When The Music 's Over

Scattered all over the floor, are empty tall boys of Olympia beer. Near my head, on top of a speaker, is a bottle half full of stale beer. I pick it up and take a sniff out of morbid curiosity. I guess it’s been sitting there, warming--aging--for a few weeks at least. The jam room is filled with wires. Waves of them splashing against everything old and fusty. These guys have been binging on alcohol and minimum wage jobs for years. Pete, on the drums, has his shirt off and a head band soaked in sweat tied around his head to keep his mullet hair out of his eyes. The middle of his body, where all the important body parts are, is made of beer and bowling alley food but he's beating those drums like every moment is an epiphany. The character in the middle of the room, playing guitar--as pale and sad as a Tim Burton caricature, is Adam. He’s drunk, stoned, swaying with eyes half glazed, half open. Some people always talk but never listen. Bob is that kind of person and he is stealing the musical conversation with an endless loop of funk beats slapped out on his bass guitar. I’m sitting in a worn lounge chair: a stray from the free box in some college kids summer junk pile. I’m surrounded by squalor. Shiny things in department stores inevitably end up tarnished, stained, reeking in the basement, even if does take generations. In millions of years they will be mined as fossil fuels but for now they fill our homes.

The music stops for a moment and the band takes gulps of beer and laugh. I can see through the mini blinds, the flooded streets and the dead cattle and phone poles as floats in a solemn parade procession. The sun is setting.

I think about what music is and realize for the first time, with clarity, that its just conversation using vibrating tools instead of our own living tissue: vocal cords. Musicians with their power cords wrapped around them are cyborgs and when the power goes out the music will change. Acoustic guitar instead of electric. A piano where there was a keyboard. Architectural change will follow; to magnify the tiny voice of plain wood and wire.

The music starts again. Bob starts. A wonderfully mellow ballad for a change. I can see relief and hope start to take shape in our faces. It doesn’t last long. Bob stops self-consciously, looking like he wished he could take back what he just played--like he might have shown something that’s supposed to stay hidden. He laughs and lurches and then starts slapping funk out of his bass and Pete follows with a butt rock beat and Adam blows away, joining the dead cattle.