Chapter 1
“Meeting the band”
I pried the curtains apart with my index finger to take a peek outside. The window fogged up as I got close and breathed too close to it. I wiped away the fog with my shirt sleeve to see a typical central Indiana snowstorm: plenty of huge snowflakes falling gently.
With the moon just a sliver and the sky cloudy, it would have been a black night sky if not for the flakes, which became shockingly bright when they plunged through the yellowish glow of the only streetlight in front of the house.
“Damn snow,” I mumbled to myself as rolled my eyes and removed my finger from the curtains, allowing them to close again.
I turned and quickly surveyed the living room. Piles of clean laundry sat on a couch, separated into three haystacks for each of my daughters. My clothes — jeans, dress slacks, white cotton socks, the whole array separated but not yet folded either — were draped over the back of the couch.
Several papers were strewn on the coffee table: a half-colored-in peacock that had been ripped out of a coloring book, someone’s homework assignment on the letter ‘R’ and others. Interspersed candy wrappers made it quite a colorful mess, I must admit.
A semicircle of open DVD cases, some with discs still in them, was haphazardly arranged in front of the television. A few videotapes had managed to make their way down from the shelves to join them.
The toy box up against the wall was overflowing like a volcano that had been spewing lava for quite some time. Stuffed animals and a yo-yo oozed over the sides and onto the floor.
I stooped to pick up the small stuffed monkey, rescuing him from certain third-degree burns from whatever might spill out next. I tossed him on the couch next to “Operation” and “Life,” which for some unknown reason hadn’t made it back to the game closet.
At least the Brett Favre autographed poster and the Green Bay Packer stock certificate that flanked the mirror above the fireplace were unscathed. Don’t know what this Cheesehead would do if anything happened to my mementos from my home state.
“Damn kids.”
I’d seen worse rooms … at the fraternity the morning after a night of a big party. But why couldn’t I get these girls to start picking up after themselves?
You’d think by the time a girl was 9, as my oldest was, they’d kind of pick that up. Don’t girls have some sort of innate ability in that area? Aren’t they natural cleaner-uppers?
If little girls have to have that behavior modeled for them by a responsible, adult female in the house, I was in trouble. Their mother split five years before and I was as far from getting married again as a devout Hindu is from eating beef.
I mean, come on, who wants to date a 42-year-old single father of three girls between 5 and 9? Nobody!
Not that I really had time for romance anyway. Tonight is the first night in the past two weeks that the Tattooed Bike Chick from Hell has found time to see her kids. She probably let her ink dude have a night to himself finally. I’m sure he needed a break.
In any event, I was determined to take advantage of the situation. It had been a while since I’d had a few beers and checked out the band at the local watering tough.
So, I left the debacle that was my living room and headed to the bedroom to get rid of my work clothes and put on something a little more appropriate. Besides, maybe I’ll meet the next Mrs. Hart there.
You can’t dress too flashy for a small town bar like Otto’s. This ain’t no Studio 54. Heck, it’s not even downtown Milwaukee during disco and new wave. Usually, there’s plenty of gun racks in the back of the 4×4s and Harleys in the parking lot.
Considering the weather, some of the bikers may have stayed home. Then again, they may have just borrowed their friend’s pickup.
I still felt a little overdressed in my blue jeans, black work boots, and black-collared shirt with a gray Green Bay Packers T-shirt underneath.
“Damn Colts fans,” I thought to myself.
Squinting through the windshield of my white minivan, I pulled onto the pot-holed gravel of Otto’s parking lot.
Otto’s two neon beer signs were lit up in each of the windows to the side of the double door. But the main sign’s second “O” had been out at least a month, so most of the locals had started calling the place “Ott’s.”
Otto, a 6-foot-3, 280-pound man whose restaurant/bar combo was the joy of his life, was not mused. His face would turn red any time he heard “Ott’s,” but he didn’t want to drive any customers away, so he’d usually just go sulk back in the kitchen or take a short walk in the parking lot.
I shuffled quickly through the snow trying to figure out what song the band was playing as I neared the entrance.
It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it … if you get drunk enough or some woman asks you, I thought. I tended to amuse myself at every opportunity.
I pulled at the handle of the left door. As usual, it failed to produce the desired result. Why can’t I remember that the left door doesn’t open from the outside? I’ve been here often enough by now.
“Damn door,” I said as I pulled at the right handle, immediately smelling the cigarette smoke I so loathed.
