Cipherdom (deprecated)

Smile Day

I had an interesting experience last week at a nearby biker place. There aren't enough neighborhood taverns like that in the 'burbs, much less ones that host live music. Dave, the guy running their open mic, talked me out of the 9:20 slot and into 11:20, which wasn't too smart on my part. The format is 8:30 to 10:00 open mic, 10:00 to 11:00 featured band, then 11:20 'til whenever, open mic.

Dave's admitted motivation was to keep a paying customer around into the late evening, which is a perfectly fine impulse! I almost immediately realized my mistake, though. When I went back to the sign-in whiteboard, someone had taken the 9:20 slot. So I settled in w/ a few rum and Diet Cokes. Dave opened and had a good drummer and bassist to back his Grateful Dead covers. He can really sing and play. This is promising, I thought. Next came an earnest guy I've seen at several of these, singing original Christian numbers. I've got nothing against that type of thing, but his execution doesn't really move me. It's not clear whether the fellow is trying to make a name for himself or just evangelize. Either way, good infidel that I am, I sidled to the other end of the bar and caught the last innings of the Sox game on tv.

This is when the real trouble began. The next two acts were full-blown bands. One thing that drove me away from Chicago in my 20s is that local music here hadn't evolved much after the 70s. To put it briefly, long guitar solos and big hair never went out of style. When I left town, the homegrown music scene practically began and ended with Ministry. In my absence, you got Smashing Pumpkins, Wilco, and the whole Bloodshot Records crew. It's safe to come home, I figured. One thing I love about the South is that music is much more commonplace. In Northern Virginia, this meant there were bars everywhere with live music, mostly featuring bands who blended trad/country/rock/bluegrass in a way I enjoy a lot. I still can't get over how many talented musicians there were around DC.

I'm not dumb enough to say there isn't talent around "Greater Chicagoland," with nine million residents. But where I live, about 40 minutes from downtown, there are precious few live venues. Those that exist are stuck in some 70s time warp. I go to the local Guitar Center, for example, and don't see many kindred spirits. This isn't just a function of my getting older; I felt equally out of place here at 18, 25, etc. It's disorienting to feel more at home hundreds of miles from where I grew up. While typing this, I'm hearing "Big Rock Candy Mountain" sung in German by Tom Lackner on bluegrasscountry.org, which may be a sign from God for me to stop complaining about culture shock.

So the boogie band played on last night. The musicians were more than competent, though everything was played at full throttle, which is a peeve of mine. Changing dynamics isn't a strength of us amateur musicians. Next was a jazzier combo of drum/bass/keys/guitar/sax. This was not an improvement, to be honest. The music didn't swing -- more like fusion. Some good musicianship, but the chord changes were oddly repetitive. Two of the three songs repeated the same moderately complex progressions over and over. The sax guy seemed to be improvising, but his mic wasn't loud enough. The last song was a triple-speed version of Average White Band's "Pick Up the Pieces," which came across pretty well but still was somehow unsettling. I decided to check out a song or two by the headliners -- who were up next, finally -- but then split before my slot came up. The schedule was about 20 minutes behind.

All the above sounds more benign than I felt. Maybe it was the rum, though I don't need that to start feeling shitty. Years of pessimism and frustration were welling up. Why did I move back here? I told myself this wasn't snobbism, because I hate snobbism. I don't work with my hands for a living, but I still consider myself working class in every other way. A construction worker struck up a conversation with me about the Sox, and it was fun. It felt the way I did on first moving south, when the difference in accents made even routine conversations seem alien and therefore stimulating. More culture shock -- a stranger in my own hometown.

The sax player from the fusion band stopped at the bar to get a pitcher of ice water. I casually said they sounded good -- a white lie -- and asked how long they'd been together. Six years, he said. I inquired about their influences. John Coltrane and some jazz horn player whose name I didn't catch. I joked about not understanding that atonal stuff, and about claiming my own false notes are intentional. The best guitar player I've known called mistakes "the Chinese parts." Despite not following my jokes, the fellow warmed up a little. They didn't get to play out much, but rehearse often in the basement. They've had one paying gig, he said, for the county Health Department. I wasn't sure I'd heard that right and so asked him to repeat it. I was about to ask whether they'd played for a bunch of crazy people when he said the gig was at the group home where he lives.

This was an epiphany. In my spite and self-pity, I'd been edging close to teasing the guy. So much for my not being a snob. All at once I felt liberated, redeemed in an undeserved way. They get to play five hours a day at the home, he said. His name is Vince. Mine is Vernam, I told him. I said that's fantastic, being able to play that much. He seemed very level, almost blank -- possibly medicated. I said the band sounded great, and he headed back to the table.

I don't want this to sound like one of those Sunday newspaper stories about personal tragedies (and sometimes triumph) meant to make us appreciate our lives more, hug our kids, etc. But there's no denying that was the effect of meeting Vince. All of a sudden I felt like staying. The headliners were fine musicians who played heavy-metal inflected hard rock that would normally make me cringe, but I enjoyed almost every minute of it. Even the second guitarist, who used a vocoder on each solo. Though my mind reeled, these thoughts had all the clarity I'd lacked just moments before. This music is the local vernacular, I realized, the same way bluegrass is the vernacular in Tennessee. Not much I can do to change it. The crowd seemed to love it. Shamed out of my unintentional elitism, I couldn't help but enjoy it, too. Sorry if this sounds like an anthropologist, but despite my best efforts to get into it, there was still a certain detachment. Just not a hostile one anymore.

As their hour-long set wound down, Dave the open mic manager sheepishly said I could do four songs instead of the usual three, because it was getting so late. I told him not to apologize, as I was having a blast -- which is the opposite of what I'd have said if not for my encounter with Vince. When my chance came, I played about the best I've ever played. People paid a fair amount of attention, considering it was just guitar/vocals following a five-piece band. I used mostly songs that have guitar leads and bluesy progressions, and people reacted to them. I felt more comfortable and confident up there than ever. That's the whole point -- just getting a little more at ease each time -- because nobody gets discovered playing at a biker bar in suburbia!

It turns out Dave burns a CD of each performer's set, gratis. It was fun listening on the way home, well after midnight. They also will webcast the video, supposedly, so I'll post that URL when the time comes. To cap off a strange day, I got a gig myself at the Lisle Smile Days festival. Hmm . . . Smile Days and me. In Hollywood, they call that "casting against type." But I'm working on it.

Posted by Vernam at July 6, 2003 10:20 PM