Sweet Home Alabama

Why I was almost (and maybe should have been) thrown out of a jazz band during a wedding.

With the exception of the last song on the last day we ever played together - which we'll come to - my experience of being in a jazz band was a parade of humiliations.

My musical problem - one of my musical problems - is that I can only remember four bars at any one time. Once I learn the next four bars of that same song or any other, the musical buffer of the last four bars disappears.

In my audition for my jazz band, I must have played and soloed over whatever four bars I was working on at the time, and they let me in.

*

With me on rhythm guitar, the bandleader filled a gap in his dream for his band. He had found a guitar player to orchestrate. I was supplied with charts with 13ths and 9s and minus signs and plus signs and tablature finger patterns. There were more prime numbers than I'd ever seen on a single piece of paper.

By the third month of practice I was like the guy on the team batting .189 that nobody wants to sit next to in the dugout. Practice by practice, music stands gradually migrated away from me in the basement rehearsal room.

The coaching from the bandleader had gone from "you've got this" to "you'll get this" to "ok, let's take five, everybody."

"Let me break it down for you," said the bandleader while the others milled around outside the basement door on their third cigarette break of the evening. "Only play the middle four strings of your guitar.  You have to stay in that sonic space. That's it. Imagine somebody else has the highest and the lowest strings."

"Who?"

"Me," he said. "You play the inner four strings. In this part of the neck. Just there. We want to keep your harmonies right in the midrange."

He pointed to the middle of the neck dragging imaginary lines in the air across the 3rd and 9th frets with both index fingers. He made eye contact searching my face for some dim sign of recognition. Not seeing it, he rubbed the frets to make sure I got it, well over the line into my personal rock and roll guitar territory. 

“Play there,” he said.

"So, play there?"

There is something about feeling stupid that brings out repetition.

"Imagine you cut the top and bottom strings off," he continued.

"You cut the top and bottom strings off?"

"No, you cut the strings off. But in your head."

"I'm ready to cut the strings off," said the drummer poking his head in and waiting for the All Clear.

Unpleasant exterior laughter.

The drummer again: "I'm out of cigarettes. I'll be back. Start without me. Please."

I didn't only play the 4-string guitar in the band.

On certain songs I was assigned the shaker. The only rung lower than the shaker is the rung for wood sticks. Below wood sticks you are on flat earth. You are in the audience. Below clicking wood sticks together there are no remaining instruments. You have fallen so low, you have to look up to see a kazoo.

The good thing is you don't need to practice. The shaker is idiot proof. A first grader knows that.

Um, until your shaker is mic'd up and you need to solo an intro to a painfully slow Eva Cassidy song. At that point, the shaker stops being easy. The sand doesn't move at all or moves abruptly. All of which is captured through the bandleader's sound system and the ruckus of your band mates moving their music stands even further away from you. Imagine whipping eggs for the very first time in front of an audience and hoping someone will clap. Those were my odds.

*

The bandleader tried to make me feel better about my shaker assignment.

“When you are locked in there can be a Zen to shaker. If you’re tight and have just the right subtle rhythmic variety, you remain both invisible and fundamental. You're one with the song. Down in the mix but indispensable. You are holding up the entire song," my bandleader continued.

“By holding up do you mean I’m the foundation or that I’m slowing everybody down?”

He didn’t answer. He wanted to come at it differently.

“The breathing and the plucking and the bowing and all of that musical busy work, all of that comes After.”

After a few Thursday night practices with the band, the mic'd up shaker was going as poorly as the four-stringed guitar.

"Let me break it down for you," said the bandleader. "It can't be so mechanical. You have to mix it up without over mixing it up. You're over mixing it up now."

"Maybe he should empty out some of the sand," said the drummer leaning into the practice room waiting for the All Clear.

*

An unforgettable joke from a rehearsal towards the end of my time with the group:

What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians ?

A drummer.

What do you call a guy who hangs out with a drummer.

A percussionist.

What do you call a guy who hangs out with a percussionist?