“Cancer City,” as I called it when the smoke got to me, which was just about every time I showed up there, was a place you had to put up with if you’re going to hear any good music in this town. Otto’s may not have been the only bar in Shelbyville, but it’s the only one that booked real bands on weekends, not just any old knob with a guitar and enough guts to get heckled in front of a bunch of rednecks.
Being that the good bands came to Otto’s, that where I went. The beer wasn’t any cheaper or colder, the urinals no cleaner, the clientele no better behaved or better looking and the ventilation just as horrid. But the food was decent and the live music on Friday nights was usually good.
Like this particular night.
I recognized the sound when I was still outside. The Mark Gray Trio had a pretty full sound for just three old farts. And they rocked!
The guitar player was excellent. Tom Johnson was as good a blues and rock guitar man as I’d seen in some time. I bet he could have held his own in some of those Chicago blues joints I’d frequented when I lived there.
Tom did most of the singing, too, and liked to inject a few shouts, “cha cha chas” and other things to liven up the room.
But more than that, he just looked like he was always having fun. Sometimes, guys made playing music look like such an arduous task, like it’s a real job or something. If Tom Johnson saw these gigs as a job, you would never have known it by the way he acted. You could see he wanted to do a good job, but he was never was so serious about himself that he forgot why he was there … for the entertainment of us poor slobs.
Between sets, he always said hi to everyone with a genuine smile on his face.
And this from a 45-year-old guy who looked like he’d been through his share of wild times. You’d expect more of a scowl or bad attitude from a big dude dressed all in black with dragon tattoos on the inside of his forearms, a face that hadn’t been shaven in at least three or four days, white stubble threatening to turn into a beard at any moment.
The band’s namesake and gig acquirer was a 50-year-old drummer with a scraggly white beard, a voice that emanated from the depths of a gravel pit, a fairly decent size belly and a weakness for old blondes and Bud Light. For that matter, Mark Gray also had a weakness for young blondes, middle age brunettes and redheads of any age, too.
He also occasionally mistook himself for Willie Nelson. Or at least a Willie Nelson in denim shorts, a muscle shirt and moccasin slippers.
“Willie’s in the house,” he’d say into the microphone before launching into his crackly version of “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain.”
OK, so it wasn’t my favorite song they did. But it went over well with this crowd.
No, my favorite tune these guys did was “Roadhouse Blues,” and old Doors tune.
Mark’s cousin, Scott, who probably contributed to half the smoke in Otto’s by himself, did double duty on his keyboards, adding the bass that was missing by not having a bass player. Whenever he started the thumping bass line to “Roadhouse,” with a cigarette naturally perched between his first two fingers, my heart began to race.
I’d considered myself the second coming of Joe Morrison more than once, immersing myself in his poetry and his band’s music to the point where I had signed all of my high school friends’ yearbooks with a lyric from a Doors song and started writing (bad) poetry and lyrics.
And hearing this band do live the only song I ever had the nerve to sing karaoke gave me hopes that maybe someday I could live out that Morrison fantasy.
The Mark Gray Trio, MGT for short, was in the midst of a medley of ’60’s rock ‘n’ roll standards when strode past the restaurant portion of the joint and squeezed my way to the bar. Luckily, there was a stool available with a good view of a TV behind the bar and the stage and dance floor when I turned around.
I sat down, nodding to the guys occupying the seats next to mine. I’d seen them here many times before, along with the usual cast of nameless regulars.
To my left was T.J., the biggest Doors fan, other than myself, that I’d met. Unfortunately, that’s all he ever talked about. And since he had that stroke a few years ago and the left side of his body went limp, you could hardly understand what he was saying.
Combine that was what had to be a history of psychedelic drug use in the ’60s and current alcohol use, talking to T.J. was pretty much impossible.
He had his black Doors T-shirt on again — wonder if he ever washed it – and his denim shirt was unbuttoned. The dark blue parka that had gone out of style when I was in junior high was draped over the back of his chair.
He nodded back at me.
“Hey,” he said, pulling his cigarette away form his lips and letting out a little puff of smoke.
“Hey,” I nodded back, hoping he wouldn’t try to engage me in any discussions until I had a translator handy.
He didn’t. Was off in his own little world again.
I turned to my right and there was the big ol’ biker boy, Billy, himself. His back was turned to me as he pawed at some 50-year-old chick in a very revealing pink Harley top with spaghetti straps. By the looks of it, she had never been very fond of bras.
