[714] in Humor
HUMOR: Literary Band Takes the Stage (DB '92)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Fri Feb 3 23:40:04 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 1995 23:36:17 EST
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 95 17:26:34 PST
From: Connie_Kleinjans@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
The Great Literary Band Takes Center Stage
> DAVE BARRY
>
> Recently I played lead guitar in a rock band, and the rhythm
> guitarist was -- not that I wish to drop names -- Stephen King. This
> actually happened. It was the idea of a woman named Kathi Goldmark, who
> formed a band consisting mostly of writers to raise money for literacy
> by putting on a concert at the American Booksellers Association
> convention in Anaheim, Calif.
> So she called a bunch of writers who were sincerely interested in
> literacy and making an unbelievable amount of noise. Among the others
> who agreed to be in the band were Tad Bartimus, Roy Blount Jr., Michael
> Dorris, Robert Fulghum, Matt Groening, Barbara Kingsolver, Ridley
> Pearson and Amy Tan.
> I think we all said yes for the same reason. If you're a writer, you
> sit all day alone in a quiet room trying to craft sentences on a word
> processor, which makes weenie little clickety-click sounds. After years
> and years of crafting and clicking, you are naturally attracted to the
> idea of arming yourself with an amplified instrument powerful enough to
> be used for building demolition, then getting up on a stage with other
> authors and screaming out songs such as ``Land of 1,000 Dances,'' the
> lyrics to which express the following literary theme:
> ``Na, na na na na, na na na na
> Na na na, na na na, na na na na''
> So we all met in Anaheim, and for three days we rehearsed in a secret
> location under the strict supervision of our musical director, the
> legendary rock musician Al Kooper. This was a major thrill for me,
> because Kooper had been my idol when I was at Haverford College in the
> late '60s. Back then I played guitar in a band called the Federal Duck,
> and we tried very hard to sound like a band Al Kooper was in called The
> Blues Project. Eventually the Federal Duck actually made a record album,
> which was so bad that many stereo systems chose to explode rather than
> play it.
> Anyway, I could not quite believe that, 25 years later, I was really
> and truly in a band with AL KOOPER, and that he was actually asking for
> MY OPINION on musical issues. ``Do you think,'' he would ask, ``that you
> could play in the same key as the rest of us?''
> So, OK, skillwise I'm not Eric Clapton. But I was LOUDER than Eric
> Clapton, as well as many nuclear tests. I had an amplifier large enough
> to serve as public housing. It had a little foot switch, and when I
> pressed it, I was able to generate sound waves that will affect the
> global climate for years to come. We can only hope that Saddam Hussein
> is not secretly developing a foot switch like this.
> We practiced six long hours the first day, and at the end, Al Kooper
> called us together for an inspirational talk.
> ``When we started this morning, we stunk,'' he said. ``But by this
> afternoon, we stunk much better. Maybe eventually we can be just a faint
> odor.''
> In the evenings we engaged in literary activities such as going to
> see the movie ``Alien 3.'' I was concerned about this, because when I
> watch horror movies I tend to whimper and clutch the person sitting next
> to me, who in this particular case was Stephen King. But as it turned
> out, the alien didn't scare me at all; I live in Miami, and we have
> cockroaches that are at least that size, but more aggressive. The only
> scary part was when Sigourney Weaver got injected with a hypodermic
> needle, which on the movie screen was approximately 27 feet long. This
> caused me to whimper and clutch Stephen King, but I was pleased to note
> that HE was whimpering and clutching his wife, Tabitha.
> But the real thrill came when our band finished practicing and
> actually played. The performance was in a big dance hall called the
> Cowboy Boogie, where hundreds of booksellers and publishing-industry
> people had drunk themselves into a highly literary mood. The show went
> great. The audience whooped and screamed and threw underwear. Granted,
> some of it was extra-large men's jockey briefs, but underwear is
> underwear. We belted out our songs, singing, with deep concern for
> literacy in our voices, such lyrics as:
> ``You got to do the mammer jammer
> If you want my love.''
> Also a group of rock critics got up with us and sang a version of
> ``Louie Louie'' so dirty that the U.S. Constitution should, in my
> opinion, be modified specifically to prohibit it.
> Also -- so far this is the highlight of my life -- I got to play a
> lead-guitar solo while dancing the Butt Dance WITH AL KOOPER. To get an
> idea how my solo sounded, press the following paragraph up against your
> ear:
> ``BWEEEOOOOOAAAAPPPPPP''
> Ha ha! Isn't that GREAT? Your ear is bleeding.
>
> (C) 1992 THE MIAMI HERALD
> DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
