May 21, 2007

The Gig Is Up

The Gig is finished. My throat has recovered to the extent that I can croak out whole sentences. I’ve polished most of the flop sweat off the guitars. I’ve collected my check. And through the whole thing, nobody booed, heckled or threw too much garbage at me.

By my standards, this was an unqualified success.

When I say I didn’t get heckled, I’m not counting the nine-year old boy who, eight bars into my first song, said, “That sounds kinda flat.” At the time I was banging away on the slide guitar doing Robert Johnson’s “Rolling and Tumblin’,” and I handled the situation like a mature professional. In the true blues tradition I improvised the next verse:

You’re short and you’re ugly,

And your momma don’t love you.

You’re short and you’re ugly,

And your momma don’t love you.

You don’t know flat from dog farts

And you’re a poopy-head too.

OK, I’ll admit that’s probably not the best lyric ever written, but I didn’t have a lot of time to polish it.

Luckily, it seems that the short ugly kid was the only audience member around with perfect pitch, because everybody else seemed to enjoy the show. In fact, the short ugly kid’s mom asked if she could purchase my version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” on a CD.

The first set continued with minimal bloodshed. It sprinkled rain at one point, and I seriously disappointed a couple who were about my age when I couldn’t remember all the words to “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” I managed to redeem myself with them, however, by noodling through a version of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” a bit later when the clouds parted.

How about that for quick, original thinking?

And so it went. The highlight of the second set came when I did my best delta blues version of another Robert Johnson song, “Sweet Home Chicago,” for an African-American couple who had told me they were from Chicago. They clapped enthusiastically and the husband said, “That was extraordinary! Well done! Exactly what sort of music would you call that?”

The third set was the best. My friends Julie and Tom were set up across the street, and they had come prepared to rock. They had an amplifier, electric guitars, microphones and a big black speaker. This set up a friendly Battle Of The Bands, a battle in which my friends had me technologically outflanked and outnumbered two-to-one.

My only recourse was to rely on my resonator guitar. If you’ve never seen or heard a resonator, you’ve missed a treat. The body is chrome-plated solid steel, with a spun aluminum cone inside that acts as a very efficient acoustic loudspeaker. Played with a brass slide and finger picks, the effect is a little like putting guitar strings on a galvanized garbage can, then whacking it with a baseball bat.

We had a lot of fun lobbing musical grenades back and forth across the street, to the apparent delight of the crowd. When my time was up, I went over and joined Julie and Tom for the couple of songs we knew in common. We didn’t let the fact that we knew these songs in entirely different keys and arrangements deter us one little bit.

My favorite moment of the day was teaming up with my friends to perform a song called “Eddie’s Choice,” which Josh White Jr. and I wrote in collaboration with a group of incarcerated kids at the W.J. Maxey Boys Training School. If you haven’t yet checked out www.lostvoices.org to see what this is all about, I urge you to do so. The stories these troubled kids have to tell might change your life. They have changed mine.

So now that all the pressure of The Gig is past, what next? Well for one thing, I can relax and catch up on all the things that have been sliding while I was trying to make sure I was fit to perform in public. I can reconnect with my family and friends. I can meditate. I can restore balance to my life.

Or I could look for another Gig. Anybody else out there want to hire a guy to whack a galvanized garbage can with a baseball bat?

  © 2007, Michael Ball