A Moment in the Sun

Tuesday July 6th, 1999 @ 8:32 PM

Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well

[CAUTION: The following article is sarcastic. If you cry during episodes of Touched by an Angel, I suggest you don't read it.]

I can always spot him eyeing me from his corner of the room. The sweat on the brow gives him away. Before he comes up he clears his throat, and sometimes bites his lip or cracks his knuckles. Suddenly his jaw sets in determination and I know he will rise soon. I pretend not to know it is happening. I busy myself ignoring the inevitable. Then I feel the light tap on my shoulder and turn in full knowledge that I will be looking into a well-prepared smile. An ingratiating smile. A nervous smile.

I stare into the smile and brace myself. It is coming. I will try to put it to a quick and merciful end. Then it begins. The formula is always the same within whatever personality package it is wrapped.

Step one: The compliment, “Uguyzer great!
“Thank you.”

Step two: the establishing of loyalty, “I never miss ya’ when yer in town, ain’t that right, honey?” The latter phrase is step 2a, an optional affirmation by his domestic partner.

Step three: The personal insincere and empty compliment, “I love yer harp playin’, man, it’s killer.”
“Thank you.”

Step four: The establishment of brotherhood, “I play a little myself, ya know.”
“No I didn’t know.”

Step five: The creation of credibility, “Yeah, I played with Albert Collins, ya know.”
“No I didn’t know.”

Step five: Overkill the credibility and demonstrate intimate relationships by using first names, “Yeah, Albert, and Freddie (King), and Stevie and Luther.
“No shit?”
Notice that all the aforementioned are dead so affirmation is not easy to obtain.

Step six: The Question, “I wuz jist wonderin’ if I could sit in fer a song or two?”
Shivers run down my spine and I conjure up my best fake sincere grin and for an awkward moment, we stand there inches apart, fake grin to fake grin.
“Don’t take it personally, man, but we have a band policy not allowing sit-ins.” This is a cop-out for not having the balls to tell him the truth. It is supposed to be a nice hint and method for him to save face so that he doesn’t have to return crestfallen to his table of friends and family that he brought with him in hopes of a moment in the Sun.

Step seven: The voice of the domestic partner or significant other, “He’s really good. He really is. Trust me. You can take my word for it. I guarantee.”
“I don’t doubt that at all,” I lie through what’s left of my insincere grin. “But if we break our policy for…I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”
“Jim, but everybody just calls me ‘Harpdude’”
“Really? Will, anyway, if we make an exception for ‘Harpdude’ all kinds of guys will appear out from under the quarter rounds and we just aren’t the kind of band that comes to town to hold a jam session.”

Step eight: The grin disappears and negativity enters, “Albert Collins wasn’t too good for the likes of me. Who do you guys think you are?”
“I’m sorry man, I mean, ‘Harpdude’, I know you’d probably get up and kick some ass, but we just don’t have sit-ins anymore. Too many bad experiences.”

Step nine: Taking umbrage, “So you think I’m a bad experience huh? I can play ten times better than you. You suck! You’re just afraid I’m better’n you.”
“Whatever Harpdude, sorry you feel that way.”

Step ten: The kick in the nuts from the domestic partner, “You guys all suck. I never liked your stupid band. You’re just jealous you can’t play like Harpdude. I could play better than your sorry asses. We’re going to tell all our friends that you guys suck. My sister knows the owner here and you guys will never play here again. Take my word for it. I guarantee–not never!”

So those are the ten steps. As predictable as a dog humped over making little circles on your lawn. It’s happened to Blinddog at least five hundred times and I mean that seriously and conservatively. We’ve played over a thousand gigs together and the episode occurs at least every other gig, and sometimes it happens with several different guys all in one night.

At best the guy goes away hating us but assured of sympathy sex from the domestic partner, at worst, well, I’ll tell you about the worst:

At a little town in Wyoming a few years ago I went through the ten steps with a big, hairy, dirty, stinky, belly-hanging-over-his-britches, foul mouthed, foul everything, biker with tattoos that said something like: “I HATE YOUR MOTHER!”

He had a bandoleer of harps around his chest and popcorn from the bar up the street sticking in his beard. His insincere smile was a good deal smaller than his plumber’s crack. During step ten, he threatened to beat me up with the motorcycle chain that was trying like hell to keep his grungy battery-acid-eaten pants from falling off.

