Remembering To Say "Yes"

She comes in wearing a spiked dog collar, a leather jacket and lavender tinted glasses.  She’s carrying a recorder and a small camera, although nobody knows the recorder has no battery and the camera has no film. 

“Gatha Snowmoss,” she introduces herself, shaking hands with one of the neighbors.  “How did you hear about this band?” she asks, gesturing vaguely toward the amps, guitars, microphones & drum kit crowding the living room.  We’re on break.

“Oh, that’s Dr. Snowmoss,” says Tambourine Grrl, talking to another neighbor, pointing at the woman across the room.  “She’s working on an article for Rolling Stone on this growing phenomenon of librarian rock bands.”

“Oh, wow!  Rolling Stone!  Really,” says the neighbor, impressed.

“Yeah,” TG goes on.  “She’s profiled a few in other parts of the country.  She found out about us when we played in DC last year, kept in touch, and when we told her about our annual band camp in Memphis, she asked if she could come and hang out.”

And why shouldn’t Jean be pretending to be a stringer for Rolling Stone while we’re pretending to be a rock band? 

She was masterful.  There was only one moment when it looked like the illusion might be punctured.  Gatha claimed to have a flat in Greenwich Village and one of the neighbors brightened and said they used to live there and did Gatha know that little bodega on the corner of wherever and whatever?  But Jean never faltered, said, “Oh yes,” but she was on the road so much she didn’t really have as much time to devote to the neighborhood as she’d like.  She got them to tell her about what they loved in the area and then nodded at the appropriate points and interjected just a bit in just the right places.  They convinced themselves that she was who she was claiming to be.  For some months afterwards, neighbors would ask Tom if he knew when the article was coming out.  He said he hadn’t heard anything, but would be sure to let them know.  He never let on.  Did Jean ever actually write something up?  Just for fun?  I think she did.

Not long ago, Lynn (the aforementioned TG) and I spent a week in the Fleur de Lys suite at the Hotel Mazarin in the French Quarter.  It’s a big space, with a huge balcony next to a strip club overlooking Bienville.  We had some friends over, one of whom (Brian) we’ve known for quite a while, but hadn’t spent a great deal of time with, so we were taking advantage of his relative newness to tell Bearded Pigs stories.  How the band originally came together, how it got its name, how we got to Memphis that first time, how we ended up playing in Scotland and Australia.  The usual stuff.  I’ve always loved telling people that when we started out, we never practiced.  Sometimes it takes a bit for people to understand that I’m not exaggerating.  Brian’s an accomplished musician, has played in several bands around town.  He finally gets it.  “You mean, you just picked a song that somebody knew, and played?  In front of an audience?  With no practice?  That’s insane!”  Truly.  I always point out that we weren’t really very good.  The often elusive goal was for all six or seven or eight of us (depending on the configuration at the particular gig) to start and stop the song at the same time.  We considered that to be a great success.  We were enthusiastic, passionate, joyful, and just serious enough.  We were tremendously entertaining.

By the time Dr. Snowmoss materialized at the big house in the remote Memphis suburbs it was no longer entirely true that we never practiced, although I never stopped using that line.  (The tagline on the back of the band t-shirts says “In rehearsal since 2002”, an ironic jab at the bands that never get out of the basement or the garage because they never feel that they’re ready.)  One year we’d done a gig in Atlanta that had gone well, but as always, hadn’t lasted nearly long enough to satisfy.  It looked to be another six or seven months before we’d all be in the same town together again.  We were having drinks in the hotel bar the next afternoon and I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if one time we could rent a whole house and spend a few days just playing?  Work on that starting and stopping at the same time thing?”  And Singarella says, “Y’know, Sue and I have this big house outside of Memphis.  The kids are all grown.  You could come stay with us.”  It seemed pretty far-fetched, scattered across the US and UK as we were, all busy with our IRL jobs, but six months later, there we were, setting up the gear in Tom’s living room for what we were billing as The Brown Beverage Sessions.  A once in a lifetime event we were quite sure.  Which we then repeated annually for seven years.  It was at the second or third of these that Gatha showed up.

