Last Trail Observation

Allow me to bow down again at the altar of Reverse Gauge Symmetric Synchronicity.

I'm in my car yesterday enjoying lunch in the low-humidity sunshine, reading a couple of chapters a third of the way in to Zane Grey's 1909 novel, The Last Trail. Suddenly, I'm yanked out of the story with this detail on page 49 of my 1994 Forge Paperback edition:

"Jim Morrison, I'll bet it's not you."

Hey! I know who Jim Morrison is. The Lizard King. He was an idol of mine during my stupid youthhood! But in Zane Grey's 102-year-old Western novel, he's a throwaway character at Fort Henry on the border, the border them days bein' somewheres in Ohio.

Then, twenty minutes later, on page 70, I read this:

"When I first seen him he was drunk, and I heard Jeff Lynn say as how the border was a bad place to come after a woman."

Hey!! I know who Jeff Lynn is. He's the mastermind behind the 70s band ELO. White guy with a huge afro and Elvis-style sunglasses. My parents were so into ELO that I heard Jeff Lynn's operatic howls every day over the course of a good six or seven years.

Now I gotta finish the novel. Who else will appear? Sheriff Ron Wood? The English dandy-slash-gambler Roderick Stewart? Maybe an Indian bounty hunter named Keith Crazy Moon? Chasin' a hardened no-good criminal name of Angus Young. And perhaps the infamous gunslinger Jimmy "Six-Guns" Page will saunter into town for the story's denouement.

I'm serious - I'm only a little past a third of the way in, so if Grey drops a few more names, chances are it will be a famous or semi-famous rock star from the late sixties or seventies.

Or maybe somebody named Paul Lennon or John McCartney.