NOTES ON “INTRODUCING THE BAND" (Edit from "BUZZ AND THE RAMALAMAS")

When I was young I didn’t sleep in a racecar bed, nor did I really want to. I didn’t much care about racecars, and wouldn’t have been able to identify a T120 like Buzz’s even if I had cared. But what I did in order to get to sleep in my actual bed was, I would close my eyes and pretend that I was down in the creaking hold of an old wooden pirate ship, and that on the deck of that ship, directing me across the motionless sea under the clear, star-lit sky were Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Goofy, in full pirate garb, utterly silent and oddly serious, piloting my sleep-ship through the night. I don’t know why it was Mickey, Donald and Goofy – I wasn’t that big a Disney fan as a kid, I was much more into old Warner Brothers cartoons and the quiet, classy anarchy of Bugs Bunny and the unbridled rage of Daffy Duck. But it was the Disney characters, nonetheless, that were my youthful psychopomps into the often fearsome and unpredictable land of dreams.