Some nights

nothing goes right. I forced myself out because laziness was keeping me home. My usual spot was taken by a half-dozen plastic-bucket percussionists. Where I did set up was an acoustic nightmare, and "acoustic" is a word that applies only in the most academic sense.

I was uninspired. I couldn't get the sound right. Couldn't get the rhythm right. People sat very close to me and proceeded to ignore me. I felt that I sucked. The same problems: 4th finger bends are unreliable; solos all sounding the same; seem to be running out of ideas and confidence. I was wearing an official Yankees shirt. A guy wearing a t-shirt bearing the eloquent and spiritual message, "Jesus Hates The Yankees" sat on the bench between my and my guitar case and tuner. In other words, a day in the life.

After about an hour, I warmed up. I started losing myself in my blues, getting energetic, moving, as I am wont to do, and using my guitar like... well a tool. An "axe," you might say. At one point, bending the notes by bending the neck, I did something really awful to my left index knuckle and it still hurts. The police swarmed into the subway and boarded a train. I turned my amp down. Then they unswarmed. A couple of them glared at me. At length, two came back and informed me that "amplifying devices" weren't allowed. I made two dollars.

And today my knuckle's screaming to be left alone, and I think I should, though I really want to -- need to -- practice. Because I just can't stay away.

As if to make an object lesson...

...of a point I made in the previous post -- namely, that those who haven't suffered simply don't "get" the blues, an interesting thing happened the other night -- small, but interesting.

It started out rough. I was somewhat uninspired. I hadn't practiced much, if at all, that day. I was having a really hard time tuning up to match the rhythm I'd put on the Looper until I finally recalled that the tuner was in the bag. It's was...not quite "ugh" but definitely worse than "blah."

A train had just dumped straphangers onto the platform. Into my peripheral vision struts a snotty-nosed twenty-something brat who decided to make a snide remark about the notes I was playing. His sorority girl squeeze looked at me and said to him, "oooh, that's so rude!" His scrawny, spineless back was toward me.

Until, that is, I turned everything up all the way and started hammering a few choice riffs into his ear. It was then that, hearing, he turned and saw. "How ya doin'," he ventured.

A friend of mine once said, "fraternity boys are the problem." As in, what's wrong with the world. I confess that I have oft arrived at a similar conclusion. Punching out the blues into his ears was one of the many great satisfactions of playing.

Now, in the interest of balance, I must disclose that I occasionally play rock and roll with a really nice guy who cannot stand the blues. "It's torture," he told me. Indeed. It certainly was birthed in torture. Torture of the human soul.

And, too, I owe the frat boy a debt, because his arrogance aroused my anger which made for some uninhibited and pugilistic playing, and that's how the blues should be played. I crossed some kind of line that night, thus making it a memorable one for me indeed.

Later, when a gentleman tossed a buck into my bag and said, "you sound alot like Stevie Ray Vaughan, you really do!", I God blessed him and entered the 7th heaven. That was a really nice thing to say to a hacker like me.

I wound down on that note, gave that guitar a bear hug and and a kiss on the 5th fret, and floated home.

The Second Time (a few days later)

Again, in spite of trepidations tainted, I fear, with a mite of grand delusion, I gathered myself and my gear and made for the subway. It was a perfect New York City summer night. There were many songs that I wish I could have sung or played in celebration of life at that moment, but, as my repertoire is so miniscule, I had to confine myself to long stretches of my beloved blues improv.

Not that I didn't, fortified by the joy of the First Time, stretch myself. I learned a simple "Star Spangled Banner" in honor of July 4th. Additionally, I was introduced to a moving but blessedly simple Fleetwood Mac tune called "Albatross," part of the soundtrack to that movie Man On Wire that I mentioned earlier (and can't recommend enough). So I learned that one, too, and decided to break up the nonstop blues riffing with it (itself a collection of blues riffs, but simpler and more organized) that sheer "improv," aka "noodling."

Oh, and too, I'd been watching (courtesy of a good friend) an ancient video series on playing slide blues and had picked up the most basic 12 bar stuff from it (so far). This I put down on one of the Looper channels as backup for some improvising in G. The rhythm was done on with open G tuning; and for some reason, it sounded better when I played over it without using a slide. I'd tuned back to standard tuning, too.

So, armed with all this, and the lyrics to "America the Beautiful" (in case I got crazy and decided to sing it), I trundled off...

However, I was a little stiff. I began with the slide stuff as a sort of no-brainer warm up. 75% of my gross for the night was dropped in my bag in the first 5 minutes. I thought, "Zowie!"

Once I'd grown tired of the slide track, I put down a simple 12-bar rhythm in F# (just to be different, and because I'd been practicing some SRV earlier without first tuning down to E flat). I decided to toss in some major blues turns, as I've been trying to expand my oh-so-limited knowledge of scales in practice. This sounded nice, to me at least. I consider this progress.

