DGC Anniversary Post 6

Art by Sako

This is a really fun one, no?

And I have some song lyrics for you today.

Ziggy wrote this really raunchy one he called “Drugs, Sex, and Rock and Roll” while he was working with Jordan on his solo record, and in the end they cut it as too raunchy. But I thought you all might like it:

Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll

Down by the docks
There’s a man you see
Down on the corner
He got what you need

Give me a reason, give me a rhyme
He’s got the season to bend your mind
Hey man, hey man, hey hey man

Down in the corner
Man on his knees
Down on a bone man
He got what I need

Give me a reason, give me a rhyme
It’s only treason if you got a wife
Hey man, hey man, hey hey man

Down there in the seats
Up here in the lights
We got what you need
The man’s got it right

Hey man, hey man, hey hey man

We also cleaned out a room in our house where a lot of random things had ended up and I found the baton that Daron references in this scene with Jonathan back in Book 2 when they’re hanging out in DC:

“Besides, a music school education isn’t like a regular college. Shit, if anything I’d know even less about the world than I do now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, come on, J. If I’ve got four classes in a semester, it’s four classes that have to do with music. Conducting, theory, advanced composition, orchestra, even at a diddly school like the Conservatory, it’s music music music. Composers of the romantic era. Wind ensemble. Ear training.” I shook my head suddenly, like I was trying to wake myself up from one of those dreams where you find yourself in a classroom taking a test, but it’s not a class you’ve ever taken and for some reason the test is in Swahili or something. “I mean, did I really need to learn conducting? Could I have spent that time better reading Moby Dick or running white rats through a maze? I don’t know.”

“I’m trying to imagine you as a conductor.”

I patted at the air in four-four and growled out a few loudening bars of Ride of the Valkyrie, my gestures becoming more emphatic until I almost poked him in the nose as we walked. “I got a B and got to keep the baton.”

The story of how I ended up with this actual baton when *I* did not go to music school is remember the apartment in the Fenway that Daron was subletting from a Berklee College of Music student? When I rented my apartment in the Fenway, the previous occupant was a Berklee student. I know because when I did a walk-through of the place I saw how many instruments he had crammed in there. It was a tiny studio but I knew my stuff would fit because he had about the same amount of stuff that I did, including the computer, Yamaha DX-7, bed, and microwave oven.

After I moved in, one day I was dusting and I realized there was something on the lintel above the door. He’d left his conducting baton, on which the word SLUGGER was carved.

In the first draft of the scene above, Daron brings this up, but it didn’t flow naturally so I cut the detail. But here it is, the genuine article: