Eddie Lives Online – 2008 Nanowrimo Entry

“For twenty years, ” the man spat over a draft glass that passed as a rocks glass in the place he was drinking the top shelf rye whiskey on three rapidly melting rocks.  “Twen, Tee, Fucking, years, they kept dragging me out of the cobwebs and propping me up like some messiah.”

The man paused and caught me staring off in the back corner of the tavern, clarity, insanity, vocal chords straining in disappointment, ” And when they finally got me out of the shadows, it was cool for a while.”

He gave the street nod of a Jersey kid.

“I was taken care of, played a couple of big shows, did a few tours.” He finished off the glass and held it out, shake the two surviving ice cubes as if I weren’t sitting directly in front of him in a bar where he was exactly one third of the clientele and I wouldn’t notice. The other two patrons were trading beers over a pool game in the back corner, and I was a good enough bartender that I would have noticed if we had a full house.

“But, they didn’t really want to know what Eddie was up to. They didn’t want to haer the music I’d been working on. It was, ‘Play your fucking one hit and move one, Old Man’, and that kind of sucked. It wwas the reason I didn;t come out before that. I wanted to avoid the downslide, the inevitable slipping of the quality of the venues, until you wake up and you’re sustaining yourself playing Cornfest in some shithole farm town where the radio stations never played more than one or two of my songs, ever.”

The guy stopped, as if he just caught the echo of his own rant and processed what he was beginning to sound like, he shook his head, “Aww, fuck it, nobody needs to hear my crap.”

In a sense, he was right, nobody needed to hear crap like that, but thats what bars are for, ranting, besides drinking, meeting up with other people, listening to music, and generally pissing on the rest of the world if you felt like disappearing for a while.

In another sense, he’s wrong, because after all, he is Eddie Wilson, and somebody needs to truly tell his story, because the fact is that ten albums, two movies, and a handful of Music Channel Biographies didn’t really get it all. Somebody needs to see Eddie now, somebody needs to hear his rant, and so here we go.

But sometimes it’s not pretty.

After his mini-rant, Eddie descended into a full on sulk, fueled and soon muddied by shots of liquer. The clarity that I’d seen earlier swirled away with the emptied small glasses in front of him, and for the most part, no mention was made of Eddie WIlson again that night. I took him home that night after the bar closed. It was one of the good deeds we as bartenders could do for our more loyal and undisciplined customers, and honestly, there was nothing else to do that night.

The owner says it’s a good way to avoid lawsuits, getting the really drunk customers home safe, but the general consensus among my fellow bar workers is that it’s boredom, humor, or complete lack of moral fiber that is usually behind our late night charity rides. Those that lack conscience take home the drunk women and take advantage, those that want a laugh, send their riders up the walk unsupported and laugh as they fall flat on their faces in their own front yards.

Hard drinkers like Eddie Wilson had become were not so much for comedy when you gave them a ride home, more like tragedy. Sometimes they were little more than puddles and you needed to carry them up the rickety back steps of whatever shit hole they were living in unless you were content with leaving them on the curb where you pushed them out of the car.

Eddie wasn’t quite that bad, in fact, on the drive home, to a two room garage converted into a tenement that he lived in at the time, he gained a little bit of lucidity, enough to get a cigarette lit and and stare across the front seat at me as I pulled into his drive/front yard. “You know Kid, you’re alright sometimes. Mix a lousy drink though.”

I laughed at him. ” You drink straight whiskey, dumbass.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not bad.”

I nodded my head, ” Right you are, but I’m just the dispenser for your own orders.”

He laughed and reached for the door handle.

11/7

“Listen, Eddy?” I caught him in a half stance and he sat back down itno the seat less awkwardly than most, considering his condition. He looked at me and waited for me to continue.

“All that shit you were talking at the bar, why don’t you tell it to someone besides us clowns. Unlike most of what I hear at work, yours might be something someone else would want to hear. They WANT to hear your story, maybe not shouted out over a jukebox Hell, ‘I” would like to hear it too.”

