A Blues for After the Orgy

I don’t tour anymore. The days of arenas crammed with razzed-up howlers horny for bludgeoning riffs and solos to dazzle them dizzy are gone forever. Kids don’t dig that now. They don’t respect dexterity. Their god is ingenuity. I’m a relic. An irrelevancy.

I still play though. Once a week I sit in with a blues band in a bar in the city. This is my heavy metal penance—after flying so high on the Wagnerian wings of hard rock, the dust of what’s left of me is cursed to regress into blues. And be rendered even more irrelevant. What could be further from today’s test tube curlicues than the bogtrotting muck of the blues? But this is my effluvium. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never played better than when I’m breathing that gloom through the gills and pouring it back in a flurry of notes that strike at what all of us seem to endure there in the free-floating murk of the bar. And it translates: people seem aware of it too, the musicians respond with a swell and the music lunges like something alive, with hisses leaking off its edges, an ooze in the curl of its glide.

One night a while back was a particularly good gig. The guitar felt like a dream version of itself in my hands. My every intention emerged instantly in a crisp burst of notes, a continuous cascade, one passage pouring into the next and the right choice for each gambit occurring to me in the instant I needed to choose it. (I’d been playing a lot of chess and maybe that helped.)

In the midst of this I noticed a kid—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—sitting at a table in front of the bandstand. The look in his eyes didn’t reach me at first, but eventually I could see that he had it in for me. There was something defiant and unblinking in the way he watched me, and his stare didn’t waver through the entire set. It irked me a little, but I was feeling too good to be bothered by some punk with a green streak staring me down. If I had to I’d deal with him after the set.

Then I saw it. Shadowed under his table was a guitar case. The kid wanted to sit in. Now, I’m of two minds about this. Thankfully it rarely happens, and I don’t encourage it, because this is my time to stretch out and I don’t want some egomaniac hack hemming me in. But there is also a spirit of generosity among musicians without which nothing magical ever happens. And playing as good as I was I couldn’t help feeling generous.

I left it up to him. When the set ended and the rest of the band left the stand to get drinks or use the john or make phonecalls or whatever the hell else musicians do during breaks I set my guitar down and fiddled around with my amp. My back was to the tables but I could still feel the kid’s gaze weighing on me. When I turned around there he was, standing at the edge of the bandstand, guitar case in hand.

He must have been the thinnest human being I’d ever seen. He obviously didn’t spend much time outside—his skin was unnaturally white and his dishwater blond hair might have been spiky if it wasn’t so greasy. He didn’t seem to have any tattoos—a rarity among kids these days—but maybe there wasn’t enough room on him to fit them.

I just looked at him. He looked back at me with that keen level stare of his. Then he nodded slightly with an upturned tilt of his head. “Is it alright if I jam with you guys?” he said.

I just looked at him. A minuet of musicanly macho to make him doubt himself a little bit. Then I said “You know ‘The Barrelhouse?’”

He said he did. The other musicians were coming back to the bandstand. I told him to come on up and plug in.

“The Barrelhouse” isn’t easy to play. It has a skittering riff that runs up and down variations on a melody that has to be played deftly or else you’ll lag behind and muddle it up. The kind of piece that keeps the rookies humble, because it’s obvious and hard to recover if you flub. The kid would know where he stood as soon as we started it.

When everyone was ready I counted off slightly faster than usual. The kid met me note for note through the first chorus, staring at my guitar the entire time while we played. At the end of the second chorus we traded brief four-bar solos, just enough to make it interesting without any lingering.

I started off, let loose a low rumble that rose and spilled a quivering trickle at the top of the fretboard. The kid started with a quivering trickle and tumbled down to a rumble on his low E-string. Had wit, this kid. On the next run I flung a crackle of sparks high on the fretboard, then did an inverted echo of them down low, making the notes loose where they’d been tight up high, and quick and flickering where they’d been thicker and slow. The kid responded with a roiling hive of notes that swarmed narrow, then wide, like the flux of an hourglass. I churned out a sputtering cloud that hovered at the bottom of the fretboard like a gaggle of thunder. The kid supplied the lightning—slashing bursts up high, jolting at jagged angles.

