Dust & Bones : The Real Story

Mark Heard Revealed

by Bob Woodward and a late CIA Director

As part of every spook's training, one has to dig into the popular culture of a country and attempt to discern something new. An agent we'll call Jeff Trice was looking into the musical mysteries of a dead man, and ran into what he considered a surprising statistical frequency and confluence of themes:

|    Fingerprint
|    Dust
|    Bones
|
|What do you make of this?  Are there any other
|repeating themes or concepts to add?

Well, as one who knew both Mark and (some of) his work, it's pretty obvious. Mark was a dry, dusty sort of guy concerned about privacy to the point of paranoia, with an unhealthy pre-occupation with skeletal systems (not with death, as the entire death metal music industry, with its many tributes to MH, mistakenly believes).

Mark refused to allow anyone (including Janet) to dust the house, and as a consequence, often had to have huge dustballs (some larger than VW Beetles) surgically removed from his nose and throat before he recorded an album or sang in concert. ``On Turning To Dust'' was a love song, relating his desire to wake up one morning as pre-Adamic man, the dust of the earth, so that one sneeze would scatter him about the entire planet, if not the galaxy.

Mark subcribed to the Fingerprint-of-the-month Club, which cost him his beloved job in the spook business, since the access devices in many buildings could never keep up with his current prints. In despair he moved to Switzerland, to a tiny Communalist hamlet named L'Abri (French for "the cheese of life"). There he studied under various paleomarxist and superannuanihilist philospohers as Eddy & Frances Schaefferov. When he returned to the West (under the pseudonym of Steve Scott), he was mistaken for Lou Reed, and rushed into a recording studio. Thus, the musical career of a budding counterpuntal revolutionary was born, and the West was saved from becoming yet another lackey of Liechenstein.

20 Jan 1996
Miles O'Neal
Historian to the Metacarpals

[Just in case anyone missed it, this is satire. Mark no more loved dust than he loved disco.]

Copyright 1996, 1997 Miles O'Neal, Austin, TX. All rights reserved.