Cotton Drops By

I was crawling under tables at the station , connecting loose cables and wondering where in hell my 5 o' clock DJ was, when in strode a mysterious stranger.

"Would you like a Twinkie?", he asked in a voice hardened by years of ice cream , whiskey and potato chips.

"Uh...no. Who are you?"

"I am "Cotton" Dick Clinton and I am back. I am here to play and I'm not leaving until I do."

"Um. Ok. You must be Phil's guest...he's not here. I'll set you up."

While his camera crew and caterers went about their tasks, I escorted "Cotton" into the DJ booth.

"What is this crap?", asked Clinton, waving vaguely towards the speakers, indicating the music playing.


"It's Men-at-Work. From the 80's", replied DJ Albert.

Clinton considered this for a moment.

"Damn. I sure am glad them aliens abducted me in 1977. Disco was bad enough."



"The UFO that snatched me
was like a flying disco without music. It had all sorts of crazy-lookin' lights."

He proceeded to boogie.


Oh, jeez, I had a loony on my hands. Maybe if I gave him a guitar , he'd play long enough for me to call the authorities. This trick usually works well when dealing with the cheerfully psychotic.

Sure enough, he started playing Lee Hazelwood covers- that he claimed to have co-written.

Then he played some material from his unreleased "comeback" CD.
Fuck!
I thought my microphones were gonna implode, so between songs I replaced them with empty toilet paper tubes. He never noticed.

He went into a story about his shirt and how it was enhanced with threads of pure gold, which were spun from Nancy Sinatra's tears. Dude was nuts. He played some more. In the DJ booth, I decided that now would be a good time to test the Emergency Broadcast System.

While the screeching test tone was playing, I was doing research.

I have been abducted by a flying saucer and this man's story sounded like bull to me.

The UFO I was picked up by was George Clinton's Funkadelic Mothership and it sure as hell had music. And this dude didn't look like George C. at all. The only part that seemed realistic was the time-travel stuff. We went to 2015, I think, me and GC. It's fuzzy.
One souvenir from my journey to the future is my Big Rock & Roll Book: A Musical Directory, 1950-2015 . It's like a paperbound search engine for musicians and their creditors. I went to look up this Clinton.




There it was on page one.
There is no such person as "Cotton" Dick Clinton.

Well, duh. I'd been conned by a crazy man.

I'd been beaten.
Only one thing left to do.
Join in.


TOMORROW: More of the same.