WHERE ROCK MET ROLL!!!

 

Visit Bop City in 2008 and finish the year with great memories of the Town Rock and Roll Built^TM! More great shows, events, and celebrations are planned before the Happy New Cheer, Bop's annual end-of-the-year blowout!


Lodestone reporter Chet Kicsson tells the following story about his visit to the Land of the Beat and the Home of the Rave.

The journalist contemplated the remains of his drink and pondered how he could be so miserable in the Rockinest Place on Earth. Bop City, not New York, not Vegas, was truly the city that never sleeps, where you could literally find your choice of entertainment or distraction, any time, day or night, year-round, in perpetually perfect weather and statistically impossibly safe conditions.

Old news. Common knowledge to the world and certainly to the tourists who still milled around this bar tonight. Not the worst bar in the Bop, but not its poshest either. The conversation was typical for the Bop and a bar: “Omigod!! You said that??” “So how long are you in town?” “You know, you wouldn’t think it now, but I played high school lacrosse.” “No way. Evan was never the writer Rustey was.”

So how was he to fulfill his mission—find a new angle on Bop? He recalled his conversation last week with Jean. Every time he was in Jean Werner’s office, he was struck by how much it reminded him of Jerrie Tyler’s Daily Globe office in “King Cougar.” Of course, Jean was at least 20 years younger than Tyler, even the 1977 model, and due to the nature of Lodestone magazine Werner was immeasurably cooler than the no-longer-Little Rascal. Werner looked different too. Like a younger Gore Vidal, maybe. Framed covers from the 35-year life of the magazine, beginning as a struggling San Francisco-based journal of the music and drug scene and becoming…well, a successful one, lined his office walls, along with autographed album covers (some from the days when you could see the art), original sketches from Win Stone, Stu Wycliffe, and Bryan White-Duke, poetry from Pete Dickens and Rob Shelley, and photos from tours, appearances, trials, crime scenes, marriages…a private shrine to pop and rock music since the dawn of psychedelia. If you loved the music, it was hard to have a bad experience in Jean’s office.

Unless he wanted you to.

The journalist had come in to ask for some time off. “I need a vacation, Jann. Three months on the road with the Mannish Boys takes it out of anyone.”

“So take a vacation. We’ll pay for it. Bring me a piece with a new angle on Bop City.” He had the nerve to smile when he said this.

“A new angle on Bop? Like a fresh take on breathing? People know more about Bop City than they do about their own families, Jean—be serious!”

“So that’s a challenge then, isn’t it? You relax, recreate, but let those literary muscles pump. Tell the world how a park that celebrates revolutionary music can make a profit without selling out.” Still smiling. When was this guy in black ops? He could smile while he asked you to kill your grandma and stuff her in your best friend’s mailbox.

The journalist had picked up his coat and headed for the door. “When?”

“Need it for the June, so…by the 17th.”

The door was almost closed.

“Hey—maybe I’ll give you the cover!”

He glanced back through the crack in the doorway. “You can be such a ----- for such a nice guy.”

So here he was, almost halfway through his budget and his schedule, without even a concept, let alone a draft. He paid the check and stepped out into the perfect evening air—65 degrees, 55% humidity, but rising. About 1:45—the rain would start in about an hour and a half, for the nightly 45 minutes. One of Bop’s great mysteries, unexplained, but hell, why fight it? Nothing succeeds like success. And Bop City is nothing if not a success. Bop City.

The Theme Park that is a City.

Stars, Cars, and Wild Guitars.

Where the Bop Doesn’t Stop.

Land of the Beat, Home of the Rave.

Where Rock Met Roll.

And where I apparently can’t get a -----ing cab.

Three blocks off, headlights approached, pretty quickly, even for this time of night. In seconds, a ’56 Corvette slowed and stopped, too close to the journalist to be an accident. He glanced over and realized it wasn’t a Vette…exactly. It looked sort of like one, but it had elements of other things. Other models, maybe, but even other makes—a little T-Bird, a little Caddy, something so old or obscure he couldn’t name it. It was a convertible, a ragtop, and the sky was already clouding up. It was definitely a classic rod, but he’d never seen anything quite like it.

Nothing quite like the driver, either.

At first you might think Deane James had dropped by for a chat, but then he looked a little like Jim Jordan, Jesse Aron, Josh Gray…he seemed to shimmer, like a reflection in a mountain lake, someone you thought you recognized but couldn’t see clearly. He spoke: You looking for a story bout Bop City?

The journalist, strangely for him, was hesitant. “…Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

The driver leaned over and swung the door open. “Get in.”

Too much to take in all at once. The leopard-skin interior—not print, either, it felt like honest-to-Jack Hanna leopard skin. The huge dice on the rear-view, the impossibly-large original equipment radio in the dash playing just what he would expect from this guy—Hut Jenkins, Vince Gallup, Howlin Mad Merton, Ray Robinson, Mac Ellas, Slim Laidlaw, Jim Rock and the Rollers, all in glorious mono and sounding like they were in the back seat. Probably had been, from the looks of the car.

