PRECIOUS BANE
                      

        Bold As Love is a fantasy. For all the somewhat alarming synchronicities I've encountered on the way, I really don't think the Once and Future King is going to turn up on Reading Arena stage any time soon, to save us black gold addicts from the Dark Ages. (On a brighter note, nor did I find any trace of anyone, upto and including the US government, secretly building occult super weapons, during my researches for Midnight Lamp*) But (whether you think it matters or not) the woods are definitely burning, I didn't make that up. So finally, here's a tribute to my sources, and to some of the people who are thinking beyond tomorrow, with no disrespect intended to the many who are still living as if there isn't one.
                                                     

In 1967 Bob Dylan and the musicians who would be The Band spent six weeks making music together in the basement of a house called Big Pink, West Saugerties, NY state. The Bold As Love version of this crucial experience is called "Bridge House" (Ax At The Bridge, Castles Made Of Sand. Greil Marcus's "The Invisible Republic", uses The Basement Tapes as his route into an utterly bonkers meditation on American folk/rock culture, from the Cu Cu Bird to the sixties. In English, this chap Harry Smith would be called Cecil Sharp, fancy that. Essential.

Carol Brightman's sister, Candace, ruled the Grateful Dead's stage lighting for two decades, and single handedly invented the concept of Rock & Roll brain-burning Son et Lumière. This is why (in Bold As Love) the neurologically active special fx called Immix are created by latter-day Dead Heads, (Aoxomoxoa and the Heads) Carol Brightman, however is a social historian, and this book, Sweet Chaos, charts the relationship between the the Dead's libertarian psychedelia and the radical politics (Civil Rights, Anti Vietnam, etc) of their times. Warning: not hagiography. Garcia does not come across as cuddly ego-free guitar-man.

"The social history of the Grateful Dead". Hagiography. As reading material, has aged a lot better than Ken Kesey's Garage Sale. Why Grateful? Who's dead? It's in here.

Never one to avoid the obvious, when I needed the US President as a fictional character I went straight to the top. I see Fred Eiffrich very much as Teddy Roosevelt played by Martin Sheen. Got a lot of time for Teddy, according to his lights.Close up, FDR, (like JFK) seems a rather more slippery character.

"Well, there she is. The greatest American who ever lived, and I made her, the way she feels inside." ..."She founded the UN or something, didn't she? Hmm..."Dead From The Waist Down#1 Bandit Queens, Midnight Lamp.