Elmore Magazine - Kickin’ in Your Stall

Saturday April 1st, 2006 @ 9:02 PM

Filed under: Everything, Publications

A Face and Folded Chairs

If you gaze at a photograph of my wedding lineup, one face seems out of place, though hauntingly familiar. Upon a tilted head a derby tilts still further, while goatee and twinkle-eye suggest a rapscallion, bemused with moonshine. ‘Tis the ghost of Sonny Boy’, says the looker.

Indeed. The face still sits upon its forlorn perch five years hence. The wedding hall is quiet, and without the revelry-dreary, like a beggared mausoleum for this peculiar solitaire. Folded chairs imply a long time betwixt dust and derriere. Walls erratically bedecked in yellowed posters of pomaded bluesmen, conjure a vision when yesternights froze time in mirth and music.

No one comes here. Few care. For years it watered the good ‘ol boys of an evening under a dim light in the back, but they became old and tired like their stories, their wives, their lives. Spiders, unencumbered now, silently weave their reticulum, and light ventures down the ghostly tendrils through dusty panes of glass. Here on a corner, in a town replete with derelict buildings and the late eve suggestion of spooks and specters, sits the forlorn museum of Sonny Boy Williamson.

My marriage proposal was conditional upon a ceremony in this inelegant hall. I drove my puzzled fiancé 1300 miles in our band bus to stand before a judge with the bust of Sonny Boy held next to the best man. I often wondered what possessed me to do that.

It was as though I was called to this journey. By whom? My soul, I guess—who I am. And who then am I? The sum of my experiences spun into values, genetically guided, and tempered with habits. We are then, I suppose, drawn to intriguing areas within this matrix of values we have become. So why did I seek this forsaken Riverboat town and its abandoned museum as a Mecca?

The answer goes to the heart of the blues culture. It is why festivals are attended and pilgrimages are made. Life is simplified for us in this culture to its basic elements, like a Picasso drawing in his minimalist period. He would draw what appeared to be a triangle with a stick on the bottom and call it a tree.

Our national culture has become complicated and dishonest. We lie to each other in every way a lie can be told: never before offered…once in a lifetime sale…world’s largest drugstore…smoke cigarettes and be a macho cowboy…drink our beer and women will gather around you…take this pill and cure what ails you…wear these clothes…drive this car…take this vacation… Do these things and you’ll be rich and famous, attractive and happy, and better than the other poor dumb bastards. We function around cell phones, computers, video crap, and a thousand marvels of technology. Our vaunted women are decked out in fake eyelashes, botox, cosmetic surgery, implants, tummy tucks, sunless tanning, hair extensions, makeup, lasered hair removal, and more piercings than a cannibal in a Tarzan movie. The only thing real about them is their fur coat for which a few families of minks were electrocuted.

We can’t even talk to a real person on the telephone anymore when these complicated lives get fouled up and cause us extreme stress. That’s why the blues culture seems so rejuvenating. It breaks life down to simple truths and simple rhythms: Today, I lost the best friend I ever had…says the singer in a voice so devoid of contrivance that it brings tears of compassion, because losing a beloved mother or father torque’s your soul until existence becomes simplified to your love and the absence of its object.

I ain’t fattnin’no more frogs for snakes…says Sonny Boy. In essence: I tell the truth and they sell it with lies and give me nothing in return. That pitiable museum stands in my eyes as a metaphor of the impotent blues culture. Rap and rock, pop and hip-hop, grunge and modern blow-dried country, take the money and the glory and hog the TV screen like whores in an upstairs window. The roots music heroes like Sonny Boy, whose history is more colorful and rich than tales from Olympus, languish in the dark background with a museum of one meager bust, a few posters, a volunteered wall painting, and a few pilgrims who have found their way through the maze of jangling, clanging, marketing cacophony seeking simple stories about life from the heart.

Posted by Carl