I've woken up thinking of live music gigs I've been too. Specifically, I’m trying to think of which ones were the best. I'm not sure why that is. It could have something to do with what I was listening to as I walked around Hollywood last night. Perhaps. I think there is probably another reason. I’m sure there is.
I consider myself lucky. I've managed to be at quite a few truly great gigs. That is lucky, for I don't go to that many. I’m held back by knowing that on occasion, I will have certain 'issues' with large crowds. It's easier to just avoid them and so, consequently I end up avoiding many gigs. There's a word for that sort of thing and you'll probably want to fling it at me. It's actually a little more complex than that and like so many of the quirks of my days, it involves a train in one way or another. I'm fascinated by trains and trains seem to be fascinated by me too. (Mostly it's Freight Trains of old and lore that have done me in, but in this instance it was the fault of a more modern, underground one.)
To my mind, there are two factors that end up determining how I judge a gig. There's the performance itself and there is who you share it with. I'm sure that in some analytical part of my brain, I’m able to separate those two factors and weigh out their value on their own, before bringing them back together as a single, unified memory. I’m sure. However, I try very hard to not recognise that process. I like feeling them together as one – the performance and the sharing.
Way back when the years still began with a '19', I was living on top of a Vietnamese bakery, on a small retail strip in inner Melbourne (In case you're wondering, the only thing about the bakery that actually was Vietnamese, were the owners and the name across the banner. They sold bagels, danishes, soup and, somewhat inexplicably, sushi.) Across the road, a friend of mine worked at the Video Store (for the kids out there, this is where us old folk used to go to rent VHS cassettes of movies and such - I did say this was back in the last millennium). I say 'friend' and today that's exactly what she still is, but a more accurate way to describe her back then would be: 'girl I had major, emotional and physical crush on'. She was the first girl I ever felt that way about.
She lived in a little side street that ran parallel to the main High Street, in a large, rambling, Edwardian-style bungalow, with six bedrooms spread over two floors, a tall, barren flagpole out the front and a radiated mauve, 70's vibe. We used to amble back to her place after her shifts and smoke grass and mingle with the good people who lived there. I haven't had much experience since with large share-houses, but my reflex rational is to expect that they would be rowdy collections of underwhelming misfits. (I don't know exactly why I assume like this, but I am a snob, so there's that...) This was not the case with The Stanely Street House. Not even in the slightest. There was a spread of ages – from 20' to 30's – and each occupant was extremely unique and instantly likeable. Even the ones you didn't want to like, grabbed you straight away.
Several of them were musicians and I occasionally sat in or around their jamming sessions. Whenever I could. They were worth admiring. One night, four of us and a wide array of instruments were crammed into a little makeshift studio/bedroom, when someone said;
“You know what'd be good now? Some drugs! Something to liven things up a little.”
I perked up straight away.
“I've got some acid in the fridge back at the house. Want me to go grab that?”
Looks of circumspection flowed around the room. In retrospect I think we were all hoping someone would have the courage or the sense to say “No”. No one did. No one said “No'. So I bounded off to mine, cut off a few of the Dr. Hoffman's that were sitting in the butter compartment and was back within minutes. Within minutes of that, we were tripping hard.
I think we played the same song, over and over, for the next few hours. LSD creates wonderful connections of unspoken communications and we were there, locked into that silent, yet completely knowing exchange. Locked in, that is, until the Kung Fu devotee with the blond ponytail came upstairs to yell at us for disturbing his sleep. The paranoia from the drug was strong now, so we brought our music session to a frightened stop and obediently bundled out on the cold, quiet sidewalk.
Two of the other guys were in a jazz band together and they suggested we go off to see some other friends of their's play at a tiny Jazz venue in the neighborhood over. That seemed the perfect idea and we headed off. That was the first time I ever set foot in The Z Bar. What a place. It was like it was an island off the coast of the rest of the planet, that was a magnet for the exact sort of folk who would crave that sort of thing. I’m sure, in your mind, it was the hallucinogenics that were coursing through me that made me feel this way, but I assure you it was not. It was the place and the people I met there that night, all either tucked into the cramped space between the bar and the band or up in the private office that sat at the top of a set of thin wooden stairs leading up from a door tucked away in the corner.
