Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #111: Music and horror: "The Ghost's CD."

If you have read my blog with any consistency, you know I write about music quite a bit, so I won't elaborate on how and why. You can dip in past posts and won't get very far until you read about my stories that deal with music and musicians, so the one I will discuss today is one of many. It is a horror story and appeared in one of the finest horror journals on the web, The Horror Zine. In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis talks about ghosts, spirits, and souls who cannot get into heaven and so lurk around the earth, their former home; one of the types he mentions are "library ghosts, who lurk in libraries to see if anyone is reading their books." If writer-ghosts are concerned about the writing they did while they were alive, do ghosts who were musicians show concern about the songs they did before they passed off the scene? My story "The Ghost's CD," suggests they indeed do.

"The Ghost's CD" is about a successful rock and roll singer name Alec McBride. Alec is the lead guitarists and, like Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and many other successful guitarists, has studied and imitated the guitar styles of the old blues players who styles were foundational to rock and roll. They have hit it big with an updated recording of a song by a bluesman named River Coleman. They have ramped it up, rather like Clapton ramped up the Robert Johnson song, "Crossroads," doing it fast and with more contemporary cadences and rhythms. Alec objects to the major alterations to the song and wants to do it more traditionally, but the band overrules him. The recording goes on to be a major hit. Everything is going well for the band.

Well, almost everything. It seems like they have struck a streak of bad luck. One of the live-in girlfriends of a group member dies from an overdose. The stage collapses two weeks later, injuring Alec and some of the other band members. A couple of months after that, two groupie girls who have come home with the band members get the idea that stopping up the cold air returns in their rooms will keep them warmer. The house has an old-fashioned gravity furnace. When the cold air returns are blocked, carbon monoxide builds up and kills them. The band is exonerated of wrongdoing in the incident, but Alec is concerned at the series of misfortunes he and his colleagues are seeing unfold.

Grand Haven Pier in  winter

One night during a wild winter party in the Michigan beach town of Grand Haven, he walks out on the dock to clear his head and sees an older man there, playing blues guitar. It is cold, too cold to have a guitar outside let alone be playing it. It is dangerous to be on the pier in bad weather, but curiosity drives him on. He approaches the figure and stops to listen. They converse. Alec realizes it is River Coleman—his ghost. He congratulates him on how well he plays guitar and notes he is the only member of his band who has "respect" for the blues. Coleman tells Alec he does justice to his music; and adds, ominously, that whatever happens, justice will be done.

Alec does not understand about justice. He has no idea how to make his band render the song they did in a more traditional way. And it's too late to do that anyway. One night, Alec's girlfriend goes to bed. He goes to his studio to listen to some music by River Coleman. When he touches the button to CD, a jolt of electricity knocks him to the ground.

Alec realizes he has been hit hard. His right index finger is burned and he can barely breathe. But the CD by Coleman is playing. Then he hears Coleman's voice in his head, as he did on the pier at Grand Haven, saying he is coming for him. Though terrified, he can't get up. The jolt of electricity has immobilized him. He senses Coleman's ghost getting closer and soon sees him in the studio. Coleman appears and compliments him on how well he plays guitar and says he can tell Alec imitates his style. Alec asks if Coleman is going to kill him. The ghost of the blues players says he could have done that when the young man touched the CD controls. And he says he didn't come to kill him but to save him. He is worth saving because he has respect for the blues. The other members in the band, he says, don't. And when he says this he becomes scarier. Then he tells him, I think you’ll do fine on your own—doing your own stuff—maybe even throw in a little blues here and there.

Alex falls asleep and wakes up to find his parents, a police officer, and his girlfriend standing over him. They take him to ER and treat him for electrical shock. After he is released from the Emergency Room, they tell him the grim truth:  the other band members, whom he was supposed to join that night, were killed in plane crash on the way to Chicago.

