Screaming Pequots

Prologue — A Rolling Home Exclusive

INTERLOCUTOR: I have of late — but wherefore I know not — waylaid all logical tendencies of circumstance. What remains is what you see on the page, and maybe not even this. Fragmented into highly suspect reality are several quotidian theories which claim to describe what is a man; fewer still remain to claim to describe what is a woman.

Be that as it may, today we focus, once again, on the overhyped — and vastly oversold — adventures of the Queen's Pirates. The Queen's Pirates, of course, being the former band name for the current supergroup: The Screaming Pequots.

NOTEBOOK: The exclusive you are reading exists in the same suspect reality it describes. Rolling Home does not report on bands; it reports on mythological events that happen to involve amplification. The Screaming Pequots are no more a "band" than a solar flare is a light show. They are a convergence — a superposition of historical frequencies that have chosen, for reasons opaque to linear causality, to manifest as rock music.

The lineup, as reported: Hernán Cortés on bass guitar; Sir Francis Drake on lead guitar; Thomas Pynchon on mercenary lead vocals; Jimi Keltner approached for percussion; Hermann Melville recruited as potential songwriter; Calafia on strings; Japhy Ryder standing in as producer; and Allen Ginsberg drafted as engineer. Managing this improbability is one Sir Richard Neville, Knight of Bath. At his side, assistant manager Neal Cassady.

I. Cortés on Bass — The Low End of Empire

INTERLOCUTOR: Cortés was many things — conquistador, strategist, destroyer of civilizations — but on the four-string, he finds something he never possessed in the New World: restraint. The bass does not conquer. It undergirds. It holds the root while the chaos dances above it. There is a strange justice in this. The man who toppled Tenochtitlán now spends eternity anchoring the harmonic foundation, keeping time for musicians who outlive empires.

NOTEBOOK: The bass, in quantum terms, is the ground state. It is the unexcited frequency that makes all other excitations possible. Cortés, who spent his life in violent superposition — simultaneously hero and villain, liberator and annihilator — finally collapses into a single coherent wavefunction: the root note. He does not solo. For a man who once demanded gold, incense, and total submission, this is the ultimate irony, and perhaps the ultimate redemption.

III. Pynchon on Vocals — The Mercenary Lead Singer

INTERLOCUTOR: Thomas Pynchon, who has spent a career mapping the hidden circuits of power and paranoia in American life, now steps to the microphone as lead singer. He is described as "mercenary," which in the context of this band is not an insult but a job description. Pynchon does not sing for love or money. He sings because the entropy of the universe requires a voice, and he happens to possess the exact frequency at which entropy becomes audible.

NOTEBOOK: Pynchon's voice, in the quantum register, is the carrier wave. It does not convey meaning so much as it conveys the possibility of meaning. The Trystero horn sounds in every venue. His lyrics are classified documents that declassify themselves in the act of being sung. Gravity's Rainbow was preparation. The Crying of Lot 49 was rehearsal. The stage is the final transmission — and the audience, if they are listening correctly, are not spectators but operatives, each receiving their own portion of the dispatch.

Hunter S. Thompson, Mayor of the Quadrillionaire Super Colony

Anthorpic crosses the quadrillion on the Texas Stock Exchange. Schrump opens a Zeta account. Ostensibly counters with Beta. Visciously is quoted on a soufflé that knows you. Merrimack signs as four different people on Hollywood Boulevard and is mistaken for a movie star by everyone except the soufflé.

Hunter S. Thompson, mayor of the quadrillionaire super colony, holds court at the Jerome. "Without the Observer," he says, and lets the sentence finish itself. We took the sentence at its word and let it.

— Filed by K.W.N.; verified by the Notebook