Dreams About Musicians (by Samm Bennett)
I'm at an amusement park, and I head straight for the roller coaster, even though I don't actually like roller coasters. As I get closer, I get the impression that it's made from bones and mud. I get into a car, and sitting next to me is Chaka Khan. Her enormous hair seems more enormous than ever: it extends outside of the car and onto the tracks. Then I realize that her hair IS the tracks. The whole structure of the roller coaster is Chaka Khan's hair. I hear the bell that means the ride is about to start, only it's not a single strike of a bell, but a pattern, specifically, the cowbell pattern that starts "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones. The coaster starts and we go careening through her hair at breakneck speed. Then I notice that down below (we are riding very high now) stands Conway Twitty. He is stroking Chaka's hair and whispering something obscene about Loretta Lynn. This enrages me. I scream at him to stop, but what comes out of my mouth is a song: "How Much is That Doggie in the Window" by Patti Page. Chaka looks at me with a curiously blank expression and says "the doggie's not for sale motherfucker", then pushes me out of the coaster car. I tumble onto the midway, and my body tumbling onto the pavement recreates the sound of Ringo Starr's drum solo on the Abbey Road medley. When I come to a stop, Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn walk over and hand me a note that says "why don't you mind your own business?".
On the corner of a bustling avenue in a town that looks like a cross between Boston, Massachusetts and Dubbo, Australia,
The Shaggs are playing enormous guitars and giant drums, at ear-splitting volume. The music they are playing closely resembles that of The Carpenters. As students from the nearby Berklee College of Music pass, they are one by one transformed into copies of the Real Book, which Harry Partch, who has just arrived on the scene, calmly collects and shoves into an enormous machine that looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book. The machine is then revealed to be some sort of oven, and the black smoke from the burning Real Books rises up into the sky, forming a cloud shaped like James Brown.
The Shaggs are playing enormous guitars and giant drums, at ear-splitting volume. The music they are playing closely resembles that of The Carpenters. As students from the nearby Berklee College of Music pass, they are one by one transformed into copies of the Real Book, which Harry Partch, who has just arrived on the scene, calmly collects and shoves into an enormous machine that looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book. The machine is then revealed to be some sort of oven, and the black smoke from the burning Real Books rises up into the sky, forming a cloud shaped like James Brown.
Porter Wagoner is sitting across from me on the subway, an F train bound for Coney Island. Every other car of the train is engulfed in flames: Porter and I are in one of the cars that isn't burning. I notice that he's not wearing one of his trademark, sparkling Nudie suits, but instead is decked out in tight fitting spandex and a codpiece, like the one the singer from Cameo wears. From the tip of the codpiece tiny helicopter blades emerge and start to spin, and Porter is carried aloft. At the same time, the subway car transforms into a stadium, which turns out to be Shea Stadium. The Beatles are making their way to the stage, but instead of their beige nehru jackets, they are wearing lederhosen, leopard-skin pillbox hats and enormous novelty bow ties with little blinking lights spelling out words like "pulchritude" and "hornswoggle". Porter Wagoner, carried gracefully across the field on his codpiece helicopter, makes a gentle descent onto the stage. He joins the Beatles in a rousing aria from Götterdämmerung, while simultaneously firing an automatic weapon at Pete Best who, out on the field, deftly dodges each bullet while repeatedly shouting "Ringo is a Jew! Ringo is a Jew!"
I'm sitting at a conveyor-belt sushi counter. The conveyor-belt is moving absurdly fast, making it all but impossible to get one of the little plates as it flies by. I look around to see how the other patrons are managing, and I notice that just to my right is Joni Mitchell. She is naked, and she is having no trouble at all with the speed of the conveyor-belt, whisking the little plates off with impressive skill. But instead of sliced fish on top of the little balls of rice, there are cigarettes. Lit cigarettes. With the filter end stuck in the rice and the burning end on top, they look like tiny smokestacks. Joni peers at them and says "they look like tiny smokestacks". The smoke gets in my eyes. Just then I notice that Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach are sitting to my left, and I say to them "y'all told me that would happen". Otto says "we told you what would happen?" "That smoke gets in your eyes!" I reply, feeling clever and self-satisfied. But then I see that Otto, Jerome and Joni are already having sex, on the conveyor belt, which is now moving much slower but is sloping downward and running into a big hole in the floor. As the threesome disappears into the hole, the sound of their moaning is slowly replaced by the sound of a song on the radio. The song is Howling Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning". But not the original. It's a cover by Alanis Morissette, who is also naked, and who is not, it turns out, on the radio but right there in the room, holding an enormous, squirming tuna fish.
Wynton Marsalis, wearing a Cosby sweater, is playing his trumpet at my front door. He's blowing a characteristically impeccable but dreadfully boring solo over "Tea For Two" when my wife comes along and slams the door in his face, the door suddenly acting as a trumpet mute. The door hinge catches a loose strand of yarn from the sweater, which slowly unravels as Wynton walks away. By the time he arrives at Lincoln Center, the sweater is completely unraveled, revealing the Megadeath t-shirt he had been wearing underneath. Wynton steps onto the Lincoln Center stage and plays a trumpet transcription of a piece by Ravel, except he introduces it to the crowd as a piece by Un-Ravel. Herb Alpert and Al Hirt, sitting in the audience, both spontaneously burst into flame.