The song they recorded by Coleman, already popular, becomes a mega-hit. His band joins the ranks of performers like Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, who are cut off in the prime of their careers. Alec takes a year off to decide what to do. But he knows he will become a solo artist. He publicly announces he will never do the Coleman song again. He tells his girlfriend he will become a solo performer and not organize a new band.

He has it from a reliable source that he will be fine on his own, doing his own stuff, and maybe throwing a little blues in here and there.

The story appeared in The Horror Zine.  Read it here.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy #9: My History as a Writer: Writing stories based on songs: "Purple Haze"

As a musician, I know a lot of songs. As a writer, I use them to create stories. Looking back, the creative evolution of these stories intrigues me. Writing a story based on a song, on the concept of song, entails more than simply taking  what is described in a song's lyrics and turning it into a narrative tale. Songs are poems of a sort and they create not merely narratives with the lyrics but also a group of creative associations that become springboards into unique plot sequences.

Looking at lyrics, I marvel at how they are so often creatively associative. An old Led Zeppelin song, "Rock and Roll," has the line, Been a long time since the book of love. I've pondered the exact meaning of that line a lot. Does it mean:  Been a long time since the book of love was written? Been a long time since I read the book of love? Been a long time since the Monotones released "Who Wrote the Book of Love" in 1957? What is the book of love? This is the richness of song lyrics. Or the line by Cat Stevens, in "Peace Train":  Peace train holy roller. Again, what does this mean? A holy roller is a derogatory name for a charismatic or Pentecostal Christian who might shout or, in some cases, roll on the floor in religious ecstasy. But what does that have to do with the Peace Train? And what is the Peace Train anyway?

Song lyrics are not as cut and dried as we think. Ideally, they get the human mind working in creative directions. They create associations. I followed the lead of some of the associations of song lyrics in my story "Purple Haze." I had used song titles for titles of stories before:  "Son of a Preacher Man," "Norwegian Wood," "Into White," and "Revolution." Most of these stories, however, took the song titles because my character, Sossity Chandler, sang the song at one point in the story. This one was different. It relied more on creative association.

Most people interpreted "Purple Haze," as a song is about an LSD trip (though this is disputable). It emerged as a hit in 1967 and remains an iconic song in rock and roll. Whether about drugs or not, it is about someone out of control and not able to function properly. This, I think, was the thing I took to make the basic plot of the story. Sossity falls in with people who turn out to be a gang that steals musical instruments. They want her guitar. They drug her and take her to an abandoned warehouse, steal her purse, and try to get her guitar (she has left it with a friend). She also finds a stolen guitar that belonged Jimi Hendrix

But Sossity is at least able to function and reason, despite being disoriented by the drugs they gave her. She finds a headset and puts in on, thinking it may provide focus to her mind. It is a track of Jimi Hendrix's first album. By letting the familiar songs focus her mind, Sossity is able to get out and get home. The police contact her, return her stolen purse, and tell her the gang has been caught.

Years, later, her nun friend Heather arranges a meeting with a

female member of the gang, who has been religiously converted and released from prison. She asks Sossity's pardon for what she did. When Sossity asks her who helped the police find them, she answers, "It was him." Sossity asks who. The woman says, "I think you know." Though she doesn't believe in ghosts, Sossity at least considers the possibility what she has been told is true.

Being confused (possibly by drugs), helpless, and fighting for control of one's senses are big parts of the song "Purple Haze." These elements suggested Sossity's drug-induced torpor. The iconic songs on the album Are You Experienced give her a focus and help her snap out of her own "purple haze." Stories of Hendrix supply additional content. Songs lead us down creative pathways. Any pathway has lots of possibilities. Songs are good for story ideas. More on this topic later.

My new book, Mother Hulda, a short, fast-moving sci-fi tale based on a story by the Brothers Grimm, is available. Pick up a Kindle copy. 

For more titles, checks out my Writer's Page.

And--amazement!--I found an archive copy of the story, even though the journal that printed it is no longer in operation.  Here it is, for your reading pleasure:  Purple Haze. 

More to come on using songs and music in stories.