AFTERWORD TO TOURING
This was the first of the collaborations, and, as I’ve mentioned, an important story for me, since it was the first story I’d worked on in a couple of years.
I wasn’t keeping up my work calendar at that point, so the exact date of this story’s origin is lost in the mists of time. My own guess is that we started work on it one weekend in the spring or summer of 1979 when Jack was down for a visit. I know that a complete draft of it was finished in time for it to be submitted for scrutiny at the first formal workshop we held—a full-dress affair, with several other writers in attendance, as opposed to our regular sessions, which consisted of Jack and Michael and me sitting around somewhere with a bottle of wine—the first Philford Workshop, held over the weekend of April 11-13,1980, at Michael and Marianne’s house. (A few years later, the weekend of May 16-18,1986, we held the second Philford Workshop at my new apartment on Spruce Street; so far no third.) And I know that I read the final draft of the story to a convention crowd in Austin, Texas, on October 4,1980, when I was down there doing a Guest of Honor stint at Armadillocon, but whether the story had been initially completed in late 1979 or early 1980, I can no longer recall.
Michael’s recollection is that Jack and I had come up with the idea for this story on our own the night before, and that when Michael came over to my place for a visit the next day, we cut him in on the story because we knew that he’d just written a story featuring Janis Joplin and another featuring Buddy Holly, and we were too lazy to duplicate his research. My own recollection is that Michael had actually been there the night before, when Jack and I came up with the idea for this story during a brainstorming session, and that we cut him in on the spot, because we were too lazy to duplicate his research, and so on. (Actually—he says piously—I did end up duplicating much of Michael’s research anyway in the course of writing the story, and even ended up correcting him on a point of Buddy Holly Trivia. For Elvis Trivia we depended on Jack, who is a much bigger Elvis fan than either Michael or myself.)
I’m pretty sure that it was Jack who first said that it would have been neat if Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, and Elvis had ever gotten a chance to perform together. As soon as he said this, the basic plot of the story blossomed in my mind in an instant, and a few moments later we were hammering out details of the storyline. I conceived of it from the start as a Twilight Zone episode—I still think that it would have made a good one—and that’s the way we wrote it; if you like, you can visualize the ghost of Rod Serling looming up solemnly at the end to wrap things up before the commercial.
Our original plan, I think, was that each of us would take one character and write about that character throughout—I was assigned to do Buddy Holly, Michael got Janis Joplin, and Jack, of course, got Elvis—but this quickly proved to be unworkable, and we all ended up writing scenes for each other’s characters: Michael, for instance, writing the very funny scene where Elvis coerces Buddy Holly into praying to Momma with him, and I contributing a long scene where Janis raps semi-hysterically about just what might be happening to them all. After we gave up on the initial plan, my memory is that Michael wrote the first complete draft of the story, incorporating most of the pages we’d produced under the abortive one-character-per-writer plan, Jack then did another draft, and I then did a final unifying draft, adding several new scenes and interjecting new material throughout. I think that the first scene I worked on was the scene where Buddy Holly goes to the laundromat—I have a clear memory of sitting on the white marble steps of an old brown-stone building at 40th and Walnut, writing furiously in longhand in a three-ring notebook, while Jack and Michael and Susan were in the Fun Arcade next door playing pinball; perhaps this was the same weekend.
“Touring” sold to Penthouse. Kathy Green squashed our original plan to publish the story under the collective pseudonym of “Phil Ford”—get it? hyuck hyuck—and insisted that we use our real names on it instead, although beforehand everyone had assured us that no magazine would be willing to list three authors for one story, and that we would have no choice but to use a collective pseudonym.
This turned out not to be true—in fact, nobody ever gave us the slightest bit of trouble about listing three authors for one story, and so “Phil Ford” went early and unmourned to an unmarked grave. This was one of the most popular of the collaborations, and, I think, one of the best. It has been reprinted a number of times, including an appearance in Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories, where one critic later judged it to have been the single best story ever published in the series. Not too shabby.