoot’s singing, they all thought they would die.

And without pause, Ray and Slim started:
“Shoo-be-doop, shoo-doop-de-be-doop, shoo-doop-be-do-be-doop,”
and Cornelius was going,
“Ah-rem-em, ah-rem-em, ah-rememm bah.”

And they went through the Five Satins’ “(I Remember) In the Still of the Night.”

“Hey, wait,” said Ray, as Slim
“woo-uh-wooo-uh-woo-ooo-ah-woo-ah”
-ed to a finish, “I thought I saw a guy out there.”

“You’re imagining things,” said Zoot. But they all stared out into the dark anyway.

There didn’t seem to be anything there.

“Hey, look,” said Cornelius. “Why don’t we try putting the bass part of ‘Stormy Weather’ with the high part of ‘Crying in the Chapel’? I tried it the other night, but I can’t—”

“Shit, man!” said Slim. “That ain’t the way it is on the records. You gotta do it like on the records.”

“Records are going to hell, anyway. I mean, you got Motown and some of that, but the rest of it’s like the Beatles and Animals and Rolling Stones and Wayne shitty Fontana and the Mindbenders and . . . ”

Leroy took the cigar from his mouth. “Fuck the Beatles,” he said. He put the cigar back in his mouth.

“Yeah, you’re right, I agree. But even the other music’s not the—”

“Aren’t you kids up past your bedtime?” asked a loud voice from the darkness.

They jerked erect. For a minute, they hoped it was only the cops.

Matches flared in the darkness, held up close to faces. The faces all had their eyes closed so they wouldn’t be blinded and unable to see in case the Kool-Tones made a break for it. Blobs of faces and light floated in the night, five, ten, fifteen, more.

Part of a jacket was illuminated. It was the color reserved for the kings of Tyre.

“Oh shit!” said Slim. “Trouble. Looks like the Purple Monsters.”

The Kool-Tones drew into a knot.

The matches went out and they were in a breathing darkness.

“You guys know this turf is reserved for friends of the local protective, athletic, and social club, viz., us?” asked the same voice. Chains clanked in the black night.

“We were just leaving,” said Cornelius.

The noisy chains rattled closer.

You could hear knuckles being slapped into fists out there.

Slim hoped someone would hurry up and hit him so he could scream.

“Who are you guys with?” asked the voice, and a flashlight shone in their eyes, blinding them.

“Aww, they’re just little kids,” said another voice.

“Who you callin’ little, turd?” asked Leroy, shouldering his way between Zoot and Cornelius’s legs.

A
wooooooo
! went up from the dark, and the chains rattled again.

“For God’s sake, shut up, Leroy!” said Ray.

“Who you people think you are, anyway?” asked another, meaner voice out there.

“We’re the Kool-Tones,” said Leroy. “We can sing it slow, and we can sing it low, and we can sing it loud, and we can make it go!”

“I hope you like that cigar, kid,” said the mean voice, “because after we piss on it, you’re going to have to eat it.”

“Okay, okay, look,” said Cornelius. “We didn’t know it was your turf. We come from over in the projects and . . . ”

“Hey, man, Hellbenders, Hellbenders!” The chains sounded like tambourines now.

“Naw, naw. We ain’t Hellbenders. We ain’t nobody but the Kool-Tones. We just heard about this place. We didn’t know it was yours,” said Cornelius.

“We only let Bobby and the Bombers sing here,” said a voice.

“Bobby and the Bombers can’t sing their way out of the men’s room,” said Leroy. Slim clamped Leroy’s mouth, burning his hand on the cigar.

“You’re gonna regret that,” said the mean voice, which stepped into the flashlight beam, “because I’m Bobby, and four more of these guys out here are the Bombers.”

“We didn’t know you guys were part of the Purple Monsters!” said Zoot.

“There’s lots of stuff you don’t know,” said Bobby. “And when we’re through, there’s not much you’re gonna
remember.
”

“I only know the Del Vikings are breaking up,” said Zoot. He didn’t know why he said it. Anything was better than waiting for the knuckle sandwiches.

Bobby’s face changed. “No shit?” Then his face set in hard lines again. “Where’d a punk like you hear something like that?”

“My cousin,” said Zoot. “He was in the Air Force with two of them. He writes to ’em. They’re tight. One of them said the act was breaking up because nobody was listening to their stuff anymore.”

“Well, that’s rough,” said Bobby. “It’s tough out there on the road.”

“Yeah,” said Zoot. “It really is.”

Some of the tension was gone, but certain delicate ethical questions remained to be settled.

“I’m Lucius,” said a voice. “Warlord of the Purple Monsters.” The flashlight came on him. He was huge. He was like Cornelius, only he was big all the way to the ground. His feet looked like blunt I-beams sticking out of the bottom of his jeans. His purple satin jacket was a bright fluorescent blot on the night. “I hate to break up this chitchat—” he glared at Bobby “—but the fact is you people are on Purple Monster territory, and some tribute needs to be exacted.”

Ray was digging in his pocket for nickels and dimes.

“Not money. Something that will remind you not to do this again.”

“Tell you what,” said Leroy. He had worked himself away from Slim. “You think Bobby and the Bombers can sing?”

“Easy!” said Lucius to Bobby, who had started forward with the Bombers.

“Yeah, kid. They’re the best damn group in the city.”

“Well,
I
think we can outsing ’em,” said Leroy, and smiled around his dead cigar.

“Oh, jeez,” said Zoot. “They got a record, and they’ve—”

“I
said,
we can outsing Bobby and the Bombers, anytime, any place,” said Leroy.

“And what if you can’t?” asked Lucius.

“You guys like piss a lot, don’t you?” There was a general movement toward the Kool-Tones. Lucius held up his hand. “Well,” said Leroy, “how about all the members of the losing group drink a quart apiece?”

Hands of the Kool-Tones reached out to stifle Leroy. He danced away.

“I like that,” said Lucius. “I really like that. That all right, Bobby?”

“I’m going to start saving it up now.”

“Who’s gonna judge?” asked one of the Bombers.

“Same as always,” said Leroy. “The public. Invite ’em in.”

“Who do we meet with to work this out?” asked Lucius.

“Vinnie of the Hellbenders. He’ll work out the terms.”

Slim was beginning to see he might not be killed that night. He looked on Leroy with something like worship.

“How we know you guys are gonna show up?” asked Bobby.