My drummer, David Troen-Krasnow, he don’t say much on stage. (Of course, I don’t give him a microphone, so his opportunities for saying much are limited, but that’s an obstacle I’m sure he could overcome if he set his mind to it.) Privately, however, he’s, well, something of a smartass, which shouldn’t surprise you at all – remember, he and I used to be in a ska band together, and if you can imagine eight people just about as snarky as me, well, you’ll get a sense of how much we accomplished in rehearsals.
How much of a smartass? Here’s an example. One of the questions we asked occasionally of ourselves was, what name would we gig under when we wanted to do a small club gig after we were insanely famous? My nomination was – I’m not even going to tell you what my nomination was, because it wasn’t really fit for a folk audience and children might be reading, if you get my drift. Dave, on the other hand, came up with Stu and his Own Juices, which beat mine all to hell.
So when Dave suggested, several weeks ago, that I write a song about my emergency backup guitar, and call it Second Fiddle, well, I was obligated to listen.
Lemme back up a little. Many years ago, when I was a wee guitarist in guitar diapers, I opened for folk legend Jack Hardy at a well-known but now-defunct church coffeehouse on the South Shore. A minute into my first song, I broke a string. And because I was a mere babe in the woods on stage, I just stood there like an idiot, until Jack Hardy’s backup guitarist offered to let me borrow his guitar, which I did, gingerly, and promptly went out and bought a second guitar, which sits behind me during my gigs and never budges, because I haven’t broken a string during a gig since. Occasionally I will humor it, or a member of the audience, and play it for a song or two, but I’m not the sort of guy who matches guitars and songs as if he’s pairing wine with dinner; I’ve got a guitar, I like the guitar, I play the guitar, and the other one will just have to wait for some disaster to strike.
So the emergency backup guitar exists mostly as a very expensive prop, but really, there’s something a little tragic about the whole story. So when I sat down to write this particular song, it came out a little dark. Basically, the emergency backup guitar is a woman that the guitarist is stringing (sorry) along. It’s not pretty. First chorus:
He’ll never break his stride
Or set her free
Or meet her gaze
Or change his tune
Each day she asks
Each day it’s way too soon
So she just sits there
Waiting
Creepy? Creepy.
I really like this song. It’s a little grim and grimy and tawdry and true, and as usual, my protagonist has very little to recommend himself. I think I like to write about these protagonists because I’m afraid, in a little corner of my soul, that I’m closer to them than I’d like to think, or, perhaps, because we all are afraid of it. This one isn’t particularly funny, but, well, they can’t all be “Shlomo the Dreidel Shark”.
As it turns out, this is the last flawed protagonist I had time to write about in 2017. When the year started, my goal was to get back to writing a song every month, which has always been my model of what I should be doing, and I haven’t done it in many, many years. And I didn’t do it last year either, although I tried. It was, well, let’s say a challenging year in a number of ways, and I’m looking forward to putting my pen to the grindstone in 2018, freshly swabbed of all the grime from the last twelve months. Happy New Year, everybody.