Virgil

This happened back in September, but I've been futzing with the blog for a while now before posting it.

We went out the other night to dinner at an old friend’s house. This was a reunion of sorts, something we do every few years when by chance what remains of the old gang of City College English majors get together. Yes, we go back to undergrad college, which is 24 years ago, and we have dwindled down to a half a dozen. One of the gang, D (I’m going to use first initials), was in town from Edinburgh (yes Scotland) and we had to take the opportunity to catch up on old times. Since S and his wife E have children, we decided to not meet out but to meet at Steve’s apartment for dinner. There was my wife, who was never part of this group but has met them through the years, and T, and B, who I hadn’t seen in around a dozen or more years. No we do not meet frequently any longer, but it’s always a blast.

I had not remembered how small these Manhattan apartments were. I had not been to S and E’s place in ages. I don’t know how the two of them and two children live in a two room apartment. That’s it, two rooms with a little kitchenette partitioned. Anyway that’s the setting and each guest brought a bottle of wine and by the end of the night the six of us (my wife doesn’t drink) finished five bottles I think. Yeah I was in no shape to drive, and thank God for wives that don’t drink.

Thank God also we didn’t talk politics. They know I don’t share their views, and of course you guys know mine here, and you can imagine their’s. Perhaps you can’t. Not only are they on the liberal side of the divide, they are on the radical side of liberal. Perhaps with age (and they are my age and older) they may, and I only speculate here, may have moderated their views, and then only perhaps a little. D mentioned she is now a volunteer with Greenpeace, and I remember B twenty years ago was a committed communist (actually it sounds hilarious today) before the Berlin Wall came down when he was studying Russian and knew the nuanced differences between Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Ah, how silly that all sounds now but when we were in college back in the 1980’s there really was a core of communists. And I can verify that the media is leftist in their outlook, both T and B write for magazines.

So I feared a political discussion. And politics in the US right around now is so hyper partisan, emotions raging over the new administration and their agenda. I was afraid we might get into some of that, since we did the last time we met, and it wasn’t all that pretty a discussion. Literature was only briefly discussed, just a mention of anything good we may have recently read. I can’t even recall what was said. What we really talked about was music.

So we had settled down to eat, a nice of meal E had prepared of curried rice, shrimp, and vegetables, and something else I fail to recall. Ah, but the wine was flowing. And we talked about music. I came realize something while I was sitting, sipping a merlot, that what really held the group together all these years was not our love of literature, though we all had met in literature classes and considered ourselves a literature group. Sure we had in the past met for Shakespeare in the Park (an annual summer event where Shakespeare plays are put on in Central Park) and we would occasionally talk about a novel we had read or a novelist that we had met or a Shakespeare play. For a brief period way back when, the writer Walter Mosley was part of our little circle, well before he hit it big. And it was a thrill for the group when President Bill Clinton mentioned that Mosley was his favorite writer. And we all said, hey we know him! But that was years ago.

No, though, it was not literature that kept our group together. I realized this while I was now sipping on my Cabernet Sauvignon. What had held us together was our love of music, and especially the blues. But even before I get to the blues, S was in a clamor because two nights before he got to see John Fogarty for free playing at the South Street Seaport. It was one of those summer concert things that are put on for the general public and I assume paid for by the city. Not sure, but it was open for the public and the South Street Seaport is sort of a tourist destination in downtown Manhattan, a sort of seaport with pubs and restaurants. I assume they set Fogarty up on the pier. For those that may not know, John Fogarty was the key member of the rock band Credence Clearwater Revival. S said that he was great, playing old CCR stuff and some of his solo new stuff. What surprised S was that such a top name performer had such a small turn out, so that he got to almost talk to him in between songs. S said that as the dusk came in and a moon rose over the water and over Fogarty’s shoulder, S yelled out “Bad Moon Rising, Bad Moon Rising” in an effort to get him to play the song. And either Fogarty acknowledged it or he played it coincidentally, but he did. For those that may not know, this is “Bad Moon Rising”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYnySGM9dQA.

