Well, we're trying to settle into The City in a more organic fashion. After coffee and writing at the leafy window, I walk downtown on workaday second avenue to meet LH @ 18th street for lunch. Two cats who, for 5 or 6 years now have wrestled collided created fought grown and laughed and traveled the world together. We get to see the landscape of one another's lives - the loneliness and self-deception the goodness and triumphs an even the occasional nobility and greatness. We are one another's witnesses. We are also one another's chief pain-in-the-ass: pushing and pulling and neglecting and bitching and knocking each other upside the head.

All hail LH the space-taker! The genius! The petulant child and selfish and giving! The great beefy oaf who smashes and dances and flies over the piano! Gigantasaurous Rex tossing about great hulking boulders of chords like clumps of sand by a god on holiday! And today, at lunch, the 37 year-old man: glasses, short salty hairbeard squeezed into a booth. Lonely and proud and good to know.

We talk and eat - Ed Debevic-style waitress and very excellent freshness on a plate at 1st Av & 10th St - watching beauty pass by in summer skirts and tight pants. Forget the museums. Dig the eternal passing dream-beauty of the flesh of stunning New York girls in barely-on summer clothes! (Tan or black or pink or cream or bronze or beige, men do want each and every one, you know.)

Dazed walk home in sunlight and street smells: patchouli and car exhaust, sometimes gutter stench right after Channel #19. At home with Herbie (The Prisoner) and a message from Sue Mingus: "Just come on out tonight & play with the band!" But I am afraid. I've been blocked or something when it comes to new poetry and ranting. Stress and growth and an accelerated information intake rate have stretched and emptied me at the same time (this on top of the stretching I've already been getting in the last year, ie marriage, moving, et al.)

So I'm thankful for the gig at Kerrigan's because it's like playing a casual date in a restaurant. People are eating and talking loudly and it's not meant to be a listening room. The band is in a long and narrow crow's nest looking from brass railings 20 feet down to the bar and over to the tables with TVs going and city-crazed tourists ordering pasta primavera (with chicken). It's a make the rent date and exactly the kind you must reconcile yourself to if you are going to have a good time at all, musically. Yaron, Essiet, LH & I are there to have fun, loosen up and not have to play "the show". I mean, sure, we're there to play well and make music, but I can just call tunes and we'll play 'em, no worries. Plus, like I say, we settle into the vibe of The City in a more organic way: as working musicians. Nothing like a casual date to make you feel like a regular cat (and remind you of your blessings). And anyhow, the staff only gives us good vibe, no "please come through the back way, please". There's good food. We sell records (three to Canadians on parade, one apiece to two brothers riding a birthday vibe, a few more to assorted surprised and now enlightened New Yorkers: "I never thought I'd come in here and hear music THIS good," et cetera). Not a bad night really, sitting after hours with Essiet telling jokes and laughing. A regular gig: easier done than said.

"Out of the Frying Pan. . . "

The good thing about working non_listening rooms is that the crowds' expectations are low or unconscious, through no fault of the working musician. Good bands are regularly paid to look respectable and provide acoustic wallpaper for an uninterested public come to gorge itself at one trendy trough or another. Now, if I can get the people to hear in an environment where the task of listening is not overly odious I know I can get 90% of them to like what the cats and I are going for. In a situation like Kerrigan's it's still possible to rouse a good 40% to active listening just by turning the volume the energy and the concept up twelve notches from what's expected (provided conditions are "ideal" and you have the full support of the house staff). The bad thing is that if you are unprepared to do battle, or if you are thin-skinned, or else expect an evening of great art and audience interplay, you are likely to be buried.

So here we are at Kerrigan's on the last of a three night engagement. It's a Saturday night and noisier that ever: birthdays, a big anniversary group, waiting lists, shrill blond voices and clueless suburban types out for a big city night, thoughtless of the decibel level of their conversations.

Just before we go on the manager - with urgent strides - brings me face-to-face with a tallish white guy, frazzled-looking, with wild sidewalk-colored hair, mustache & glasses. With an angry scoff and in one unbroken sentence he snorts out,

"Yeah, man, I don't know what the problem is here but your publicist has been harassing me trying to get me to come out & listen to you for weeks and I'm SUPPOSED to have a free dinner and they don't know anything about it downstairs an, listen, I REALLY don't have time for this kind of bullshit. I'm a very busy man." (This really happened.)

