#gpc sdtk

Driver said, “Son, I just had to ask ya / Did you find yourself a greener pasture?” “No, sir” / I said, “No, sir.”

I have an hour of her time and she picks the Sevens. (I imagine her asking, "Have you ever been here before?” and my reply would be, "Yeah — for someone else.”)

We don’t see much of one another anymore. I used to kid her all the time about visiting me in Brooklyn but now I don’t bother. 

She begins: “Order a fucking drink, will ya?”

We talk about our jobs and the need for each of us to quit. One of us is always daring the other to do it, but there is never any follow-through. We just kvetch and kvetch, and now we’ve done it for so long that we kvetch about the anniversary gifts they give us for sticking around.

“This time you’re gonna do it,” I say to her. “Send me your résumé. I’ll take a look at it.”

“What about you? You gotta quit, too.”

“I’ll quit if you quit.”

“You have to promise.”

She reaches for my hand across the table and we shake on it. But before I can let go, she wants to make sure I understand the fine print of this deal.

“I am gonna be pissed,” she warns, “if you bail on me.”

Every now and then I hear from the harp player whose band was the first and only one I’ve ever played in.

“In my younger days,” he writes, referring to the nineties, “I always wondered what John Lee Hooker meant in ‘Sittin’ Here Thinkin’.’ Now I know.

J.B. Lenoir (with Fred Below), “The Whale Has Swallowed Me” The American Folk-Blues Festival Germany, 1966

-- I remember several years ago, the musician posted this clip. It’s a weird amalgam: the clunky AFBF stage set, J.B. clowning with his guitar, Fred Below in a cardigan (stealing the show), the cameraman’s pointless closeup of a rocking chair...

In the film The Soul of a Man, Wim Wenders and his editor (Mathilde Bonnefoy) intercut “The Whale” with MLK’s “I Have a Dream” and archival footage of civil rights protests. It seems an odd choice to me, as I’ve never thought of “The Whale” as protest music. (If it is, it’s a lot less direct than what Lenoir wrote and sang on “Alabama,” “Remove This Rope,” “If I Get Lucky,” “Shot on James Meredith,” or “Alabama March.”) 

"In 1956, some recordings Douglas had made for a folklorist were released on one of the first blues LPs, and from 1959 onwards he recorded intermittently for Chris Strachwitz. He led an electric band around the East Bay bar and dance circuit at weekends, and was planning to become a fulltime musician on retirement from his day job, but he didn’t make it to 65.” (Chris Smith, 2006)

It took me years to figure out how he played the V chord in the key of E -- the B chord, the last of the three chords before you go home, the resolver in a twelve-bar blues -- the dominant chord, as it’s called...At the V chord, instead of making the conventional barre chord, the B7, which requires a little effort with the left hand, he wouldn’t bother with the B at all. He’d leave the open A note ringing and just slide a finger up the D string to a seventh. And there’s the haunting note, resonating against the open A. So you’re not using root notes, but letting it fall against a seventh. Believe me, it’s (a) the laziest, sloppiest single thing you can do in that situation, and (b) one of the most brilliant musical inventions of all time. But that is how Jimmy Reed managed to play the song for thirty years and get away with it. I learned how to do it from a white boy, Bobby Goldsboro, who had a couple of hits in the ’60s. He used to work with Jimmy Reed and he said he’d show me the tricks. I knew all the other moves, but I never knew that V chord move until he showed it to me, on a bus somewhere in Ohio, in the mid-’60s. He said, “I spent years on the road with Jimmy Reed. He does that V chord like this.” “Shit! That’s all it is?” “That’s it, motherfucker. You live and learn.”

A drip in the ceiling (“Interesting you mention that,” the upstairs neighbor tells me, “since my, um, house guest said he saw some water the other day”) prompts me to drag the now water-stained desk twenty feet across the floor and to inspect its contents. 

Inside the drawers, which are dry, I find various papers, a box of envelopes, blank postcards from Japan, a stapler, a Chinese ink stamp, a spindle of blank CD-ROMs, and a bunch of cassette tapes. I look over the titles on the spines of the tapes. Stockholm blues festival. Skunk Jive blues. Cassette. 99.5 FM interview...

There are more somewhere -- shouldn’t there be? One that I was sure would be in here was a ninety-minute Memorex tape given to me in high school by a Korean kid who collected blues and Nixon-era rock guitar. Side A, I remember, was an anthology of “Crossroads” and “After Midnight” covers: 

Crossroads - Cream

Crossroads - Allman Joys

Crossroads - Derek & the Dominos

After Midnight (horns mix) - Eric Clapton

After Midnight  (Michelob version) - Eric Clapton

After Midnight (Budokan version)- Eric Clapton

After Midnight No. 4 [details since forgotten]

Blues Power (Fillmore version) - Derek & the Dominos

Side B was half of Eat a Peach: 

One Way Out - Allman Brothers

Trouble No More - Allman Brothers

Mountain Jam - Allman Brothers

Maybe it’s in a box that I’ve since forgotten about. Or it’s entirely possible this tape didn’t make the cut when I moved. Do I even need it, if I remember this much?