All I saw of Billy was the black leather vest that covered his massive upper body with graying dirty blonde hair falling out from under the back of the blue handkerchief he had tied over his head.
He believed in showing off his tattooed biceps. Tonight was no exception. The Charlie Brown tattoo, complete with a one-finger salute of the vulgar kind and a bubble over his head saying “There Ain’t No Rules!” was always a vivid reminder that Billy was in fact in the house.
Lock your doors. Hide the women and children.
“Hey Joe,” I heard a familiar voice shout from behind the U-shaped bar. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Corona, right?”
Well, well, well … now here was a rose among thorns.
Other than the band, this was the only other reason I’d found to come to Otto’s.
Angie was the prettiest, friendliest bartender I’d ever met. Heck, she was just about the prettiest, friendliest woman I’d ever met.
I turned away from Billy and checked her out quickly. She had her long black hair tied up in a pony tail tonight. A very good look for her. She had the most honest big brown eyes I’d ever seen.
Eyes are the doorway to the soul. That’s how I read people. And Angie’s eyes told me she ranked right up there near the top in integrity and honesty. Unlike a few people I’d met in here since Otto bought the place a few years ago.
The red Otto’s T-shirt was pulled tight across her chest and tied in a knot behind her, leaving just the slightest sliver of flat stomach exposed. When she bent over to get the beer out of the cooler, you could see just a glimpse of the small of her back above her tight-fitting faded blue jeans.
I never saw her outside the bar, so I have no idea whether she dressed like this just to get guys to spend more or if she liked to tease us 24/7.
She wasn’t giggly like some of the waitresses in the place. There was kind of a maturity about Angie that you didn’t see in most people who weren’t even born when I graduated from high school.
She was still playful, though. She liked to flirt and smile and laugh whenever any of us told one of our stupid, sometimes off-color jokes.
Oh, to be 15 years younger. Oh well, flirting will have to do. No way she’d be interested in me.
“Yes, maam,” I replied with a soft smile, hoping she’d get all flittery inside but not expecting it in the least.
“You’ve got it, darlin’,” she said in that Southern accent that creeps into central Indiana speech quite often.
She turned around and bent over, slowly pulling the clear bottle up out of the icy water. Did she know what she was doing to me? Hey, I didn’t need any more incentive to buy a beer or make sure she got a decent tip.
She was nice enough and worked hard enough that she’d already earned that. This, however, was pure torture.
I think I managed to compose myself before she took a quick look over her shoulder back in my direction before turning her whole self around and walking over with my beer.
“Now, how come you’ve been such a stranger?” she asked as she put the beer down on a napkin on front of me and plugged the top with a small slice of lime.
I rolled my eyes and shook my head slightly.
“Dufushead hasn’t been taking her visitation. She finally took the kids tonight.”
“Well, will miracles ever cease?! Hallelujah!” she shouted with a big grin.
Angie reach across the bar and patted me solidly on the shoulder.
“Good for you, Joe,” she added.
“Well, you’ve got my favorite band here, too,” I told her. “I like just about every song these guys do. But I never know when they’re going to be here unless I drive by and Otto feels like putting the bands on the sign.
“It took me two times seeing them just to figure out there name wasn’t ‘Gray’”
Angie chuckled softly.
“Otto likes to abbreviate, honey,” she explained. “That way, he doesn’t have to pay somebody for two hours each week to change the sign. It only takes 15 minutes.”
She leaned over the bar and said quietly, “Have to save the big bucks for the bartenders, darlin’.” She winked and laughed and started to move on to another customer.
“Hey, Angie,” I called to her. “Can I get some Mozzerella sticks?”
“Anything for you, Mr. Cheese-head,” she laughed.
If anyone could have sighed any deeper than I did right then, it would have been listed in Guinness Book of World Records.
I pushed the lime wedge down into the beer, plugged the top with my thumb and turned the bottle slowly upside down. Somebody told me once that doing that will get the lime flavor evenly distributed throughout the entire 12 ounces. It’s amazing the scientific discoveries made in a bar.
I grabbed my beer, took a sip and turned my chair around toward the stage and small dance floor, where I saw a few pretty good looking women shaking their bodies to a raucous rendition of “Mony, Mony.”
“Wake it shake it, Mony, Mony,” Tom shouted as the women flung their arms into the air. They also displayed their ability to follow directions as they shook every bit of body they had. In some case, that was a very good thing, making for some very good eye candy.
In other cases, it was just plain wrong. A woman whose body continues to perform the wiggling Jell-O dance well after the impetus for such quivering has ended should find alternate dances. I hear ballroom dancing is making quite a comeback.
