Excerpt from my great novel

The Pinehurst Kids, in contrast, actually attempted to play music,
which being the production of sounds that stand in rhythmic and / or
melodic relationship to each other, through the use of vocal and
instrumental means. This thing humans call music has been around as
far back as the beginnings of recorded history. Unfortunately, the
Pinehurst Kids were illiterate, and were therefore not familiar with
recorded history. Nor had they ever actually heard what passes for
music these days. They were all children of a quirky little cult that
had moved to a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean, in the mid
1950's. The Pinehurst colony, as it was inaptly named, was dedicated
to the ideals of ritualistic sand worship and cooking sea weeds in
brine. This concoction was called "Super Stew". This was the colony's
only food. A prolonged diet of Super Stew inevitably led to irritable
bowl syndrome, hallucinatory sightings of the ghost of Abraham
Lincoln, and unbearably itchy armpits. This was the milieu into which
the Pinehurst Kids were born. Their mothers breastfed them salty milk.
Their diapers were manufactured by hand from palm fronds and crab
shells. From the ages of five to fifteen, the children were kept in an
outdoor kennel and forced to sing and dance for their meals.
Lamentably, the elders' sense of timing and harmony were nonexistent
at best. The net result of this ten year experiment was not,
therefore, to yield the perfect song and dance troupe in the hallowed
tradition of what mainland America thrilled to in the guise of the
Osmonds or the Partridges. Rather, the product was akin to something
wholly the opposite. There has never been such a thing in the
experience of man or beast to which I could refer the reader for
reference, so I must instead try to describe them from scratch, using
only my (admittedly godlike) powers of perception, conception, and
mellifluous diction. Imagine, if you will, a thousand forks scraped
across a thousand non stick coated frying pans. The sound of this
event is recorded onto magnetic audio tape. This audio tape is then
fed to a starving wild goat. The goat is led by a leash on a
precarious foot path up the side of a mountain in northeastern Greece,
to the summit. The man who leads this goat along the path is an old
blind hermit, which would make the path all the more precarious were
this hermit not a lifelong resident of the area, whose feet have trod
the path thousands of times before. At the summit, the hermit ties the
goat by its leash to a gnarled, pathetic old olive tree. The hermit
then descends by the same foot path, leaving the goat unattended. From
the valley below, an infantryman from the U.S. armed forces sets his
sight on the forsaken goat with his shoulder mounted, laser guided
rocket propelled missile launcher. His aim taken, he fires the rocket.
It takes off and travels in a graceful arc, a narrow white stream of
smoke tracing out that arc in the cool spring air. The goat bleats
frantically as the missile hurtles towards him, to no avail. The
missile reaches its target, and the tape eating goat is consumed by
the fireball that blossoms from the missile when its explosive warhead
detonates. The resulting sound is identical to the sound of the
Pinehurst children's musical endeavors. Not having seen musical
instruments being used, nor having instruction manuals to teach them,
the Pinehurst children attempted to figure out the mystery of musical
instruments on their own. The Pinehurst colony did not use
electricity, so the children were wholly unaware of it and its many
uses. Their set was therefore acoustic, though they were using
electric instruments.

The guitarist did not realize that the strings could be held to the
fret board at different locations to alter the resulting sound. His
resulting musical output was therefore severely limited. In his
attempts to discover how the guitar was played, he had convinced
himself that they were played in pairs, one strapped to each leg.
Wearing his guitars as chaps, with the bodies at his hips and the
necks running down the front of his legs, he would either strum the
strings or pluck at them individually. At some point, he hit upon the
fact that the tuning pegs altered the sounds of the strings when
plucked. He would bend at the knees, so that the strings and the pegs
were within his reach, and play his symphonic abominations, wholly
original compositions written for the unamplified electrical guitar
and limited to the sound that can be obtained by tuning peg
manipulation. The word "composition" as used here should in no way be
taken to indicate that he transcribed this work to paper, for as has
already been made clear, these Pinehurst children were wholly ignorant
of the application of ink or graphite to paper.

The electric bass guitar is very similar to the guitar, but the larger
size and different number of strings made them look sufficiently
different that the Pinehurst children had absolutely no idea that they
were to be played in a similar fashion. The bass player was therefore
left to his own devices to determine the correct playing method. He
hit upon the following. At first glance, he might appear to be holding
the guitar as any other guitar player would. On second glance,
however, one would notice that the guitar is being held with the
strings facing this man's body. Also, the strings are not actually
attached at both ends to the guitar. The two lower strings are
attached only at the neck, and the other two strings are attached only
at the bridge. These strings thus dangle limply from the guitar and
drag on the ground. His unique sound is accomplished by rapidly
rotating his upper body, so that this twisting motion, when imparted
to the strings, causes them to whip through the air like tassels on
the handlebars of a banana seat Schwinn bicycle. Occasionally the
strings will slap against a microphone stand or an audience member.
These metallic dings and yelps of surprised pain were his musical
notes. Bass Guitarist magazine planned to print a cover story profile
of him once. For some mysterious reason that has remained unsolved to
this day, the entire staff of the magazine died in a freak printing
press accident just before that issue was to go to press.

The drummer would stab the drum heads of his snares, basses, and toms
with the ends of his drum sticks, puncturing them and rendering them
unusable. He ran through drum heads at a prodigious rate. His cymbals
he used as Frisbees. He would send them sailing over the heads of the
crowd, to smash into the far wall. The vocalist simply recited, minute
by minute, the actions he had taken since waking up that morning. The
band's set ended when he reached the moment at which the band took the
stage. To continue further would risk infinite recursion.