He shook his head. “You been watching a lot of VH1 lately kid? I’m not the ‘Behind the Music,’ type. I’ve got nothing to sell, and I don’t want to look like Vanilla Ice or fucking Leif Garret coming on to tell how bad it got and how they’re off drugs and doing all these new great things. I just don’t have the energy or desire to put out that amount of bullshit. Those guys always end up looking like clowns. Next thing you know, I’d be getting a call from “The Surreal Life,” or some other reality show wanting to drag whatever was left of my name through the mud.”

“Not my style, kid.”

He went back to getting out of the car.

“Then let me do it. Can I at least write some stories about the stuff you say at the bar?”

He stood up then leaned back inside the car, looking at me, studying at me, some of the clarity I saw earlier breaking through, with ego riding along with it. “Tell you what, go ahead, put a few of them in your little ‘blog’, see if you can stay interested enough to make it through one when you’re not being paid to listen or drunk off your ass.”

He stood up into the cool night air, looking pleased with him self, backing away unsteadily, leaning over so he could look me in the eye one last time. “Yeah, go ahead. See if you can make it through one story, I’ve told you enough of them down there, and if you do, we’ll see how it goes.”

“I will, I’ve got just the one in mind, but I’m not pulling any punches, I’m gonna tell it the way you told it ion the bar, and then I’m gonna post it. You know what that means? Posting is forever. Everyone will know the story you thought you were telling five drunk people at a bar.”

“I’ve told them all before kid. I just don’t call in camera crews to sort my dirty laundry.”

If I’d thought of it, I would have recorded his saying that with my cell phone, but I’m not real quick with that type of thing. Hell, I’m lucky I can take video if you tell me twenty minutes ahead of time and redo whatever it is you want me to record a couple times. Instead, I just tried to write it down here verbatim, and really, who gives a fuck anyways. Eddie knows what I have, it’s definitely not anything worth suing me for.

I really had to give some thought to what story I would tell. There weren’t really as many complete ones as he thought, at least not that he actually told out loud. It would always start off with something like, ” This chick, used to play rhythm with us in the 60’s, right before we made it big…” and it would convolute into comparisons to today’s TV stars and musicians and celebra-wads that just like to get their names on the news and thought that made them special. That was one of Eddie’s favorite rants, about how that chick that played rhythm would have told all these reality shows to piss right off if they went after her, but he wasn’t quite right about that, because I’d seen her on a brief where are they now segment, one of those that he’d made fun of when I dropped him off. Fact of it was, she just got too married, too old, and too fat, and had too few pieces of actual footage of her available from back when she was none of those things. She was a quick byline, like one of the little Partridge children, not even on the level of an Oliver Brady.

My Blog Post – Sal and Eddie.

Another of his old cronies that he seemed to talk about a lot was his buddy Sal, they’d grown up together, and made it, the first time, together. Sal had taken it hard when Eddie came back from the dead, but that hadn’t seemed to stop him from continuing to live off the Cruiser name, even if he wasn’t in the new band with Eddie and his new boys. Sal had actually used Eddie’s resurrection to continue his bookings with “The Cruisers,” replete with his own rotating crop of Eddie stand-ins, all just flawed enough that they would never steal his flashing, disco-spotlight.

At various times in the period since Eddie had gone off the bridge and disappeared at what was touted as the beginning of a glorious music career, there were waged massive public relations campaigns around the music of the Cruisers, usually centered around some “lost” recordings, Eddie’s reappearance in the late 80’s, or the movies that were made about the band around those same times. The campaigns were at the forefront of the hype model used for lesser and greater talents over that era.

So, basically, you end up with three sets of inteviews of Eddie’s band mates, first with the original Cruisers, then another set before the first movie and finally, the ones done after Eddie came back. The contrasts tell quite a story of what people will allow themselves to believe, specifically, Eddie’s best friend Sal.