Fortunately, the ones with shapes most pleasing to my own particular tastes caught my eye most of the time.
Suddenly, I caught sharp pain in the side. Recoiling slightly, I jerked around to see Billy’s red bulbous nose staring me right in the face and his elbow leaving my ribcage.
Now, a lot of folks who came into Otto’s drove motorcycles, and as far as I could tell, most of them were decent folks. Even if some of them did have some piercings in some strange places and tattoos that I wouldn’t have shown off in public.
Billy was not one of them. Billy was what you think of when you start thinking of Altamont. Billy wasn’t quite a Hells Angel, but he wasn’t the most polite person in Shelbyville either.
He was drunk and/or angry most of the time anybody saw him, disowned by his father, who had been Shelbyville’s most successful banker.
His way of telling you he could tolerate you was by punching you in the arm, calling you “chief” and suggesting that you were less than a man if you couldn’t drink as much as he could. Of course, nobody could do that, nor wanted to, so Billy was always the manliest man in the place.
At least, the way he figured it, he was.
“Hey, dude, these bastards are pretty damn good!” he yelled, slurring the words and spraying some recently imbibed whiskey into my face. The rest dribbled down his chin.
I took off my glasses, wiped them off with a napkin and replaced them upon my nose. Billy had no clue he was the cause of that.
I was going to choose my words carefully, then decided not to say anything about Billy’s social faux paus whatsoever. Best not to take any chances, I thought.
It didn’t take much to rile him up, especially if he thought you were trying to show how you were better than he was. You wanted to tell him to grow up. But I guess after 45 or 50 years, if someone has decided they didn’t want to grow up there was nothing anybody could do about it.
“Yeh, this is the only band that comes in here I can stomach,” I said, trying as hard as I could to avoid eye contact, which was difficult since his face was still way too close to mine for comfort.
I would have much preferred he turn his attention back to the floozy he was getting cozy with earlier. But I think she has led the most recent invasion of the women’s restroom by allied troops.
I looked over to the restrooms and saw her lead the retreat back to her seat.
“Thank goodness,” I thought to myself, doing some quick thinking.
“Nice girl.” I raised my eyebrows and sent my eyes in her direction hoping Billy’s eyes would follow.
“She don’t suck too much,” Billy laughed heartily and slapped my back rather strongly as the short blonde .
But once she caught his eye, he forgot all about me and started hanging all over her again, the best thing to happen to me since Angie left went to the kitchen to order my deep friend artery cloggers with marinara sauce.
It was about time for Angie to return with my muchies, and right on cue, she tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey, hon. Your food’s up. And here’s a fresh Corona for ya.”
There was something so pure and good about her touch. I got that deep down satisfying feeling from it. Not like the lustful thoughts that always dominated my mind when I saw other attractive women. All I could think about when I saw the women on the dance floor was sex.
With Angie, it was different. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure making love to Angie would have been awesome. But that’s what it would have had to be … making love, not having sex. There’s a big difference.
The band was finishing up Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and Tom was in top form. A “cha cha cha” here or there. A request that “somebody scream!” that was always obliged by a few folks. He’d throw in the name of one of the waitresses in appropriate places just to personalize things.
Mark also liked to goof, introducing the other guys as being from Los Angeles, Calif., or Muscle Shoals, Ala., or Nashville or some other supposed hotbed of musical talent even though they all hailed from parts south and east of Indianapolis in the Hoosier State.
I don’t know that anyone really paid attention to that crap anyway.
“Thank you very much,” Mark’s gravely voice said. “We’re gonna take a short break and be back in about 20 minutes.”
He pointed a drum stick out into the hazy air.
“Don’t forget to tip your waitresses – Brandi and … um, it’s …Danielle, right?”
Scott leaned toward Mark from behind his keyboards. “Yeh, Mark, that’s it, Danielle. And don’t forget Angie.”
“Oh, and Angie behind the bar, too. Thanks, we’re the Mark Gray Trio.”
The girls on the dance floor whopped it up and gave the band a big applause while most at the bar either ordered another drink or took off for the restroom.
I got into my cheese sticks as the guys stepped off the stage.
A few minutes later, when I was finishing off the last morsel of marinara-covered cheese, I noticed the guys in the band had taken over the area that Billy and his latest lust interest had vacated.
Angie was taking their orders.
“I’ve never had the cheese sticks,” Tom said. “How are they?”
