February 28 2009

late feb 09     A couple years into playing keyboard while singing covers of blues/rock 'pop' tunes of the 50s in bars with dance floors, I realized that the owners of these 'clubs' were mafioso types of organized-crime fame. It didn't 'faze' me much. Heck, it was their money that paid this poor piper, but I wasn't 'organized.' No, I 'saw' myself as just a poorboy monkey in a monkey suit doing his job of warming up the customers to be working up a thirst. I never had any large thirst for singing slow songs, though always did enough to give drummer and prime slow song vocalist Larry, and or saxophone & vocals Joe a song they didn't have to sing on, didn't want to sing, or were wasted by their effort on the previous song. Each had as many songs committed to memory as I did; collectively, we knew over a hundred. Life—my musical one, that is; because most of the other aspects of my young-&-coming adult (ha!!) male child of World War Two's existence were unravelling fast and furiously--all my 'fault', of course. But I was still in denial for another few years, and by then, it was the proverbial too late for a whole huge helluva lot of other still-seeming-possible lives to 'steal' my sense-of-intrigue & desire away. Standard normal life, as I saw it happening to me then, sucked, & I resolved to whack away at life's dilemmas on my own, & to hell with the detested them & all their would-be meddlings into m, I own it, dammit, don't I?-private world! This attitude  helped loosen all the stops, as it were—a significant bunch of them, anyway &, abandoning all, I bought a boat & lived a freestyle waterborne fare. The disin-tegration of the other me, who tried to do a day job & keep a wife, completed itself over the next couple years. All the while, my music self never failed to satisfy my fantasies every weekend. Not only for the money, but way more, in my instance, for the peculiar sense of glory that types like I was, the, feed their super-egos on. Being adept at whipping bar crowds into a dancing frenzy that resulted in the kind of skyrocketing alcohol drink sales that bar owners just love was my strong suit, if you will. I got excited & whammed away on my ax to make the music accom-paniment & screamed bloody murder on the fast songs, making everybody start getting sweaty. That—the energies' exchangings, & resultant firing up the atmospheric ambiance, as it were--as it was--is where whatever it is in that part of my brain I like to call Hardway, who also drives a part of my soul & spirit, to suck up on this kind of catalytic energization/ excitation, feeds itself. Or should I write: fed itself. I mean: I haven't absorbed this sort of surefire stimulant for more than a dozen years, now. One additional, knack/ talent I figured: Was the ability to play, at her most opportune moment, just the right song for the current girl or ladyfriend to weasel her mafia boss away from business for some gentle squeezing on the dance floor; usually for the one and only dance most of those boss types ever gave their moll during an hour or 2's hanging out in one of his bars; & probably taking the till with him when he left--the lucky dog. Though a bad mutha dog, all us poor folks, band & dancers/drinkers alike, envied our illusions of Mister big shot's (seeming) portrayal of a lifestyle to drool over, & like that there. It's comical to review those experiences; always marveling that I: The no-alcohol kind of guy that I was and am, has literally enabled thousands, if not tens of. The enabler, & often, the designated driver, too, oboy.