Freedom [73]
Patty, carrying earplugs, went along with Walter to the show that night. The Sick Chelseas, a foursome of assonant local girls barely older than Jessica, opened for the Traumatics, and Patty found herself trying to guess which of the four Richard had been hitting on backstage. She wasn’t feeling jealous of the girls, she was feeling sad for Richard. It was finally sinking in, with both her and Walter, that in spite of being a good musician and a good writer Richard was not having the best life: had not actually been kidding with all his self-deprecation and avowals of admiration and envy of her and Walter. After the Sick Chelseas finished playing, their late-adolescent friends seeped out of the club and left behind no more than thirty die-hard Traumatics fans—white, male, scruffy, and even less young than they used to be—to hear Richard’s deadpan banter (“We want to thank you guys for coming to this 400 Bar and not the other, more popular 400 Bar . . . We seem to have made the same mistake ourselves”) and then a rollicking rendition of their new record’s title song—
What tiny little heads up in those big fat SUVs!
My friends, you look insanely happy at the wheel!
And the Circuit City smiling of a hundred Kathy Lees!
A wall of Regis Philbins! I tell you I’m starting to feel
INSANELY HAPPY! INSANELY HAPPY!
and, later, an interminable and more typically repellent song, “TCBY,” consisting mostly of guitar noise reminiscent of razor blades and broken glass, over which Richard chanted poetry—
They can buy you
They can butcher you
Tritely, cutely branded yogurt
The cat barfed yesterday
Techno cream, beige yellow
Treat created by yes-men
They can bully you
They can bury you
Trampled choked benighted youth
Taught consumerism by yahoos
This can’t be the country’s best
This can’t be the country’s best
and finally his slow, country-sounding song, “Dark Side of the Bar,” which dampened Patty’s eyes with sadness for him—
There’s an unmarked door to nowhere
On the dark side of the bar
And all I ever wanted was
To be lost in space with you
The reports of our demise
Pursue us through the vacuum
We took a wrong turn at the pay phones
We were never seen again
The band was good—Richard and Herrera had been playing together for almost twenty years—but it was hard to imagine any band being good enough to overcome the desolation of the too-small house. After a single encore, “I Hate Sunshine,” Richard didn’t exit to the side of the stage but simply parked his guitar on a stand, lit a cigarette, and hopped down to the floor.
“You guys were nice to stay,” he said to the Berglunds. “I know you’ve got to get up early.”
“It was great! You were great!” Patty said.
“Seriously, I think this is your best record yet,” Walter said. “These are terrific songs. It’s another big step forward.”
“Yeah.” Richard, distracted, was scanning the back of the club, looking to see if any of the Sick Chelseas were lingering. Sure enough, one was. Not the conventionally pretty bassist whom Patty would have put her money on, but the tall and sour and disaffected-looking drummer, which of course made more sense as soon as Patty thought about it. “There’s somebody waiting to talk to me,” Richard said. “You’re probably going to want to head right home, but we can all go out together if you want.”
“No, you go,” Walter said.
“Really wonderful to hear you play, Richard,” Patty said. She put a friendly hand on his arm and then watched him walk over to the sour drummer.
On the way home to Ramsey Hill, in the family Volvo, Walter raved about the excellences of Insanely Happy and the debased taste of an American public that turned out by the millions for the Dave Matthews Band and didn’t even know that Richard Katz existed.
“Sorry,” Patty said. “Remind me again what’s wrong with Dave Matthews?”
“Basically everything, except