Abstract for “Backbeat the Waves”
Set in a time between glam rock and filthy punk, “Backbeat the Waves” washes over the summer that changed Mercury Widdershins’s life. His divorced mother struggles to keep the family bar from sinking. His strung-out sister bursts like a seagull popping Alka-Seltzer. His tollbooth-collector uncle stresses over the opening of a new bridge that completes the city’s beltway circuit, which might make his job at the only tunnel through the harbor obsolete. His extended family of barflies includes a wooden-legged charlatan, a former stripper with dementia, a reporter with literary aspirations, an AWOL sailor of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, arabbers, beat cops, beatniks, and ballplayers.
Merck’s life completely spazzes when his cousin Nixie arrives from Appalachia for treatments at the prestigious hospital nearby. Girded by a bandolier filled with drawing pens instead of bullets, Nixie brings a weird look, strange words, and ultimate questions. Together, they discover their own liberating music, recover their adolescences stolen by fate, and muster their separate solutions to what the future holds. Set in 1977 between the debut of Star Wars, the death of Elvis Presley, and the launch of the Voyager space probes, “Backbeat the Waves” explores moments when people exist between things: city and country, adolescence and adulthood, perseverance and mortality. How, or will, Merck and Nixie reach escape velocity?
For a summer that witnessed the death of a universal “king” and the launch of human culture into outerspace, the most dramatic events happened at home.
Just let me hear some of that
Rock and roll music,
Any old way you choose it;
It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it,
Any old time you use it.
It’s gotta be rock and roll music,
If you want to dance with me…
-- Chuck Berry
Representing the United States, Voyager 2 Golden Record
Launched August 20, 1977