Monday night I saw a rock and roll show that absolutely blew me away. My friend David McCoy heard about it somewhere, I don't know where, and had seen it before, I think. We got to The Joint at 8 o'clock, which is when the doors open, except when they don't. Monday night they didn't. David knocked until somebody showed up and told him no, man, 9 o'clock tonight, they're starting late. Which will not shock anyone who has ever been to see live music.
So David asked the guy, where is a good bar, and the guy said try the Chinese restaurant down on the corner, it's OK. Which it was. The fountain and koi pond wasn't running, which was a shame, but the koi weren't dead yet and maybe it still ran lunchtimes. So we drank a drink each, and talked about music -- the guy next to me worked at IBM and mostly stuck with classical, and I never did hear whether he liked the night as much as he might have.
And since we were getting a late start, we agreed that we would just do one set. Figuring they would start at, what, 10 o'clock, we would just hear what they had to do for that set and head back to the hotel like our mothers would want us to. We got back and the doors weren't open, but they did open eventually and we went in. The bar stretched the length of the joint (which is, remember, called The Joint) and we sat down up front.
We were not the oldest people in the joint by any stretch. Shortly after we sat down a woman came in and sat next to me who was wearing her hair long and natural and had it in a hairband that has plastic daisies on it, and that did not look good. There were some young women eventually, but the majority of the people were men, leaning toward long natural hair, which tended either to be good or straw blond. The younger women, in the minority, tended toward low-riding pants. No one appeared to have arrived with the intention of sticking to ice water.
The band came out, and they were something else altogether. I would stop well short of calling in old-time rock and roll, because it was a lethal mixture of early-60s British blues and late 70s shrieking black-hearted rock and roll. The mostly lead singer was a guy named Terry Reid, and he wore a big blowsy jacket and big pants that had the reet pleat. He couldn't decide whether he was having more fun being the funny guy who had been there and sung that or being the guy being there and singing this. He brought the dogs and let them bark and howl then yanked their leashes to make them mean.
He swung the mike stand so much it unscrewed out the bottom and a roadie had to screw it back in. He grinned and mugged and jumped and shouted and waved his arms like Doctor Frankenstein at the Nobel dinner. He leaned in face to face with the players and dug them in the ribs and sipped from a tumbler with something brown in it like tobacco juice. Maybe it was whiskey, maybe it was Starbucks, who knows, this is 2003 and this guy sings for Keith Richard, so he could be straight from his AA meeting or maybe not. He sang falsetto and rasped and shouted and squealed, and looked like he didn't mean it, but he did.
The guitar guy was Waddy Wachtel, and he looked well and truly like an IT guy with long yellow curly hair and a good personal trainer. You can't write about guitar playing. He was really good at it, and I'm leaving it at that, except to add that if you needed to you could use the riffs I heard to stop a buffalo stampede. That's all you can really say, except to point out that sometimes people seem to have the skill so strong and solid that they just imagine how the guitar should sound and it sounds like that. OK: Waddy Wachtel sounds like what we all sound like in our heads when we play air guitar. That covers it. The guy who played the bass is named Rick the Bass Player. He plays sometimes for Neil Young. When the band played Cinnamon Girl the song sounded like no one had ever played it before and they were hanging around earlier backstage grinning through cigarette smoke and somebody thought of how the chords might sound if the amps had been turned up to the point where the feds get involved. And I think that's pretty much what happened. The drummer you couldn't see except that he looked really, really happy, and if I had a beat like that to beat I would have looked happy too.
So guess what? We stayed for the second set. Nobody went home except the people who did. I am so glad I didn't go home early. Oh Lord have mercy, I am so glad. There was a guy by the stage, sitting next to us, at the table that said "reserved" on a scrap of yellow paper somebody taped down with cheap tape. He looked like Tom Petty, kind of, with a $300 haircut that was shagged and layered and had something like four shades of yellow and gold and what -- harvest, or something. His nose had been catastophically broken, or maybe was just naturally kind of bent. He had on a pea coat with big pointed lapels. The fact that he clearly had the money to get the nose fixed and didn't was endearing. His eyes were sharp and clear. He sat at the round table, and somebody sat with him, and people who noticed him came up and shook his hand. He did not get up when they did this. I leaned over, and I said, "Excuse me." I told him I had seen people coming up to him and paying their respects. I asked him, "What is your name?" He said, "Michael. What is yours?" I said, "Whit," and we shook hands, and that was it.
The second set was like someone set a bomb. The band went right back at it. They said they were going to play a ballad but I didn't hear it. I think there was some Zeplin and some Stones and what, Yardbirds? Who cares? The whole place went up like the music was hot oil and we were water getting poured in. People would get down off the stage and get back up, and I took out of my ears the earplugs that McCoy handed out and put them in my pocket and held onto the wall and wedged my foot against the baseboard because I thought I was going to shake loose from dancing, or, really just swinging my body back and forth until I was sore. (Which I still am.)
A young woman who had been standing around looking pretty got up and sang and played guitar and you know what? I heard she was Michael's girlfriend but that wasn't how she got the job, at least not altogether. It is a pure crystalline joy when youth is not wasted on the young. Also a guy who used to sing with Paul Revere and the Raiders got up and he tore the place down and threw each brick out in the street. And some guy who goes around with the Rolling Stones went out and hit each brick with a hammer and we all kicked around the crushed stuff until it was just dust.
The music was like the hot oil now was burning and we were water at the bottom coming up shaped like a bullet. Then Terry Reid -- the guy with the reet pleat -- climbed back up the broken ladder they used to get up and down off the stage, and I have no idea what he sang at all. You could barely hear his voice, even though the cords on his neck were tight under his skin, and the guitar and the drum and bass were just a big slug of dirty clotted fire, and I thought, if only these guys would keep playing we could all live forever and that would be OK.