This chapter title was 100% chosen to rile up Brian Ibbott from Coverville. (Maybe I’m glad I ended up with more than 27 chapters…)
It also worked well since it is all about Local Boy & Cousin Jimmy forming a band and learning covers from the 27 Club members they have awareness of circa 1976. Thirteen songs1, skipping Paul McCartney since Local Boy considered it a sacrilege. (Respect the greats!)
Here’s the full LBJ playlist of covers Local Boy & Cousin Jimmy learned, cheekily referencing time travel if you squint enough:
Tidbits:
- Formatting the intro as one line and some bullets intentionally mirrors chapter 22 of Timely Persuasion, which is also right around the home stretch towards resolution.
- “…bought with the green I raised lowering lawns.” is one of my favorite lines.
- Naming the band LBJ happened by accident, but living in Texas for the past decade certainly contributed. Mainly I didn’t want to overdo the four-letter LBXX pattern, and when you’re starting with LBCJ your brain just goes there.2
- “Old Lyndon didn’t play, but he had a few protest songs written about him.”
- I always knew I wanted cover art featuring a folk guitarist being controlled by marionette strings. Planned on seeing if TP cover artist Jose Robertó would do something but couldn’t get a hold of him. Later I stumbled onto a work called Puppet Master by Elmer Borlongan when Googling for marionette musicians. Tried to secure the rights to use it but also couldn’t get in touch. Eventually my old friend Russell Foltz-Smith came through with his take on the poor ol’ puppet pandering ploy. The line about honoring “the wishes of everyone who had me by the strings at the intersection of the past, present and future” evokes that cover art.
- After briefly considering Name That Tune or the Johnny Bravo episode of The Brady Bunch, of course it comes back to Scooby-Doo. If you do the math, we’ve skipped ahead from 9/25/76 to 11/6/76 between chapters based on episode airdates.3 Might be the longest time jump unaided by time travel in any of my books!
- Would you believe me when I tell you it was intentional to have Local Boy count years on his fingers to get the math right—but still get it wrong?
- Jimmy can see the redhead as herself when she’s possessing other people because she once became him during the “memory” of the Barnstormer soundcheck. Rules-wise, once you’ve had that type of time travel merging you can always see a fellow traveler for who they really are. That’s a big reveal in and of itself, which leads to a lesser reveal that the redhead has been around Local Boy more than we realize.
- With that, we’re taking one more trip to open mic night at the unnamed Coffee Shop…or is it?
FOOTNOTES
- Actually fourteen since “Won One” isn’t on Spotify (yet). ↩︎
- I don’t think I consciously remembered this when writing the book, but there is a bit in TP where the narrator guesses LBDG might stand for “The Lyndon B. Disease…” something. Local Boy counters with “Lyndon B’s Democratic Great Society.” ↩︎
- And yes, Micky Dolenz really did voice a musician named Alex Super on Scooby-Doo! ↩︎
That morning’s Scooby-Doo mystery featured a band fronted by an animated Micky Dolenz from The Monkees. Or Micky did the voice of a cartoon musician named Alex Super. It wasn’t supposed to actually be Micky Dolenz from The Monkees. They’d moved past the stunt casting and celebrity plotlines of the second incarnation.
After you watch Scooby-Doo, check out Local Boy Done Gone