(Last) Weekly Roundup: Shut It Down Edition
It seems like yesterday, but it was long ago. Danger Girl and I were looking for lunch this past Saturday. Like all fat men, I love to eat but I'm currently a tooth short due to some combination of a skatepark crash and the fact that an incisor that was crowned in 1988 is not necessarily going to last more than 33 years without disintegrating. So I was already in a self-pitying mood when I walked into the door of the Potbelly sandwich shop in Dublin, Ohio...
...only to find that, in (not exactly) the words of Joni Mitchell, they'd tiled over the musician's stand and put up a pair of tables. I would laugh at anyone else who wrote this phrase but: I felt an actual, physical shock in my chest when I realized what had happened.
From April 2010 to July 2011, I played the lunchtime shift at that sandwich shop two hours and thirty minutes a day, three days a week, Monday/Wednesday/Friday, exceptions being duly made for travel and other commitments. In exchange I got a free meal and tips that ranged from nothing (happened more than once) to ninety-six dollars (happened just once).
Because I am who I am, which is to say a profoundly dysfunctional person, I made far more of the gig than it should have been. The fellow who played on Tuesday and Thursday did the same set every time, same songs, using an acoustic guitar and no microphone. This was not ambitious enough for me. I used an amplifer, a few effects, a wah pedal, and an old-standby Shure SM58 mike into the house PA for vocals. This allowed me to adjust the volume of what was happening from "10:45 AM, nobody but the staff" to "12:30, a line out the door and standing room only." But I was almost certainly too loud, every single time.
After ricocheting wildly through a vast variety of solid and hollowbody electrics in the first few months, I settled on a Godin LGX-SA with both standard and piezoelectric pickups, so I could mix the sound on the fly to sound more like an acoustic guitar without having the infamous "piezo quack" tone that everybody hates. I left the amp and microphone set up all the time, knowing the other fellow wouldn't use them, which allowed me to ride a motorcycle to the "gig". I thought this was awfully cool of me.
My Tuesday/Thursday colleague was so consistent in his songlist that the girls who worked at the Potbelly told me they could estimate how much time they had left in the shift by what he was playing. He knew all his tunes by heart and was supremely relaxed in his work. I arrived carrying four full songbooks bristling with dozens of sticky tabs in each plus the three-ring binder of music I'd been building since 1989. Nothing was off the table, from terrible white-boy blues covers to "Thriller", which would cause the sandwich girls to make a creepy-monster motion a la Michael Jackson's original video.
A few times each day I'd decide to play something cold out of my books, having never tried it before. I have enough of a chord library in my head that this rarely blew up, but at least in one case (Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now") I had to admit defeat and stop halfway through because I didn't have a solid enough handle on how and when to play the changes.
I told every girl I was dating at the time to come see me whenever they could, and sometimes my child's mother would swing by as well. Normally this wasn't a problem because it was a daytime gig pretty far out of the city and therefore not an option for my invited guests, but there was one profoundly awkward situation where three of my favorite people independently decided to surprise me. They arrived separately over the course of the first hour and took seats around the little raised one-person stage that was built into the wall. None of them knew each other, but at some point I was going to have to stop the gig and say hello to someone, at which point the other two would flip out. What to do? I liked all all of them and didn't want to lose anyone. After about six tunes where the shaking of my hands was producing a nontrivial vibrato effect, I had an idea. I stopped playing and started obviously fiddling with my amplifier as I cut and pasted the same text into my Blackberry for three different numbers:
They're giving me a hard time about socializing during the gig, and I have to run out of here as soon as it's over; can I call you afterwards?
Amazingly, all three of them readily accepted the ridiculous premise that my essentially unpaid sandwich-shop gig had restrictions on fraternizing with the crowd, and they drifted out one at a time over the course of the next hour. When the third one left, I waited ten minutes then ran to the bathroom to set up separate meetings with each of them.
I always knew that the gig couldn't last, that I'd eventually have to get a serious day job to make up for the fact that I no longer lived in a two-income household. So every single day felt sweet as it happened. I was stealing from the past, where I'd saved money and signed low-effort support contracts to pay my bills, but I was also stealing from the future, from the money I'd need to earn if I wanted to maintain my house and meet my son's future needs. It was special, to be thirty-nine years old and playing music for a very modest living, knowing it would have to end.
In June of 2011, Honda offered me a contractor position helping to run their North American production infrastructure. I played my last Friday with a few friends and the girlfriend then known as "Vodka McBigbra" in attendance. The first song I played was John Mayer's "Clarity", and the last one was an original composition called "Not A Big Deal". Then I put my amplifier into the trunk of my Lincoln and drove home, expecting that I'd never again play for a small crowd on a regular basis.
Turns out I was wrong. The Honda job led to a position as ad hoc musical director for a church in rural Ohio, which I played and enjoyed during my whole Honda contract. Later on, for most of 2016 and 2017, I played a downtown Potbelly twice a week, basically taking an extended lunch on those days from an insurance-company gig I was working. Ninety minutes a day instead of one-fifty. I played a carbon-fiber Rainsong acoustic, didn't use a microphone, cut the five books of music down to two. It was great, but it wasn't the same, because by then I was kinda-semi in the business of being a parent, a husband, and a grownup (in order of increasing difficulty). What I mostly remember about the second gig was that my boss was this beautiful but morose late-twenties blonde who always looked like she was going to cry, and that sometimes she would bring me a cookie as I played. It was fundamentally a smaller thing; the restaurant was half the size, I was half as loud, and by then many of the customers had already adopted the urban habit of living their life with AirPods installed.
This past Saturday marked the first time in maybe six or seven years I'd seen my original sandwich shop. It makes sense that they tore the musician's stage down; in this unprecedented era of the deadliest disease in human history (that's what it is, right? Because we're destroying the lives of every child in America to address it) it's of course not a good idea to have someone singing at the top of his lungs in the direction of the customers.
Still. I wish I'd known about the removal of the stage. I'd have offered to take it away, and I'd have stored it somewhere at absolutely indefensible expense, and some time this summer I'd have installed it in my new barn. Amplifier and PA and everything. And on the days when I felt I was cruising at rock bottom and needed a few moments of unalloyed joy, I would have taken the three steps up, landed on my stool, plugged in my sunburst Godin, and played a few tunes. I'd have imagined all the bored businesspeople who were nonplussed at my presence, the young mothers who would encourage their toddlers to dance through undanceable tunes, the college girls pretending to be zombies as they whipped up sixty sandwiches an hour. Tunes I can barely recall, played by someone I can barely recall being. And it wouldn't be the same -- but when is anything ever the same?
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For Hagerty, I wrote about a truly great race car, a truly fake racer, and a trio of truly odd motorcycles.