Solo of the gods.
Saturday March 30th, 2002 @ 8:54 PM
Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well
I looked out at the audience and a cow looked back at me and mooed. We were setting up on a flat bed truck in the heat of a summer afternoon and the cow was the most attractive female I’d seen since I arrived. It was an Angus with long fluttering eyelashes. Her tale teased coyly as she swatted the flies around her bottom. Leaning on the fence all around this unabashed bovine lovely were about a hundred humans, smoking and spitting tobacco, and encouraging the cow as she chewed cud from a forkful of hay they’d spread around the lot.
In counterpoint to her sonorous moos, the crowd hooted and hollered profanely while they beckoned her to come hither and yon. The cow just stood there until rocks began to pelt her backside. She moved away. An empty Budweiser can hit her between the eyes; she whirled and trotted away. The humans roared with varied intensity depending on where she ended up each time she moved. A man belched mightily and several women around the fence laughed hyena style.
I noticed the ground inside the fence was chalk-lined into many squares. The squares had numbers in them. After about a half-hour of taunting the cow, a man yelled out, “She ain’t a gonna do it, let’s get the chicken.” Soon a fat, frightened, chicken was tossed onto the squares. Unlike the cow, the chicken was lively and ran all about. The crowd pelted the chicken with pebbles and cigarette butts. Everyone laughed and encouraged the chicken. They had forgotten about the cow that now stood still, probably wondering how she had gotten into such a predicament.
Suddenly the Chicken slowed and arched her back a moment and then defecated quickly onto number 37 sending a big bearded guy into a paroxysm of knee slapping and bellowing. The Chicken had done what the cow couldn’t do; she had ended the contest. “You purty thing,” the man cried, “You done shit in my square…” If I remember right, he won about three hundred dollars, and the chicken.
Dark clouds were piling up over the Rocky Mountains to the West and they shimmered with electricity. The happy winner had the chicken under his arm and was showing her to his buddies, bragging about her shitting prowess on his way to be a judge in the women’s flatulence contest. Five, big, burrito-biting, bitches and a microphone-need I say more?
I felt bad for mankind. The only creature with the powers of reasoning, humor, love, compassion, creation and emotion was using these awesome potentialities for scatological fun and games. I became sad when I pondered this event and day being the highlight of the year for many of these people. They had held meetings, made plans, raised funds, and labored over its success. I thought about the enthusiasm they must have shown when they voted to have the great shit-in-the-squares lottery.
We started the music and people came from inside the bar and all around the games area where they had been crunching beer cans into their foreheads, catching a greased pig, and flinging cow turds for prizes. They had a kissing booth with a woman who looked like Howard Cosell smoking a cigar. People paid to watch drunken volunteers kiss her on the lips. Having no dance area, people danced where they wished and between the folding chairs in front of us. The dancing reminded me of the bouncing that toddlers do when they have to pee.
To the west the storm clouds had spilled over the mountains and were spreading across the horizon, close enough now for me to spot miniature zigzags darting out of them. A low rumbling threatened from within the black interior. The sun’s descent met the billowing whorls below and suddenly glowed brilliant red, the atmosphere magnifying its size and intensity. The moving sky became a harbinger of the apocalypse. I expected to see the demons from the Lost Ark movie shooting out of the swirling clouds. No one paid attention to the weather, the collective mentality wallowing in alcoholic stupor.
The late afternoon became very dark although turquoise skies remained in the east, lightening streaked repeatedly and pervasively in the approaching clouds followed by fantastic claps of thunder. Often many streaks of lightning would criss-cross against the black backdrop and thunder would arrive from all over in surround sound. The cow mooed nervously and a flea-bitten dog barked then hid under a pick-up truck. We started playing “The House of the Rising Sun.” Raindrops began to puff the dirt and I could smell the rain in the dust.
The fresh rain produced a lot of odors: gasoline from a spill just ahead of our flatbed, wet hay from the pile brought for the cow, freshly cut grass from across the street, the red end of a cigar absorbing the moisture, the coat of a mangy dog, rubber from an electrical short, hot summer asphalt soaking up wetness, rain pelted barbecue briquettes, and sage brought in on the wind from the prairie beyond.
When Jason went into that great solo you all know him for in this particular song, the heavens let loose their fury. The sky had become so dark that the stagehand had turned on the floodlights producing a spectacular water dance of blue, red, yellow, and purple. The thunder no longer followed the lightning, but now accompanied the jagged displays in mighty crashes one after another and simultaneously as well.
Jason Coomes lives to solo. Everything else in life is waiting. This is his purpose on earth and he treasures the moment with the passion of parting lovers. To say he is in a zone is to make tawdry the complete isolation of which he is capable. His focus transcends concentration into a spiritual centering that at this particular time had me impaled in wonderment.
Rather than flee the storm he strode out to become part of it. He lifted his guitar away from his body and to the turbulence above. He played with a fury matched only by the galvanization of the atmosphere. He didn’t curse the gods for their rage, he joined them. He saw the powers of the universe as a mighty orchestra come to elevate his solo in omnipotent power and ineffable beauty.
The wind tore through his long yellow hair and it flew like a battalion banner in the charge. Lighting burst about us illuminating the sky like titanic strobe lights, and wrote its own crackling, tearing, sub-melody to Jason’s solo. The tubes of his two puissant amplifiers glowed orange as he wrenched the volume level to compete with the elements. Chuck sat transfixed by the spectacle ahead of him, knowing that to stop and break the spell would be sacrilegious, a violation of everything Jason held holy and sacrosanct. Andy was stoic. Somehow nothing mattered but the transcendence. Equipment could be replaced, but never the moment, never the memory, never that rare glimpse of paradise.
I’ll never forget colors from the flood lights dancing fiendishly in the blurring rain against the alternating black and brilliance of the coruscating heavens with Jason in their midst, giving his very soul to the elements and the powers beyond-playing the solo of the gods.
The solo ended. We stopped. I looked out at the audience. No one was there. Of course they had retreated inside to safety and security, to cigarettes and beer, to inane jokes and meaningless laughter. They had missed it. A singular occurrence as rare as a magic unicorn, as precious to human potential as the first breath of a newborn.
I have seen many bands in my lifetime play outside and encounter the elements. Invariably they retreat to break time and a little smoke or booze. I may go the rest of my life and not see an orchestra like Jason and the gods. It was a thing to behold. It restored my faith in the potential of mankind. It was an escape to utopia, Valhalla, the Elysian Fields. It’s what separates we humans from the cow and the chicken-and the gulf is wide.
Carl
Posted by Carl