Saturday April 1st, 2006 @ 9:02 PM
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
Sunday March 26th, 2006 @ 9:10 PM
The Plight and Pluck of the Unsigned Band
Richard Less took another shot of Jack Daniels before taking the stage. The fire glowed in his stomach. He felt deliciously reckless. His focus was completely in the present and the whole world had microcosmed into the crowd standing before him. When he reached the top step and sauntered to his guitar, the rush was euphoric. He fought against going giddy with excitement, then calmly strapped on the instrument and begin tuning.
After a few moments he looked out at the sea of faces and hit a practice lick. The sound burst from the pulsating amplifier like a leaping gnome and galvanized the audience who reacted with a thundering cheer. Nothing had ever felt this good to Richard before. Nothing. Now that he had a taste, it could never end-or life was over for him. This was as good as it gets and all that he had dreamed about in years of anticipation.
The band teased the audience with warm-up sounds that suggested the awesome potential of blackfaced tube amps and a monster P.A. system. When they finally broke out in song the night screamed to life like startled jungle birds, and nobody cared about tomorrow.
That was 1995 and the debut of Gaunt Deborah, a Grateful Dead cover band. Every friend and relative they had was there that night. The band had distributed fliers all over town and had talked up the show with such enthusiasm that a gig had become an event.
Electricity has made music the most exhilarating auditory force in history. It is the musical equivalent of steroids-making modern musicians the Incredible Hulks of sound.
An electric guitar played through an amplifier can turn sissies, weirdoes, and nerds into superheroes. On today’s planet, skinny rock stars can become demi-gods with legions of worshippers. In medieval days, perhaps they could have modeled for gargoyle sculptors. I don’t see them farming all that well. Electric sound can transform a personality.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you view it, this force is an ego elixir much coveted. Robert Johnson’s soul sale to the devil would be happily contracted again today, by the thousands, if Beelzebub hawked his wares at annual guitar conventions. Actually, the selling of ones soul isn’t always legendary, and can go well beyond the fable. It is often the harsh reality of success in the music business, and the investment of one’s soul doesn’t always bring a satisfactory return.
I have traveled over a million highway miles observing the vicissitudes of desperate musicians across our land and in many foreign countries. I have seen the intoxicating accolade they get from time to time that drives them on like gold fever. I have watched many youngsters striving to emulate their music heroes whether it be Metallica, Led Zeppelin, or Stevie Ray Vaughn. They play guitar instead of studying English or History. They forego college or drop out so they can go on the road to play clubs. They lose girlfriends and wives and try not to have children, and if they do, end up neglecting them.
The heart of their productive adult lives is being sold for a tease-that tantalizing hope that the talent they believe they have will be recognized by those who count. But alas, the winnowing process eliminates almost all of them, but only after it has slapped the sunbeam from their faces and scoffed at their dreams and dashed their hopes with bludgeoning reality over years of time and endless roads and ugly rejection.
There is a saying among optimistic motivational speakers: “What you can conceive and believe, you can achieve.” In the world of music it is often: “If you can conceive and believe you self-deceive.” Unfortunately, this is the hard core of truth in this business: very few musicians see themselves as they really are. Instead, they see what they desire to be. They see it in their idols and attribute it to themselves.
In the nineteen-eighties I used to see pimply faced teen-agers weighing 115 pounds wearing spandex and earrings, sporting their first satanic tattoo, gyrating around the stage at the junior high with a flying V guitar used as a phallic symbol. Because their parents had been emotionally blackmailed into buying them stacks of Marshall amps the sound was deafening. Almost all beginning musicians interpret loudness as talent. In reality it is simply noise.
Nowadays I see the modern version of those eighties kids in “gangsta” britches with their underwear showing and their considerably shorter hair spiked with two or three pounds of gel. Instead of using falsetto screams, the cool style now is guttural screaming. The music is still distorted monotony, but hip technology allows synthesizers to torque and torture this advanced form of noise.
