Thursday, December 10, 2009

Stratocaster

He looks as though he knows something. His brow, mostly obscured by the leather hat he didn't take off when he came in, is furrowed in honest concentration. His slight shoulders are hunched inwards, his whole body is foetally curled around the shiny red stratocaster held to his chest. His knees are up, his feet on the stool beneath him so that the guitar is the centre of his universe.

His form is wrapped loosely in the faded blue jeans of rock uniform and a wrinkled longsleeve shirt. He does not look up or acknowledge us. There is a lull in conversation but no particular silence as the assembled wait to hear what he has to say. His hands are cracked and brown, criss-crossed with the cuts and wrinkles of age; His nails are a filthy grey. There are matching brown nicotine stains on the first joints of the middle and index fingers of his right hand from a lifetime of smoking rolling tobacco. His knuckles are swollen, they look arthritic. He has no guitar pick.

After almost a whole minute of silently speaking to his guitar, he strikes a single dull, ugly chord. He reaches one hand to the headstock to quickly and deliberately turn a machine head, then strikes the chord again. It is just as dull and ugly as before.

Suddenly his posture changes somewhat. He leans his weight back on the stool so that most of his face is visible under the worn brim of his hat. He plays the first three chords of 'smoke on the water' completely out of time and then pauses again. He waits a moment, then starts to play a simple pentatonic lead. He stops just as abruptly as before, then tries again. The murmur in the assembled throng pitches upwards as multiple mocking voices pipe up across the room.

He continues like this for several minutes, stopping and starting as if trying to remember a song he knew long ago. He is on a stage, people are watching him, he is being played through a PA and he seems to have no idea. Much of the crowd disperses to the bar or the beer garden, chortling. He will be done in five minutes and then they came come back for whatever is on next. I stand and watch on, fascinated.

It is warm inside the bar and unusually busy for a Monday night. Boys in op-shop bought dinner jackets and skinny-leg jeans converse with stunningly beautiful girls who look like they were lifted straight from a sixties fashion magazine. Coopers green is the beer of choice. We are in Melbourne all right.

As he progresses he seems to get faster but not better. His half-formed meedlings seem to take on a sense of urgency. I am now the only one paying attention. There is something fantastically avant-garde about this scene: trendy bar, beautiful young people, decrepit old man sitting onstage playing like a learner with nobody looking at him; but the sound is filling the room anyway.

His ten minutes are up and the sound technician tries to get his attention. The man hasn't looked up from his guitar since he got onstage, it's a futile endeavour. The sound technician kills the PA and the man plays on for a full minute before he realises. He stops, looks up, scans the room slowly and deliberately, unplugs his guitar and walks straight out the front door into the freezing winter night holding it by the neck. As the door swings shut behind him Kings Of Leon swells out of the PA in the fast-attack fade-up of hasty DJing. There is an audible murmur of approval amongst the crowd.

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