Mirage

Open mic night, in any location, is rife with up and comers and failed acts – forty-something’s reliving a lost past in which music was a gateway to fame, fortune, and one-night stands mediated by drug use and drinking. Or the people that see the misty outline of that gateway walled up on four sides by collars, ties, home ownership, taxes, and money sucking children. Those who frequent the event pass a test when they first begin, not based on ability or charisma but frequency. The hierarchies are there – the regulars are lazing in the back, flicking supercilious glances at the performer on-stage, leaning over to their band mate and whispering with a grin. Both are clutching plastic cups filed with cheap beer that falls occasionally from overgrown beards onto the table. Drink is taken for granted, a requisite for the regulars but with the worth of a brightly colored rock. The new guys are guzzling. Their legs are shaky, their answers monosyllabic and slurred. They glance at the stage occasionally in a look that encompasses both anxiety and potential energy, fear and a growing sense of importance. The hecklers too, drunk before sunset has reddened the light passing through the bar windows, lean over themselves and grip rock chix by the waist, sniffing into blonde-streaked hair and kissing cheeks clotted by makeup. They yell boisterously at anything that moves, snorting like rhinoceroses and cursing like Bill Hicks.

PJ’s in Manhattan, Kansas is one of these bars. It is also one of the few music bars in the small college town and, as such, it has a certain mystique when one first arrives. Its name is thrown around the Friday night milieu; flyers emblazoned with its name cover lampposts and windows like wallpaper. Auntie Mae’s, a bar down the street, has folk and bluegrass acts; Kathouse has the big names; but PJ’s is egalitarian and equal-opportunity – more DIY and less atmosphere. True, many cringe when its name comes up, but PJ’s seems to be both a curse and a spiritual affirmation – music is alive but has a bit of a limp it says.

The brick front hosts a marquee that can be seen from the center of the party central, aggieville. It calls out to drunks: “Purgatory Paradise, Placate, Bearded Assholes, Puke Weasel, Terror Tractor, Poirot, A Case of Bad Karma, Northern Lights, Shhh.” The names reek of locality and clear channel. The building sits across the street from a dominos and The Library, a liquor store used by college students to bolster the legitimacy of their drunkenness. “I went to the library and got fucked up,” for example.

The door to the bar is open on warm nights and on passing one can hear the muffled whine of a guitar through the flyer covered windows or the screams of a touring emo power pop group wafting through the air on the winds of evaporated hair dye and tears. On occasion, a ridiculously large trailer or bus is parked next to the door. An ill-conceived logo is slapped onto the side. “Come inside!” it says in fiery one-hundred point font, “We’re having a rocking good time and you will too.”

On moving inside, past the rotating cast of door people, the bar is split into two fairly distinct sections. There is no wall between them but as the night wears on the metaphysical boards are shored up by a clay-like crowd molded slowly into those who hate what is happening onstage and those who don’t particularly mind it. The former, in an act of visual if not auditory defiance, lean against the bar ordering drinks, giving away nothing as to how they feel about the music or the musicians. Or they play at a pool table angled toward the center of the room like an arrow. The occasional crack of pool balls reverberates through the room followed by a yelp of triumph or “shit”. Round, worn tables and stools, the battalions of years of lacquer layers and beer stains, lay like bones for the listeners. Ambitious touring bands, not yet broken by indifference and starvation, try to move the tables back for extra rock room. On average this extra bit is taken up by a single person, one foot rocking on the lip of the stage, straddling the few inches of space between audience and band. The head is flailing dangerously; rock horns optional. Behind the musicians, strung from wall to wall, is an enormous tarp Budweiser sign. It is a backdrop, a fatal reminder of illegitimacy and the money that floats ephemeral about the music industry. “Drink more and the music gets better,” it sneers.

But beyond all this, the place is an opportunity for any person to get onstage and fulfill some creative void, crushed gemlike between libido and class. Every Sunday night is open-mic night. It has turned one of the slowest bar nights into something of a tradition for PJ’s. The only requisite is the courage to go onstage and play your music or, in many cases, someone else’s.

Gerard is one of these brave souls. He is a man in his mid-twenties, built powerfully from his time in the military in simple black shirt and jeans. His head is shaved in the army style, tight on the sides, high on the top. He stands comfortably, sharing drinks with a group but drinking slowly. He seems an odd candidate to play music in front of a group, flanked on each side by his army friends who could easily fit into the heckler category. They yell PT slogans at between-song banter. Hooahs run wild as Gerard ridicules himself for ruining Johnny Cash after a turn of Ring of Fire.

“I’m glad you like it. Now fucking go out and listen to the real thing.”

He sits in the middle of an empty stage lit by a red and orange fluorescence. This is sometimes the most difficult act to listen to – the solo performance. Individuals playing at open mic tend to be nervous, stuttering out a few words between songs and fumbling through a set comprised entirely of late-80’s early 90’s rock – Sex and Candy blending into Hootie. But Gerard plays the crowd. He is self-deprecating. He understands his courage may outweigh his talent. Pointing to his friends he says:

“These are the only people enjoying this and they’re wasted.”