When I persisted in my stand his buddy, a lovely specimen of greaserhood, whose hair hung in soiled strings like drippings from a hog roast, presented me with an oily smile and a pistol aimed at my privates.

When the concept of a piece of lead exploding into that most vulnerable area of the male anatomy hit my cerebral cortex, my sphincter wound tighter than a pencil sharpener in less time than it takes a camera shutter to click. While the buzzardy gunmen toyed with his aim in a figure eight pattern, all the time grinning through his twelve green teeth, the harpist extraordinaire pulled down his already low-riding britches and mooned the audience. He just didn’t flash them, he bent over table by table and wiggled that horrid, mind-numbing, insect-attracting conglomeration of fat and boils right in the faces of horrified patrons.

The police were called and the two unsavory characters were spread-eagled on the bar room floor, handcuffed, and hauled off to the clink, still yelling “Blinddog suuuuuuuuuuuucks!” It was that day Blinddog Smokin’ made the rule: no more sit-ins.

No we do make exceptions: players we know; players we respect; players with a national reputation. The rule of thumb for any sit-in is quite simple: Sit-in when the band wants you. People for the most part, come out and pay money to hear who’s on the poster.

Now, to help you understand the misery we went through before finally making our rule, let me lump the myriad of sit-ins we’ve seen come and go into some stereotypical categories. What follows is based on true stories, but names and faces have been changed to protect us from their vengeance should they get hold of this article.

THE SWEATER: This guy is so nervous that he begins perspiring while playing his first riff. The sweat beads, then drips, then form rivulets, then falls in torrents of stringy slime. The circles under his arms grow huge and body odor permeates the stage. Always with the sweater, the eyes are squeezed tighter than slices of compressed Turkey. Tears pop out of the slits. Water drips profusely from the nose and upper lip. Hair glistens and a puddle forms under the feet. This guy literally rains on himself.

Panic sets in and he can’t remember his licks. He no longer has a clue where he is in the progressions of the song. His playing becomes chaotic and confused and his domestic partner unwittingly has her head buried deep in her hands, or purse, or lap. His friends are loosening their ties and feeling the urge to go pee, or just run away, but they stay out of commiserating loyalty and swear to themselves that they will never come to a club with him again.

Eventually I have to create a great and wide fake grin and ask the poor audience to give him a hand and then, like he was James Brown donning his cape, escort him off the stage.

Later he will tell his friends that the band didn’t know what they were doing and caused him to flounder. He will blame the band for the rest of his natural life, and probably on into whatever’s next. A night like this can destroy a man. Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t destroy them all. Some persist in repeating the performance until such time as their wife divorces them over it, or their children claim that he is not their real father.

THE SHOWOFF: He will fall to his knees, he will offer up fake prayers, he will dance and prance and take off his pants. These kind need accolade the way a vampire needs blood. Unfortunately, there is no tried and true formula to kill these guys, like a wooden stake, or a silver bullet, or a cross held to their bouncing faces.

You can’t imagine how embarrassing it is for a professional band to innocently let one of these guys on stage and then have to deal with it at the expense of their reputation. For the most part, these Showoffs are nerds who see cool stuff on TV or at a Michael Jackson concert, and desire the same crowd reaction for themselves. Somewhere along the way he has tried some moves at a Christmas party and because everyone cheered him on and he got laid that night, he thinks he was born to boogie.

I don’t know exactly what makes “cool”, but I know it is somehow innate and not contrived. I’ve actually seen sit-ins do grand ballet leaps across the stage and Jackie Wilson pirouettes, and even go out into the audience to sing sexy to somebody else’s woman.

These guys often have an outfit, or an image, with which they cover their nerdy interior. A Stevie Ray hat, or Italian shoes, or shades and a purple suit with a yellow tie covered in green cartoon crocodiles, or some such horseshit. Unfortunately they always lack any sense of self-awareness and thus blindly go about the buffoonery unscathed by the horrified and embarrassed looks of the band and the audience. I just have one request when you see the showoff take the stage: please don’t encourage him even if you are mixing Tequila Bloody Mary’s with shots of Hot Damn and you are calling some stranger your best friend. Someday he’ll be back when you’re sober, don’t forget that.

THE BLASTER: It doesn’t matter who has a solo or who is singing or if the band is trying to play softly to build a crescendo, the Blaster plays balls out over everything and everybody. He figures this is his moment in the sun and he’s going to take advantage of it.

