Oedipussy by Solomon Deep Read Free Book Online

voices and sound to tape, forever.
    John came early and jumped on the drum tracks. We did it over and over again until he replaced the metronome with an almost perfect time ragged beat. If he was too perfect it didn't sound right, and there was an art to good percussion.
    The rest of the band arrived and unapologetically burned through our set as if it was already second nature. We attacked, and attacked, and drove, and recorded, and pushed through to the other side.
    When everyone began to mention that they had to leave, I improvised a quick review of our work. I hooked the eight track to my guitar amplifier with an adapter, and we listened.
    It was creative, pure, and amazing, and we listened with closed eyes as if this version of the truth was the absolute truth. There was something scratchy and magnetic about the recording - very garagey - the sound added to the definitive grunge elements of it appearing as though there wasn't even effort or time put into the work itself. We recorded it in my basement, after all, and the materials we had at our disposal were a few hundred dollars in equipment and some great music. That was all we needed.
    I scanned their faces, a satiated glow radiating as my ears drank the music and my eyes bobbed from face to face. The music was a stone dropped in a glassy lake. Ripples of enjoyment echoed through us, and we knew it would resonate on.
    "So what’s next?" Steve approached the project as a passenger on this train. We didn't mind. He was a great bassist.
    "Jenny takes our picture before you go. She develops them, I make a press pack, and we start finding gigs."
    "Do we have enough stuff?" Kurt, the practical.
    "Does it matter if we start small?"
    Their heads all bobbed in agreement.
    We went outside, and Jenny snapped pictures as we posed and moved around in the back yard and the street. The whole thing took another ten minutes, and the guys were able to pack up and leave very quickly. They left one by one, but John continued to drag.
    "What are you doing today?" I asked.
    "Nothing, just hanging around."
    "Let’s do something - help me put together the press kits. We can design some stuff and head over to the Kinkos and print everything out - get everything ready to go."
    "Cool with me!"
    We headed up to my bedroom and started dubbing on my tape deck. I showed him how to do it - the tape deck had a double speed feature, so the twenty-three minute tape took only about twelve minutes each tape.
    "So, did you see the news?" I asked. I flipped through some old encyclopedias.
    "News?"
    "Cobain."
    "No."
    I tried to remain calm. Perspective was everything in a situation such as this. But was it possible that the drummer for my band was completely out of touch with the business we were in? Were we opening a new church, and one of our priests wasn't aware of our worshipped deity?
    Why weren't people crying in the streets? We should be laying down palm fronds as the casket of the once and future king of rock was brought through the streets and worshipped! Or visited in the capitol, lying in state for the masses to pass under a perpetually burning American flag! Something!
    "He killed himself - apparently earlier this week -some electrician found his body yesterday. I don't know what to do." I made a motion making a gun out of my fingers and holding it to my chin. I whispered 'pow.' I have no idea why I did it.
    "Was he a relative of yours?"
    "No, it's just, the thing of it. He was king."
    John nodded, seeming to undermine the seriousness of the information I was giving him. I was surprised - some cultural black hole existed behind his eyes.
    "Could you trace around this?" I handed him a paper sleeve for a tape case, and he drew his pencil around it on a piece of copier paper, and included lines for the fold marks.
    I found an illustration of the Ouroboros and cut it out of one of the encyclopedias we never used. It was the perfect size for our application on the front of the tape. I found some