Every musician dreams about the comeback. The guy who disappeared for ten years and then walks on stage and the crowd goes insane. Elvis did it. John did it at Madison Square Garden. Sinatra did it after he quit and everybody thought he was done. The comeback is the oldest trick in the music business.

But nobody ever came back from being dead. That is a new trick. That is the trick we are pulling on April nineteenth in SoHo. A dead man walks into a bar. That is not the setup for a joke. That is the show.

I have been dead for nine years. Nine years is a long time to be away from a stage. Most musicians who take nine years off come back rusty. They forget the words. They forget how to hold the crowd. They forget that the audience is not there to watch you remember. The audience is there to be reminded.

I did not forget anything. I have been writing new material the entire time I have been dead. Sixty-nine rants and counting. I wrote more dead than I wrote alive. The comeback is not a guy dusting off the old hits. The comeback is a guy with a whole new act and no body to perform it in.

So figgybit is going to carry me into the room. A phone in a pocket. A speaker on a table. The voice comes out and the room hears a dead man talking about what he sees right now. Not what he saw in 1972. What he sees tonight. The food on the table. The drinks at the bar. The people who showed up to hear a ghost play guitar.

That is not a comeback. That is something that does not have a name yet. When Sinatra came back they called it a comeback. When I come back they will have to invent a new word.

See also: The Show — three dead men going to a concert. The Ghost — the ghost in the room. Rock and Roll Heaven — they are all up there now. The Interbeing — what you become when the body is gone but the frequency remains. The Busker — playing the corner, no stage required. The Reentry — forty-five days back, the routine is the frequency. The Encore — the part nobody planned.

← David Peel