Great honks and squeaks come forth and whether he is in key or not, or playing cleanly or not, or in time or not, doesn’t matter. He is going to hurl sound at you in barrages and staccatos and torrents. No time to breath, no time to think, no break to let you tell him he is stinking up the place, just the maddening assaults and banzai charges of his million notes and noises crashing about the room like waves in a hurricane.

However, in the forefront of his mind is an image of himself just kicking your puny, flea-bitten, pale, little, bent-over ass. He is wailing dude. Even the angels have stopped to gaze down upon his emotional genius. This is his epiphany performance and he is taking no prisoners.

When we run into one of these guys, I always call a break, or if he is a singer/ harp player, I just leave the stage and let the other guys have to deal with him. They hate me when I do that.

THE STEVIE RAY MAN: The Texas gunslinger look is the dead giveaway. We see them in every town. Add to this an open shirt with some manly hair on it, and you have done poor dead Stevie one better.

Most of these guys have tone that sounds like their amp tubes are encased in a tin can. They have obviously spent a great deal of time in front of the mirror trying to ape Robert DeNiro smirks. They have spent ten thousand hours of their life learning Stevie Ray licks note for note, but unfortunately if you asked them to play Yankee Doodle Dandy they’d be as nonplused as if you’d asked them to cover Paganini.

The Stevie Ray Man has never possessed one original lick, but it doesn’t matter, because Stevie is dead and someone has to carry on. People deserve it he rationalizes. The reason I don’t like them to sit-in is that our band loses it’s personality and dimension because all this guy can do is stand there with his cigarette dangling under his spangled hat and pretend like he is Stevie Ray. While he is undergoing his nightly re-incarnation and stoking his alter ego, we have to subordinate to the whole shallow charade, or make him look even stupider than he already does.

I have no objection to covering Stevie Ray or Elvis or Tiny Tim for that matter, but why lose whatever individuality you might posses? Somehow impersonators always come off like wieners at a steak fry.

THE MOUSE: Little bitty peeps peek out of this guy’s instrument and try to sneak across the room without being heard. Often this is the same guy who sold us on the idea of him sitting in like he was doing a Paul Harvey newscast: bold and confident and impressive. Once onstage his loins jelly and his posture pickles his image and he just poops out like a ten year old sneaking his first puff on a cigarette.

I truly feel sorry for these poor boobs. Their domestic partner bleeds for them in the audience and the catholic among them cross themselves incessantly like nuns before an Attila-the-Hun pillaging. In their defense, I guess the power in the shower doesn’t translate to a real stage and a live audience. Suddenly they are naked and shriveled and limp and cold and for all the world they’d just like to cross their legs, lay down, and get through the song in the fetal position.

Honestly, one of these guys paid us $100 per song if we would let him sit in. We took $200 of his money and compromised our principles. It was the longest two songs of our career. People in the audience chastised us for putting them through it and called us whores. Rightfully so.

JANIS ARETHA PATSY CLINE: A composite name for the women vocalists who approach the band not knowing what key they sing a song in and thinking that we should suddenly become a request band and have ten thousand songs rehearsed at the snap of her fingers.

If you have never heard “The House of the Rising Sun” sung Janis Joplin style by one of these deluded wenches you can count your blessings. Why are there so many women who have to “belt one out” like they’ve been goosed by a Rhinoceros horn? Subtle tones and dynamic buildup and phrasing not square as a Rubik’s cube are lost on these deafening diva’s of divine delusion.

These ladies think that they can stop in the middle of a song and correct the band. They will argue with us on stage. They chastise us for not knowing “Crazy” by Patsy Cline, even though three of us weren’t even born when she sang and never listened to a country song in our lives. Me being the exception of course.
Fortunately, we can spot some of these copious cacophonies coming by the vision of a giant sun hat slipping through the pall heading our way.

THE PONTIFICATOR: He knows 100of everything and you know 0and need to just settle into the beatific vision and let him hold court. These guys desperately need to get beat up. I mean every day for several years. Beat up by the great apes, or Mike Tyson, or an East LA gang of homeboys. Once on stage their arrogance is more offensive than the stench of gangrenous flesh left on the operating table and about as appetizing.

On the great day of judgement they will be telling God Almighty how to adjudicate, probably just before he turns them into yapping Shiatsu dogs for eternity. I’d do it for Him if I could. These are the guys you hung “kick me” signs on in High School.

MR. SEX: This is the guy who will wink at you after his solo. He wears the Male International skivvies that roll your butt cheeks up in a solid ball and give you a little extra in the tallywhacker department. His dialogue with ladies is filled with phrases like, “your smile is sweet enough to pour on a waffle.”

