Billy dreams that he's sitting shotgun in the van next to Joe.
Billy knows it's a dream, bcause they're in the piece-of-shit van from the last tour, but the stereo is working perfectly. In reality, the first tape they played got stuck in the cassette deck and stayed there, occasionally flaring into life when you turned on the engine.
Joe is playing the Dead Kennedys to annoy Billy, because Joe is secretly an eleven-year-old trapped in a thirty-something body.
Was. That's the other reason Billy knows it's a dream.
Billy never liked the Dead Kennedys.
Sure, they sounded a lot better than some of the tuneless crossover-thrash shit Joe normally listened to, but the lyrics...
Call Billy pretentious if you want, but he always thought that rock lyrics should have some poetry to them. Some artifice. Listening to Dead Kennedys lyrics was like listening to someone read out the opinion section of a newspaper.
I'm tired of self respect, I can't afford a car, Jello Biafra chanted above the tape hiss. I want to be a prefab superstar.
Okay, maybe Billy had other reasons for disliking the Dead Kennedys. Joe always liked to play this song for him in particular.
If my friend say I've lost my guts, I laugh and say that's rock and roll!
The road ahead is dark. Billy keeps his face fixed forward, doesn't turn right or left.That's deliberate.
He knows Joe is there, he could practically feel his body heat - but that was just his brain playing tricks on him, because Joe isn't here anymore, and his body is cold and in the ground two thousand miles away in Alberta.
Anyway, even if Joe was somehow alive, he was just looking for Billy's reaction, and the best thing to do was to refuse to give him one.
Is my cock big enough, is my brain small enough, for you to make me a star?
Give me a toot, I'll sell you my soul
Pull my strings and I'll go far
"You know," Billy said, "If I'd sold my soul to a big record company, at least I might have got paid. I sold my soul to you and I got nothing but grief."
He hears the sound of Joe's laughter and then Billy wakes up.