A few years after I moved to Atlanta (from New York), I stopped off at a Buckhead grocery after work to pick up a few things. While I was standing in line at the check-out, I scanned the tabloids in the rack beside the cash register. One of the papers, The Weekly World News, had a couple of headlines that caught my eye. The main one, “2-Headed Woman is Pregnant (One Head Wants the Child—The Other Says ‘Absolutely Not’),” looked pretty interesting, but the one that really intrigued me was the smaller one at the top with a picture of a rebel flag. It quietly announced: “Confederate Flag Spotted on Belly of UFO.”
That would make an interesting song, I thought, so I jotted down, “Belly of a UFO” in my “song ideas” notebook, and in the margin I wrote, “Rebels, Aliens, Gettysburg.”
It took over 20 years for me to put it all together, but I finally got the song written. It evolved into the story of a hapless alien, who, incidentally, looks like an average Southerner and is still alive in present-day suburbia (I love tweaking the space-time continuum in my songs). Anyway, this poor clod (red-neck? green-neck?) is still bemoaning the fact that he totally botched the arms deal between his planet and the Confederate States of America, and both his emperor and Gen. Lee were extremely disappointed. What’s worse, it wasn’t just some ordinary deal; it was one that could have changed the outcome of Gettysburg (“…okay, perhaps 10,000 ray-guns could have turned some things around, but everyone was blaming me…”). I mean, let’s pull out the big guns here. You can’t make this stuff up, folks…well, okay, maybe you can…
After the song was written, I started wondering—did I really see a headline like that on a grocery store tabloid all those years ago? and I kicked myself for not actually buying a copy of the paper. But, ah, the good old internet (where everything is available, including obscure tabloid covers) came to the rescue. After only a few minutes of Googling, I rediscovered the specific issue of the tabloid in question. It did exist! Even more than 25 years later! Obviously, I wasn’t the one that was crazy (at least in this particular instance).
So, I printed out the cover, recorded the song with my Macbook and uploaded it to YouTube. Here’s the link: http://youtu.be/VQ8yZVbhRR8
Just don’t tell General Lee. Rumor has it that it’s still a sore point.
David Ray Skinner 