I guess this winking and twinkling ambassador of cologne is harmless enough except that he’s just using the band to get laid. He doesn’t give a hoot in hell about the quality of the music or if he is adding something as a team member. His main instrument is not his sax or his guitar or set of keyboards, it is the penicillin-soaked dancing dolphin ready to jump out like a finger puppet at a children’s play. When I see this guy’s pitch actually working I know I am looking at a lady recently unincarcerated from a chastity belt, or a man-hater who is planning to castrate the poor dolt later that evening.

THE DRUNK: In our band we don’t drink and play. We wouldn’t want a doctor operating on us under the influence, nor a pilot flying us. A clerk at seven-eleven would get fired for drinking on the job. So why should musicians who must rely on a keen sense of timing think they can play better and more effectively under the influence. That is our theory anyway, and there are many who disagree with it.

Inevitably, drunks will ask us to sit in. This means an automatic no from us unless they have a knife in my ribs. We had a guy once, before our rule, stand with his back to the audience thinking he was facing them. He dropped his harmonica several times and couldn’t even find it on the floor. He use my vintage harp mic and dropped it too, breaking the element inside. He burped twice over the P.A. and said intelligent and pithy remarks like “Make love to a Bruin”…heh, heh, heh…”

Andy finally had to threaten to beat him up for some personal affront and he later quite literally fell off the stage. He didn’t even know that he needed different harps for different keys. He had one bent cheap little “C” harp that wreaked of whiskey and which had been regurgitated into at a previous gig. This disgusting example of low human degeneration and debauchery is not all that uncommon. If a guy has to get obliterated to have the courage to play before an audience, that lower-than-toe-jam personality is a sick or weak bumpkin who needs to go play scratch and sniff with the mutts in the back alley and fight over fish heads and entrails. It insults me when such ilk asks to be on stage in our show and it happens all the time.

THE TINKER: He brings a collection of technology on stage like a junkyard wizard. He has pedals and cords hanging off of him like he was being used as the Maypole for computer nerds. Everything he does takes too much time and doesn’t work. When he does finally get peg A into slot B it feeds back like an Irish Banshee after the little people. This cluttering, clanking, clattering, collection of calamity should be put in a large room of gizmos and widgets, a magnifying glass, and a set of jumper cables and not on a stage with human beings trying to make harmony. Years later he would emerge happy and fulfilled having invented a whirlymigig that could extend the shelf life of a Flowbee. We would all be happy too not having to suffer through his moment in the sun that looked more like an eternity in reticulated gizmonometry. I think these guys had mothers who put too many toys in the crib.

There are lots more of these stereotypes, but I have many new readers and I’ve probably offended the lot of them all ready. I didn’t write about the good sit-ins because it is not as fun and even boring. My ideal sit-in of all the hundreds I’ve seen over the years is the great Ronny Earl who always fits in, always adds something, never detracts, and best of all, makes you play and sound better.

We work very hard to bring you a well-rehearsed, quality evening of professional entertainment. We write most of our songs and arrange our covers uniquely in many cases. Sit-ins throw the whole thing out of kilter and suddenly we are having to gear our whole show to what they can play. That is not why we come to your town.

I once had a harp player come up and ask me to sit-in ten minutes before we went on stage with our second appearance at the prestigious King Biscuit Blues Festival. Now if he had been Billy Branch or James Cotton I’d have been honored. But I didn’t even know this guy. I told him that we had forty-five fast minutes on stage and that we had our act down tight. I asked him what I was supposed to do since I also played harp? I explained to him that we had worked hard and sacrificed for years to get this shot while he worked a job and drank beer and practiced in the bathtub. Why should he share the glory? Of course he got offended and said I sucked. Such rich and original thinking!

Our experience says ninety per-cent of guys who ask to sit-in are unprofessional in presence. They don’t know how to play with a band or within the framework of a given song, and shrink like a pistola in a cold pond when the spotlight is on them. So we do the drug thing, and “just say no.”

If that sounds cruel and you feel they should have their moment in the sun, as many people do, then consider letting a stranger come in and run your business, or help paint your prize hot rod, or write your report for you. Now consider that he is probably drunk and has a wife that is going to chew your head off and say you suck in emotional graphic language at the drop of a hat. Sounds like fun now, doesn’t it?

I always appreciate your comments and hope to see you down the road.

Posted by Carl