The funny thing about music is, there’s always someone
waiting in wings to blow the fucking pants off of everybody. All the time there
are music critics that say that there’s nowhere else for music to go, that it’s
all been done, that nobody is ever going to top the bands of yesteryear. Then
invariably, inevitably they’re proved wrong in the worst way.
When his shift is over at 10 p.m., he hops on the bus,
destined for the half-double downtown where he lives. The whole trip, he taps
his foot and nods his head to a tune that hasn’t been heard by anyone except
for his pet snake and his little sister through the floorboards. His left hand
compulsively mimic the chords of his creation, while the old black lady next to him curls her
face slightly, thinking he’s got a twitch.
When he gets home, he doesn’t hear his parents arguing.
They’re probably at the bar. His sister is over at a friend’s house and the
neighbors got evicted yesterday for delinquency. This affords him one of those
few rare moment t where he can dispense with the headphones that he usually has to plug
into his amp and let his music roam the nooks and crannies of his house, without
the backlash that would typically accompany a session of that nature.
He tosses his work shirt on the bed and unsheathes his
guitar from its usual place in the closet. He knows to keep it under a sheet,
because the last time his old man was hard up for drinking money, it
ended up at the pawn shop. He had to work for two whole weeks to get it back. A
measly $200 was all the shop owner wanted for it. Had he known what he was
holding was a Frankenstein guitar monster from hell, he would have charged
more. If he had a crystal ball, he would have given dear old dad enough money
to drink himself to death.
After some slight tuning, McDonald’s least favorite employee
goes to work on his instrument like an ant farm disassembling a dead bird, his
fingers methodically finding each and every one of the chords that have been
running through his head all day, with only the blips of the cash register to accompany
them. It’s like calculus with tones, runs and arpeggios, but even though the
complexity of what he’s playing rivals that of the most skilled violinists,
somehow the end result is something accessible to the human ear—that diamond in
the ruff of chaos that everybody never knew they always wanted to hear.
The notes bounce off of every surface of his room from a worn-out
Jackson 5 poster to a stack of oft-flipped Chopin sheet music. In a perfect
moment between musician and musical instrument, his guitar becomes part of his
hand and the nexus between his thoughts and actions encounter no resistance in
between. He is affectively talking with his axe, and the dialog is so good,
Winston Churchill or T.S. Elliot couldn’t have said it better.
There's big dreams and little means. Minor frustrations and big considerations. There's Lies about Love and hums about humanity and riffs about romance, all mixed together in a beautiful mess that pulls at the heartstrings while everything's left of the frets. Inexplicable sensations and Good Vibrations and soulful creations are all dissected, analyzed and rearranged with mastery to get a better of idea of that little unreachable explanation of humanity that's taken every author in history millions of pages to get their finger on, without ever reaching it, like one of Zeno's Paradoxes. The hamster on the wheel that toils with everything he's got to reach a conclusion that is, by its very defining characteristics, asymptotic in nature...
When he’s done, there is a long, silent pause as he brings
himself back into the present. There’s a noise, but due to the intensity what
just happened, he fails to recognize it right away.
Someone is pounding on his front door.
He tosses the guitar back in his closet and descends the
steps, which are being bathed in a blue and white strobe. Through the peep
hole, he sees a police officer, and he takes a second to straiten his hair a
little before opening the door. When he does open the door, the cop on the
other side has his eyebrow raised, slightly.
“Yeah?”
“We got a noise complaint about twenty minutes ago that
someone was playing some pretty loud music in this house.”
“Oh…uh, that…that was me…I’m sorry. I was just practicing.”
“Yeah…well, keep it down, alright, kid.”
“Oh, yes sir. I didn’t mean—“
“It’s alright, but it’s after ten, so you can’t play that
loudly.”
“Okay, I won’t. I’m sorry--”
“Again, it’s fine. Just keep it down.”
“I will, officer.”
“Good…by the way…”
“Yeah?”
“That was pretty awesome.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Yeah…well…goodnight.”
“Okay, ‘night.”
“Yeah…”
And that’s him.
That’s the kid that one day is going to rock your ass inside
out in the best way. For all you know, you ate one of his burgers or sat next
to him on the bus. Eric Clapton was a busker in West London after he got kicked
out of art school. Any one of the thousands of people that passed by him would
be paying hundreds of dollars to hear what they tossed a shilling in a guitar
case for in 1961.
So long story short
Don’t complain too much if they forget to hold the onions on
your McDouble. The kid’s got bigger fish to fry.
McFish, to be precise, along with twenty pounds of ass
kickin’ solo, contained within a five pound bag.
February 3, 1959.
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