St. Remedius Medical College: “Album Tour of Duty”

The Ultimate Live Show, All Across Space-Time

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

Both inside and outside of St. Remedius Medical College’s Music department, the cliched “fine line between genius and madness” was best described as “well-cooked angel hair pasta.” It bobbed, it weaved, and it often crossed over one or both poles. The further reaches of musical theory produced monsters, sure, but it also produced one of the great series of rock albums, culminating in a truly brilliant concept show never achieved before and, in the aftermath of the Quantum War, probably never again.

Larry Lightspeed (real name: Greg Ashcraft) started as the bass guitarist for the Dallas band Interface, a space rock band modeled heavily on Hawkwind and comprised solely of St. Remedius music majors wanting to apply their studies to practicality instead of merely theory. While a popular band in the late 1980s boom of the Deep Ellum district, all of its members watched the music industry meat grinder attempting to sign bands but only if they sounded exactly like Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians and decided to eschew fame for permanence. Notes and anecdotes from bystanders related how they wanted to expand the horizons for presentation without turning into what the lead singer referred to as “turgid prog rock opera,” and Interface’s third album, One Hand Speaking, led the wave of interactive genome modification by encoding the keyboardist’s notes into the song of the common grackle, thereby turning every grackle gathering in Dallas into an immediate earworm. However, Larry had further plans, which required the expansion of DNA sequencing and editing starting in the 1990s.

First, Larry decided to leave false clues in other birds’ behaviors and DNA, including songs that encoded images, requiring enthusiasts to record various birdsongs to gather the requisite images. (Of particular aggravation to birders was that one population of ruby-throated hummingbirds now had a call that encoded a PNG image of Transylvanian paleontologist Baron Nopsca, and they taught that call to other hummingbirds along their migration route.) This did not stop with birds: all of the population of the introduced Mediterranean gecko in the greater Dallas area contain a genome with a sequence of seeming “junk DNA” that actually promises a complete operation manual and quick start guide. The cipher key was hidden in a solo CD single album offered for sale at Mendellosian Books, only for the translated text to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” over and over. This, though, was just the start.

Nobody noticed Larry’s disappearance until after the wave of albums arrived for review with local publications, particularly the local weekly Creative Onanism, but he only disappeared on the same day the first album arrived. Once per week, a new album would show up in the mail, postmarks strangely obscured, with a CD or vinyl cover with extensive liner notes but only a number or letter on the front. Heard separately, they all seemed incomplete, with instruments fading out and resurging at odd intervals, and then the live albums started appearing, with titles such as “1B7L Live At the Burgess Shale” with instrumentals from the particular albums played in obviously wild locales. Many were recorded opposite volcanic eruptions, based on the background noise, and then curious fans discovered that the liner notes included geographic coordinates. Visiting those locales just added to the mystery, as the eruption recording sites were at long-extinct volcanoes such as Pilot Knob, with dates from one billion years before to 2 billion years past the present day. Even better, visitors often found plaques cast out of ceramic eroding from the sites, and each one had another coordinate that led to a new original album lying in plain sight, often with a cover that simply read “PLAY ME.”

By this time, the confusion was palpable. Known time travelers expressed complete befuddlement, and some attempted to visit the sites at the time of the assumed live shows, only to find nothing. Likewise, no chronal travel equipment, either from St. Remedius or from friendly organizations, was reported missing or overly used. Finally, a slight trace of plasticizers from a particular brand of keyboard case suggested that Larry and potential cohorts used roundabout paths through quantum pockets to move to particular times and locations, and some rumors suggested that Dr. Terry Martinson was involved in tracking how and when the albums were recorded when he was last seen. As soon as they started, though, the flow of review albums ended, and enthusiasts discovered that the Mendellosian Books supply ran out at the same time. All anyone had left were ripped copies and streaming archives, which set off wild speculation on possible new albums and the current whereabouts of Larry Lightspeed.

Six months after the last copy of the Mendellosian Books stockpile sold, Web sites, social media outlets, and select print publications received a single CD with only one sentence on it: “Fried Tarantula on 11/11.” Adherents took this to mean outside the famed Norman Cookler’s Widely Celebrated Deep-Fried Tarantula location near the St. Remedius campus, so from all over the world and elsewhere rushed Larry Lightspeed fans on November 11 to solve the mystery, witness new mysteries, or just find out what Larry had planned next.

That morning, the street out in front of Norman Cookler’s was packed, with police redirecting traffic away from the block. Businesses that would normally complain about outdoor events stopped complaining because of the massive influx of business, with the Norman Cookler’s itself being stripped of everything by noon. At 12:30 that afternoon, just as the crowd was starting to become restless, an abandoned bullhorn in the back the back started playing the album “N.” Phones and other devices started ringing, with the ringtones changed to portions of “4”, and texts everywhere came from an unknown sender, admonishing “Play What You’ve Got.” Befuddled fans dropped CDs and LPs in antique and new players (one had five albums on 8-track), cranked up the sound…and discovered that just as all of the live albums combined multiple originals to create something new, the totality of Larry Lightspeed’s artistic output created something absolutely different and absolutely unique for each listener. For an hour, it was the greatest experimental concert since the Stanford theremin concert in 1991, and absolutely nobody could have recorded the entirety of it, although many tried once they realized what was going on.

Among many other entities, the best temporal scryers at St. Remedius attempted to locate Larry Lightspeed, with no trace of him anywhere in time and space. Dedicated quantum pocket explorers likewise looked for further traces other than the previously logged ones, and even a consortium of necromancers hired by one particularly wealthy fan found no trace of him, his empty structure, or any of his mental essence anywhere. Aside from a platinum plaque found in the peak of Herschel Crater on Saturn’s moon Mimas, simply reading “3012.213” and Larry’s signature, Larry Lightspeed appeared to disappear entirely from the entire time-space continuum. That plaque, though, feeds further speculation on Larry’s next project, and whether it intersects with the Great Tarantula Concert or is an unrelated original work. Meanwhile, the existing albums saturate modern music, with remixes, rematches, and homage bands aplenty, and one mix becoming the main soundtrack for the live-action adaptation of Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Dr. Terry Martinson Larry Lightspeed Music Department quantum pockets St. Remedius