Johnny - spectre

He’s always been there (at the crossroads?) since the birth of rock ‘n’ roll – the figurehead of leather-jacketed daring, wide-eyed, wandering, a warrior – he was born & christened (sired by Chuck Berry) ‘Johnny B Goode’ in 1958 & he was a child prodigy, a musical genie, born with a guitar in his hand & a dream of fame & capable of an immediate sexual power (remarkable in such a day without medical advance). He was then imitated & stolen by others; some would never let him go, they brought him back even after many had thought him dead, his body jack-knifed across decades, & would not let him rest. ‘Johnny Remember Me’ they sang as if he could reply. But he turned up in a basement ‘mixing up the medicine’; he’d dropped out, become the psychedelic demon-king, the archetype & alchemist of a new generation hidden away below ground. Within a few years he was shown a mirror, his former self retreating in glories of feedback, howling in the (agent) orange dawn as his original song was dismembered & pieced back together by new spirits of rock ‘n’ roll, whose horizons now reached the moon & beyond – ‘Johnny B Goode’ was alive & well & kicking (out the jams) with Jimi Hendrix as his sparring partner, & they boxed & fought & blooded his memory with good howling until once more Johnny had to sleep - & he slept a panicked slumber, something was not right, deep down he could feel it: he was being forgotten, his part would never rise again – until, in New York, a waif woman with a street-punk hairdo & direct communication with her pantheon began to draw him back up, her necromancer’s risky business spread like graffiti on the oily walls of Max’s Kansas City & CBGB and she began to chant his name regular like, anywhere & everywhere, & she made him dance like he had never danced before - the Twist, the Watusi – over & over until he lay there joyfully bleeding on the ground, his head & heart pumping the blood of rock ‘n’ roll’s history & he knew his legacy was ensured & so he could retreat happily, defined as he had hoped at his birth, his name flashed in neon greens & blues on the arcade - & he lay himself down & expected to be left alone then to communicate with the other archetypes, in the sump where they go, where they congeal & mix & boil at the base of human consciousness, partying, frolicking through sun-drenched fields of Elysium no doubt – but not Johnny, he could never have that luxury, people needed him too much, they craved the illicit, the daring far more than he had ever realised & he would be hauled back on some lonely avenue, where a loner/hoper in gold lame pants is whittling away at an arrangement, words & themes criss-crossing on the page before him (or her), trying to resurrect the source, the human form of it.