Eventually and thankfully, most of these kids will drop out from music, some in time to go to college, and some after wasting their young adulthood, but still in time to buy a cool car, get a girl pregnant, get a job at Radio Shack, and dig themselves into some real good debt that will keep them out of harm’s way for the next thirty years. But those who truly sold their soul will hunker down and endure.
The fans that provide the initial impetus will go by the way. These moms and dads, fraternity brothers, high school buddies, groupies, roadies, and goofy drunks all get tired of the supposed euphoria. They get married, get jobs, move away, or just stay home and watch television. The musician now has the task of making real music and building a real fan base.
At this same time, they are usually looking in the mirror and realizing that being in their thirties trying to look like Axel Rose isn’t going to cut it with the junior high kids anymore. This is when they become either a country band or a blues band. Rock clubs cater to the whimsical nature of the current fad and usually don’t pay enough to cover gas to the gig and often make the band pay to play.
Therefore the blues world gets another swell of guys with pentagram tattoos, and seven earrings. At first they do the obligatory Stevie Ray adoration routine playing Pride and Joy with licks which sound suspiciously like Van Halen. The rockers who go country play the same Van Halen licks in songs like: “All my ex’s are from Texas.” But, to many, hope is once again rekindled. Clubs are actually paying them a few hundred bucks. Now in the genre of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, the musicians foresee a long future, after all, Pinetop Perkins and Robert Jr. Lockwood are still blues stars well into their eighties.
Eventually, all but the most stoic, or the most talented, or the most foolish, drop out of this dream as well. The life is poor and the infrastructure is unstable and fickle. They resort to getting some god-forsaken job they hate, or living off a girlfriend or mother, and playing weekends at the local watering hole. Or they sell their gear and become satisfied telling stories at the same watering hole about how good their band used to be and how they almost made it. They become brothers with the guy who used to box and the guy who used to bench-press 400 pounds. Nobody listens, nobody believes, nobody cares.
That’s where Richard Less ended up. The fire no longer glowed in his belly; instead the booze fermented there and made his breath smell like vinegar and vomit. His pathetic and exaggerated stories were tedious, and sadly, he believed them. He once begged to sit in with my band while claiming to have blues deep down in his soul. He wiped drool from his lips when he spoke and staggered to keep his footing, trying to keep his face obnoxiously in front of mine. I rejected him of course; hopefully I was nice about it. He died shortly thereafter. Drank himself to death. He looked old and forgotten, but he was still a relatively young man.
So we see these competitions: battle of the unsigned bands. They come eagerly from everywhere to show those who run the record labels that they have what it takes. They thrive on hard work, self-deception, and 100 proof hope. Some of them are actually good. Those are the ones I feel the most sorry for. They will win these competitions, maybe get signed to a small label, and will spend an extra few years finding out that there is very little fame and fortune to be divided up. The losers of the competitions will drop out much sooner and be able to raise kids, and have a career in something for which they are better suited.
And what about you, the fan? What do you get out of this Darwinian survival of the fittest? You get to watch both struggler and stud, or career pros-the latter fall into three categories: the talented, the tough, and the lucky. The best entertainers are all three and I salute them. They are a hardy and colorful lot. If you look at the numbers and the money, it is far fewer who make it to the top of the music world than make it to the NFL. But don’t feel too sorry for those who don’t, just remember the old gamblers’ adage: The next best thing to playing and winning-is playing and losing.
Author’s note: The story of Richard Less and his band, Gaunt Deborah is true to every detail except the names. Of course there are stories I could tell of guys born to cotton pickers in Mississippi who grew up playing blues harp from their first pucker. They too have no easy time of it. But you can find today’s story trailing back into every junior high school in America, with the possible exception of Chugwater, Wyoming. It is the way the music game is played in our culture. A rare few make it to icon status and with television to promulgate that vision, it makes for Midas-madness among the impressionable youth. At fifty-seven, I’m still caught up in it. God help me.
Posted by Carl
Sunday February 26th, 2006 @ 9:11 PM
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