I offer to work something out: "Well, I'm not sure what's, shakin' as far as reservations go, but my road manager, Robert, will be here in a minute and I'm sure we'll be able to take care of things as soon as he arrives. How about if I get you a drink at the bar. . . "

"Well, no, man," he interrupts here, still snorting, "I just don't have time," etc. "I may just have to go. But really, you should call your publicist 'cause this is a REALLY BIG ****-up."

"Well, I guess maybe you should just do what you think is right," says I - and down the stairs he runs (!) and out the door. The manager and I exchange the looks of men who just now (and personally) saw a live, five-headed chicken from Ripley's Believe it or Not.
"Sorry," says he.

"Not to worry," says I. "It wasn't the Times. Plus, in his mood - wired, exhausted, clearly not focused on the big picture - he'd have written a bad, probably sloppy review anyway."

And so the battle begins: the trio is announced in the mains. A slight drop in the conversation occurs as people within in earshot try to decide whether or not something important has been said. And LH begins his attempt to establish a vibe and convince the people that what is about to happen is what's important. Some small number among the great wash of blathering do sense that music is being produced, but the majority have not yet had a broken their jawing. LH tries a few different tacks: blowing them kisses, painting spring-fed ponds in the woods, chiding them, offering them treats, showing them a picture of a threatening bull pawing the dirt. But finally realizes the odds (soon four of us will be playing, but now it's just him and the mob) and decides to go into the tune, albeit with ribald musical commentary on the unwieldy crowd. Only scattered applause at the end of the tune.

However, the vibe has gone out whether or not the majority of customers know it. Plus some tables are being turned over and as I approach the stand I'm starting to see faces I recognize - not many, but enough to start a slo-mo chain reaction of eventual increased listening. There's the girl from UW Kalamazoo and her boyfriend and her mom. There's the guy who keeps buying CDs and giving them away to his friends - even brought a few tonight. The wait staff is definitely on the team just as they have been the last two nights - even stopping to listen & just dig it, making time to do so. And just as I go into my first number here comes Selma, a beautiful 70's-ish woman who dug it so hard last night she danced a jig in the second set. All weighed down in gold rings and dark glasses, her hair just back from the salon, she's getting set up with her usual: double rum & coke (ice on the side). She'll help us out later I think with more dancing and good vibe. Hope against hope.

LH helps mightily as we try with Essiet and Yaron to conquer with grace what cannot be conquered with volume. Hopeless smiles and occasional sympathetic head shaking give way to outright mutual digging as we all put on our casual date armor - now Essiet pulls a joke out of his solo and bats it around in perfect exuberant virtuosity - now Yaron quotes Elvin Jones on creating contentment and strength in any context - now LH sends streamers of red-ribboned passages over the air like a wry third-timer in full cruise-ship departure mode. We expand our conversation to fill the space. We work. We hope.

Nevertheless, it is Saturday, and even with our "space expansion" and our excellent few allies scattered silent here and there it is still louder in the house than it is under Niagara Falls. Now, it's one thing to go up against a certain level of steady crowd rumbling. It's quite another, I propose, to go up against a mob engaged in outright yelling. This is what we've got, I'm afraid, and in spite of myself the clash of sounds is turning evil in my head. It starts to really get to me, and just as I consciously focus my spirit toward a more positive attitude and in the middle of a tune I get handed a $20 bill and a scrawl that reads:

Glenn & Peggy
50th
Wedding Ann.
Night and Day
or
My Man

CLEARLY, now, the boundaries of my patience are being pushed. I'm tempted to sneer, shake my head, drop the note off the balcony and end the set right then and there. But my friend the manager - who has treated us better than he is used to treating the cats, comes up and sorta' friendily pleads with me to PLEASE consider singing Happy Birthday to a group of three people at a gigantic loud table across the room.

So what do I do? Well, I mean, we've come here to work, after all - no sense gettin' all in a lather about it. I roll my eyes and laugh to LH. We're doing an extended "Cold Duck Time" to close the set and I just use my solo to screwily work in all nutty, off-kilter notes for the happy birthday routine - including all the damn names AND the anniversary announcement - finish my solo & go over to boogie down with 70-year-old Selma to loud applause and a second $20 from the anniversary table ("Just 'ause you've got style, kid")!! We never did play Night and Day.