LBDG Commentary 19: Wrong Way

Originally this was part of the previous chapter, but a desire for shorter sections with cliffhanger twists earned it a number (and title) of its own. The namesake Sublime song is fitting¹, with “Wrong Way” coming on the heels of the “wrong girl” reveal.

The scene here is mostly an internal rant debating the right or wrong way to give someone bad news until the twist that the (wrong) bride has one more surprise at the wedding.

The Right Tidbits:

• To nobody’s surprise, I dig “the justice held his peace.”
• It’s true that it will be decades before Local Boy sees the old man again, though with time travel involved it depends a little on perspective.
• “Dogged my druthers” isn’t quite “dangerous folk rock appeal” as far as Local Boy one-liners go, but it fits the “aww, shucks-ness” of the character in the aftermath of the wedding revelation. Sort of a reframing of “stuck in my craw” in a positive Biff Tannen misremembered cliche type way. It would also make a pretty good lyric rhymed with mothers/brothers/another’s.
• Speaking of mothers and another, “…still born at the right time with another mother” name checks one of my favorite episodes of the original Quantum Leap.
• The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis directly inspired the characters on Jimmy & Local Boy’s favorite cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Here Local Boy acknowledges the connection, pairing it with The Twilight Zone to show how he’s predisposed to roll with the weird things happening to him.
• Suck it up, settle down, blah blah blah, one horse town as a Local Boy lyric is a paraphrased callback to his son’s fall in love, settle down, be alone in a lonely town line quoting the band the Amazing (Royal) Crowns. Local Boy picked it up from reading the book, but didn’t remember it exactly since his memory is phonographic, not photographic.
• I’ll go into more detail in the next chapter’s commentary, but I’ll tease here that switching the kids from being born a year and a half apart to twins started off as a teensy tiny retcon from TP so Local Boy’s daughter future daughter would be 27 when she died. But retcons are lazy, so I had to figure out a way to make it really work…

Check out Local Boy Done Gone

1. The title and music are fitting, but the lyrics get a little questionable if you try to read too much into how they correlate to the chapter. Also: Bradley Nowell missed the 27 Club by barely 3 months and cited Jim Croce as an early influence. Respect the greats, ignore the rest. ↩︎