Driving off into light snow, I almost didn’t get there.
Two hundred yards down the road, I remembered that my ’87 Ford F-150 with the missing taillight also lacked a current registration sticker–I hadn’t bothered to put it on with the truck immobilized in the driveway–so I turned around and rumbled back. (As long as I was risking being caught with just one taillight, it didn’t make sense to have expired registration, too.) The sticker was on my desk. I retrieved it, walked outside behind the truck with a flashlight and a paper towel, and stuck it on as best I could on top of a wad of 10 years’ worth of older ones. Not the way I like to do things, but I had a show to see!
Shadows is a great bar. I mean, it’s a bar, you know? Plenty of room to sit, eat, drink, and hang out with your friends. I liked it immediately for the energy and mix of people. Unfortunately, this makes it a tricky place to hear a band. To me the sound was “damp” and muffled, and as soon as people got up to dance, the performers disappeared. Now this is probably just fine, generic bar band scene and all, so don’t get me wrong. But the only way to actually see the musicians is to score a table right up front and peek between the people dancing or standing up in front. If that matters to you, then never mind paying $16 to sit in a bar to catch an act. On the other hand, it would be a hoot to go there for burgers, beer, and live music in the corner. If the emphasis were largely social, that is.
T-Model Ford’s backup band, Gravel Road, played first. All white guys and fairly young, from the few glimpses I could get, with a fine backwoods swamp-rock sound. The sort of music where all the pieces of the first big fat chord slide in one behind the other, and then it goes WHOMP and thuds off into the night. Menace with a backbeat, always welcome. When the headliner came onstage about 45 minutes into the set, the excitement level rose the way you’d want it to, and it was uplifting to see the 90-year-old bluesman and hear him say how great he felt. The music was somewhat of another story.
I’ve been listening to T-Model Ford’s 1997 CD, Pee Wee Get My Gun, which is pretty damn raucous and kinda scary. For a guy who first picked up the guitar at age 58, it sounds like he did all right, and also that if he didn’t, you wouldn’t want to say so to his face! I figured that as a 90-year-old, he’d be a lot more mellow, and he was.
To his credit and my good cheer, he was obviously having a terrific time: “Lookit, they’s DAY-AN-cin’!!!” he burst out at one point. And day-an-cin’ they was, all kinds of folks, but by standing on my chair, I could see him every now and then until my knees went wobbly. Oddly or not, though, after three or four songs in the same key with the same chords, I began to feel a little bored and would have started talking with my companion if I’d had one. That’s just the way it is, I guess. For me to see someone like T-Model Ford at this stage of his life is more of an homage than anything else, and I’m very glad I did.
I’ve been catching old blues guys all my life, whenever I could, jazz greats, too, up close with Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, T-Holy Jackson, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Barry Harris, Count Basie, Miles Davis, and a bunch of others. Closer to my heart perhaps, I’ve seen Dylan, the Band, the Grateful Dead, Steve Miller, Ravi Shankar, Bruce Springsteen, the Sex Pistols, the Clash (w/ Screamin’ Jay Hawkins), the Ramones, Elvis Costello, the Damned, the Bad Brains, Blondie, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Robert Mirabal, and dozens more you’d think were super cool. For over 30 years, my wife has taken me to symphonies, operas, and uncounted chamber music concerts and recitals. I go to any and every kind of ethnic or world music gigs I can find. Avante-garde, crazy electronic experiments, I’m there.
Not sure what the point is here, but we need this stuff, you know.
(I’ll be back to Shadows, too. Not a tourist in the place!)
Related posts:
Well, I totally believe you. My room at that Best Western was “okay,” just charmlessly...
