In the Court of the Yellow King Read Online Free PDF

station-manager.
    My shows. Because it was me.
    Never in word or deed or thought had I betrayed my sorrow, even to myself. The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord.
    What tied my days together was obligation. My obligation, as Hank Williams put it to me years before, to post and blaze the trail. Sometimes, I was obliged to protect the music, sometimes support it, and toward the end it was through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul.
    Not even now.
    Not even now. I’m tired. I’ve broken again. I’ve broken and done this thing. They’ll just look at me funny. No one punishes my sort much here, not the way they punish the real nuts. But my sort aren’t usually up causing this much trouble.
    Except I cry, you dig? I cry so hard in the night with no voice. The bitter wretchedness of the whole elaborate construction of tinsel and mud that’s all any man’s misspent life ever is, that all comes back with an icepick headache of shame and disgrace.
    They will be very curious to know the tragedy – they of the outside world who write books and print millions of newspapers. They may send their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must halt before the confessional.
    But the shame calls forth the memory of honor, and the tears likewise of sacrifice, and my tachycardiac old ticker still telegraphs the story for all the cats and kittens not yet even born. For Rock & ROLL.
    For a minute or two now, until they pinion me and whack me up with something subcutaneously, I have a voice and it’s alive. I cast my lot with the wild Indian who swallows the sun in the sacred mushroom and rises in the dark morning of the eighth day with a song. A big beat and a song. I can feel my voice going out on the air now. On the ether. I can.
    I can. Someone is listening. Story time with Uncle Moondog, tonight. Gonna tell you how one day a King was born in Tupelo, a King I sat before and heard him sing something few others would hear. And some of the rest. The parts I have the strength to croak.
    The Moondog wants to tell you what the King In Yellow sang. About Carcosa Radio and the Big Beat. Have a seat. Turn your radio up. Is there still radio? Are there still all the hits all the time?
    Time. There is this microphone. Whatever those pills are is some heavy shit, and not in that Times Square kind of way. The microphone’s the thing, whereon I’ll tell my audience with the King.
    The parts of the King Of Rock & Roll that came from somewhere else. The parts that didn’t fit the rest of him. The larva inside him, the spy that took control of the flesh. The real King, killed and cut up and reborn like ten, like a tapeworm that squishes in your hand, and all the parts not left to regrow are eaten and shit out and eaten again, forever.
    Before Elvis Aron Presley, there was nobody white like that, no one the networks would let me run on prime time, anyway. Bill Haley was the rock-and-roll Frankie Sinatra, a dinosaur with feathers, like my old band in Johnstown that we called the Sultans. Heh. The Sultans of Swing.
    What an antique time. I suppose I helped kill it, me and guys like Carl Perkins and Buck Owens and Jerry Lee Lewis.... Oh, brother. What Prometheus did we let loose, kids? The Beast touched down in Tupelo.
    I don’t like talking about the first time I met him. The second time, that was just for the press. Or they thought it was. Public Relations, you understand. No, I did my own research, when I thought I was on top of things. Hell, I went to Jamaica , to hear this new kind of music the Calypso orchestras were playing when the