The life lesson of my musical career has been how unpredictable the future is.  “Where do you see yourself in five years?” goes the standard interview question.  Answer however you want.  You will almost certainly be completely wrong.

In 1991 I was living in St. Louis.  I was in the middle of a crushing divorce and it had been thirteen years since I’d played and sang in front of people, back when I was a college kid in Milwaukee.  I hadn’t written a song in longer than that.  It was embarrassing to have to admit to myself that my teenage dreams of a musical career weren’t any more special than most kids’ teenage dreams.  The coffeehouse open mikes, the occasional paid gig in a bar weren’t the start of anything.  I’d been so sure I was destined for greatness, but it turned out I was just another kid with serviceable guitar skills and entertaining stage patter who didn’t have that insatiable hunger, that nearly pathological drive to make a career out of making music, no matter what.  I felt a little ashamed of myself, that I’d let myself down, that I hadn’t lived up to or made the most of whatever bits of talent I had.  It wasn’t self-sabotage, nothing that dramatic.  I graduated, got married, moved to a new town where the playing opportunities were few, but none of that’s a good enough excuse. I didn’t put any energy into it.  I’d concluded that nearly all the songs I’d written were junk.  Then, when we moved to DC, where there surely would’ve been places to play, the guitar mostly stayed in its case while I tried to write poems and stories on the margins of my days while most of my energy went into building my career.  And while I was wistful and deeply miserable about it, I believed that all of my music making was in the past.  I was, of course, completely wrong.

By 1998 I was remarried, living now in Birmingham, and doing solo gigs occasional Friday and Saturday nights at Marty’s, building a following and embarrassed at how much money I was making.  I’d had nearly three years with Liquid Prairie in St. Louis after that divorce, along with the local open mikes and the duo with Ranger Dave (Prairie Dogs) before the move south.  This time, when I moved, I made the effort.  I wasn’t after any kind of musical career any more, and that was wonderfully liberating.  I just wanted to keep getting better at playing and singing, at charging up the audience and feeling the rush that it gave back.

The Bearded Pigs evolved, entirely by accident, starting in 2002 (or 2001 or even 2000, depending on what you pick as the starting point – Melbourne with Marian and Bruce, or the weekend I sat in with SG’s band in North Carolina).   We managed just a few times a year, but each one memorable.  By 2008 we were invited to play in Scotland (the “talk of the steamie”); the next year, Brisbane Australia (TomCat, grinning wide as he walked across the ballroom to the stage where I was doing soundcheck “We’ve got dressing rooms!”).  I took none of it for granted.

What makes a band?  What is the alchemy that changes a group of musicians playing together into its own entity, with its own musical life force?  With Liquid Prairie in St. Louis it happened in Ranger Dave’s living room during the summer of 1992.  With the Bearded Pigs, it happened in Memphis.

When I say “we weren’t very good”, I mean as a band we weren’t very good.  Individually, we each had our moments.  For the first few years the Bearded Pigs setlist was based on what I played as a solo act. Singer songwriter stuff.  Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Earle, Julie Miller, John Hiatt.  In those  days the “we never practice” line was very strictly true.  We’d play at the Medical Library Association conference and maybe one or two others over the course of a year.  I might send around a song list by email and, as time went on, Roger or Mister TomCat might suggest a tune.  We’d watch each other’s hands to learn the chords.  There’s a recording of us in Phoenix where we start “Helpless” twice and then I scratch it altogether, laughing while reminding the audience that “We’re doing this for ourselves, not for you!”  Oh, we are rough and ragged on that recording!  Somehow, we still sound pretty good – better than I remember.  Maybe it wasn’t so weird after all that the audience kept growing and having a good time.

