It was a raised
back bar, meaning I was sitting two feet higher in my chair with my guitar and
the bar opposite was handling the lunchtime crowd two feet lower at Porkers Bar and
grill. Carna was the barmaid. She invited me to play my music the day
before when I was grazing there (good German food).
Where I was set up
is important to the story. It was all so
very strange. Imagine the hole of my
guitar was 8 ft from the faces of a couple, man and woman, doughty, I would be kind. They stared at me for 20 songs. Stared.
Didn't acknowledge any recognition of songs, wag a finger, maybe say
"That was a good one."
Nothing. Stared. Sometimes bit into their Weiner schnitzel.
Lunchtime crowds
come and go. It's a hard sell I have
learned. In this process of basically
being ignored while I rehearsed, actually, for an upcoming show I got
flustered, just unplugged and left. The
prettiest girl in the bar said, "I liked some of your songs." She had tattoos all over, and was the property
of her man. I walked right past the Robottrons
that gawked at me without saying a word. Carna kind of turned on me, it seemed,
I don't know. Two trips, I was out of there.
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Distractions. Nothing but distractions. Blinking lights. Big screens, sharp video cuts and the
digitized mechanical noise. People have
adapted to the digital sound. They take
orders from machines (Press 1 to proceed), they are entrained to the digital
voice.
A singer with an
acoustic guitar doesn't stand a chance.
I'm built on a aural tradition of listening to the human voice, in my case in tune with my
guitar, hopefully. Doing such sends out sound waves, healing sound waves, into
the cellular bodies of those around me.
The exchange of ideas, values, emotion belong in those sound waves.
Digital sound is
mechanical noise based on I and O. It
truly does not register on an oscilloscope like analog or aural. If you see a sine wave for digital music it a
representation of what we expect to see. Actually, it's computer language. And people have melded completely with it and
are part of the global machine.
A singer with an
acoustic guitar doesn't stand a chance.
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