Tale of Two Pities
Monday September 27th, 1999 @ 8:36 PM
Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well
It was the best of gigs, it was the worst of gigs. The great stage glowed
blue and red in the humid blackness of a summer night. Several thousand eyes stared from the dark revealing the reflected floodlights, their desultory blinking giving the scene a firefly effect.
Preparing to mount the steps was a guitar stud I’ll name Big Bad Blues Bully. Standing legs apart in his worn-at-the-heel snakeskin boots, he tucked in his flowing shirt and put on his game face while venting a stream of macho-babble at his young, disinterested girlfriend.
BBBB was regionally famous. It was no pilgrim who strutted into the spotlight and stung the masses with a piercing note from a Hendrix cover tune. This was my kind of show: big amps, mercurial licks, power chords, throbbing rhythm and a player with balls. Testosteronic, high torque, bombast. Anticipatory shivers swept my skin leaving goose bumps in their wake. The base guitar slammed through my ribcage with reverberation. I dug the power.
When the husky voice honed by years of drugs, booze, and
hard nights filled the summer air, the ladies showed the hint of a collective writhe, let their eyes cross just a little under half lids, blew an
imperceptible moan through pursed lips, and role-played medieval wench in their minds eye. This guy had the goods. I envied him.
Guitar licks blistered our ears for the next hour. Hot, fast, and nasty. But
they were licks we’d heard before: Hendrix licks, Stevie Ray licks, Buddy Guy licks–trite and shopworn. Licks that sounded alike. Licks all at the same volume. Licks we loved from their creators, but that didn’t ring true from the imitator. BBBB or Fourbee, said little if anything to the audience, preferring to let his music speak for him, only it was delivering a boring sermon.
The human mind is entertained by surprises. Predictability creates boredom no
matter how high the energy, the intensity, or the technical skill. We have a
remarkable ability to adapt to any environment once it becomes predictable,
but in the delight of novelty, there is no end. Great entertainers continue
to surprise you with their talent and personality, even if the surprises are
subtle. Fourbee ran out of surprises before he finished his first song.
The two sidemen drooped forlornly behind their wannabe guitar hero going
through the motions, probably wondering what their cut of the festival check
was going to be. I have always thought that the further removed from death an
entertainer is, the more fascinating he becomes. These guys looked like God’s
practice attempts at resurrection, almost alive but definitely cadaverous.
People begin to make bathroom treks. They stood in line at the barbecue tents, the chatter level rose to challenge the music level. When human beings get bored they begin to itch for some reason. I saw much scratching and digging going on. They had come to be fed musically and they were hungry and restless. Had you asked any of them if Fourbee was a good player, they’d have agreed that indeed he was. They would blame their inattention on themselves, pointing out that it was a hot night, or their wife had been galvanized with a PMS attack, or their baby messed his pants and they forgot the diaper bag.
When Fourbee and the Cadavers mercifully put an end to the long string of Hendrix/Stevie covers, the former came up with this great original
salutation: “We love you people. With all our hearts!” That exclamation is always enough to make me want to throw up. What the hell are they talking about? Love is a pretty serious word in my book. This guy loves his guitar and his snakeskin boots, but he couldn’t care less about a mass of faces of whom he really knows very few. There were people in that audience who would disgust a syphilitic mendicant. He didn’t love them and most of all he didn’t love himself.
When he left the stage waving a triumphant hand in the air, he began to curse the people to whom he had just professed his wholehearted love. He cursed the festival promoters and he cursed people I didn’t know. He issued as vile and effusive a barrage of gutter profanity as I have ever heard, and I was three years in the United States Marine Corps. He condemned everything and everyone, mixing religious and sexual profanity with a tone so venomous it would shame any self-respecting viper. Fourbee’s girlfriend nodded in agreement and suggested they leave this ungrateful conglomeration of shit-eating mankind. And he did, forthwith, and in a violent huff.
This technically talented man had obviously put countless years of practice into his instrument, but had neglected his soul. His self-loathing was destroying his music and his happiness. A great body of notes thrown out to our ears without the context of a profound and textured soul, is nothing more than noise in the night. I pitied the man.
I pitied the slender girl singing in the coffeehouse two weeks later. She had no snakeskin boots, just stood barefoot on the floor strumming a twelve string guitar singing through an anemic P.A. to twelve people. Blinddog Smokin’ was the headline attraction at the large nightclub downstairs. We had a couple of hours to burn and nowhere to go, so Jason and I made our entrance into the cozy room that smelled of coffee and fresh baked pastries.
I love making entrances. I used to study John Wayne coming through the saloon doors, then stopping to survey his audience. The door of the coffeehouse faced the audience slightly to one side. I sauntered in with a combined J.W. body posture and facial expression that said: “Ain’t I bad?”
No one looked.
I hate that when it happens. Why would these twelve people be more interested in who I sized up as a granola eating-hairy armpit sporting-super maudlin-save the whales-hemp is heaven-gunnysack dress wearing-body odor is beautiful-all mankind is a sisterhood-please don’t judge me while I judge you-self righteous-Joan Baez is God-let’s spraypaint fur coats-pansexual-acid tripping-cappuccino is health food-my mother is a lesbian-let’s all hold hands and save the world–dorky, dirty, dingy, daffy, dipshit like this pathetic and pusillanimous, patron of puerility? Stereotypical folksingers tend to rile me a bit.