That first long weekend in Memphis changed things.  I certainly wouldn’t call it practice.  We weren’t doing anything that systematic.  We were at play.  Sang, drank, laughed a lot.  We were quite sure we’d never be able to get everyone’s schedules aligned to ever do this again, and we weren’t going to waste the opportunity by getting too serious about it.  We kept that spirit in the subsequent years – each time believing it to be another once-in-a-lifetime event.  We’d descend on Singarella’s on a Thursday, set up the gear in his living room, arranged in a circle so we could see each other.  Thursday night’s playing was messy and crude, Friday’s got a little tighter, and on Saturday the neighbors would come over, bringing food and more drink and we’d play for hours.  Still playing mostly for ourselves, but loving the energy of all those people.  It was loud and sweaty and joyful.  Cogman dancing with his saxophone, amping up the crowd.  Guitars getting louder and voices rougher as the night went on.  When the last of the neighbors finally left, we’d go acoustic in the kitchen, sipping bourbon or wine or Jameson, unwilling to give it up until we nodded off to sleep, one by one.

What makes a band?  In Memphis, we had plenty of time to listen to each other.  We tweaked those messy beginnings and endings.  Roger and TomCat brought more songs.  Bruce’s lead guitar became louder, sharper, more blistering, more feedback.  I remained the front man, the one who called the tunes, but I wasn’t the only lead singer any more.  The band was becoming more rock, less singer/songwriter.  When I worked up the song lists, and then called the tunes, pursuing the arc that’d carry the audience along with us, I had much more to work with, having three lead singers instead of one.  I was jealous of the ways that Roger and TomCat were better than me, of course; but we were a band, so I put up with it.

There is a magic that a band creates around itself, around its members.  You find that there are things you can do, things the band pulls out of you, that you can’t make happen on your own or with any other group.  This is why some bands stay the same band, even when some of the members change, even when all of the members change.  It’s partly repertoire; sometimes a band keeps the same name, but really it’s just a tribute band to an earlier incarnation (the Rolling Stones teeter on the edge of that and would probably fall in, if it weren’t for the uncanny brilliance of their septuagenarian live shows).  In the best cases, though, the band keeps pulling new energy out of new members, and although a new musician might shift the direction of the band, the band tugs on the new musician, pulling them in the band’s direction.  We’d say that as long as there were two or three of us together, it was a Bearded Pigs gig, no matter who else might be on the stage with us.

There are duos that refer to themselves as a band, but that always strikes me wrong.  You need at least three to be a band.  A duo is not a band.  I don’t know why I feel this way.  My very favorite musical experiences have been as a duo with Ranger Dave.  As much as I love working solo, and as great as the experiences of Liquid Prairie and the Bearded Pigs have been, none of that ever matched the consistency of the pure musical joy of the Prairie Dogs.  I was a slightly better singer than Dave, he was a far better guitar player.  So he was happy to let me pick the songs, sing most of the leads, do my rhythm guitar bits while he wove wonderful guitar lines around the song.  I’d get to sing for a bit and then I could stand back, finger-picking the chords while I listened to him play.  He made me sound like a much better musician than I am.  Which is what your bandmates do for you.

With the Bearded Pigs we’d say that as long as one of us knew the song, we could play it.  Watching each other’s hands to learn the chords, we’d find places where each of us could do their particular thing within the frame of whoever was taking the lead of the song.  Then there was the time we found out we could play a song even if none of us really knew it.  We were in Memphis, between songs in the afternoon, trying to settle on what to do next.  SG, on bass, started thumping the bottom of “Roadhouse Blues” (Singarella’d had a Doors album playing earlier in the day), just killing time.  Dook, the drummer, picked it up.  I was standing by my microphone and remembered a verse.  The changes are simple.  And off we went.  What I didn’t remember, I made up.  You could do that in that band.

When I was a teenager I was ambitious for my music.  I believed in my future.  Waiting for it was agonizing and terrifying, but I was so sure.  Thus it was so terribly crushing when it failed to materialize and I found that my dream was nothing special.  Then, when I found myself back making music, and actually becoming good at it, it made me giddy.  It was so unexpected and such a gift.

