In a far-off land or a land just next door, a long time ago or some time in the future, there was a plague. It raged through the land & killed off  more than half the people. The cities fell into decay and thousands fled into the countryside.  Years after the sickness had run its course, social chaos, superstition and violence continued to dominate. In this atmosphere of confusion and terror, Dr. Hiro Toshiba, an ex-psychiatrist turned mystic became head of the Ministry of Health. Soon afterwards the Ministry seized power & became the defacto government of that part of the country that had come to be called Zone 3.

The doctor had seen in a vision that the origin of plague was in the dreams of decadent and un-clean people. Dr. Toshiba set out to cure the disease of dreams. He set out to destroy the evil seed of dreams. Being a psychiatrist, he knew that dreams came from the unconscious so he set out to eradicate the unconscious part of people. He was only interested in consciousness. His motto was “Consciousness -- Thick -- all the way through.”

Now in that country, there was a man named Leland Frank. He was a country & western singer. Some say he was a slight man with courtly manners, a storyteller, a drifter. Others say he was short with a stoop -- nobody really. They say he was in love with a woman named Rose but that she died in the plague. Some said that he killed her himself to save her from prolonged suffering. Everybody agrees that he came from a little town called “Grateful” located at the foot of a large mountain on the edge of the forest, East of the city of Trinity, Zone 3.

The story goes that one evening after leaving his gig at a local roadhouse, he was mistaken for a Ministry of Health Agent by a religious cult leader called the Judge. A lot of people were against Dr. Toshiba’s program of radical mental hygiene. Some for good reasons, some for bad. Anyway, the fact is, the Judge & his Dogs of God strung Leland up in the hanging tree & some people say he was dead for 7 minutes, some say for 3 minutes & some say he died for a whole day but they all agree that he somehow he survived.

After his miraculous survival Leland began to dream. Some say he lost his memory and wandered around for years before showing up again. Some say he spent  time in “Trinity” at the Ministry hospital as a research subject. Everybody pretty much agrees that Leland’s dreams were so strong you couldn’t get near him without a kind of magnetic influence taking you over so you didn’t really know if you were dreaming or not – everything seemed pretty much real, pretty-much see-through. It was the kind of dreaming you only get once in a long long while, the kind of dream where eternity doesn’t seem so far away, where possibility seems more like probability, where chance takes on the look of fate.

Time passed, things changed, & some time later in that year Leland joined a revolutionary bunch called the Wolves of Creation that was run by a ghetto refugee called Sonny Abilene. This group of revolutionary riff-raff was also opposed to Dr. Toshiba’s Anti-Dream Program but for different reasons than the Judge. Sonny & the Wolves figured that the plague had been caused not by dreams but by the denial of dreams and the imposition of too much authoritarian control especially in the domain of so-called spiritual discipline. Back in the days before the plague there was a big movement called “Inner Business” & it was run by a consortium that made a huge killing in the market with its One-Mind spiritual up-lift program combined with a vaccine designed to clear the mind of any sort of thought whatsoever. That was the Clean thoughts-Clean blood discipline they had back then.

Although the Wolves of Creation saw themselves as revolutionaries, they were mostly theatre people, artists and poets & they didn’t so much engage in violent revolutionary activity – rather they liked to break into official Ministry of Health broadcasts with their own brand of “Dirty Dream Music.” After a while Leland’s songs started to show up in these illegal net-radio broadcasts and he became something of a counter-culture celebrity.

It wasn’t long before this battle for the hearts & souls of the people came to a head. Naturally the final confrontation between Hiro Toshiba (on the side of the Ministry) & Leland Frank (For the Wolves) took place in that no-place called the Zone of Dreams. They met in a concrete bunker that housed the Ministry’s Virtual-Reality-Dream-Simulator & the magical battle was on. It was a question of whose story was going to stand the Test Of Time. Fact is, the good Doctor’s own demons did him in – underneath the clean veneer was the really mean & dirty & he just wasn’t ready for it. He lost track of the projection program for imposing your own dirt on the other guy & those demons turned in on him & just ate his head from the inside out. He was thick all right, but not with consciousness.

Tonight, we have a program that we hope will give you a feel for those hard times in that far-off place, right next door. We will touch upon some of Leland’s dreams, his loves & his problems; you’ll meet some of the characters he got tangled up with & you’ll hear some of those songs that made him famous.

Ladies & Gentlemen please Welcome Leland Frank & The Ghost of Tennessee Rose – the rest of the Radiators couldn’t make it this evening but they are here in spirit.
 

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