Before the first movie release, and the reappearance of the ” Season in Hell,” recordings, Sal was found scratching along the lounge circuit, trying to gleen whatever he could from their brief fame, and angling to make a buck himself over the new hype. He was modestly successful, but it couldn’t help him that he came off in the interviews as thinking he was the muscle behind Eddie and the Cruisers, the Pete Townshend to Eddie’s Roger Daltrey.

In subsequent years, Sal began to show evidence that the myth of his youth being destroyed was not sitting well inside him. His ego was taking a battering, and with each new microphone asking him how he felt after losing the heart of his musical triumphs, anger, resentment, loneliest and fear began to creep into his comments, his expressions, and carved lines into his face following his receding hairline out and around his head.

In the years after Eddie returned, Sal became more and more outwardly resentful, though not completely willing to go after his once best friend. He threw out angry comments when asked but pulled just short of completing them, like a pitcher throwing fastballs on a twenty foot string. He found other targets just outside of the Eddie WIlson Bullseye.

After what he thought of as a snub at the second movie re-release. Sal was quoted as saying, “For Chrissake, Eddie Wilson drives off a bridge in Jersey in the early 70’s and resurrects as a Bruce Springsteen wanna be on the 80’s, who writes this shit?”

At a benefit in Ohio, where Sal appeared with his own band as well as Rock Steady’s lead guitarist, Rick Diesel, with his own band. Sal walked up to Rick before he played and pretended to examine his guitar curiously, commenting. “I was wondering if you still had the hookups for the other strings.”

When Rick asked him, “What other strings?”

Sal replied, The ones that ran over to Eddie when you were playing for him.”

Rick went through with the days gig, but canceled the rest of the joint tour through the midwest, to almost nobody’s disappointment.

I got that from various sources, but I did ask Eddie at the bar one night about his old buddy Sal. He just shook his head, “Ol’ Sal, he’s always thought he was the big dog, but never acted it, or proved it. And when he plays, he doesn’t actually hear what’s coming out of his amp, he hears it in his head, vastly improved over the actual product. You can’t fault him for growing the wrong set of ears, kid. “

“It doesn’t bother you that he acts like that?”

Eddie shook his head. “Nah, Sal is Sal, always will be, and that high and mighty act of his has never worked with anyone that cared. Not the girls at the High School gigs we used to play, and not the public when the fans started coming in droves, into even when I wasn’t there to present my side of it.”

“So you’re saying that it was all you?”

“Who are you? You’re comin’ at me like a regular TV gossip hound.” He laughed and swatted my shoulder across the bar. “Got a mike hidden somewhere? Are you wired?” He said all of these in a joking fashion, yet, his gaze at me sharpened. “Seriously, and this is AWAY from the mikes, even though I’d tell them the same thing, it was never all me. BUT, it was never all Sal either, or even just the two of us.”

“There was the rest of the band, Wendell, Tommy, Rita, and there was the Word Man, together, we hit the right note, if only for a little while. I couldn’t have done it without Sal, at least not that time, and he couldn’t have done it without me. “

“So it doesn’t bother you when he tries to act differently?”

“It’s not Sally that’s at fault with that crap, kid. It’s the ones that buy into it or try and promote it, when they know it’s bullshit. And really, why should I care?”

He let it hang out there in the air for a while, taking a couple drinks, staring sideways along the bar, then said.”Besides, when he made that crack about me lookin’ like the Boss, Springsteen was everywhere, I took it as sort of a compliment, and as a reason to study some of my wardrobe habits.”

Everyone within earshot laughed, and the night resumed it’s normal pace, playing the jukebox, switching off winners at the pool table, and more talk completely unconnected to the Cruisers.

end of my post.

Eddie wasn’t around much the next couple of days, which wasn’t unusual, his attendance at the bar was sporadically heavy. He dropped in very quickly on my afternnon shift that Thursday, buying a few squares on the football pool and quickly slammming a couple tall Scotch and Soda’s.

