I’m sitting on Deep Purple’s jet waiting to take off from Detroit Metro. The accomodations are luxurious, and the general mood is a Saturday afternoon junior high school field trip. Somebody slips a videocassette of Fat Gty with Stacy Keach into the TV and the sense of disjuncture is mildly aphasing — I dunno whether to watch the flick, look out the window or try to interview their manager. There’s the sense that I wanna get everything in at once, though maybe that’s because I know there’s only so much information culled once I succumb to the magnetism of that bar over the left wing. Or maybe I’m trying too hard. Everybody is having a good time, neither partying it up nor creaking through seeming mornings after. What about all those tales of sleaze and distorto of these things? Maybe I am on a field trip.

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I’m here reportaging almost as much as I see this as the new rucksack ramble. Jack Kerouac coulda been here if he’d had the sense to stay alive, and it’s the same dream flight downriver except nobody on this plane is as interesting as Neal Cassady. But you are; hang on.