My friends Bob and Linda visited Tucson this past week. Along with a couple of other friends, who are now more or less permanent Tucson residents, and several of their friends, the action was nonstop. Truthfully, I’m exhausted!
I won’t recap the full calendar of events and activities. However, as always, much of it revolved around music. For many of us, music remains a tie that binds, much as it has been going back more than one-half century.
The week’s festivities included several informal jam sessions as well as a live music venue. Bob carried one of his guitars with him on the flight to Tucson. I had transported one of my guitars and amplifiers cross-country from home to Tucson in the Subaru. Recent Tucson transplants Sherry and Tom own several guitars and a couple of amplifiers. Thus, we were well-equipped to sing and play no matter where we might be on a given day.
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By chance, Sherry had an out-of-town visitor from Chicago, whose older brother lives here in Tucson. In his retirement, the older brother plays keyboards in a geriatric Grateful Dead jam band.
Last Saturday we attended one of the band’s infrequent shows at a dive bar on funky 4th Avenue known as the Hut. It’s a spartan but popular outdoor bar and music venue that hosts a varied array of local music performers.
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Now, when my friends and I jam, we might cover a few Grateful Dead songs, mostly tuneful selections circa Working Man’s Dead or American Beauty. Unsurprisingly given our age, our musical sweet spot mainly blends familiar 60’s and early 70’s entries made popular by many of the usual suspects: the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Grateful Dead, Tom Petty, Little Feat, et al. However, to my pleasant surprise, on this day the local jam band was pounding out early and less well-known selections from the Grateful Dead’s extensive musical library to support the extended jams.
The musical interplay between the band’s lead guitarist and keyboard player was delightfully tight, revealing a high degree of skill and lots of practice. Such interplay is essential to keep what amounts to variations of simple three-chord riffs interesting for listeners. Pulling this off for an uninterrupted three-hour set was no mean feat.
To do so requires a commendable degree of instrumental proficiency. I’m a guitarist, but also a sucker for the soulful bluesy sounds produced by a Hammond B3 organ, especially when it’s paired with a Leslie rotary speaker. (Today a vintage pair fetches $10,000 and upwards on the open market!)
While listening, it was evident that Sherry’s visitor’s older brother had had years of childhood piano lessons. As is almost always the case whenever I watch another guitarist perform, I was focused on his right-hand technique. For example, I noticed that the guitarist was a flat picker, not a finger picker. His lead technique with the flat pick was advanced: smooth, controlled, seemingly using only slight movements of his right hand. Though he is considerably the better player, I can emulate his styling to a lesser degree, much as he emulates those of the late Jerry Garcia.
Garcia’s style utilized the usual array of rock and blues scales, slurs and bends but then combined these with more traditional bluegrass elements. Occasionally I wonder how Garica and the other exceptional players in the pantheon of deceased guitar gods might have evolved musically had they survived.
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However, I digress. Suffice it to say that on this Saturday the locals’ playing was both impressive and entertaining. I began tapping my foot. Soon enough I was gently swaying, and, finally, dancing. Me dancing is not a pretty sight!
Even more than the music, I enjoyed watching the gathering of geriatric Dead Heads. I spotted a good many tie-dyed rainbow T-shirts, long, flowing peasant skirts, colorful tunics, and kaftans. Except for their grey hair and aged faces, it could have been a street scene right out of Haight-Asbury in the 1960s. One grizzled older guy danced happily through the crowd, swinging a puppy in his arms. Among all the receding hairlines, fully one-third of the men I observed sported ponytails.
Some people remained on their stools, perhaps too old, or infirm, or buzzed in the late afternoon heat to risk possible injury by testing the dance floor. Apart from the dozens of empty beer bottles and plastic liquor cups littering the venue, I also detected the unmistakable, sweet smell of weed wafting among the gathered on a gentle breeze. Meanwhile, other attendees, drawn to their feet by the band’s rhythms, happily writhed, twisted, raised arms, thrust hips, shimmied, bent, and shook their respective booties with raw abandon.
And while most of the dancing men were content to bob and weave in place, most of the women, despite the passage of long years, took to the dance floor like fish to water, relying on sheer muscle memory to recapture the elegant and alluring dance moves of their youth. To my eyes, a few of the women remained quite alluring and natural in their dotage, while a few others seemed to be trying too hard.
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And suddenly the music stopped. It was not quite 7:00 p.m. No encores. The band members simply unplugged their gear and departed the stage to be greeted by friends and family, Sherry’s out-of-town visitor included.
Watching these elderly Dead Heads departing the scene, I finally understood why this performance had been scheduled to take place in the afternoon. For some it soon would be bedtime, while the music venue still had to be cleared before tonight’s youngbloods arrived for the Indie show.
