King Biscuit Time Magazine - Road Kill Column

Sunday February 26th, 2006 @ 9:11 PM

Filed under: Everything, Publications

The Shadowed Path to Glory

There’s an old adage about a voluptuous young lady and an older rich man meeting for the first time. “Would you accompany me on my private yacht next weekend?” he asks in a gentile manner. “We could drink champagne, sleep in my private quarters, and have my servant bring us breakfast in bed, and I would pay you one million dollars for the inconvenience you would suffer in departing your normal schedule. Do you accept?”

“Why, of course,” she exclaims, clapping her hands in glee. “I would be honored.”

The old gentlemen smiles politely, takes a sip of his tea, checks his schedule, shakes his head slightly, then asks, “Would you mind terribly if we did this at the Holiday Inn? Same deal?”

The young lady frowns deeply while she thinks about this new and less sumptuous proposal. Everything considered, her face brightens back into pleasantness and she nods, “Yes, I suppose that would be alright.”

The man uncrosses his legs, bends over the small table at which they sit, grasps her hand gently, and asks, “Would you do it for a ten grand?”

At this the young woman sits straight up, folds her arms defensively, and snaps back at him, “What do you think I am, a whore?”

The man looks at her with an expression of surprise and answers calmly, “My dear, we already established that. Now we are just haggling over the price.”

I find this little story germane to the music industry and more specifically to blues bands trying to eke out a living between festival gigs. The things we will do to keep the dream and us alive, are often degrading, and sometimes insulting. After certain gigs we can’t wait until morning to get in the shower and try to scrub ourselves back into a semblance of dignity.

Most musicians have accepted this aspect of whoredom in our profession and joke about it like cartoon Magpies over a breakfast of road kill. We elucidate the depths to which we’ve sunk in lurid and humorous detail.

Blues festival musicians parade the platform with Peacock panache. But the onstage pomp belies the seedy matrix sustaining many musicians day to day. It’s a price most will pay for the privilege to prance and preen at prestigious festivals. The peculiar lives of performers evoke much curiosity.

Want to take a peek inside the whorehouse? There are many whoring roles we play, but I shall use just one for an example. Here then is a vignette suggesting the flavor of this distasteful aspect of the music world. Before opening the door, allow me to remind you that a musician is an artist who wants to share his talent with his fellow man, contribute something special to the world, and be recognized as an important ingredient to a healthy society. That is our glory and we would very much like to retain dignity in its pursuit.

That’s why you might be surprised to read that my vignette involves the wonderfully dignified institution of marriage. No musician, who retains even the illusion of being special, wants to play a wedding. To begin with the hall is usually a church basement or community center or outside by a pond of quacking ducks. The surfaces are linoleum, glass, and plaster-harder than the heart of an IRS agent and guaranteed to throw the notes and vocals into ricocheting clutter. The band is placed without stage in a corner behind the long table of potato salad and deviled eggs.

We are expected to start off playing softer than Munchkin’s whispering. There is no level on an amplifier low enough to satisfy the bride’s mom who wants the oohs and aahs of those opening wedding gifts to be heard over the band. “Can’t you play some Andy Williams or Barbara Streisand?” She asks indignantly.

No matter what we play, we will be hated by 90of the audience. This is because Grandpa and Grandma prefer Lawrence Welk while the teen-agers want some hip hop about hitting your bitch in the teeth with an ax. Cousin Jim Bob is walking around with a bottle of Jack asking you to play Sweet Home Alabama or anything by Richard Petty, who after inquiry, turns out to be a retired race car driver. So, we poor whores just play Mustang Sally four or five times and see if anybody in the band knows Wildwood Flower. The latter is an especially useful tune because old people think it’s a polka and almost everyone else can find some messed-up dance step that fits it. They keep saying, “What the hell is this song? I know I’ve heard it somewhere.”

There’s always some hermit uncle-a human anachronism who only ventures out in public when one of his relatives gets married. He’ll stand square in front of the band digging and scratching in the favorite crevice-residence of his fleas. He hasn’t seen a live band since Faron Young came through his hometown singing Hello Walls. This actually happened to me. The guy asked with the sincere curiosity of a sniffing hound dog, “Is this niggero music yer’ playin’ here?” I guess he felt putting an “o” on the end of the term kind of cleaned it up proper for the wedding ambiance.

Then there’s the drunken brother of the groom. This knothead is having his moment in the sun, and must demonstrate both his love and cleverness by coming to the bandstand every five minutes for a toast or a testimonial. It doesn’t matter if the band is in the middle of a song; in fact we may be so lucky as to have him share a microphone with his nasty-breath self, singing off key, “RIDE SALLY RIIIIIIIIIDE!”

The toasts last five minutes and aren’t funny even though the drunken brother is giggling throughout like a junior high kid with his first Playboy magazine. The testimonials often end up with the drunken brother balling and giving people long, clingy, hugs. The band has one collective thought: “…only x more hours and we get paid…”

In the meantime all the nerds and homely friends of the groom are taking advantage of the intoxicated beneficence of the bride by laying slobbering kisses on her lips, then walking away with loopy grins and getting back in line hoping she won’t remember they’ve been through twice before.

She won’t. She’s already kissed Uncle Ralph who smells like garlic and has loose bridgework. She kissed her cousin Bernetta, the lesbian who used tongue on her. She even bent over and did the swim in her wedding dress with a dwarf stuck to her bustle pretending like he was surfing to Wipeout. She’ll be primed enough to take jumper cables to bed.

After awhile the booze always fires up the testosterone and someone gets thrown into the bandstand. Ladies, who hours earlier looked like serene angels in the church, have become hissing demons as they pull each other’s hair in support of their boyfriends who are pounding each other’s heads into the base drum. Bands that drink and play have an advantage at this time. They can just go ahead and kick somebody wearing a tux or try to kiss somebody good-looking.

By the end of the night, the band’s P.A. system has long ago been taken over by drunks with Karaoke on their minds, and they weave around the bandstand arm-in-arm harmonizing to Amazing Grace. Some guy always thinks its cute to end a verse with a horrific belch, usually while trying to do the Ave Negela dance-not because he’s Jewish, but because it’s a wedding. I remind God that He promised not to bring another flood upon the earth, because He must get sorely tempted.

Finding the Brides father to get paid for this musical prostitution is another matter. Usually he’s slumped in a corner. If he’s not passed out he’s pissed off. “Nobody liked you guys,” he proclaims, crumpling our check in his fist. He’s right of course, but then we knew that going in.

Like whores, bands have become expert in getting paid. We compliment the ornery curmudgeon on his manhood, his honor, how beautiful is his daughter, and how much we enjoyed the hospitality. We have already lied about everything from the groom’s goatee being “cool” to the bride’s mom cutting a “fine figure,” so why not lie all the way to the finish line.

The bride’s yapping Sheltie dogs have managed to pull the Red Snapper head and skeleton out of the garbage and have it in the cake dish they knocked off the table. Their tails wag victoriously over their delicious concoction. Pretending to shake the hand holding the paycheck, we gently tug it away from the resisting father of the bride and back out the door bowing and smiling and proclaiming what a grand event it was and how proud we were to be a part of it.

On the way home we all swear to never do this again, but every now and then we do. Why? We need the money-and such is the shadowed path to glory.

Posted by Carl