Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [71]
Devastating was more the first word Stubblefield came up with, no matter the current fashion. And dangerous, possibly, to assume the outfit was not worn somewhat ironically.
INSIDE THE ROADHOUSE, all was murk. Light mostly from three neon beer signs over the ancient oaken bar. The puncheons squeaked against their pegs as footsteps fell upon them, and they swagged between the stout joists where gravity and decay and all the other evil shit time wreaks against material things had dragged them downward. Stubblefield led Luce through the dancers to a back booth, the tabletop pale yellow Formica patterned with overlapping black outlines of boomerangs. Not as jolly a place as Luce had guessed, though she had nothing to guess upon but scenes from black-and-white movies where nightspots were pretty glamorous and existed somewhere far away from here.
They were barely seated when two tall rum and Cokes magically appeared. Luce looked at them and then at Stubblefield.
—El patrón, he said. At least for now.
A three-piece band played on a raw plywood flat barely six inches higher than the floor, hammering out “Baby Blue” from meager materials. A guitar, a bass, a drum kit. And the guitarist’s urgent hog-calling vocalizations, the kind where you can’t understand a single word but the message is unmistakable. The drummer was maybe a little eager with his rolls and cymbal crashes. The guitarist pushed his picking and singing through a tweed Fender Bassman amp the size of a suitcase. The volume cranked so high that tubes blew regularly enough that he kept a cardboard box of 12AX7s beside the amp like a janitor with his light bulbs. He played a black lacquered guitar, shining with points of light from the neon.
Stubblefield asked if Luce would like to dance, and she said, Not yet.
The band’s covers were mostly the kinds of songs people wrote in the past when everybody took songs more seriously. Back a couple or three years, when Gene Vincent and Charlie Feathers and Groovey Joe Poovey were having hits. Guitar licks falling like little ball-peen hammers beating on roof tin, and some young man at the edge of sanity shouting all his yearning and anger for the world to hear, keening it out mad in the manner of old battlefield Celts. Two and a quarter minutes of urgent utterance broadcast mostly over radio stations you couldn’t pick up until dark.
At some point, the band tuned endlessly and then played an original composition, made up by the singer-guitarist himself. He had drawn various ideas from circuit-rider hymnals, Stephen Foster, Uncle Dave Macon, many elder bluesmen. Also George Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Elvis. It was the history of America filtered through the mind of a handsome self-educated country crackpot with a pompadour and a Telecaster. The dancers all sat down. For the last lines of the song, the singer fell to one prayerful knee, and the job of making eye contact with the audience rested entirely on the band, for the singer pitched his crazed unblinking gaze toward higher things, a better world where desire prevailed beyond understanding.
At the end of the song, the band took a break and the composer came over and scooted next to Luce across the burgundy vinyl. A courtesy call on the new owner. A round of three rum and Cokes materialized. The guitarist’s greased hair was a shade of Superman black that never grew out of any earthling’s head. Also, he sported a mustache and a tuft of growth beneath his lower lip the same absurd color. Some hillbilly hipster reimagining himself as Nathan Bedford Forrest or