It's quite late and I have returned from a long walk to Wal-Mart. Fatigue is making me unsteady, as if I have chugged a glass of wine on an empty stomach. My mind wanders.
Speaking of wine...
Today began the Underground Music Showcase with its swarm of 200 local bands downtown. My younger son (the violinist-composer-bassist) is playing violin accompaniment for a singer-songwriter at a wine bar this evening and is playing in two more shows tomorrow.
Speaking of wine and underground...
The Underground Music Showcase probably has much in common with "the supreme madness of the carnival season" in Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. I hope that nobody leads my son down a "long and winding staircase" onto "the damp ground of the catacombs."
Speaking of amontillado...
The word "amontillado" reminds me of "armadillo" for some reason tonight. I had a friend in Texas who once kept an armadillo as a pet. It was an unsatisfactory pet. It wouldn't play, it wouldn't come when my friend called it, it wouldn't learn tricks – unless you count finding its food bowl as a trick.
Speaking of armadillo...
I saw B.B. King play his wonderfully expressive blues back in the 1970s at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas. The venue was a former National Guard armory with lousy acoustics and an ever-present blue haze in the rafters from all of the marijuana smoke rising from the cheap seats in front of the stage.
At the end of his set, B.B. King was joined by a local journeyman blues guitarist who had considerable dexterity but no originality. The journeyman could deftly stitch together the dozen or so blues cliches that he had cribbed from authentic blues musicians, but he had nothing to say musically of his own. Listening to this hack play his guitar was like listening to someone recite random pages from a novel. All the same, the crowd went wild. I was incensed when the potheads sitting around me in the cheap seats cheered louder for the journeyman's flurry of mechanical, meaningless notes than they had cheered for B.B. King's spare, heartfelt playing.
Speaking of a hack playing the guitar...
I think that I'll play a few folk tunes on my old guitar and then head for bed.