And then we started discussing The Who, perhaps as we opened the bottle of Shiraz. S had to put on Quadrophenia on the CD player, one of The Who’s great albums. He was telling me how he had been in a discussion of it with, oh who knows who, and that he had a new appreciation for it. Now I’ve got a few Who albums, but not that one, though I have all the big name songs that came off it. And when S said that he and whoever he had been talking to about the album came to the conclusion that the song “Can You See the Real Me” was possibly the greatest single rock song, I said no way. I had too vague a memory of the song but couldn’t pin it down exactly. I remembered the closing lyrics, “Can you see the real me, me, me, me, me” but the melody was off in the ether-atmosphere of my mind. The greatest rock song, no way possible. But he said yeah you got to hear it, and I said alright put it on. But when “Can You Hear the Real Me” came on, we dissected it carefully, playing it a number of times. Wow, S. convinced me. I’m not sure I would call it the greatest, but it’s certainly up among the tops. First of all the lead is actually played by the bass (Entwhistle is possibly the greatest all time rock bassist) while the drums (Keith Moon is the greatest rock drummer) and Townshend’s guitar create such a rhythmic intensity that it just knocks you out. And Daltry’s vocals deliver. Here, listen to this carefully and tell me this is not one of the greatest rock songs of all time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Or4QGI80Y.
And then we started to reminisce. I think at this point the bottle was a Pinot Noir, but at this point who could taste the difference. We talked about our times at the blues club down in Greenwich Village. We used to meet there on a late Saturday night, late like getting there after midnight and listening to the blues until two or three in the morning. The place was called Terra Blues, and the décor was simply atrocious. Come to think of it, all blues clubs usually come in two types of décor, grungy or atrocious. Terra Blues probably combined the two into its own horrendous interior design: outlandish punk posters, iconoclastic pictures, walls painted black, and seedy, cheap furnishings. It was also a time when you could smoke at the clubs and by late evening you could see a cloud of cigarette smoke half way up the ceiling. God, I have never smoked but after a few hours in that place I would be coughing like I smoked a few packs of unfiltered Camels. But it was packed, and that was with a hefty cover charge and double the normal priced beer, and you would be lucky to get a table, but mostly you stood and if the band was really hot and you rocked to the syncopated rhythm. And the tables were no more than five feet from the stage, so the sound was right on top of you.

Back to the dinner table, S said he had just bought Michael Powers’ new disk. I said, Powers has his own CD? Michael Powers was, and probably still is, the top billing at Terra. He was fantastic. Great blues voice and awesome guitar player. It came to the point we would only go to Terra if Powers was playing. At one point I was convinced D had become a Michael Powers groupie. She would go up to the stage and she would whisper to him and they would smile, and Lord knows what they talked about. She said she even went to see him in somewhere in Europe or was it England, I don’t recall. But she’s English and I guess it was possible they were in London or somewhere coincidentally, but I know she had an infatuation for him. Now as the evening would get on and the music hotter, Powers would, at least when he was younger, get out from the stage and move out into the audience, still playing his guitar. When he played, it was like waves of rhythm pulsating out, as if that cloud of cigarette smoke above us was throbbing to the rhythm. That was a thrill, and probably having had a few beers by then and numbed by the smoke, it felt like you were under a spell from the music, as if you were riding some sort of carpet to heaven.

But that was before Powers lost his leg. Yes he lost his leg from diabetes. I think it was from the knee down. I turned to S and asked, “how do you let something like that go?”
“What do you mean?”
“A whole leg gets gangrene in this day and age?”
“I guess he didn’t realize it.”
“Yeah, but diabetics lose their toes. How does one let it go so long that it creeps up the leg before you have it looked at?”
S turned to me, and with a smile said, “He’s a f’ckn musician.”

Here are some video clips of Michael Powers. I picked the ones where he’s playing in Terra Blues. Hope you like them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_jqdezeSik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dssf0TaxfE