Great White Whale

By Augustus Burnham Shute - Moby-Dick edition - C. H. Simonds Co, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10895971

I have been working on so many projects it makes my head spin, but I have, it appears, come to some resolution on one that has haunted me for years, like a great white whale that bit off some of my attention span.

In any event, it began innocently enough, back in the There Be Pirates! days, and somehow, Long Tom Hegarty and I were talking at a band rehearsal. If my rum-sodden recollection is somewhat on course, I had put together a few verses for a song based on Moby Dick. It was to be somewhat of a hip-hop narration, spun by Ishmael himself, and when I belted it out, Tom called out in his best bosun's rasp, "Great white whale!"

The song had its title. But it would be another decade or so, longer than Odysseus took to get back to Greece, to get it to where it is today.

I listened to Moby Dick, a book on CD, not tape, while I delivered The Sun Runner magazine to the far northern Mojave. It was well suited to the drives of three or more hours each direction. It began to seep into my being, and I began to realize just how great of a book it truly was.

Now, while Moby Dick was a novel, it was based, as they say, on a real story - or rather a combination of several. There was the sinking of the Nantucket whaler Essex in 1820 by a sperm whale that left only eight survivors. Then, there was Mocha Dick, an albino sperm whale who had haunted the coast of Chile for decades. Mocha Dick was reputed to have been encountered over 100 times by whalers before he was finally killed in the 1830s. It was said he had 19 harpoons lodged in his back and would spontaneously attack whaling ships.

I would too if you harassed and tried to kill me for 20 years or so, sticking all manner of stabby things in my back.

Then, in 1851 - the year Moby Dick was published - the whaleship Anne Alexander was rammed and sunk by a whale near the Galapagos.

"Ye Gods!," Melville wrote. "What a commentator is this Ann Alexander whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster."

Some of you know my affinity for maritime music and history, and so my wanting to own the whaling rap market probably comes as no surprise. But this song led me in so many directions. I watched the movies and television series of Moby Dick. I scanned the Classic Comic Books version for an angle. There was so much in the book that I had to winnow it down in order to not have an eight-hour opus to the Great White Whale.

A verse would come, here and there. "Thar she blows!" the lookout would cry, and the crew would lower the longboat and we'd give chase. I tried to find a real shrunken head like Queequeg had. I wanted to go to Nantucket, but couldn't quite manage to make it there.

Finally, in a burst of speed like a Nantucket sleighride, I finished the damned thing, and have it for you here, though I cannot say this will be the final rendition of this song. Other potential verses taunt me in the midnight hour when the moon flows across the sea and I catch a fast moving ripple.

In any event, here it is, ready or not. I'm hoping you'll enjoy it. I have a lot more music in the works, and I am diligently working to finish my book project in time for the Twentynine Palms Book Festival this November where I am slated to be a guest on two panels about the desert, and perhaps conduct a reading or signing event during the festival.

Without further ado.....