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 Watershed vs. The Raspberries: A Deleted Scene from Hitless Wonder 
 

     On his way out the front door, Willie slipped Biggie a cassette tape and said, "Make sure you guys listen to this." The original label had peeled away from the cassette. On the white blur that was left, Willie had taken a ballpoint and written, Best of the Raspberries. "One day Watershed could be this good."

     We’d never heard of the Raspberries.

     Willie threw his hands in the air and said, "Awwww." He told us they were from Cleveland and they were the quintessential power pop band. Melodic but ballsy.

     We’d never heard the term power pop, either. To us, pop was Kasey Kasem and America’s Top 40. Richard Marx and George Michael. We were a rock band.

     After he was gone, we put the tape into the deck, and we heard the scratches and pops of needle-in-groove. Willie had made this recording from vinyl.

     The first song kicked in with big drums and a ballsy, Pete Townshend-esque guitar lick. Mama, yeah. Whew! belted the singer, and the bass and rhythm guitar slid in with a nicely-distorted crunch. Pretty damn rocking.

     Just as quickly as I could form that thought, however, the song downshifted into the first verse, and the singer, sounding too much like every high school thespian I’d ever heard, sang, I-eye never knew how complete love could beeeeeeee. ‘Til she kissed me and said baby pleeeeeeese, go-oh all the way-eee. Any balls this song had ever had were now snipped-off and rolling around on the floor.

     "What the hell is that?" said Biggie.

     "This doesn’t rock," I said.

     Herb laughed and cranked up the volume, "This fucking sucks."

     Rock and roll was Keith Moon setting his drums on fire. Keith Richards smacking his forearm to find a virgin vein. Not whatever this Raspberry pansy was spouting.

     Biggie hit stop on the tape deck. "How can this guy sing with all that cum in his mouth?"


An Artful Introduction
 
The introduction is a tricky little beast, as anyone who has ever been asked to do one can attest. Here's an example of  how we think it should be done, given by Van Alston (owner of Slim's Downtown Tavern, a bar that readers of Hitless Wonder will recognize from Chapter 11) on June 23, 2012 at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC.
 
I'm Van Alston. I own Slim's Downtown, a little rock and roll bar that has been on Wilmington Street for thirteen years. In bar years, that's just shy of forever. I've done my time in the bar business. I've done my time in the band business. I've tour-managed well adjusted adults and snot-nosed prodigies all over the world. I enjoyed every minute of it. I'm pretty much a guy with no talent save the talent of making bar tabs disappear, which has endeared me to a musician or two in my day.

I look around and I see a group of people who we define here in Raleigh as "those who bring the rock." Not just band guys, but tour managers, bartenders, booking agents, barflies. It takes all these folks to bring the rock. You can't have rock without the whole group. I like to sit around with these people and tell stories and listen to their stories. It's easy to do. You're out on the patio at Slim's, having a couple of beers and it begins... remember when? The stories just start to flow. It's easy. Right up until someone invites their cousin Jimmy to sit down. He's not in the group that brings the rock.

Nobody knows how to talk to Cousin Jimmy. He doesn't share our frame of reference. He doesn't speak the lingo and no one at the table cares to try and explain it, because explaining disrupts the flow. He doesn't know forty-three different drummer jokes, so damn, you have to tell the whole joke instead of just the punch line. It must seem to this poor guy that he is sitting in a thick fog listening to a bunch of people speaking swahili.

You're here today to listen to Joe Oestreich read from his book "Hitless Wonder." Joe plays bass and sings in the band Watershed. He's been doing that for more than twenty years. In the band business that's on the other side of forever, far on the other side. He's a graduate of the Ohio State University Creative Writing Program. He's been published in a road case full of magazines including Esquire and Sports Illustrated. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University, just outside of Myrtle Beach, which is home to many golf courses and hopefully he will like this introduction enough to invite me down to play sometime.

Which brings us to "Hitless Wonder." Joe has written the book that none of the guys at the table of rock bringers could write. He has somehow written a book that simultaneously appeals to guys like me and guys like Cousin Jimmy. There are spots in the book when I can taste the Pabst Blue Ribbon, when I can feel the thump of the bass tighten up my stomach, when I can hear the whine of the rock stuck in the front left tire of the van.

The thing, though, the truly wonderful, kick-ass thing about "Hitless Wonder" is that cousin Jimmy can read it and all of a sudden he can understand the language of rock as if there was a bell of amazing clarity ringing out on the other side of the table, guiding him through the fog. It takes a man of no small skill to ring that bell. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Joe Oestreich.


Hitlless Wonder
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