In St. Louis, there were two or three bars that paid the additional license fee to stay open until 3:00, rather than the common closing time of 1.  So those are the bars where the musicians went to wind down.  Kelly’s, under the overpass near Busch Stadium, was where I went most often.  I pulled into the parking lot one Friday night at the same time as Brian Casserly (the round mound of sound).  Brian’s a trumpet player and singer, then and now one of the finest musicians St. Louis has produced.  In those days he usually played with the Soulard Blues Band and might’ve been coming from one of their regular gigs at the Oyster Bar.  We (Liquid Prairie, that is) had just finished packing up from four hours at Molly’s.  “You make any money tonight?” says Brian as we walk from the parking lot to the door.  “A bit,” I say.  Only $10, in fact, but if you’re getting paid, you’re a professional.  Brian was leagues beyond me as an artist, but there we were, two street-wise musicians, still jazzed on adrenalin, ready to soothe the jangle with a couple of hours of alcohol so we could get some sleep and look forward to doing it again. This was all the success I needed.

In 2012, almost exactly twenty years after I picked up a guitar in front of an audience again, after my thirteen year interregnum, I almost had the music taken away.  The explosion in my spinal cord left my hands numb and stiff and weak and unresponsive, utterly incapable of the delicacy and nimble agility my guitar playing required.  This time I resisted fiercely.  Having unexpectedly found my way back into music in my late thirties, it never occurred to me that the failures of my body meant I was finished in my late fifties.  I’d think about Django Reinhardt’s burnt and crippled fingers, Renoir strapping the brushes to his arthritic hands.  At Christmas, Josie gave me guitar picks with her picture on them. 

An angel touched our sometime bandmate Boutch’s shoulder.  We were at a party, about a year and a half after my collapse.  He handed me a harmonica, saying, “This is my travel harmonica, the one I always have with me.  You take it.  You might never play guitar again, but don’t ever stop making music.” Ten years later I was back on a stage, playing with another band.  I was a guest this time, just a bit of harmonica, a bit of vocal.  But all of the same wonderful rush of making music with other people.

Most afternoons now I spend some time with the guitar or the harmonicas.  I’m rearranging how I play guitar, and I keep surprising myself in ways that encourage me.  It turns out I have more of an affinity for improvising on the harmonicas than I would’ve thought.  I suppose it’s possible that I’ll never play for an audience again, but I don’t fret over it.  I just don’t know where or when.  If I were to predict it, I’d almost certainly be completely wrong.  There’s a guitar player at the end of my street that I got together with a couple of times before the pandemic.  Maybe we’ll play again soon.  And not long ago Lynn and I met a bass player who’s trying to talk himself into going to one of the local blues jams.  I might go along.  I might bring the harmonicas. 

What I didn’t know in my twenties was how much room there can be in a life to be so very many things.  I thought you had to choose and you made your choices and they defined your life.  You only got to be one main thing.  Anything else was what you made do with around the edges.  When I decided to make a living as a librarian, I thought that closed off the other options.  It took me years to see how unnecessarily I was strangling myself.  The night in 1992, when I played and sang at the Venice Café Christmas party was an uncorking of pressure that’d been building for thirteen years.  I’d been a Venice regular for nearly two years by then and almost no one knew that I played.  Even while I was forging all these new friendships, I’d kept it that buried because I didn’t think there was room in my life for it anymore.  But when Jackie then asked me if I’d like to come by on Saturday afternoon when she and Dave and Wren and Lynn Ann were playing some country songs, I didn’t say no.  I might’ve.  I thought about saying no.  But I didn’t.  Six months later we were calling ourselves Liquid Prairie. Now I’ve had thirty years of being a successful musician – every bit as successful as I needed to be.  I’ve been a ridiculously successful librarian as well.  And so many other things.

So much turned on that moment of not saying no.  From then on, when the unexpected unfolded I remembered to say yes.  Just like every gig with the Bearded Pigs or the Prairie Dogs or Liquid Prairie.  You dance with abandon into the future, trusting that those around you will buoy you up, make you better than you think you are.  Reality, my reality, turned out to be so much more capacious than I imagined.  Jean really was Gatha Snowmoss.  We really are a rock band.  We just don’t have the next gig on the calendar yet.  I just turned 67.  I could last another 15 years.  Anything might happen.