Angie motioned to me with her head.
“Ask him, hon. He’s a real live Cheesehead. He knows about stuff like that. I’m just a corn-fed Hoosier gal. Don’t know nothin’ ’bout any cheese.”
She laughed.
“A real live Cheesehead, huh?” Tom asked. “My grandparents used to take us up to Wisconsin when I was a kid.”
“Oh yeh? I grew up there,” I replied.
“I got to be a big Packer fan cause we used to stop in Green Bay every year and watch training camp. But I’ve never actually been inside the stadium.”
“Cool,” I said as I undid a few buttons on my shirt to reveal the big Packer logo underneath. “I own stock.”
Tom’s face lit up.
“No way, dude! That’s awesome!”
He ordered the cheese sticks and introduced me to Mark and Scott before engaging me in a discussion of our favorite football team.
Meanwhile, Scott and Mark alternated puffing on cigarettes, dipping tenderloin chunks in a white substance known at Otto’s as tiger sauce (don’t even go there) and sucking down light beer.
After finishing their food, the guys started back to the stage for the second of three sets.
“You sticking around for a while?” Tom asked me.
“I’m here all night unless some chick picks me up, which has never happened before,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
“Cool, I’ll talk to you after the next set.”
The guys hit the stage again and launched into some blues with Tom doing a great Jimi Hendrix impersonation on “Red House,” including playing with his teeth. OK, there was no guitars lit on fire or playing between his legs – he was a little big for that – but the tone and timing and everything else was quite impressive.
The more I sat there listening, the more I found myself singing along. The more I kept drinking the more I thought that this was something I could do on stage someday. Maybe they’d let me sing “Roadhouse” after they set up or something, before the crowds got in there.
Wouldn’t want to scare the paying customers away later on, you know.
Maybe Princess Patricia would actually take the kids early one Friday so I could try it out. Something to keep in the back of my mind anyway. I mean, I’d just met these guys. I couldn’t ask to do a song with them yet.
When they took their second break, Scott and Tom came over and we started talking about football and music, two of my passions.
“Hey, I love the way you guys do ‘Roadhouse Blues,’” I told Scott. “You play bass on the keyboard just like Ray Manzarek did with the Doors.”
“You know Lonnie Mack played on that didn’t you?” Scott said.
“He did?”
I had no idea the famed Indiana guitar wizard had ever played with the Doors.
Scott took a drag of his cigarette and nodded. “He’s the guy that Morrison’s talking about when he goes ‘Do it Lonnie, do it’ on the record.”
“No way,” I shook my head. “He says ‘Do it, Robbie,’” cause Robbie Krieger was the guitar player.”
“That’s what a lot of people think,” Scott replied. “But it was Lonnie Mack. Next time you listen to it, really listen. You’ll hear it.”
“I’ve listened to that song hundreds of times,” I said. “I always hear ‘Robbie’”
Tom just shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know, but if Scotty says it’s true, it probably is,” he said.
“Well OK. I’ll Google it online tomorrow,” I said. “I’m sure it’s on the Internet somewhere.
“Can you guys play that tonight?”
“Sure, anything, buddy,” Scott said.
“We’ll do the extended dance club mix party version for ya, brother,” Tom said with a laugh. “We never know how that song is gonna turn out.”
“Cool,” I said, trying to determine if anyone other than my biological brothers had ever really called me “brother” before.
The crowd continued to fill Otto’s with smoke and its stomachs with liquor. I probably had a beer too many. But I was having fun and I didn’t want to leave.
The final set roared with dance tunes as the women convinced some of the men to join them on the dance floor. The guys had either lost their inhibitions through alcohol or figured that if they didn’t hook up with someone now, they’d be going home alone again.
The women weren’t aiming to find someone to sleep with that night, just someone to dance with. Well, that’s what most of them were looking for anyway.
I had quit dancing 10 years ago. Last dance I had was at my wedding reception. After the way my marriage and subsequent divorce went, I didn’t really want to expose my heart again. Believe it or not, it was less scary to expose my questionable singing ability.
The guys finally got around to “Roadhouse Blues,” inserting a long instrumental in the middle that made the song last forever.
“If you’d have been walking on Venice Beach back in 1967, you might have heard the sounds of the Doors,” Scott said during the song.
I really got into it. I could picture myself with the black leather pants and black leather jacket and long black hair flowing down past my shoulders as I pouted and shouted just the way I’d seen Val Kilmer do as Joe Morrison do in the Doors movie.
