Gutbucket Quest (23 page)

20

The blues, like the dream, continues to retain its rights
—
even if its future is uncertain. We see in it an appeal to close the shutters on a withered concept of virtue and a harsh and oppressive civilization; we see in it a demand for non-repression, elaborated by the images of a capacity for fantasy that has not been crushed. We see in it one of the few modern . . . poetic voices through which humanity has fiercely fought for, and managed to regain, a semblance of its true dignity.

—Paul Garon,
Blues and the Poetic Spirit

S
lim stood on stage, ready to play. Nadine was on his left, ready to sing with him. Progress held his right down, playing rhythm guitar. Belizaire stood in the background, hefting the biggest, heaviest-looking bass Slim had ever seen.

It looked to be made of bone, but no bone could possibly be that large or flat. Two of Elijigbo’s drummers held the floor down. Progress had asked him if he wanted a keyboard player, but Slim had declined. He’d always found keyboards disruptive and dissonant in the kind of blues he wanted to play.

An odd hush had fallen over the festival town. Many of the people had gathered on what Slim had always thought of as the threshing floor, where the gate usually stood or sat. He knew they were waiting
to see what the new boy had. He and Nadine had made love and smoked a joint beforehand, but he was still nervous. It was a new feeling for him. The stage had always been home for him, the place he was at his best. He’d always been ready and steady on the stage.

In the old days, friends like Fogarty and McKee and Sunflower had said he was the only human being alive who never suffered from stage fright, and that fact, they said, made them wonder about his humanity. It had been a good joke, then. But now, he was nervous on stage for the first time in his life.

Songs. He needed songs. The sound men were tweaking the boards, the band was ready to play, Nadine was ready to sing. And Slim’s fingers were itching.

“Son,” Progress said. “You know what you wanna play?”

“Yeah, I guess. You wanna make a list?”

Progress pulled out a frayed old notebook and a stubby, chewed pencil. “Okay,” he said. “Shoot it to me.”

“Let’s see,” Slim said. “You tell me if you don’t know any of these. Uhm, ‘Dust My Blues,’ ‘Alberta,’ ‘Two Trains Runnin’,’ ‘Lend Me Your Love,’ ‘Worried About My Baby,’ ‘Ridin’ in the Moonlight,’ ‘Spoonful,’ and maybe ‘The Red Rooster.’ That seem like a good set?”

“S’copacetic with me,” Progress said. “Ain’t none of ’em we don’t know well enough. What you wanna start with?”

“How about ‘Dust My Blues’? Who did it here in Tejas?”

“Man named James Son Thomas,” Progress said.

“In my world, it was a cat named Elmore James. Bad, bad player.” Slim hitched his guitar up to playing position, “Let’s do it,” he said.

He started out with the twelfth-fret hammer and slide that Elmore used so much, setting up the rhythm and the groove for Nadine to jump into.

“I’m gonna get up in the mornin’,” she sang. “I believe I’ll dust my blues.”

Slim played a little passing riff in the change from E to A. Just enough to accentuate the positive.

“
I’m gonna get up in the mornin’,

I believe I’ll dust my blues.

I gotta leave my baby,

I got no time to lose.”

Slim hammered on the twelve again, listening to the monitors to see how he sounded, then he smoothed down as Nadine went into the second verse. Sometimes he was a busy player, injecting grace notes into the spaces, but something was making him lay back. The amp? It sounded good, distorted just right to add a little dirtiness to the tones. But he felt a reluctance to play any of the passing riffs he was used to, any notes that weren’t the right ones. That seemed all right, though. Not worth fighting about.

Nadine was tearing the song up. Slim had never heard a woman sing it before, but Nadine was getting down low and wet, making her voice cut through. He was impressed. He’d heard some mighty fine blues singers in his time, but Nadine had the kind of voice that a player dreams of working with, the kind of voice that jumps right into the groove and grabs people by the balls, be they male or female. Now, he could understand her deep need, her attitude about the power and wanting it to be all
her
behind the music.

He could feel the power rising in him, softly and easily, growing in his gut and flowing out into his mind and fingers. He could feel it passing into the strings, into the guitar, and from there, into the amp. And somehow, by some quirky feedback loop between the speakers and the pickups on the guitar, the amp was feeding the power back to him. He could see how people would think the amp was fighting them. It was uncomfortable and devious, but he laid back and tried to
accept it. When he relaxed and let it go, he could loosen up more, and play in his own style.

The song ended, and he called out, “Red Rooster,” and the band segued right into it. The music snapped and popped and growled and slinked and left a little more room for him to play. He started adding grace notes and using the strings to get the chicken scratch and cat strut sounds that he used to make the song his own.

Nadine almost crooned the old song. Her voice was low and soft and deep. He watched her knees bend and her ass shake as she reached down into herself to grab on to the arrogance and slyness the song needed. He watched her thrust her hips out as she slywalked to the groove, bending and shaking with the words. He quickly pulled his pocketknife out of his pants. He’d filed down and polished the backside, and when his solo was ready to stand forward, he used it to play slide, trying to duplicate on strings the rhythm of the song, and the slow, languid way he played slide, it came out as what he called “fuck music.” He called it that, he and others, because you couldn’t hear the groove and the lowdown slide without thinking of steamy, hot sex. He liked it, and the smile on Nadine’s face as she laid back to give him room told him that she liked it as well.

They finished off the “Rooster,” and he started fingertapping the nine-note hook riff for “Spoonful.” He laid a heavy sustain and vibrato on the lingering eighth note. He’d been told he had a strange vibrato. Most players shifted and bent the string up and down. Slim had taken his vibrato from violin players, stretching the string back and forth sideways. People had tried to tell him that, with steel strings, it took too much strength for too little effect, but he liked the subtlety and distinction of it.

