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This, of course,
is one of the all-time great themes, and not just because I’ve staked
my entire musical career on examining it, either, you bunch of cynics. No,
the reason that leaving one place and going to another is such a great theme
is that it’s the stripped-down heart of one of the only two stories
that actually exist at all, once all the window-dressing has been taken
down. “Protagonist goes someplace” is one story; “Protagonist
goes someplace and then comes back” is the other. According to one
theory, the former is tragedy and the latter is comedy, and there aren’t
any other stories to tell. I’ll buy that; it makes sense to me. It’s
a comedy if everybody winds up back where they started, and what kind of
spin you put on the journey makes for the difference between black comedy
and slapstick. “Going Back to Memphis” is closer to the former
than the latter. It goes like this:
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