The History of "Mursketine"
by Josh Robins
Sometime in 1998 when I was living near Dallas, I had the dream in which my subconcious first conceived the term "Mursketine". I've always heard that you don't ever see WRITTEN words in dreams. Of course one could argue that "Mursketine" isn't a real word... Also, many people have asked if I tried turning on the lights in my dream... no I didn't because (1) this was before "Waking Life" was released and (2) there weren't any light switches available in the dream.
I started working on the opening guitar riff of the piece now known as "Mursketine" around the same time. The idea of naming the finished
tune "Mursketine" didn't happen until 2 years later in Austin. The riff had been sitting on a four-track tape for 3 years and I decided to finally do something with it.
Originally I named it something stupid like "The Gary Chester March" (or something) because I thought it sounded like something Gary (Ed Hall, Pong) would play. Fortunately, I'd
always remembered the "Mursketine" dream very vividly having told the story of the dream over and over and decided that was a better name - it fit with the sort of sci-fi vibe of the tune.
In early 2000, I'd had an idea to make
one 45-minute piece of ROCK music and perform it live. This would be "Mursketine"... or so I thought. I still have these tapes full of
riffs, good/bad ideas, alternate versions of stuff, etc. I was spending a lot of time playing with
Stinky Del Negro's band and going to college. By late 2001 I had done almost nothing with these tapes and abandonded the 45-minute song idea.
Instead I decided to break it up into individual songs but trying to find people to play them was going to be challenging. My first effort was an early version of "Mursketine" which was performed
by my old band Arlo Nestus (featuring Keith Palumbo now of CARDINALE) and was only HALF as
long as it is now. On September 11, 2001 I was so emotionally inspired by the day's events that I sat down with another riff from the "Mursketine" tapes, hit record on my four-track and played (in one take) what
is now known as "Mursketine II" or "The Return to Mursketine". What started as a single riff was now nearly a complete song. Unfortunately, it was shelved in early 2002 do to the break up of Arlo Nestus. However, In December 2001, I debuted a ROUGH version of "Fanfare of the Imbeciles"
(featuring ALL of the early version of "Mursketine") as a string quartet piece and was performed by none other than the TOSCA STRING QUARTET! "...Imbeciles" was supposed to be part of the original
45-minute piece as well. The sudden "birth" of Mursk II had inspired me to start working with the old tapes again. That's when I decided to look diligently for musicians
and finally finish more of the songs on my four-track tapes. In April 2002 I met Rick and one of the first tunes we played was "Mursketine II". By this time, I'd finished arranging "Mursketine" in its final form (the way
we play it today). The difficulty level of "Mursk II" and the constant turn-over we experienced in our first 3 years made learning the piece difficult. I'm
very happy that we've finally started playing it live. It's one of my favorite pieces that I've ever done. Over time I've worked on various riffs from my old tapes and they've come to be songs for the Invincible Czars but not all of them were part of this
"Mursketine" project I started 5 years ago. There will be at least one more piece in the "saga" called "The Stupid Sorcerer".
Here's what happened in the dream: It started in Utah County (in Utah) where I waited in line all day with my mom to get
to the caves of Mt. Timponogas. We were climbing the mountain to
ride an amusement park-esque ride. The ride involved a giant, chrome-colored, metal ball identical to a space ship from my favorite 80s comic book Dreadstar.
The inside of the ball was silver, shiny and pristine with the capacity to hold hundreds of
families who paid to ride in it. Once everyone was strapped in, the ball was shot in a straight line directly UP into space... and then came straight back down to the launch pad safe and sound. Remember, this was a dream
and dreams don't care that there's no gravity in space. So we waited and waited and waited and once
we finally got in the caves of the mountain, I started seeing large, humming, silver boxes imbedded in
the rocky walls. I deduced that these were generators used to power the ride. "Mursketine" was written vertically
on each generator is a very futuristic, red-pink font. While waiting in line, I thumbed through a pamphlet that was sitting
in a wire magazine rack (for bored patrons to peruse while waiting in line) that detailed the process of generating the power of
Mursketine. It turned out that Mursketine was the power generated by chopping up bunnies. The
pamphlet showed an equal sign with a drawing of a house on one side and a silhouette of a cartoon
ish, crouching rabbit. So it was Rabbit = House. Below was the same pictorial equation but this
time the left side was a car and the right side was only a half rabbit silhouette. This meant
that through the power of Mursketine, one could power a whole house by dicing one bunny. A car
required only half a bunny to run for the same amount of time. And so on. I found this deplorable and told my mom that I wasn't going to go on some ride
that was powered by killing bunnies. My mom replied that she'd waited all day and wasn't going to get out of line now.
When I got out of line, I knew I'd have a LONG wait for my mom to go into space and back
so I hiked around to the other side of the mountain. Here I found a dug-out man-made steel cave in the side of
the mountain. I entered it figuring that this was where the power for the ride was actually generated. Inside the chamber, I found
myself overlooking a huge swimming pool about 2 stories below. The pool was illuminated with oppressive lime-green lights hanging from the
ceiling which shone down on about 50 intertubes floating therein. Atop each intertube sat an H.R. Geiger-esqu alien from the movie Alien. Unlike the alien from the
film, these aliens were totally docile because of the green lights shining down on them (again... it was a dream.) In fact, each one was kicked back
in its intertube sipping lemonade through a straw with those little second-mouth-thingies that come out of their faces in the movie. This is when I realized that the whole bunny-chopping thing was just a cover-up to keep the public
from knowing that this ride was powered by chopping up these aliens. Just like the company in the film,
the owners of this ride wanted the whole alien thing kept hush-hush. With this new information I was compeltely happy
to get on the ride with my mom. I mean, who'd have a problem with riding a ride powered by killing and entity that
kill you if you didn't kill it? Might as well have some fun... see some space. Here my memory of the dream becomes extremely fuzzy. I know that
was stapped into the ride and shot into space with the rest of the people I'd been in line with all day. At some point "they" (a voice over an intercom)
announced that something had gone wrong and we would be lost in space or at least not survive re-entry. I spent the rest of my time trying to find an issue of Heavy Metal
Magazine so I could get one last look at a naked woman's body before I died. Why Heavy Metal? I don't know... probably because this whole
dream sounds like a bad one-page story from that magazine. Plus, as my friend Snoopy from La Mancha says, "How can ya not like Heavy Metal?!?"
Oddly, I happened to find and an issue in the cargo bay of the ride/ship. It had lots of Simon Bisley pin-ups in it and thumbed through that
for bit. Then my childhood friend Jared Hamilton showed up and told me we were going to make it back and I woke up. booking/contact: invincibleczars {at} yahoo.com
newsgroup/email list: invincibleczars {at} invincibleczars.com