He stepped up to the mike and motioned to Nadine to let him sing. He didn’t do it often, but “Spoonful” had always been one of his favorite songs. He tried to pitch his voice low and quiet, where he thought it sounded decent. He knew he couldn’t come close to anything
anyone would actually call singing, but he had heart and enjoyed it. It was, after all, just a rehearsal. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t sung before. He could pass if he didn’t push it, and there were a few songs he could pull off without falling down.

“
Well, it might be a spoonful of diamonds,

And it might be a spoonful of gold,

But just one spoon of your precious love,

Satisfies my soul
. . .”

After the first verse, Nadine stepped up and began to sing with him. To his astonishment, she pitched and adjusted her voice somehow, and managed to sing in harmony with him, and it worked. No one had ever done it before, but it worked. He felt, as he and Nadine sang, that the power was about to explode inside him. His dick got hard and his hands seemed to glow red and itch. It felt good. So good that, when his solo came around he cut loose completely, finding a speed and a groove he’d never been behind in his life. He played for twenty-four bars and didn’t want to quit, so the band let him go on jamming.

Offstage, people were dancing and smiling. Some few stood and stared, caught up by the power in a sort of helplessness. Dust devils formed and spun around the threshing floor, whirling between the dancers, picking up leaves and twigs until they assumed a kind of transient solidity. The trees bowed and swayed and rustled, leaning toward the stage as even they began to swing with the groove.

Nadine stared at him wide-eyed as he hammered down on the riffs that were evolving under his fingers. It was as if each note he played was the culmination and sum of every note that had come before, and the partial exposition of each note that was yet to come. Slim’s eyes were closed and he was playing to Nadine, unaware that the playing had, for that moment in time, brought the entire festival city to a laughing, dancing halt. He had surrendered without knowing
it, he was in control without awareness. A mystic would have called it enlightenment, but Slim wasn’t conscious of any great happening. In giving his heart to Nadine, playing for her, he opened the rest of himself up to the power, and let it flow out of him. He only played.

He took his scale down to a diminished seventh, remembering the Climax Blues Band version of the song. For the first time in his life, he played into what most people in his world would have called jazz. He didn’t think about it, didn’t call it by any name, he just played through, following the notes that seemed to build by themselves. The playing was slower, more tentative, because of unfamiliarity. But it seemed to smooth the frenetic power his playing had created. The dust devils fell apart into powder, the dancers slowed and stopped. People began to once again go about their business. Slim finally felt the power leave him. He let go of it without reluctance, completed, and the band let the song end.

Slim turned to Progress. “That was pretty good, huh?”

The band broke into wild laughter. Belizaire fell to the ground, his raucous guffaws ringing out over all the others. Progress was breathless and teary-eyed from it. Even Nadine was laughing. Slim looked around at them, puzzled.

“What is this?” he said. “What’s so funny?”

Progress worked hard to catch his breath. “Oh my,” he said, the laughter still in his eyes and barely gone from his voice. He un-strapped his guitar and stood it in a stand. Slim did the same. Progress walked over to him and put his arm around Slim’s shoulders.

“Son,” he said, still chuckling. “You just knocked this whole festival into a rocked hat. You really don’t know, do you?”

“Know
what?”

“You just here and now played with more power than anyone I ever did see. You had every single man, woman and child here in the palm of your hand. You coulda done
anything.”

Slim walked around in circles. Then he grabbed Nadine’s hand, held it, and faced Progress again.

“All I did was play,” he said. “I was just playing for Nadine, ’cause she sang with me.”

“That’s just the point, son. You didn’t
care
about the power, so you just let it go, you surrendered. Once you did that, nothin’ else mattered. Whoo, boy! You did some playin’. I ain’t never seen nobody reach out the power like that.”

“Was it good?” Slim asked timidly.

“Good?” Progress said incredulously. “
Good?
Son, if you’d had the Gutbucket in those hands, you’d have about torn the place up entire. They’d have been dancin’ and standin’ all the way into town. Good?” Progress laughed again. “Yep, it was good. It was good enough that, fearful as I is, I can hardly wait for tomorrow, when it’s our time to play.”

“Don’t we need to rehearse more?” Slim asked.

“Not after
that.
I don’t think none of us is ready to play no more behind that. You just be thinkin’ of good songs you can pick.” Progress shifted his attention to Nadine, who had been standing quietly at Slim’s side. “Nadine, honey,” he said. “Seems like as if you set it up for Slim. You want to try to figure out how you can do the same thing tomorrow?”

“Sure Daddy,” she said. “My man and I won’t let you down.”

Her
man, Slim thought. He liked the sound of possessiveness in her voice, liked the attitude the phrase conveyed.

“Well, chillen,” Progress said tiredly. “I gots to go get me some rest and talk to some folks about this and that. You two go on ahead and have some fun. Meet some of the peoples that done come out here.” He walked off with Belizaire, leaving Slim and Nadine standing alone on stage.

“So, what now?” Slim said.

Nadine shrugged, the motion of her shoulders giving her breasts a delightful bounce. “What do you want to do?” she asked him.

“Well,” he said. “I have two things in mind.”

“Oh yeah?” she said, looking at him through one cocked eye, her suspicions clear.

“We could go skinny dippin’ and make love in the river,” he said. “Or we could go get something to eat. Now me, I don’t know which I’d rather do. I’m hot and horny and I’d dearly love a swim and a swive. On the other hand, I’m starving to death, too. What do you think.”

“Race you to the river,” Nadine said, already starting to run.

She won the race. But Slim, despite his extra weight and short legs, wasn’t far behind.