On September 7th I rode through the soft, hot night to my last Monday night open stage at the Tranzac for at least the next three months. The Southern Cross bar was extremely cold but Sarah Greene, working the bar again, said she didn’t know how to turn it down, so it has to either be on or off.
The open stage list was wide open, so I picked number three and sat down to tune my guitar in an unusually quiet room, but I was glad for that. Of late, the music has been quite loud there. Ben Bootsma had dropped in and there was also a pretty young blonde woman sitting at the bar. She’d apparently just wandered in on a whim and had never been in the Tranzac before.
They were talking about careers and the expectations of relatives as to what one should have accomplished by a certain age. The consensus was that money isn’t important unless one is raising kids, which none of them were. Sarah commented that she loves that, in her career as a writer, she can have a friend over to her place for lunch, on a weekday. Sarah said that she could work as a psychologist right now and that Ben could teach music if he wanted to.
Chris Banks, this week’s open stage host arrived at about quarter to start time. Ten minutes later, Sarah and Bryan came in. Bryan asked if I’m doing some good writing, but I didn’t really know how to answer his question. I think that people think that when I’m writing at my table during the open stage, it is something unrelated to the event. They don’t realize that I’m actually noting everything that’s happening in the moment.
At just after 22:00, Chris was still setting up. Ten minutes later, Bryan and Sonja remembered to sign up to perform.
We started at 22:12 with Sonja, who shared with us the first song she ever wrote, which she told us, was “in true Sonja fashion, about unrequited love.” The song was called “Still Chasing Shadows” – “ … I’m the silly girl that asked for more … still chasing shadows, we all know how that goes …”
For her second song, she had Bryan come up to play guitar and she turned away from the piano to just use the vocal mic. She said that she just taught Bryan the song the day before. The song was entitled “Lorelei” and it was a kind of fairy tale love song about a mermaid and a king.
Bryan stayed onstage because he was next on the list, but Chris said at this point that we could all do three songs, so Sonja did a cover of Patty Griffin’s “Up to the Mountain”, which was apparently inspired by Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been On the Mountaintop” speech.
Bryan’s set began with “Steer You Right”, which he co-wrote with his cousin Danann, who was also there that night. It turns out that all of the originals that Bryan sings are the result of that same collaboration. Last week, Sonja had been too nervous to accompany Bryan on the piano at the same time as she was doing her backup vocal, but they’d been practicing and she did play this time. Musically it’s a pretty good song, and Sonja’s vocal has been arranged very well to make for a sweet and soulful enhancement. It’s not really my type of song, but it’s certainly as good or better than a lot of the love songs one hears becoming hits.
Bryan’s second song was “Chopping Wood”, which he’d also done last week. It’s heavily loaded with the metaphor of the process of gathering the right kind of wood to build a fire representing how one keeps love burning in a relationship.
Before Bryan began his third song, I asked him about the writing process that he and Danann use for their song writing collaboration. I wondered if one of them writes the lyrics while the other writes the music, but he said that they do everything together. I asked if twenty years down the road, when they are famous, they might each claim to have written the songs by their self. At first Bryan said that’s already happened but then he said he was just kidding. He said, “Well, you know what it’s like. You’ve probably collaborated with someone.” In terms of song writing, I really haven’t. I told him that I once had a drummer who didn’t want to play the way I asked and that the drummer had argued that a band is a democracy. I said, “No it’s not! You’re fired!”
Bryan’s third song was another of his and Danann’s, and it was called “Future Girl”. He said that it was actually the first song they had written together. It was a love song to someone who hadn't yet entered his life.
I was the next and the last performer. Counting Sarah and Chris, there were a total of six people in the room. I announced that this would be my last night, since I would have classes on Tuesday morning starting the following week. I told them that my first song would be my first attempt to perform one of my translations of a Jacques Brel song, this one being “Ne Me Quitte Pas” which was most famously translated into English by Rod McKuen. I said that Rod McKuen died early this year and he never spent a single day in jail for his crimes against poetry. I said I was unsatisfied with his translations because he didn’t transfer the darkness of Brel’s songs. Chris wanted to know who has done the song that he might have heard and Sonja answered “Edith Piaf”.
I didn’t make as many mistakes playing the song as I expected I would – “Please don’t leave me now, we need to forget all that’s tumbled down, and the many times that we got it wrong, how to get along, and the wasted days, let go of the time we so often lost and the joy it cost to keep asking why …”
I decided to do “One Hundred Hookers” as my second song, but I introduced it by talking about the poem that my friend Cad Gold Jr. had written twenty years ago that talked about him having a hundred hookers in love with him and how they have sex with him for free. I told them that when I first saw the poem I thought, “This has got to be a song!” Again, I didn’t make a lot of guitar mistakes and the little group that were there, including Sonja, thought the song was funny.
I finished with “The Next State of Grace” – “ … my mind hangs above this emotional wreck like a scavenger looking for parts, and it lives in a mansion that’s built from the sweat of my tar paper third world heart …”
It was still one hour to midnight and that was the end of the open stage. Since Chris doesn’t bring his bass with him when he hosts, he doesn’t play us in or out, so there’s a better chance of finishing early. I was glad of that because there was a thunderstorm warning for midnight and I didn't want to get caught in the rain, though it didn’t happen in my area after all.
On their way out, both Danann and Sonja were quite complimentary about my lyrics to “The Next State of Grace”.
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