The old question runs, If
you could go back in time and meet someone, who would it be? For me that's easy: Robert Johnson. He was perhaps
the greatest bluesman of all time and his influence on blues was decisive.
Countless guitarists have imitated his chops and lead parts and copied his
chord progressions. Keith Richards listened to Johnson; the influence gave the
Rolling Stones their bluesy sound (as opposed to a regular pop sound). He stands
as a giant among blues musicians. Too bad I really can’t meet him. Or can I?
Well, I can in a way. I can build a world he is in and I can
enter it through the eyes of one of my characters. That’s what I did in my
novella Strange Brew. It is a tale of a pop singer from the 1970s who meets up
with a witch—a very powerful and very flipped-out witch. The old Cream song “Strange
Brew,” says, “She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue / In her own mad mind,
she’s in love with you. / With you! What are you gonna do?” The main character
finds out you don’t brush off a powerful witch. He becomes her unwilling
partner.
But he begins to see her soul. They travel time. They make
love. He realizes that her magic cannot fix everything. To repair the damage
she has done to her brain with drugs, the two of them travel back in time to
meet up with the witch’s old lover, a HooDoo magician. They travel back to the
USA in the 1920s. A local bluesman is playing the bars. Of course, it is none
other than the main character’s guitar hero, Robert Johnson—and my guitar hero.
For these sequences, I get to at least imagine and, to a degree live, what it would have been like to hear Johnson play and to talk with him. The human imagination is the next best thing to being there.
The episode of going back in time also gave me a chance to portray the pre-segregation
South—the society Johnson lived in and struggled
in. I depict the racism, some of the violence, and the bigotry that reigned in
those days. I also get a chance to show the community of people (black people
and a few whites) who managed to navigate the waters of this time, to care for
each other, to do good, enjoy themselves, and to produce some of the most
amazing music ever done.
This is a perk fiction can give. It can enliven our
imagination and provide the best access we will ever have to the past. Want to
meet Benjamin Franklin? Helen of Troy? Jesus? The Goddess Aphrodite? Sergeant
Alvin York? Create them as a character. It will bring you closer to them than
you could ever imagine you might be.
And, of course, I would urge you to pick up a copy of Strange Brew. It is filled with music, magic, love . . . and an appearance by Robert Johnson.
No comments:
Post a Comment