After a while of that, I felt sufficiently warmed up to give "Albatross" a shot, and I think it sounded OK, but was punctuated by moments of sheer amateurishness, which embarrassed me. Still, it's a beautiful little tune that seems to carry me straight to the ocean; I can hear the waves and see that fat bird and some little seagulls, too, in that music.

At one point, a Queens bound train stopped and dumped a mass of agitated passengers all over the platform. I literally had to dodge them and do some basic acrobatics with the guitar to avoid giving some a black eye. I thought, "Paydirt!" But alas, none, not ONE, did anything but watch. It was a pretty clean looking crowd, up and comers, I guess; people who simply can't grasp the DNA of the blues.

New York is most definitely NOT a blues town, no matter what anyone says -- not yet at least. Another notch down in the economy and that might begin to change (but I won't hold my breath). This sort of leads me to a theory about why the blues doesn't seem to catch here.

The DNA, the blood, the heartbeat of the blues is suffering; more specifically, hope in the midst of suffering. Real suffering. Slavery-like suffering. Your average working New Yorker a) doesn't admit to suffering and b) probably hasn't really suffered; hasn't faced an insurmountable injustice. Surely, lots of New Yorkers have, but not the well dressed ones -- by and large. Behind the "Eminence Front," you might say, the blues don't play. Here, even the beggars are arrogant.

Suffering -- and so, the Blues -- breaks up the hard ground of pride and arrogance and turns it into humility. But New Yorkers aren't a humble lot, in general. As one friend put it, New York is "a city known for hubris." And hubris is water if the Blues is oil.

But the Blues is what I know and it's what I play and it's my gift to this city that is...on after 9/11 and the Financial Meltdown, humbler than it's been in a couple of decades.

At one point, a nice kid asked if I could jam on Little Wing (Hendrix style). Since it's been years since I've played it, and never did play it all the way through, I declined. Then I thought, well, why not give it a shot. So I tried, but after stumbling through the first few bars, I had to switch gears and get back to the cover of "improv." He dropped a buck in the bag anyway, and I thought that was unbelievably cool of him. He did not, incidentally, come across as New Yorker -- too nice, too sincere, too devoid of the veneer of sophistication that coats everything in this city -- and this age -- like soot.

I left at 1 am, after doing a humbled "Star Spangled Banner" (which went completely unnoticed and I was as grateful for that as I was disappointed) and naturally left feeling somewhat defeated that a) I had botched that tune and b) sounded lame on Albatross. But then my thought were directed down a different track: I'd put entirely new material into play, something I didn't think I could do and have never done before. So what it wasn't too polished -- I hadn't practiced it much at all. That was progress. And, too, somebody recognized what I was playing as the blues, and thought, "Little Wing." So that was a good thing too, as far as it went.

And I know it's time to get back to Little Wing.

The First Time

Last week, on some odd whim, some artistic compulsion, I scraped up $140 and bought a Roland Micro Cube amp for the express purpose of playing in the subway.

And that very night, I did, for two and half hours. I was given six one-dollar bills. One person even thanked me. That was a mind blower.

I mean, when people reach into their pockets and pull out a buck, because they either like what you're doing, or admire your guts, or feel sorry for you, or whatever, it's very touching.

Now, I trust I wouldn't have taken the initiative to take this humble, yet, for me, gutsy step, had I not been laid off 8 months ago from a pretty good job on Wall Street.

As odd as it might be for a modern human being to think this way, I am a believer in small business and individual initiative. I believe in taking your talents to the marketplace and seeing what you can get for them. This was a factor in my decision to play the subways. It wasn't as if I had this great repertoire (I have hardly any), or I think I am that good that people should hear my playing. It's only that I can do one thing: play simple blues riffs for hours.

Now, since I haven't earned a dollar since November, 2008, and my resume is the most ignored document in history, I decided to take what little I had, and bring it down into the marketplace.

I put some simple 12-bar rhythm on my Boss Looper and began to play along with it. If there was ever a place for the slow blues, it's in a subway station around midnight. As much as I might have been tempted to turn up the gain and get a little loud and in-your-face, that was just not the place to do it. Most of the people were slung in the benches, dragging themselves to home or to work. It wasn't for me to call attention to myself; it was for me to play a bluesy soundtrack. And that was just what I did. Occasionally, bands of privileged white hipsters would obnoxiously invade the place, on their way out for night of a debauchery, but those people don't understand the blues, and I wasn't playing to them.

When I arrived home at 1:45 am, I was too charged up to sleep and so I watched Man On Wire, the movie about Philippe Petit, who strung a cable between the Twin Towers and walked on it for 45 minutes in 1974. It was a story of love, passion, art, and balls. I was in the perfect frame of mind to appreciate it, in my small way, that night, the night I simply had to go out and play the blues in the 59th Street subway station.

Godspeed, Philippe.