There was a Paranoid-Schizophrenic club owner masquerading as a sort of Fifties-style Frank Sinatra; A giant, Maori Jazz guitarist/nightclub bouncer, with bulging muscles and the most tame, effete first name; a 90-year old geriatric, dressed up in her finest, 20's flapper gear, complete with bejeweled headband and ivory cigarette holder; a red headed lesbian, with a thick layer of ruby lipstick piercing against her porcelain skin, who sang deliciously soft and sweet and made me think of the 'Gone With The Wind' character she shared a last name with; and some left over, over weight, passed over, over indulged drunken members of Harry Connick Jnr's touring band.
Just after 2am, we came down from the office and the feeling in the room had changed. Later on, I would learn that The Z Bar acted as the unofficial social-club for the city's jazz musicians. On any given night, the boys and girls who had played elsewhere and had finished, often found there way there. This was a Friday night and since it was after 1am (the time when most live music venues close) the tiny bar was now thick with musicians and their instruments. Standing around in small, bawdy groups, they each gave off a restless nervous energy which had in turn infected the rest of the place. They had not played their emotions into exhaustion at their own respective gigs and now they all had axes to grind. Whiskey could dull for a moment this building aggression, but only like the same way distraction temporarily tempers a broken heart.
This energy did not last long however. As was the tradition, the band invited up one or two to play along with them. This soon grew into several more invites to more of these well soused individuals and this multiplied out and on, until there was a huge ensemble hammering, blowing and plucking away. There were so many of them, that they ran the spread of the whole space. To the eye, the scene would have looked exactly like chaos, but to the ear it was ordered, clear and perfectly balanced. People played in turn, with no one trying to drown out another. They rose and fell the volume and intensity in perfect unison, like an ever circling roller coaster, riding sixteen coaches long. Every player gave an unabashed example of their own personal style, though at this young stage of my journey, I would not have been able to identify the differences.
Then, one of my fellow acid-droppers, worked his way onto the drum-kit. I can't remember how he did it exactly, but I’m sure it was elegant and seamless. He was a tall, thin and raking fellow, all limbs and bald head. Yet around a drum kit he was as lithe and smooth as a petite, seductive dancer. All the other players lowered their volumes to a complete silence and my friend began his way through a crashing, violent drum solo. After a few minutes of working over the kit in every conceivable approach, he started to rise from the seat. He banged over The Toms, past The Floor Tom and beyond The Ride and started to drum a high beat across the wall behind him, as he elegantly moved along it.
This wall led him to the side of the bar, which he promptly continued to beat on as he climbed onto a bar-stool and on to the top of the counter. Standing up now, he used all of his reaching height, to find the underside of the ceiling with his drumsticks, as the roof now became his instrument. He stood there for a while like this, as I watched him from up close, my mouth obviously ajar. The song they played into his solo was the old standard 'Caravan', which calls for a looping, jungle rhythm and this is what he was still giving us as the bartender now approached him with two bottles in hand.
The Drummer, worked his sticks back off the ceiling and down the wall towards where the bartender now held up these bottles. He hit them. He hit those two vodka bottles hard and yet somehow they stayed intact. He started incorporating other surfaces of the bar now and a catastrophic symphony of sounds rang out across the room. People all around me were hooping and hollering, some shouting out The Drummer's name. I then realised that I was one of the ones shouting out his name. It had come out of me unconsciously. Unforced. Unconcerned. I was so purely 'in the moment' in the way that only a great music gig can send you. Each second passed and improved on the euphoric intensity of the last. It just got better and better.
That was a great gig. It was the mix of the acid, the eccentric people I’d met, the desperately dark musicians pressing into me, the quality of the music, the crispness of the sound and the ranging emotions pushing around the room, that brought everything together. It was The Drummer's total physical sacrifice to performance that acted as the central highlight, but every part of that two hour open jam was transcending. And I knew that as each beat, movement, chord and yell passed, they were instantly gone. Gone from The Now and turned into Memories of The Then.
The Drummer eventually drummed his way back onto the kit and another hour after that, the massive jam session ended. The drugs wore off and I found my way off home, alone and to bed. I’d get to see many more truly great performances at The Z Bar before they closed it some five years later. As I said above - I’m am quite lucky like that. Many of those could easily find their way into my All Time Top Ten List – if I ever were to try to construct such a thing. But my fingers danced over the computer keyboard through to this one. My mind went back to this memory.
I had planned to tell you of a different gig. One where I held onto someone that I hoped to hold onto for the rest of my life, all whilst the sweetest acoustic country music, got sweeter and sweeter with each song. That was a great gig. She left early. A few songs before the gig ended. One moment she was there and then she whispered a goodbye and disappeared off. She had to go. So she said.
That was a great gig.
There's probably a reason I didn't speak of that one.
I’m sure there is.
