MATT BARRETT’S TALES FROM THE ROCK N ROLL CRYPT: Episode 6
AN AUDIENCE OF NONE
It was a slow night at the Cave. Maybe a Monday or Tuesday, but who am I kidding? With me it could have been a Friday or Saturday. Most of the audience had left after the first set. That’s kind of what people did. They would stay for the first set and at the first opportunity, like when I was taking my break and not on the stage, which was between them and the door, they would escape. I mean, people generally liked my music but how long can you sit and listen to one guy with
a guitar unless you have decided to get totally drunk and be one of those people whooping like a redneck at inappropriate moments, or weeping like a recently defrocked nun at a Leonard Cohen concert?
I had once tried playing straight through without a break from 10 to 1:30. I had enough of my own songs and about 100 covers I either knew or could figure out on the spot if someone yelled out a request. Like if someone called out as an antidote to a string of anti-war songs “Ballad of the Green Berets!” I could do it. In those days I remembered the lyrics to every song I ever heard. I still do I guess. I haven’t tried lately. But anyway, stretching out one set for 3 hours so I could guard the door was not completely successful. Some people walked past me to either smiling sheepishly or avoiding eye contact while others snuck out the back door and took their chances getting back to Franklin Street through the back alley and parking lot past the smelly dumpsters of the restaurants.
So by the time the clock struck midnight towards the end of my second, or maybe third set on this fateful evening it was just me, my biggest fan (you remember him?), a couple making out in a booth, a guy watching TV at the bar, and at the far end of the bar Peter the piano tuner and Tim the bartender who were sort of listening, sort of talking to each other or conspiring.
Now I’m the kind of performer who once he starts never wants to get off stage and as long as there is someone to listen I will keep playing. But this was stretching the definition of the word ‘audience’. And when the drunk guy left cuz his tv show ended, the young couple went off, probably to have incredible sex while I mournfully crooned on, and even my biggest fan was measuring how many steps it would take to get past me to the front door, it was beginning to look like my encore list would go unused.
Finally it was just me, Peter the piano tuner, and Tim the bartender. But it gets worse. Peter began playing with the zipper of his jacket and then zipped out the back door. At the same time Tim went to the storage room to restock beer. And there I was. Hopelessly and shamefully alone, playing my amplified guitar and singing through a PA system to an audience of none. I was at rock bottom. And still I kept singing, though inside I was thinking of the futility of the path I had chosen. Was I that bad? Were my songs so terrible that God would punish me with the ultimate humiliation, a troubadour with no one to troube to? I spent the rest of that song questioning my entire existence until I noticed that Tim had come back from the storeroom and Peter had magically reappeared and they were both listening and talking as they had been before.
When I finished the song I asked them “What just happened.” They were laughing. They had done it on purpose as a joke. A joke that had sent me into a bout of existential angst that maybe, one day I might recover from. Ha ha. Thanks a lot. Very funny.
“Is there anything you want to hear?” I asked hopefully.