It's 2000. We've probably been drinking or smoking grass or both. It's probably a weeknight.
Me: "Let's play a show."
You: "Cool, I'll play guitar."
Me: "Cool, I'll play Rhodes through 14 pedals I don't know how to use."
You: "Should we practice?"
Me: "Sure."
We practice. Once. During the practice it feels like we're living on different continents in cultures with vastly incompatible languages. I try to change to a simple lead but you don't follow it. I try to follow what you're doing (some of which would be actually be interesting if we ever synced around it) but you change it up into something discordant and lousy as soon as you catch me at that.
It sucks so we give it a name -- Moronic Emphasis, I think it was -- and take it on the road. Specifically to Desmond's, this bar on Park in the 20s It's a Thursday or Friday night and we're opening for Enter Sandman, which is this terrible not-quite-punk band led by this terrible-not-quite-communist who in 1994 legally changed his name to Sandman. So it's not really the name of the band so much as it is the name of this guy Sandman who enters. You know that I'm not making this up.
The show feels like something of a coup. You've got your guitar and I've got 14 pedals I don't know how to use, along with a Fender Rhodes piano with half the keys broken that weighs about a thousand pounds. We play for 20 minutes. I try to lead but you dodge that expertly, I try to follow but you kick me under the piano. A tritone goes off between us and you smile to yourself, like, yeah, that's the one.
A girl says "are you guys going to start?" She's trying to heckle us but the joke's on her because she just watched us meanderingly noodle without talent in opposite directions for 20 minutes. We stop. Whatever irony in her reaction is neutralized by the fact that she can never have the time back. I get kind of shy on stage (especially when I know it's awful) but as your and my final chords go off vaguely within the same minute and somewhere on the same circle of fifths I get up the nerve to look up.
There are about a dozen frat guys in the bar, or what we would have called frat guys in college and what in another milieu might be called fascists. Anyway, my point is that all of these chumps look downcast, as if we've ruined their nights, like somebody let a pledge die or something. A few say angry things but the joke's on them, they just watched us noodle without a shred of talent for maybe half an hour to 45 minutes.
Enter Sandman. I always thought he was something of a nimrod but he did stick up for us that night. He said "Some people just don't know experimental music when they hear it." Then he launched into some bullshit first song and I bought us beers and we pretended to be happy with how it had gone, performing in lock step for the first and only time in our lives.
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