The Reverend, ignoring the sheriff’s question, turned to me. “You stay here with him, Sam, all right? Don’t let anyone except me or Ted or Grant through the door, understand?”

“Yessir.”

“What the hell is going on?” asked Jackson. “I only ask because it seems to me that neither one of you were too surprised to see him here. Me, I see a rock star from 30 years ago who I thought was dead, I get curious.”

The Reverend took hold of Jackson’s arm and led him out of the room. “Lock the door behind us, Sam.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice.”

They left, I locked the door, and I heard a voice from behind me say one word.

“…mudman…”

Wow.

Okay, it wasn’t quite the same as hearing Morrison call himself the Lizard King…but it was close.

The Buckeye State has produced only four rock acts that ever amounted to anything more than passing curiosities: Devo (Akron), The James Gang (Cleveland), Guided By Voices (Dayton), and Parallax (Zanesville/Cedar Hill). Parallax came out of central Ohio in the mid-1970s, just as the progressive rock movement was hitting its zenith. Bands like Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Flash, King Crimson, and a trio of Canadian upstarts calling themselves Rush were engulfing the airwaves with long, complex “concept” pieces like “Close to the Edge,” “Tarkus,” and “2112.” It was not uncommon (thanks to the earlier success of Iron Butterfly’s 17-minute “In-A- Gadda-Da-Vida”) to turn on your FM radio and hear only three songs played over the course of an hour. 10-minute songs were almost short compared to a half-hour epic like “Karn Evil 9.” It seemed that if you were going to be taken seriously in the prog rock movement (by anyone who wasn’t Lester Bangs of Creem magazine), you had to produce a “concept” piece that would initially befuddle listeners while giving the DJs time to take a leisurely piss break. A lot of it was pretentious crap, but some of it was kind of amazing. It didn’t matter if you thought Rush’s “The Fountain of Lamneth” was overblown silliness, because Yes’s “The Revealing Science of God” might blow you away right after.

One of these concept pieces that you could hear played on FM radio back then was an 18-minute beauty by Parallax entitled “Kiss of the Mudman.”

What made “Mudman” so unique that even Lester Bangs admitted a grumbling admiration for it (Bangs was infamous for loathing everything about the prog-rock movement) was its fusion of traditional blues with Hindi music. Critics were divided on whether or not it was a successful piece, but even those who disliked it had to admit that it was unlike anything produced during the short-lived prog era—and that it was performed by your basic rock trio, using only a bass, drums, and a single guitar, without any studio trickery or overdubs, served, according to Rolling Stone’s review, “…as a testament to Parallax’s serious-minded goals, if not their cumulative musicianship, which seems too agile at times to move ‘Mudman’ into the realm of potential classic. Still, Canada’s Rush might soon have reason to be looking over their shoulders if Knight, Shaw, and Jacobs continue to move in this direction.”