Our Heroes continue along the road, which they now know to be the Road to Oz. (The reader knew that from the book title.) The landscape is pleasant -- if you haven't noticed, this journey is considerably less perilous than Dorothy's past exploits. The travelers have spent every night in bed, and aside from involuntary body modifications by social-climbing autocrats, they've experienced no hardships.
That changes at their next encounter. They enter a pretty, but uninhabited valley, where the sound of music -- like a wheezy hand-organ, as Baum describes it -- is unceasing. The source of the music turns out to be a strange little fat man who makes music simply by breathing. He's Allegro Da Capo, and his lungs are full of organ reeds. Button-Bright dubs him "The Musicker." He literally can't stop playing music without dying. Our heroes find the music appealing for about thirty seconds, and then get tired of it. After promising to get Mr. Da Capo an invitation to Ozma's party, they hastily leave the nightmarish valley.
This chapter points up a technological change from Baum's day to our own. As I write this in a cafe, I hear music -- some bland indy rock the hipster baristas evidently enjoy. In the car, I hear music -- either the radio or one of my own CDs. In the grocery store, the department store, the restaurant -- music everywhere. We live in the Musicker's world now. That wasn't true in Baum's day. Phonographs existed in 1909 ("There couldn't be a funnygraf in Oz!" says Dorothy), but an Edison cylinder recording didn't last more than a couple of minutes, so it wasn't practical to keep background music playing. A very posh restaurant or department store might hire musicians to entertain the customers, but even they had to stop every so often. If you wanted music at home, someone in the family had to learn to play an instrument, which meant that once you heard the three or four pieces they practiced, the show was over.
The notion of having music instantly available everywhere was one of the Utopian elements of Edward Bellamy's socialist novel Looking Backward, published in 1884. Using the cutting-edge high-tech medium of telephones, the people of the far-future year 2000 could listen to music whenever and wherever they chose. But now that music at everyone's fingertips has been around for half a century or more, we think of it as an annoyance as much as anything else.
The Road to Oz was written just at the cusp of the change, I think. Mechanical sound reproduction was just becoming widespread, the wonder of it was starting to fade, and the annoying possibilities of having to listen to everyone else's music were becoming apparent.
If the Musicker was an annoyance, the next valley over holds the first genuine danger of the book. Foxville and Dunkiton were classic examples of wacky wayside villages, and now we come to the book's first randomly hostile freaks: the Scoodlers. What's a Scoodler? It's a humanoid with two fronts and no back. Scoodler heads have faces on front and back, their limbs are double-jointed, and even their feet are double-sided like an upside-down capital T. And in proper randomly hostile freak style, they want to make Our Heroes into soup. Even the Shaggy Man's Love Magnet is no help, because the Scoodlers say they'll love every mouthful of him.
Naturally, Dorothy and co. decline, but the Scoodlers insist, and when Our Heroes try to flee the Scoodlers reveal their secret weapon: they can take off their heads and throw them! Pelted by double-faced heads, the travelers soon give up, and the Scoodlers (after recovering their heads) lock them in a cave while they get the soup kettle going.
As soon as he gets a chance to think and plan, the Shaggy Man devises an escape which turns the Scoodlers' most powerful weapon against them. Since they throw their heads at enemies, the Shaggy Man applies the principles of America's National Pastime to the fight. He catches their heads and tosses them into a chasm as fast as they can throw them. The result is a throng of headless Scoodlers feeling around in search of their heads, while Our Heroes run for it.
Once again I'm struck by how "stagey" this section is. One can easily imagine Scoodlers on stage, with colorful costumes and big false heads. The Shaggy Man could use the orchestra pit as the chasm while he plays his deadly game of catch. And then exeunt all, pursued by a headless Scoodler.
Next time: things get done!
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