He is also entirely serious. Behind the jokes and the occasionally missed notes, Gerard wants this to be good. He practiced for the event, repeating the lines to Breaking the Law a million times in his head. Again and again, So much for the golden future, I cant even start I’ve had every promise broken, there’s anger in my heart You don’t know what its like, you don’t have a clue If you did you’d find yourselves doing the same thing too. Breaking the Law, breaking the law.

Blonde-Ponytail is one of the regulars. He goes on with three others after Gerard finishes. He has been coming to this event every week for years, finding it easier than getting a gig or maybe enjoying the feel of a show every week. He is a large man; around six-foot-two two-hundred some pounds. He put his fist through a window once. He is very possibly the only angry hippie I have ever met. His usual pre-show process consists of smoking dope outside in small parking lot lined by a tanning parlor and stacked apartment complexes leaning against their walkways and stairwells. He comes back into the bar with eyes glazed over in a thick red haze. When he stares, one thinks of old photos, animal eyes in the dark, Devo, and early flights, but mostly the animal eyes. He plays bass, exclusively slap. During the five minute hectic sound check, the tenor pop, slap sound reverberates throughout the room. The other members, just as drugged out but less aggro, set up their instruments while they occasionally run at full wandering gait into speaker cabs and cymbals. Each song lasts ten or so minutes. Nine and a half of that time taken up by extended solos played on two or three chord changes. C G D, C G D, C G D, the lines of triplets and wah sounds blend together like a cheap damask surface. Blonde-Ponytail, his face raised in an ecstasy of wildly fingered sixteenths, looks like a chubby desexed Maria Falconetti staring up at her judges waiting for her role of Joan of Arc to close in a blaze. His judges are the crowd, but he ignores the rolled eyes and faces hidden behind high life bottles and he looks forever upwards.

I saw Blonde-Ponytail play once before. Arthur Murphy, my best friend throughout my college years, was obsessed with the concept of open-mic night. We were playing in a band together, he on vocals and guitar, me on dissonance. Every weekend, as Sunday drew ever closer, he would hint at PJ’s laughing slightly as he mentioned it, as if the concept was both the most entertaining thing he could think of and the most ridiculous. I should preempt this with the certain role we had within the Manhattan community. Through sheer ridicule from most of the fraternity population, a small group of tight-pants, elitist music snobs, and skirt/tights combinations inextricably formed. We were the creative writing majors who wanted to be Bukowski or Miller; the conceptual artists; the atheists and the solipsists; Henry Rollins worshippers and Mascis hairstyles; reformed Magic the Gathering players; band shirts and Woody Allen blazers. A clock could be set to the frequency “fag” was thrown our way as if that should be a word we were afraid of. In effect, when I finally bowed to Arthur’s unending hints, we were already an unwanted presence at the PJ’s open mic club.

Six of us came together to play the event under the moniker Shaye Saint John, named after an internet vedette. Our drummer was a photography major with pink hair who opted for sandals rather than drumsticks, Arthur was on vocals and guitar, I played saxophone, and our maraca player played maracas. The two other people wandered the bar. We were not serious. The audience was incensed. Between songs, one or two claps and a resounding boo cleared the soundlessness, undercut by clinking glasses and low conversations. The boo’s gave us courage. After fifteen or so minutes of Boredoms-style songs, with Arthur throwing in an occasional, “Shut the fuck up! Aaaahhh!” the mics were turned off. Our turn was over we were told.

But Arthur wasn’t. He was a fairly accomplished solo artist in the town, and he had signed himself up for two sets, the second meant to be laid back and acoustic. Arthur drank too much. Upon forgetting some of his words, he would interject a smoke-induced guttural yell and strum harder. After a few minutes of this, Blonde-Ponytail walked onstage and began slapping away. The following conversation ensued:

“What the fuck are you doing?” says Arthur

“Why don’t you put your dick in my mouth!” says Ponytail

“Huh?” says Arthur

“Put your dick in my mouth!” says Ponytail

“What the hell is wrong with you?” says Arthur

Blonde Ponytail was pulled away before he could punch or sodomize my 140 pound friend into a pulp, and we were told to get out of the bar.

We were antagonistic. We broke the unofficial rules surrounding the event. I don’t think we even had good intentions, “to shake the place up” so to speak. The night means something to nearly every person who gets on the stage. They rehearse and built up a repertoire of faithful covers, each one a remnant or display of the repressed creative individual. It is meant to be an equal-opportunity event, the equivalent of a karaoke bar or hunting club, but bound by rules made by its very nature. It is a miniature world surrounded by but separate from jobs and classes, shitty housing and Pabst Blue Ribbon cans stacked all over the room. You can imagine yourself doing this all the time, touring the country, wild crowds hushed during a balladic tale of love lost or fighting to take something off during an uninhibited account of sexual prowess. Welcome to the American Dream Matthew Lesko style, where money and fame are handed to you. But the miniature world can be popped like a smoky bubble. When it does, maddened figures stream out like Maenads drunk and frenzied with bakcheia. We escaped better than we probably deserved. They lost their rockstar dreams and everyone needs a mirage.

~ by cryptidisicon on October 24, 2007.