Pearl's Records

No one knew where Pearl’s records came from. The rumor circulated that he owned a record-pressing machine, or that he had privy access to a bunker full of LPs, assembled by a Sacramento millionaire in the Sixties, so that the survivors of the coming nuclear war would know what the old world sounded like. Or that he was playing ordinary music distorted to sound like plates, engines, wind and rain, which didn’t explain Lady Di. Or the night at the Blue Study when he played samples of what I am almost sure were the eighteen missing minutes of the Watergate tapes. To say nothing of the strange sounds he played at the Nevada festival: no one on earth should have had those sounds.