"Nobody who could ever write worth a damn could write in peace."
Charles Bukowski, Barfly
Scott Amendola probably gets his rhythm training listening to people mispronounce his name - or maybe learning to do it himself. Watch him up close and see him scrape drums with the handle of the brush, or pound his snare with a mallet - perfectly. Mostly he plays with his eyes shut. He plays at Bruno's tonight, and I look for the sign as I walk.
I'm not this far down in the Mission before. Walking from 16th to 20th feels as close to dangerous as San Francisco ever feels to me, and it's still light out. It's the longest day of the year.
Bruno's is an old steak-house, and it has that fake ranch-house feel. The ceiling is old wooden slats, but I can't see that as I slide into the long, thin entrance bar and order a Pilsner Urquell. The lighting shocks and appalls - tea-candles along the bar, greenly bubbling aquariums for elongated fish behind the bar. The fish aren't home.
After a couple pulls of beer and a couple words with the tatooed bartender, I find the toilet. It's lit with rose-colored flourescents, dim and pink. I resolve to watch my drinking tonight.
I hear a couple horns and move my beer into the next room. Maybe the band starts.
Maybe the band doesn't start. But I find a seat right next to Scott Amendola's kit and look around. This is the "cork club", so the walls are lined with clean cork. I like seedy, so I think about covering the walls and ceiling with moldy old wine corks, flashing malolactic crystals and tannic grit in the weird, dim lighting.
The band sets up their gear between two groups of raised seats, then leaves for a last-minute huddle. Here, the audience looks down at the band. What there is of it, I mean. It's 8:00 on a Monday night, 8:15 now, and I count the gathering of demented music lovers on one hand.
The instruments outnumber us all. There's a string bass, three saxophones, drums, and a small keyboard whatsit. I see guitar pedals and gear, but no ax.
Demented latin combo music fills the house, and we wait for the band to come back. Maybe they see us and decide to forget it.
On the train earlier are two voices arguing basketball, and one says "So who's in your team if you can only pick white guys?" I look to see who talks so openly racist around here - he's black, but I guess he's still got some racism in him. Leave that out and the conversation is just like any of the all-time baseball team arguments in Post Office. Maybe it's traditional.
My first beer is empty, so I get up for another. It's traditional, customary, and expected of me. In fact there's already a waitress at my elbow, just for dramatic effect. She takes my glass and the band comes in. They start with "Last Chance", a good bass riff that wanders into floating, spacey jams.
"59th Street Blues" starts on its heels, and the amplified sax and guitar feedback remind me of 21st Century Schizoid Man. Noodling ensues, and during a warmly humourous call-and-response jam the girl walks in.
She has a heart-shaped, mystified face and doesn't want to walk past the guitarist, who's blocking the steps to the tables. My heart goes out to her as she crawls between the rails to find a seat. But the waitress walks right by the guitarist and brings my beer.
I wish I'd brought my deck.
The keyboard whatsit turns out to be a melodica, some bastard child of a harmonica and an accordian. It sounds like it might be related to a kazoo, for good measure.
piano ! hurdy-gurdy flute ! pan-pipes
| |
| recorder ! pan-pipes (incest, folks)
| |
accordian ! harmonica
|
melodica
All those !s are unnatural conceptions, too. No self-respecting priest marries a recorder to its own parent. Not a legitimate relation in the lot....
The next number is a soulfull blues. The girl with the heart-shaped face sits down across the stage-pit from me, and I watch her while the music plays on. Every note seems to animate her face, like the play of sunlight on ocean waves, reflected radiance set in beauty. She has nice legs too.
I decide to stick around for the second set.
At the break I talk to a couple of beat-looking young kids from Toledo. I also talk with Scott, and he's ok with taping. I wish I brought my deck, but there's beer so I have another.
The music starts again with a pretty little number called Filthy Habits. "Written when Frank Zappa was listening to a lot of Leo Sayers," says Scott. Huh?
I should listen to more Zappa.
The funk gets stronger, the drums pound. Scott doesn't pound the cymbals his forehead yet, but soon. The music rages like beasts fighting in a pit. Then the melody drifts back in on wings of saxophone, and gently tucks us into bed.
Then comes the melodica part. Did I mention that kazoo ancestry?
The show closes with "an old Jimi Hendrix standard," which I almost recognize. But I don't.
Where is that girl? Gone?
©1999 Michael Blakeley