This was fun. The kid was a rare bird, one that had done some real woodshedding in a shadowy room somewhere, the probable source of his platinum tan and monomaniacal eyes. But after a while I sensed that he was mocking me. Whenever I held out a long note he would mimic it on his own run, making it shimmy and stutter, and then he would bend any blue notes I’d made into a kind of weeping parody. I felt myself losing ground. He must have sensed it too, because then he started replicating my runs note-for-note, but speeded up, so that at the end of them he would whang out some wizardly flurries that said “I’ll do whatever you do and then some.”

Then he got bolder. On his next run he took two full choruses all for himself and it was as if he’d seized a livewire and was weaving it in wild arcs, snapping out jabs that splashed crackling ebbs in their wake, bending his phrases so they curled on themselves and then burst in a blur of bright notes.

He was looking right at me now. He must have thought he had me on the ropes, so I did a whipstitch jig with hopskip cross-steps stretched over two choruses, and then I played it all over again. It was a prosody, you see, and I knew he couldn’t repeat it.

But I knew he wasn’t beaten either. The crowd was responding to him more eagerly than to me, he was increasing with each turn he took, and he was the one who was raising the stakes, not me. I was definitely on the defensive, reacting to his runs, struggling to regain the ground he was stealing from me.

Then he unleashed a torrent of all the tricks he’d ever taught himself in his woodshed, piling flail upon zing in a whirling vortex, ushering hissing gusts that slithered from one edge of the whirlpool, only to be countered with a coil of staccato on the other side of the swirl. The band had become part of the air, rising to meet him at the peak of his jags, a thick chugging throb that widened the width of his grasp as he grabbed eeks and shurls from the air and steered each shriek of feedback into an intricate shape for chorus after chorus; the band was his, and while they wailed a great gutpit yowl of ecstasy sprung from the back of the bar.

I’d been dealt a deathblow. But I didn’t die. Instead I felt myself standing in a kind of breathing emptiness. I felt forgotten by gravity and weirdly free. They were expecting a surrender. Instead I hurled a last gasp across everything I could remember, chasing an unbroken line wherever it carried me and not retreating, however hard it got, however horrible, whatever faces found me in my memories, whatever shame I’d known, whatever failure, whatever pits of fear and weakness, I had to continue, unblinking, and forge toward wherever I was meant to arrive. I felt stillness, almost silence, as I played, and the gulf between me and everyone there, even the kid, seemed to open and pour into me.

Something occurred to me then. After the orgy. When I was touring and recording years ago, the tide of the times, the zeitgeist, was pouring through me, as if I were an artery, on its way to its next transformation, to inhabit the next generation, and the next, and eventually this kid’s. It had abandoned me as it abandons everybody eventually and this song of loss was my blues, something I’d lived through, something larger than me that had nothing to do with fast fingers or arsenals of technique and was complete and couldn’t be defeated. A tickertape of dry fireworks thinned to thrum on my low E-string.

Maybe the kid couldn’t understand all this, but I saw something gentle, even admiring, in his eyes. The battle was over. He smiled slightly, nodded with a brief duck of his head, and we went back to trading short four-bar runs.

It was like playing catch with a breath of air, drawing it in, letting it spread inside us and then breathing it out again with a spin different than the one just flung at us. At the end of the set we shook hands. The crowd was loud. I asked him if he had a band. He told me no. I announced his name to the crowd.

He packed his guitar and told me he’d see me around. Watching people giving him high fives and peace signs and slapping his back as he left I wondered what awaited this weirdo, this freakshow geek, this virtuoso who’d grown in the shadow of the end of the world. Was his orgy only lonely? Would some boolean thread of the zeitgeist ever bless him with its kiss?



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