I often thank God for the small things, sort of like you would say to a friend, “nice, good catch.” Saturday afternoon, I parked my car, looked up, and was directly in front of a music store. I walked in and bought the light strings I’ve been needing ever since I bought the Martin. All my other guitars are strung with mediums, and I kept imagining breaking a string and being unprepared … just like a student I would chide for not having a pencil on a test day. I bought the strings from the clerk and met up with Brandon.
I was pleased when Brandon suggested eating at the very place in Athens, OH, I wanted to go for lunch, the local favorite, Casa Nueva. http://www.casanueva.com/
Back in the spring of 1985, a group of eight recently unemployed restaurant workers decided to form a worker-owned cooperative. They recycle, compost, recycle cooking oil, and feature a seasonal menu of almost all locally grown foods from wine, to milk, to the components of that day’s salsa. The food is Mexican-fusion. Basically, it’s fresh and it’s good. We have mushroom parmesan dip – the mushrooms are grown locally – and seasonal enchiladas full of Laurel Valley Creamery raw-milk cheese, and the chicken in it came from King Family Farm. And I like the idea that the stuff came from around the corner. The milk in my coffee at Donkey was also from a local creamery. There is always a wait because there are only a couple dozen tables, and I’ve figured out that this is because they make everything from scratch. They have all the people they have room for, and for the food to still be good. And in contrast to my McDonalds dashboard dined the night before … I feel better. I go back the next day for lunch and order the exact same things.
Brandon and I took advantage of the diminishing good weather and walked all through parts of the campus and the downtown before grabbing my instruments and heading to the venue. Slowly, the other performers wandered in. I was uncasing my guitar when, from behind me:
“How are those strings working out for you?”
…Because I’d unwittingly purchased my strings from Corbin Marsh, one of the other three songwriters on the bill. http://www.myspace.com/corbinmarsh1 (listen to “In Too Deep”).
We opted to do the night as a songwriter-in-the-round, four mics across the stage. And man, was that the way to go.
I like songwriters in the round in general, because it becomes like a live mix tape, each person’s song informing the next person’s choice. Connective threads develop, from the most tenuous to the most obvious. And where you sat down in that line, who you followed and who followed you becomes a fun gamble that can change everything.
I wound up after “the happy one” (19-year-old Jake Loew, wielding his uke), and before the “rockin’ one,” Corbin Marsh. About right. Stuck in the middle was Chris Tomazic, a true folk singer, who apparently did a 4-month stint a la Walden … all out in the wilderness … or at least that’s legend Corbin pedals about his friend to the travelers like me, eager for a good story.
Our 4-song rounds piled onto each other one after the other, three hours passing like a moment. Our tenuous threads included these Jeopardy-sounding categories: Crazy people, Fruit, Love Songs, Place Names – Particularly Illinois, weird guitar riffs, Girls and Trees, and Death.
And it was AWESOME. Chris sang a love song about trees, so Jake sang a song about Illinois, so I sang a love song about Illinois and Corbin responded by refusing to do his song about Chicago and instead with a love song about being single. “Learning to Roam,” might have been my favorite song played all night.
We had a nice crowd, a good sound guy, and a stage full of mutual appreciation society. You can’t ask for much more than that. And I fell in the spot for the last song, which became Love A Girl.
I’m trying to be better about going out post show when people, especially the other acts, invite me to. So I took Corbin, who’s entire performance as my foil I’d thoroughly enjoyed, up on his offer of a post-show beer at Jackie O’s (http://www.jackieos.com/), a local bar that brews phenomenal beers.
For example, I had the Dark Apparition Mole, and it was SPICY! I’ve never had spicy beer. The description of what goes into it reads like a witch’s spell:
“We stuff 850lbs of malt into our 7bbl mash tun. By the end of the mash dark malts are spilling onto the brew house floor. Chocolate,coffee, dark fruit, caramel, and some nice earthy/spicy. Malt: English 2-row, Six Row, Munich, Special B, Gambrinus Honey Malt, Roasted Barley, Black Patten, Chocolate, Cara 8, White Wheat. Hops: Columbus, Perle, Kent Golding. Character Builder: Brown Sugar”
So I drank and talked shop. Corbin, in his less than half a year working at the music store and much longer playing in the Athens scene, has seen the growth of music here. The Avett Brothers rolled in and bought a guitar from the place he works, recently. The Nelsonville Music Festival is becoming big. We trade stories as the crowd around us becomes unbearable. A drunk blonde plops herself on the half of my bar stool not occupied by my own ass (and that ain’t much) … and passes out. Her drunk, blonde friend comes over and starts slapping her. Corbin tries to break it up, but this is, I tell him, where I get off.
In the street, someone is getting arrested and a girl on the sidewalk is screaming … no HOWLING … at the police putting him in cuffs. Another girl in heels has torn her stocking at the knee and blood is flowing down her leg. OU is ranked as the country’s No. 2 party school.
