This is a cold fried chicken and tart mushy apple kind of night and autumn is a leaving season.
Keeping the shop door closed keeps the cold out. The shop is a ship of curiosities, a memory palace full of one-liners. (The punch lines left with the people who told the jokes over coffee and the memory of what cigarettes taste like.)
The heater kicks on and I hear it again: that vaguely unintelligible song. The music of metal and heat and squeaky parts. The city is a battle of the bands: there is a song in the interstate overpass rattling as loaded semis storm by at 2 in the morning. Then the fupa-fupa-fup-thump of a tire going flat. The echoes of couples conversations and the lone man in a red hoodie arguing with his demons at 3 am.
We sing, one and all, unaware of the melody. It’s just some tinny tune we heard as a baby. A lullaby or a military march. The memory of a plague whose name is forgotten.
When I was young I lived under a blessed illusion painted by my parents that pain is temporary. This too, though, is culture prop-up job. One of those old cowboy movie set props dust downs that only looks real through a tight camera angle.
Sometimes in the morning after a night on the wharf my hip sings, some harmonizing echo like last night when the cooler weather rolled in bringing tree whipping wind and whitecaps. The lines wrapped from the capstan to the timberhead are stretched like an erhu. The cold fingers in the wind play. The fleet dances on the whitecaps like middle-aged hipsters when their favorite song plays over the supermarket speaker. This song is a refrain of pain, kicked up in a current and echoing up into the city with it’s apathetic ears and high falutin’ notions of upward mobility. The song sings to the clouds, to whatever heaven waits. This pain sings forever. These bones are just one more instrument being tuned.
that sweet spot it never lasts that long like dust preserved in amber the story’s only ever partially told like cigarette butts in an old beer bottle the memory’s discarded when it’s too old and nothing’s left of the sweet spot when the stage lights go cold
[Chorus for an unwritten song about the stage (RIP) at Charlie’s II, Mount Carroll IL]
I found out from my friend Dave Cuckler that the stage at Charlie’s II has been taken down. The bar is still there, of course, at least for the time being. Bars and stages all have a time and place in which they exist; although I don’t frequent bars anymore, I do like that they’re around and there are bars I miss. I miss Freddie’s in downtown Louisville; it was the last true dive bar in a city that’s more interested in tourist bucks than in local creature comforts. Freddie’s was a time capsule and when it closed whole decades were erased. History is an odd thing. It’s always happening, always unfolding, but when they eye remembering and the arms accumumating the artifacts is gone when the repository is scrubbed clean — in the case of Freddie’s for a chiropractor — the history is gone. What’s left is conjecture and myth.
In the case of the stage at Charlie’s II in Mount Carroll, Illinois, the stage was pulled out to make room for pool tables. The bar is still there, which means people will still talk about the music played there. There are pictures and sound clips, digitized in social media amber. But it bears pointing out the thing that killed the stage was it’s life.
When I lived there I was amazed at the amount of musical talent in the town. I started an open mic for poetry and music at Brick Street Coffee (also gone, RIP Lou) and the music spilled over. It was glorious. The stage started to attract musicians from the region. Then the music industry turned its eye and saw musicians playing standards along with their own songs. Standards the industry wasn’t getting paid for.
There’s a larger story here, but I don’t know that it’s mine to tell. A story about how corporate greed kills the songs people have been singing for decades. Songs and the singing of songs is one of the ways memory is passed on. But, like the agribusiness corporations that patented the corn seed… one of the oldest seeds in the history of people that’s responsible in part for our proliferation … the money behind the music industry kills small venues they have no interest in sustaining.
Like I said, there’s a larger story here. And a few years ago, I would have chased it. But now, I just want to remember the stage, the place, and the time. I don’t mind writing the chorus. But someone else needs to write the song.