And the driver. Even if he lost the shades (at night—too cool for school, this fella), impossible to tell this guy’s age. 20? 50? 17? Was he legal to drive? Old enough to smoke. The cig dangled improbably from his left hand, adhered against physics in the rush from the ride. How the ---- fast were they going, anyway?

The speedometer—when in the ---- did they calibrate them to 300mph?

“Hold on.”

He wasn’t kidding. He shifted again and the car couldn’t possibly still be on the road.

“So what are you looking for? The Real Bop City? That’s what most of you boys come down here for.”

The journalist didn’t answer. He was still searching for his response when the driver flicked his stub into the night and continued.

“When you walk along the sidewalks in Vieux Carré and hear the melodies of Anthony Chess and Richard Flambeau cascade from the always-open doorways, you feel it.

“When you cruise by the jukejoints of Billyville and the beat hits you from the Blue Boys or the Tennessee Two or the Jenkins Brothers Band, you feel it.

“When a coffee-colored Cadillac smooths you through Checkerville and the grooves of Mac Ellas and Thunderbolt Perkins leave you black and blued, you feel it.

“It’s the beat, the rhythm, the kick of America.

“It’s Bop City.”

They were on Bop Street now, the Main Vein, where it all happened and you were there to see it. The rain had just begun to spit down.

“It used to be Rockville, until a rebel genius named Sam Bop bought the town council and turned a dying sharecroppers’ town into the first whole-city theme park ever in 1959. There was plenty of noise, but Sam knew that Sammy Rapp was right…rock and roll was here to stay, and no pile of broken 45’s was gonna change that. By 1961 Bop was the third biggest city in Arkansas.”

They were headed south and east, out of 54 Acres on their right, Littlepool on the left, into Dolce Voce and Wheel City. They were directly under one of Bop’s massive statues, the Atlantic Crossing, bridging 54 Acres and Littlepool. Of course, they could see McCarty Tower downtown, the thousand-foot-tall, four-sided flying V, but they were close enough to see the Statues of the Titans, too—Paul Stellar, Abe Goodie, Coy Carson…

“Course, that ain’t all good.”

The anonymous driver was still talking. They were almost into downtown now.

“Bigger towns get bigger problems. Rockville was a river town, so it had always had its share, but with five times the population, the tourist trade, the party feel, now it had more. That’s where me and my friends come in.”

Through the Tower, crossing onto Thunder Road out through Billyville, or maybe take Main Street out to Mount Rockmore. The driver cupped a fresh cigarette (Pall Malls—when were those cool?) in the palm of his hand against the wind. The ash fell into his palm, but the thing stayed lit.

“Who am I?”

The journalist knew the answer would come from the same place the question had. “I’m that spirit again, the charge you feel when the drums kick in. I help keep the peace in Bop City.”

What, that’s it?? “Sir?”

The driver, for all that speed, now acted like he had all the time in the world. “Yeah?”

“When you hold your cigarette like that, doesn’t the fire hit your hand?"

He looked over the lenses of those impenetrable sunglasses at the journalist.

“It don’t hurt.”

Down Main Street, past Saville Row and toward the neon-lit, poster-painted faces of the Quarries on Rockmore. “Look, you don’t come to stay in Bop if you don’t get it. You don’t come here if the music is your calling. You come here if it’s your life.”

This better be a story. The guy’s sounding a little loose now. “If you don’t feel alive till you’re dancin, drinkin, pettin yore pet, Bop City’s yore home. Now, some folks come here to visit, and that’s fine. But some come to prey. And that’s bad. See, the music’s got its own downbeat; it don’t need no help.”

On cue, a late-night cruiser stepped from shadows along one of Haley Heights’ avenues.

“I been here as long as Sam’s been buildin, and there ain’t been no shortage of work for me yet.”

Need facts, if this is gonna be something besides Tracker Thompson 2008. “But,…who are you? What do you do?”

Frustrated, the journalist wondered--was he annoyed, or just playing with me? He hadn’t shown a sense of humor yet. “Hell, I told ya oncet.”

The driver turned south, toward Checkerville and Miller Swamp. “I’m the spirit of the music. I’m the soul of Rock and Roll.”

The Dell-Victors’ “Walkin’ that Walk” segued into “All for My Baby” by Davey Viera. “I ain’t no Hillbilly Cat, nor Man in Black, nor a Killer. I ain’t the Godfather of Soul, nor the Genius, and I sure ain’t no brown-eyed handsome man. I’m the rhythm that cain’t be put down. They put Jesse in the Army, Jim in jail, Richard in the church, Billy Ray in exile, Vince in braces, Slim, Davey, P.J., Jimmie, Robby, Tommie, Cool Jim, Stovall, and so many more in the ground. Hell, I done buried more pioneers than the space program, but I cain’t be stopped. I’m Billy Blue, and you better believe I’m here to stay.”

It would be several hours before the sun rose, but the journalist knew his day had finally begun.