Picture this: A ’57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser with auspicious dimensional mods, screaming across the salt flats at speeds that would make Einstein say, “Told ya so.” Behind the wheel sits lanky Gurney Poe, your cosmic tour guide and extradimensional chauffeur, conducting an impossible symphony through the greatest sound system never invented. “These tunes,” he says, leaning in conspiratorially, “are dimensional echoes caught in amber, preserved in grooves that don’t exist.” He grins that signature crooked grin. “Sure, it looks, feels, drives and smells like a dream machine, and it is one magnificent ride. But this isn’t just a car. I mean, of course it’s a car. But it is, foremost and primarily, my listening room. The stereo runs on high-octane mojo and chronological confusion, and what comes out of those speakers…” Poe paused, blinking back a tear, and began again. “What comes out is perfect in every dimension.”
“Listen close, and you’ll feel it. There’s that low-end thrum, the backbeat that shivers your bones. I’m hurtling across white plains that stretch into quantum mirages, and the tunes slice through the old convertible’s open frame. There’s a language in the horns. It’s a dialect that refuses any single dimension. They conversate, back and forth, like old friends who’ve seen the sunrise a thousand times over distant burgundy seas. The keys, sometimes humming, sometimes biting, give the rhythm a square shoulder to lean on.
There are voices, too, wild and human, some ragged like old leather, some smooth like polished stone. They’re testaments to heartbreak, to stubborn joy, and that delicious tension between sin and salvation. Layers of guitar lines, sometimes twangy, sometimes shimmery, stitch through the grooves, stitching yesterday’s asphalt barrooms to tomorrow’s neon cathedrals. Every once in a while, a horn blasts out a phrase so rich and true it feels like a cosmic argument settled at last.
Those songs are school and family and sex and church. The beats are steady and insistent, snapping your head back into the moment. These pulses have run along humid night air by river bends, rattled rafters in roadhouses, and bounced off plaster walls in subway clubs. There’s a spirit here, a timeless refusal to let dust settle. It’s as if every note is an invention. Even when I’m pushing this ostensible road machine beyond what local physics can allow, these rhythms show me where I came from. And maybe where I’m going.”
“People ask me what Z Kooper and The Zookeepers sounded like,” Poe says, adjusting his fez. “Truth is, memories of those shows are like trying to catch smoke with chopsticks. Something about quantum harmonics and fifth-dimensional reverb makes those particular wavelengths extra slippery.”
“But these tunes — I swear, it sounds like they almost remember that impossible Zookeeper sound. It’s temporally impossible, of course. No one should remember. But through some cosmic sleight of hand, fragments of that phantom frequency have stuck to these artists. Their music hints at something that refuses to stay lost.”
He grins that cockeyed waxing crescent grin. “So is this what Z and The Zookeepers sounded like?” Poe asks, adjusting his mirror. “Probably not. But it’s definitely what the multiverse sounds like from the driver’s seat of this particularly impossible Merc.”
