INTRODUCTION

With the Dick Tracy piece sold, I went back to Reprisal and the short story I'd been tinkering with in November. I'd contributed "Menage a Trois" to Jeff Gelb's Hot Blood a few years before (where Jeff Fazio spotted it and bought it for an episode of Showtime's The Hunger.) In the summer of 1989 Jeff Gelb had written asking me if I could come up with a short story for an anthology combining horror and rock. I'd already done two rock- related stories—"The Years the Music Died" and "The Last ONE MO' ONCE GOLDEN OLDIES REVIVAL" (see Soft & Others)—and didn't know if I had a third in me.

But it got me thinking about my days as a drummer in a garage band during the mid-sixties. The Pebbles were the hottest party band along the upper Barnegat Bay section of the Jersey Shore when the lead guitarist, Mike Murphy, and I walked away, found new players, and devoted the summer of '67 to seeing how far we could take this music thing. We cut a demo of two original songs; the demo got us a manager who booked us into Greenwich Village spots like the Cafe Wha? and midtown gigs at Steve Paul's Scene West, but we went nowhere.

Remembering those times, though, it occurred to me how far we could have gone if only I'd known then what I know now.

And that was how the story started.

So "Bob Dylan, Troy Jonson, and the Speed Queen" takes you back to the West Village in 1964, when Dylan is digging The Beatles and a rough beast called folk rock is slouching toward the City of Angels to be born. The Eighth Wonder was real—Murph and I used to go there to hear a friend who was in the house band—and I've tried to reconstruct it as accurately as my fogged memory will allow. But on rereading it I find I wasn't careful enough about the songs Troy rips off from the future. Imagine how something like "Life During Wartime" with its references to headphones, computers, disco, and CBGB's would have sounded to an audience in 1964.