“Clouds” on horizon are snow showers
A few days ago I attended a jam session that included a couple of published authors, one of whom you’d definitely know. (Does anyone feel a disconnect already?)
While I was off in a corner adjusting the tuning on my 12-string, the gentleman in question was delivering a long monologue on the futility and presumed unmanliness of precision tuning. He then proceeded to snatch a horribly mis-tuned instrument from a fourth party, no doubt flustered by the rant, to tune it himself. Crudely, of course, and in less than 20 seconds he’d broken a string. Boy, was I ever in the wrong place. (That should have been obvious from the 10 pounds of sheet music and fake books each of them brought…) But I sat down and stuck it out for about an hour before I packed up the Guild and left, heaving the biggest sigh you ever heard when I got out of earshot.
The rest of them went on for another two and a half hours, I learned later. More power to them, and they didn’t sound half bad, considering. But I’m just not that kind of musician. Actually, I’m not all that sophisticated at all — the guys in question were much better at the kind of jazzy, white-boys-sing-da-blooze, jug-band, hootchy-kootch numbers they favored. I’ve been playing guitar since high school, but I only ever learned as much as I needed to play what I wanted, which after a few years became just my own songs. About five years ago I stopped writing lyrics and moved into spontaneous, instrumental mini-jams, inventing short progressions on the spot that could be songs and playing them over and over for the emotion and quality of sound that emerged. You might call it noodling, but it’s much more than that. Some of these stay with me for months and may someday acquire lyrics. One never knows.
The point of the other evening, however, was not that so-and-so did such-and-such, but that I was able to gather up my self-respect and let my own wind blow me on down the road. That same wind blew me into a little birthday party we had last night for a 75-year-old neighbor of ours, and was it ever grand.
The event was stupendously perfect. Everyone got beautifully ripped and told incredible stories. The birthday lady remembered flying down to Zihuatanejo for the first time 50 years ago in a DC-3 packed with Indians and crates of chickens. She got off the plane, found herself in a grove of palm trees and asked the lone taxi driver, “Where’s the town?!” He pointed to a footpath. She walked along the sandy trail among the palms until she emerged on a pristine, empty, white sand beach with gorgeous blue water and not a soul around. She told us, “There were only two gringos in town, and I married one of them.”
For the rest of the evening, I never left the DC-3 with the Indians and crates of chickens landing by the white sand beach. But somehow I did get around to showing her partner (not the man she married then) an old drum we have from Cochiti Pueblo, and he and I fell into an instant drumming session. We must have played for 15-20 minutes without ever saying a word. His eyes were closed and mine might as well have been. It was pure musical magic and brought down the house.
This is something I came from the factory with. Probably you did too.
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