The Bluesman

The Bluesman

I call my self Zack and have since ’67. You may wish to too, though, there is no insistence that you should, nor, is there any particular reason to do so. In fact, this announcement is simply a common courtesy, a lead weight and a rope in a high wind that might prove useful. You could without guilt or any other offence call me by a name of your own choosing, perhaps, more poetic, or even biblical, or lyrical like a song bird, or guttural like a hammered bone. But I imagine some name will come to mind when you call to me as I bring forth this case.

Now, I’m not one to carry strange or deeply evasive beliefs. No, rather it is a requirement of mine that reality be visited by my own eyes. True, what I see might not be truth. I might be beguiled by magicians or thieves or even natural mirage glimmering in high cold deserts. But none the less, I am willing to accept those and only those visions as reality satisfied by my perspective. Truth being a juried exhibition and arrived at by consensus has no particular value to me, or in my opinion, any one else. However, the moral is of tremendous weight and significance, so often over looked or at best glimpsed deliberately askance in our corrupted modern world.

So to find myself in that great northern forest of black spruce (Dr. Seuss trees I call ‘em), not far from the north line of the arboreal march and visited by an invisible calling to immediately return to the den of my pubescence thousands of miles to the south was not so unusual for me as it was to heed this unseen driver. I have never seen your God and so I do not believe It exists. But I have died and seen the white light and my remains before being revisited. Is that incongruous? I think not. I have been privy to many secrets and other redundancies.

And to insist on further blasphemy because I can not abide hypocrisy: If your heaven at all resembles that creation of primitive economics to drive slaves to work and die to occupy the dream mansions of their keepers, waited on by their brothers now abused, granted virgins and heavenly rights to rape and pillage as they had been raped, forgetting in some opium induced stupor the humiliation and pain brought upon them in life and accepting this evil unending dream and illusion as it is drawn and painted on ceilings; then I want no part of it. But, if Dante is correct and the spirit carries forth intact and the Gates exist they must be blocked by the infinitely numbered herd of sheep that have passed on but are not loved by Hell. Again, not to accept the existence of those Gates until the pennies fall from my eyes, but to acquiesce to that which I, with past eyes open, could be said to be and adequately meet my expectation; it would be your Hell. But as I have demonstrated, I could not give testimony to either’s non-existence.

I suspect that not being capable of attesting to the reality of that grand (if over heated and possibly underrated), place was the reason I was drawn to revisit my youth. The message though clear and crystal was not cryptic as one might assume. You see in the valley of the goddess, once lush with fruits and bounty, lives still, though once dead, The Bluesman.

Now, this is no ordinary Bluesman, not a resident of Mississippi, nor, apparently able to find a map to the Crossroads dreamed of by young poets. He was not willing to be conned or convinced by hucksters that Highway 61 could be marked by a sign created by the hand of man that marked the spot.

Given these sad circumstances, as lovin’ as he is, as grand his aspirations, as sincere his convictions, and as slick his callus, only the chosen would see his suffering, his blues. As wasteful as that is in the cosmic sense, you see, he would gladly have paid the price, any price, and thought he did. The joke played by some Greek god not yet aware of mythology or Satan gone down Baton Rouge on The Bluesman, was to laughingly refuse the offering, denying him fame or fortune but allowing him adversity and competence and good karma for a future he could care less about (and cared as little about him) and a past that haunts him, without playin’ with Mayall or Butterfield, or other white men of consequence.

The Bluesman and I have shared the same time, like Mars and Venus circle the sun and to never quite link though they are sometimes aligned or hula hoops circling the same waist, but necessarily, in order to keep rotating, out of sync and never conjoined as some mates are like forged rings. Like the tears I shed at the black granite wall for brothers I knew so well but never met. Yes, we are estranged siblings, brothers, cast out of the same family who went different ways but are forever bound by common blood.

So, following the immediacy of the summons I traveled night and day, eyes red in hopes to hear him play, to hear his testament.

On arrival I couldn’t see. The venue was dark, The street murky. The performance was over. I was devastated; my soul was just chafe without kernels open to the vagaries of the wind. Worry occupied every corner that this might have been the last ring of the guitar or the final time the piano cracked concrete.

Away a dim light revived my spirits as a light in darkness so often does. There in the shadows The Bluesman was waiting, for him serendipity, for me a private performance mano y mano, hand to hand. He sang the tale of his death and his woe filled resurrection. Lovely demons burnt his face with cigarettes. They strangled his voice, and tortured his manhood. His song was colored with the wallpaper in the anteroom of eternal misery and his disappointed life.

Then he sung of being cast out of hell, destined to his purgatory, a roadie sittin’ on an amp for The Rolling Stones. As good as the best to forever be back stage or ridin’ in a cargo plane going from someone else’s show…to show.

My beliefs have been shattered by the consequences. I’m still not sure about Hell, still not seen it with my own eye’s. But I have heard the word of a witness; a testament in fact to new dimensions.

I am sure of one thing though, the Devil gets the last lick.