I mentioned to Jason that we could still catch the two-dollar movie one block down the street and even though we’d already seen it twice, it would be more to my liking than this slip of a girl and her I-brush-with-a-garlicroot grin. We almost left, then he said, “She’s doing some cool stuff on her guitar, let’s stay a minute?”
I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had pulled down his pants and mooned the twelve people. Jason judges guitar playing the way a school marm with a bun judges fourth grade penmanship. So for the first time I really focused on this woman. She was actually a cute little thing, and sanitary. I even begin to suspect that she shaved her armpits and brushed with normal toothpaste. Oh, it was the dreaded folk music alright, but something was shining through.
Jason and I stood cavalierly at the counter remaining aloof. I still pitied this lilting Lilliputian with her wee audience, but I decided to stay and find out what was drawing us to her. A song went by, then two, then more: original songs; philosophical songs–some humorous, some sad, some enlightening, but passionate every one. She was a sprite of sorts–a person who glows, whose aura can be seen even by the pragmatists among us. I will call her the Songbird. With a mutual glance, Jason and I knew to go sit with the twelve and become an official part of her audience.
I sat upright, chin high, and somber. I still had a reputation to uphold. I was too full of machismo to yield my admiration to a nymph folksinger. Jason though, was studying this woman, chin in hands. He openly admired her clever guitar tactics and percussion tricks. I followed his lead, and looking casually over my shoulders in the event somebody cool was watching, I let my body descend into the famous sculpted thinker’s posture.
This lady was a storyteller–creative, ardent, and picturesque. I gave her the supreme salute: I paid attention. I had stayed at first because as the Greeks were fond of saying: she was good to look upon. Then I noticed her vocal style and how she uniquely handled each word, each syllable, crafting her trade with meticulous detail. Along with this was her ability to make her guitar an unobtrusive and integral part of her persona and her stories. One tended not to notice the guitar work, only accept it as part of the whole.
My growing admiration of this effervescent raconteur moved to a higher echelon as I found her to be wise and sophisticated. Her words forced me to examine life, and myself. I sensed her mind behind the music and it was convincing and resolute. I begin to like her. I found myself impaled. I yielded my defenses and let her move me. Her songs had the conviction and passion of someone that has felt and felt deeply, and her experiences were not borrowed.
The greatest connection a poet can have with his audience is on a spiritual plane. Courtship from the bard is a pavane that slowly brings two minds into harmony and the busy, chaotic, nonsense of a whirring individual brain is courted into the beautiful waltz of a shared epiphany. The thoughts are isolated and frozen for examination and the souls of both giver and receiver are lifted and nurtured. This then is performance with purpose. One walks away gratified and delighted.
A vignette portrayed by this songbird will illustrate the concept: She sat in a restaurant in Boston one afternoon and stared through a great picture window at the tranquil winterscape covering a frozen lake across the way. Steam from her coffee shimmered the scene as she beheld the utter peace and unspoken loveliness framed by the window. Slowly her eyes allowed a reflection on the glass to limn into her consciousness. The image was that of her own face, superimposed upon the scene of fantastic tranquility beyond. It was a disturbed visage that looked back at her in counterpoint to the pacific loveliness that served as its backdrop.
Startled, she realized of a sudden that she was out of sync with nature. Her face did not fit in. The worries and troubles of self-centered materialism and a frenetic society had twisted her spirit and the evidence was in the window.
The Songbird decided right then to change some of her values and ways. As I listened to the story told so well, I had to wonder what my own face would look like against such a window. I felt the torque on my own soul and my heart felt heavy with stress, angst, anxiety, and rage. These qualities should not be in my life. But unless they are exposed, I carry them as my hidden and heavy cross.
The little audience had grown to twenty-five, but I hadn’t seen them come in. I rose to leave as our own gig was to begin shortly. I looked at the Songbird and shook my head in revelation and admiration. I thought of the Big Bad Blues Bully and realized how this diminutive dryad had just kicked his ass and stole his wallet. How very much he could learn from her. How very much had I. As a performer she was bigger than he was in every way except shoe size. She had kept me guessing, delighted me, surprised me, taught me, inspired me, and entertained me profoundly. I caught her eye as I left and nodded my respect. I didn’t really care about my image much at that moment. I was busy digesting food for thought. As I went to perform for my own fans, many times the number of hers, I envied her.
The Big Bad Blues Bully will undoubtedly go on bludgeoning his audiences with mammoth sound, and overwhelm them with volatile licks and a million notes. His angry soul will dictate a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes him feel his glory is being robbed by we foolish and ignorant people who can’t appreciate his great technical skill. We pedestrian slugs who just get in his way. We are ingrates who he unfortunately needs to measure his success. But we won’t give it to him because deep inside we know he is empty and self-loathing.
Perhaps he should sit in a restaurant and look out a great window at a peaceful scene and see his own angry face in polarity– angrier still if he knew that he had his butt kicked by a one-hundred pound girl with a P.A. system smaller than a breadbox. We blues men are supposed to be the left ventricle of pathos. We are supposed to herald it like stentorian trumpeters standing on the great cliffs–and the echo should ring pure and true. Ironically, sometimes we discover the brass for our testicles in a foundry small and feminine.
Posted by Carl