I was singing and writhing in my seat. I’m glad it was late and the only people left didn’t really care.
The guys finally capped off the night with “ Purple Rain,” a song I hadn’t heard them do before. It surprised me a little to hear them do a Prince song, but they branded it with their own style.
By the time they got to it, the place had begun to empty and most of the folks had left the dance floor.
Shortly after the song started, a short brunette walked up to me.
“You look like you want to dance,” she said.
She was kind of plain. Not really very attractive in my way of thinking. But she didn’t appear whacked out of her gourd or drunk and I was kind of in the mood to dance.
“Yeh, I am,” I said as I got up.
I put my arms around her and we danced slowly. It seemed like we were the only ones out there. I wasn’t remotely interested in her as a girlfriend type. But it felt good just to have some sort of nonsexual contact with a member of the opposite sex.
The song ended and I thanked her asking me to dance.
I don’t know if she was expecting me to ask for her phone number or to go to Denny’s for coffee or what. But I was happy with things just the way they were and left her kind of looking at me like there was supposed to be something more.
The guys came down and I thanked them for “Roadhouse” and an opportunity to dance.
“Do you guys have a schedule or something so I know when you’re coming back?” I asked.
Mark took a sheet with all their gigs for the year from the stage and handed one to me. “There ya go, Joe. Maybe you can make a road trip down to Versailles or Bedford sometime.”
“If my ex takes the kids, I can do that sometime,” I said.
“Well, we have to start tearing down and loading up the truck,” Tom said. “You can hang out with us while we do it if you don’t have anywhere to go.
“Or maybe you have someone to go home with, huh?”
He raised his eyebrows up and down and smiled.
“Oh her? Nah, not my type,” I said. “Sure, I’ll hang out. I’ve got nothing else to do until I get the kids back at 5 tomorrow night.
“You want some help? I’ve never torn down music equipment before, but if you want to show me, I can help. I may as well make myself useful. No sense just watching you guys work.”
Tom showed me his own special way of wrapping up cords. Then, I carried monitors, speakers, mic stands, lights and stools through an inch of snow to Tom’s old dark blue Ford truck as Mark sat at the bar splitting the band’s pay for the night into three piles. Luckily, the snow had stopped falling.
When the gear was loaded, I shook their hands and told them I had a great time hanging out with them.
“God bless you,” Tom said as I headed toward my snow-covered minivan.
This had to be one of the coolest nights of my life. The only thing that could have made it better would have been to have Angie ask me to marry her. Ha!
I got so pumped up, I went home and started a Tom Cruise “Risky Business” scene in the living room. Except I kept my pants on when I took the broom in my hands and sang along to every song I ever had dreamed of singing in front of an audience.
I pulled out the 1960s garage band snarly sound of The Standells’ “Try It” and The Sonics’ raw, uninhibited rant, “Strychnine.” You’ve got to present folks with some songs they’ve most likely never heard before. Gotta open their minds, you know.
From there, I delved into Texas power guitar rocker Charlie Sexton’s love song, “Hold Me.”
I made sure to give the audience a reason to watch, too. I always hated it when bands just stood there and played. Boring! Why don’t I just go home and listen to the album?
You’ve got to move, child. You’ve got to show them that this music is doing something to you inside. OK, so I got a little crazy. I blamed it on the beer.
But it was my living room and nobody was there. So, who cares?
I threw in a little Weird Al Yankovic for the comedic effect and Muddy Waters’ seminal blues classic “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and I’d not only covered the vast majority of musical styles I adored, but also managed to stay up most of the rest of the night with my set.
Of course, “Roadhouse” closed the show.
But the crowd wanted one more. They were cheering as I left stage to use the bathroom and get a sip of water. They lit their Bics and I could see the flames flickering in the darkness of my house while the smell of butane wafted all about.
Give ’em what they want, I figured, so I suggested a Doors twin spin to send them home. “Soul Kitchen” was a big hit and I always got a kick out of singing lyrics like “Your fingers weave quick minarettes, speakin’ secret alphabet, I light another cigarette, learn to forget, learn to forget.”
Oh, and “The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes.” That is just such a cool image.
When it was over, I made sure to thank everybody and tell them they could but T-shirts and CDs on their way out.
“Don’t forget to tip your waitress, Brandi,” I said, falling onto the couch exhausted.
I hadn’t done that in a while. I thought my rock star wannabe days were over years ago.
It reminded me of the first time I decided I liked singing.
