Strange Brew (The Tortie Kitten Mystery Trilogy Series Book 2) by Constance Barker

Author:Constance Barker [Barker, Constance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Constance Barker
Published: 2021-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Shen didn’t give me the I-told-you-so look. He was too intent on the elderly musician. Gray took Shen’s intent look as an accusation.

“Look, man, you have to understand the times. A bunch of Limeys had co-opted American music and made a lot of bread. They were influencing the youth of America, turning them against the war, against the values we hold dear. I volunteered to change all that.”

“How?” Shen pressed.

“Me and the boys were all in the Army. Volunteers, not draftees. We wanted to kill a commie for mommy, shoot some zipper heads for the American Way. But the Army knew we were players, right? So they put a bunch of us in bands. Personnel was moved around until they found the right combo for this combo, you dig? And the Peerless Scarlet Jack Explosion was born: our mission was to infiltrate the youth movement and weed out anti-American sentiment.”

The speech sounded rehearsed. “Did that work out well for you?” I glanced around the featureless hospital room.

Gray finger picked the guitar. “We weren’t the first, and probably not the last. The government worried about the youth movement ever since the baby boomers became teenagers. Why do you think Elvis was drafted?”

I thought we were about to take a crooked road to crazy town, but I didn’t interrupt.

“They tried to control the musicians directly, but the government cats were too square to get it. They were backing guys like Pat Boone and Fabian, repackaging and spoon-feeding watered down rock n roll pablum to the masses. They had it under control for a while, and rock music, real rock music, died.

“Then came the British invasion. The kids were turned on, but the hippies, they were subversive. Uncle Sam did not groove on subversion. They needed more direct control, musicians who were part of the scene, not the industry.

“We wrote songs, played for the troops. Response was monitored. Hypnotic beats, infrasound in the bass lines, disharmonic chords, hypersonic frequencies, enormous volume, we threw in the kitchen sink of any sound that would interfere with the brain. Engineers tweaked everything until it worked as well as it could. When we played out on tour, every city we visited responded with a higher number of armed services recruitment.”

Shen turned thoughtful. “If it worked so well, why did the Vietnam War remain so unpopular? The Peace Movement went on into the ’70s.”

Gray nodded to himself. “Our handlers wanted more. They wanted to plant ideas in people’s heads directly. Our shtick worked on live audiences, but it was hard to capture on a recording. Transistor radios can’t reproduce hypersonic or infrasound frequencies, for instance. You can’t cut that into vinyl, either. That’s why Manifestoes was a bust. We tried to put the message in the lyrics, to make the overall album a cautionary tale. You know, if you think this way, you’ll end up in the madhouse.”

Shen asked, “Sonic Lobotomy was different, somehow?”

The finger picking stopped. In Gray’s eyes, I could almost see a fire burning. “Yeah.

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