Dave Barry - Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

“Sometimes,” says Debbie Brown, “I’ll drive by the gates at about 3 in the morning—that was his time—and I’ll turn my back on all the souvenir stores, and just look at the house, and it reminds me a little bit of what it was like. But I don’t really like to do that too much, because it reminds me of how empty it is now. It’s over. The fantasy’s over.

“But just for a little time, I was part of something special. And I was special.”

After Shirley Connell let me look over her back fence at Elvis’s horses, she showed me her photo album. It’s thick with snapshots of Elvis, many taken at the gates. Sometimes it’s just Elvis; sometimes she’s in the background; sometimes he has his arm around her. The two of them change, as you flip through the pages, he from bad-ass motorcycle rocker to Vegas headliner, she from girl to woman, the two of them growing older together.

“I try not to even drive by the gates anymore,” she says.

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 Thi 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, California.

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 Groaning, 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 1960s. 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 . 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.

Recently, I was chosen to serve as a musical consultant to the radio industry.

Actually, it wasn’t the entire industry; it was a woman named Marcy, who called me up at random one morning while I was picking my teeth with a business card as part of an ongoing effort to produce a column.

“I’m not selling anything,” Marcy said.

Of course when callers say this, they usually mean that they ARE selling something, so I was about to say “No thank you” in a polite voice, then bang the receiver down with sufficient force to drive phone shards deep into Marcy’s brain, when she said she was doing a survey for the radio industry about what songs should be played on the air.

That got my attention, because radio music is an issue I care deeply about. I do a lot of singing in the car. You should hear Aretha Franklin and me perform our version of “I Say a little Prayer for You,” especially when our voices swoop way up high for the ending part that goes, “My darling BELIEVE me, for me there is nooo WAHHHHHAAANNNN.” My technique is to grip the steering wheel with both hands and lift myself halfway out of the seat so that I can give full vocal expression to the emotion that Aretha and I are feeling, which is a mixture of joyous hope and bittersweet longing and the horror of realizing that the driver of the cement truck three feet away is staring at me, at which point I pretend that I am having a coughing seizure while Aretha finishes the song on her own.

I think they should play that song more often on the radio, along with “Brown-Eyed Girl,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” and of course the Isley Brothers’ version of “Twist and Shout,” which, if you turn it up loud enough, can propel you beyond mere singing into the stage where you have to get out of the car and dance with tollbooth attendants.

On the other hand, it would not trouble me if the radio totally ceased playing ballad-style songs by Neil Diamond. I realize that many of you are huge Neil Diamond fans, so let me stress that in matters of musical taste, everybody is entitled to an opinion, and yours is wrong. Consider the song “I Am, I Said,” wherein Neil, with great emotion, sings:

I am, I said To no one there And no one heard at all Not even the chair.