Brilliant Pebbles.


Jay Berberick, hosting the show "Atmospheres" KJKH Lawrence, Kansas requested a gloss on Brilliant Pebbles. We post it now re-written as it might be of general interest. The song attempts to incorporate something of the abysmal grandeur of a dark Manichaean fable, with a sci-fi / lo-fi twist.
The term BRILLIANT PEBBLES refers to a type of anti-ballistic missile defense system, first proposed and tested during the 1980s as an arm of the space-based Stategic Defense Initiative.

An earlier incarnation of the BRILLIANT PEBBLES system appeared under the name 'Smart Rocks'. Essentially the concept envisioned posting thousands of tiny, floating, non-nuclear interceptors--solid rocket-propelled canisters--in space. These collision-impact vehicles were to float expectantly above Earth in low orbit ready to swarm, ram and destroy attacking ballistic missiles while the incoming arc of the strike passed through the planetary exosphere en route to their transcontinental targets . The more polished re-christening of these new space-based weapons as BRILLIANT PEBBLES took hold when hopes for quick deployment of other ambitious weapons like the space-based X-ray laser withered. In contrast to such precariously experimental alternatives, BRILLIANT PEBBLES seemed to represent a flexible, simple and purportedly cost-effective option. President George Bush judged it feasible, adding that with the USA under a brilliant pebble-studded defensive canopy, "no war planner could be confident of a ballistic missle attack."


 Sympathy for the Devil
An old, shambling, weather-beaten hippie, Eli Poole, living fossil of late 60s consciousness, passes time by handing out, sometimes selling, peyote buttons that he has smuggled from Mexico. One day, as Eli performs his humble office from his stoop in the San Francisco streets, the Devil himself appears before him. One maverick to another, he offers the Devil some of his peyote buttons. Satan downs the hallucinogen. One could hope, if you were an old hippie, that that pitiful spectre of evil and infinite loss might be transfigured, --a buoyant mental traveller on the road to sustainable bliss. Only the ultimate turn-on could blow the Devil's mind, open it to the nirvana that Eli knows is there and spare the world from" the crime and sorrow" of his displaced wrath... For Eli believes he has seen into the secret of what makes the Devil so bad: the Devil's profound pain that paradise is no longer possible, yet who nonetheless cannot accept that all is eternally irredeemable. Logically then, the Devil must dare to try everything: one special door might lead to enlightenment and elusive rapture.

Vengeance Is Mind
But happiness will never be Lucifer's lot. His peyote trip unfolds in a series of harrowing experiences. In a full-blown psychotic reaction, he hallucinates that he himself is crucified, twirling on a spinning cross while being pelted by crystal rocks that stream from the Blakean Eyes of God. When the peyote wears off, the bitter Devil, in a mood for maledictory chastisement, revisits the old hippie and avenges himself by hurling a mighty curse upon Eli and his folly, which transforms the poor hippie's brain into a synaptical guidance system, a living theatre for what is, in effect, the Star Wars defense system called BRILLIANT PEBBLES. The substance of the fateful curse is delivered in riddling language parodistically modeled after Nostradamus' apocalyptic prophectic verses: "fortress in the sky made of rocks without no mortar" refers to the floating impact rockets of SDI. "Waiting for your orders" means that the outcome hinges upon his defensive manoeuvres. "When thrones send snakes into the heights" here read government for thrones, missiles for snakes. "With stones you must resist" you should take as if he is psychokinethestically heaving these rockets. As he catapaults the "stones", Eli becomes a human "ballista" (ancient military throwing engine) in a doomed, eternal Sisyphean contest.

Eli falls into states of great agitation: he peers inside his hat and, in the reality that is hallucination and the hallucination that is reality, observes a missile attack commencing. In the frightful state in which the vengeful Lucifer has placed him, Eli must try to save the world again and again. His eyes are overcome from the sight and smoke of this battle.

We Didn't Know
In "situation rooms" where secret things are tracked and done, scientists look on with incomprehension and amazement at the missile attack that has commenced. They grasp that some unseen power is thwarting the nuclear attack which the warrior-scientists have been forbid by law to defend against, and moreover, is using the banned methods they developed and longed to implement. No one will have the chance to accuse them of implementing the Brilliant Pebbles defense however, because the news of incident will be suppressed for every reason imaginable and the public will never learn of it. Yet, with his big effort Eli has averted Armaggedon. Argue whether the story tells of a true attack, the freakout of a madman, or the grand delusions of a false savior. Whatever. To him, the challenge was real time.

In the meantime, the man who saved the world is out on the streets again canvassing the San Francisco Mission district ( or another mission morning as NASA would say ), stalking spare change and buttonholing passers-by wary of his grimy, shell-shocked appearance. The spare change rattles in their pockets, rhyming with the rattling onslaught of the "pebbles" crashing into the enemy rockets that Eli heard in that orgy of mutual destruction. Has Eli played a larger-than-average part in some great circle of returns by propitiating an impassive witness, the Mesomerican corn-divinity with offerings of titanium kernels? Are the cactus buttons of peyote, with their extended needles, like the orbiting attack satelites themselves with their long equiponderant antennae, vehicles of superior vision? An ungrateful world leaves Eli to disintegrate in the midst of his attempt to transcend its limits. The pulverizing autonomous grind of the abiding universe, an ocean of entropy, explosion, and chaos is eulogized in the refrain (along with the cactii buttons, the satelites, the quarters for panhandlers, etc.) all merging into BRILLIANT PEBBLES.