Things That Happened Around Here Yesterday

*** Blue Monday at The Nines.

What happens is that Pete Panek and The Blue Cats get up and play an hour's set. They take a break, and Pete looks around the room to see who's ready to jam. He looks and says, "Okay, you, you and you," just throwing a band together on the spot. Nobody knows what they're going to play or what's going to happen.

For the last couple of times, now, he's paired me with this guitar player named John, which is about all I know about him. I believe he's a student at Cornell, although I'm not entirely sure and what he might study is beyond me. This young man has a remarkable touch with his Epiphone Les Paul, though, and a fairly deep blues background. Here, he's throwing down Magic Sam's "All Your Love".

In the past, I've used the term "forensic quality audio" in describing these recordings. There is more to that than mere comment on the audio track. Here's the point: this stuff is not for everybody, I'm pretty sure. The real point: it's all about me. When I'm playing this stuff, the moment-to-moment sensations of on-the-fly composition and introspection clash mightily. There really isn't time to reflect on any given note and determine whether it worked, although I always wonder intensely. The odd thing is that, afterward, I can recall most of any given solo very vividly, but the memory is always conditioned by that wonder and my knowledge of what I was trying to do. To really examine it for how it actually worked requires this kind of extrospective evidence: what finally came out of my speakers in a much more completely objective context.

Very often, I'm happy. Sometimes, I'm not.

At the very end of my solo in this one, there is a bit of modal clumsiness, and I think I know what's going on here: I'm not paying close-enough attention to the blue in this. It's an extremely fine line: between searching (in real-time, mind you) for unique expressions and straying out of the blue. The thing called for here is patient determination: there is a groove in the blue, and it won't do to approach it with distractions.

The ES-355 is wailing, though. The note-bend at 1:54 is really good. That could have gone either way: I didn't have the right touch on that E-string when I first went for it, and might have easily given up on it, but managed to push it on through to the whole-step bend, and the timing worked out very nicely, I think. I also very much like the vibrato-yank at 2:12. That occurred to me a very tight split-second before I reached for it (for several reasons all set in a fast-moving context), and those PAF pickups were right there on the spot with tone to spare. The very last note of my solo is a bale-out, but listen to the tone that the guitar puts out for me as it fades. I just have to love that.

Also: here is a bit of Chuck Berry's "Let It Rock". I just love this sort of thing. I throw a little lead-duet with John about halfway through and then crash his return to the lyric to make him throw down another twelve bars of solo, but I just love to play these rhythms. Here's a secret that a lot of kids don't know: rhythm guitar players get to drive the whole band when they know what they're doing. Don't be sneering at rhythm parts: there is enormous power in them.

***


I took that photograph yesterday afternoon from my friend Mark's front porch.

It had been about 11:30pm the previous evening when I was walking through the house. There was not a light on in the place, and that's how I saw the cops coming, by their rotating beacons bouncing off the hillside across the road. I watched as they went blasting down The Hollow at over eighty miles an hour, completely silent in all that flashing riot. It was spectacular. I wondered what it was all about, and didn't know until the next morning when I heard that Craig's life was ending right about then.

I didn't know Craig very well. I had met him several times while sitting around on Mark's porch in the summertime. He was mildly retarded, and used to cruise his riding lawn-mower up and down the streets of the very small hamlet of Harford. He would stop and chat for a while. He lived by himself in that trailer and was by all accounts a fine neighbor. What I do know is that I never saw him without his dog, a sweet shaggy Golden Lab mix of some sort.

They say that he died in trying to save his dog from that fire. Both of them died in the fire. It's as sad as can be, but it doesn't surprise me one bit. It fits perfectly with all the very little I ever knew about him. Harford won't be the same without him this year.


Ps. -- this is what the season looks like around here:




In the top photograph, you can see Daisy Hollow Road curling around the brow of the hill, on the right, before running down into The Hollow proper.

The second photograph is about the light hitting the trees the way it did at that hour. The shot does no glory to the spectacle, but I saw it for a moment.