"Adam," mumbled the drummer. "I'm out of cigarettes. I'll be back. Start without me. "

*

Eventually, we had a single gig.

It was for a wedding. The band was paid $500.

The bride was the college roommate of our singer. It was industrial chic. There were high ceilings and fraying black curtains suspended by thick knotted rope inside. The wedding was held out back in a sunlit yard. After the ceremony, the wedding party filed back into the dark hall. She was from Alabama, a long way from her wedding venue in an area south of Seattle.

We played through our two sets uneventfully. It was fine. Everything was fine. The shaker was fine.

The crowd took us in for awhile, milling in front of our raised stage like koi pond fish. At first they focused hopefully, but gradually they angled away, swam off, and we lost them.

When we were setting up that afternoon, I had suggested to the bandleader that we play Sweet Home Alabama. (The intro was, not accidentally, my current four bars.) "The bride's from Alabama. She’s blond. She was in a sorority! Let's do it."

But my status had fallen below making rock and roll song recommendations. Now I really wasn’t invisible or fundamental in the mix. The bandleader looked in my face for some dim sign of recognition.

“Let me break it down for you,” I said, beating him to the punch.

At the end of our second set, we were starting to shut things down, and the Alabama bride passed near the stage.

"Are you from Alabama?" I asked her. At this point it had been mentioned in toasts about fifteen times.

"Yes," but she was distracted with her wedding. Brides are always distracted at their weddings. I find them very hard to get into conversations with.

I pressed on. "Do you want us to ‘turn it up’?" I did a New Jersey guy’s impression of a Lynyrd Skynyrd accent introducing a song. Possibly, I was imagining that Alabama has only one song.

She had zero idea of what I was talking about. If it was anything that had to do with what we had been playing already it was an anxious no. I've never seen a koi pond fish move so quickly.

But as she started to walk away, I played the opening five notes of Sweet Home Alabama with that riff’s perfect pop and snap. I let it hang there on the 5th note.

I struck oil.

It was the $500 song.

It was the moment when Willy Wonka turns around slowly at the end of the movie.

She yelled out "Sweet Home Alabama! Turn it up!”

So we did. "To 11," as people who don’t play instruments like to say.

It was a mutiny.

In four bars, a year of augmented chords was trampled beneath a single guitar lick like an 8-track tape stuck on repeat. My six-string, four-bar junkyard dog was "off leash." The drummer raced back onto stage like a rodeo bull. He had a musician to hang out with!

By the time we got back to bar one again, I was ready to drive a red, jumbo tire Chevy pickup truck through the wedding hall, up and over the buffet tables, and crash it down onto my bongo drum. No, I didn’t bring the bongo drum up because we’ve already covered enough painful territory together.

As we looped over those four bars, the crowd sang the same eight words on the chorus on repeat, from “Sweet Home” to “skies are blue.” The volume was loud to the point the amps hissed and we rattled their eardrums like wax paper.

We played those four bars longer than the live version of Freebird. That riff killed off the jazz band, the percussion joke about Adam, the chord charts, and my shaker. It buried all of it in roadhouse parking lot gravel.

Sweet Home Alabama transformed that wedding hall into shot glass whiskey, long wooden bars, black plastic ashtrays, thick paper coasters with uncomfortable flags for the Confederacy, forgotten Dixie cups of Budweiser on amps, scuffed cowboy boots, and rattlesnake neckties. There were girls with red polka dot shirts tied off on their chests like the Dukes of Hazzard, and guys holding pool sticks straight up and down like pitchforks. There were backlit plastic waterfalls circulating in Rolling Rock signs, sticky red barstools, lip dangling cigarettes, amp burning cigarettes, cigarettes tucked into guitar strings near the tuning knobs. There were juke boxes you could kick to get free songs and pinky-finger guitar slides made from the necks of broken beer bottles.

Lord, I'm comin' home to you. Here I come, Alabama.

Southern Rock, y'all. Southern Rock.

Turn it up.