He waited until I had a free moment and then leaned over the bar slightly, talking as privately as it gets in that case. “Got anything going tomorrow night?”

“My night off, probably won’t be anywhere near here.”

“Well, if you want, there’s something I think you should check out, what do you think?”

“Like what?”

“It’s a surprise. Trust me on this one.”

“Sounds good. Guess I CAN meet you here, say around 5?”

“By the way, read your ‘Blog’, did you have to take a colege course to write like that?”

I studied his eyes, got nothing, “Yeah, with prerequisites, you like it?”

“Needs a little work.”

“You’re welcome to do it yourself, or give me some more meaty stories.”

“Tomorrow night should be one, though I’m not sure if I want you writing about it.”

I looked at him in silence. Running what that could have mean through my mind.

“Ok, see ya tomorrow.”

Chapter 2.

The Tennessee Six

I’d never ridden in Eddie’s car previous to that night, In fact, I don’t recall ever even noticing what kind of car he drove, or if he even drove at all, as much of our clientele’s driving privileges had fallen to the attrition of drinking and driving in today’s landscape. When we walked to it, a big old Lime Green ‘76 Buick Electra convertible, I really couldn’t recall seeing it in the parking lot before, not that I really paid attention, but for sure it wasn’t one of those that regularly spent the night there when he couldn’t drive home, and this car would have stood out if it were.

It was that old ’70’s GM Green that some executive had once thought was attractive and the ragtop was white, it looked to be garage kept, with a decent wax shine and clean black tires with a bleached white white walls. In the fall days of the midwest it was hard to keep any of those in good order. It still had Jersey plates, EDDY W, and the sticker was current though I knew he’d been around our parts for going on at least five years.

I stopped and admired it, “Nice ride Eddie, didn’t know you had this. I love these old boats.”

He laughed, ” Yeah, me too, though I can confirm that they don’t float.”

“What? This isn’t the one that you ran off the dock is it?”

“No, but almost the exact same model. That one was a cube of steel before I had a chance to get back to it, that was before they saved those things and auctioned them off on E-Bay.”

“They kept James Dean’s car, didn’t they?”

“Kid, I was never close to as important as James Dean.”

“True, but don’t tell Sal that.”

He did a double take. “You don’t think too much of Sally, do you?”

“You read the post, didn’t you? I think he’s a bad facsimile of a sellout.”

“You need to cut him a little slack. There’s a lot more to it than ‘Three sets of interviews’ to Sal’s part in everything.”

“I’m all ears.”

“In due time. I have another angle planned for this evening.” He got in and reached across the front seat to unlock my door.

I slid in onto the front seat leather, as wide as many people’s couch. The interior was as nice as the exterior, with chrome shining around polished plastiwood like the counter of a retro diner. I took a long look around the inside, taking it all in and detecting a slight scent of ‘new car smell’, then looked at Eddie in approval.

“You ever take this thing outside?
He laughed and pinted at the dash. ” Well, this is sort of a specil occasion, but I try to get her out once in a while, that odometer has been zeroed out 3 times.

I looked at the odometer he’d been pointing too, it read 17 thousand something, and took another gaze around the car, looking for signs of wear, but there were none, not so much as a scuffed arm rest. “This is all original?

“What? C’mon dumb ass, you know better than that. A lot of it’s been restored, some of these parts are third generation, but they’re factory. The engine, I wasn’t so strict about replacing with factory parts.”

“You put a ‘bigger’ engine in this thing? How many gallons do the mile do you get?”

“Okay, Kid, ya got about ten more minutes to bust my balls about this car, then we got to have a little pep talk before we go into this club we’re heading to.”

“I’m kind of done busting your balls, I love this car, I want this car, but the pep talk can begin immediately.”

Instead, he turned on the radio, and pushed one of the buttons to go to a country station, one of the three or four available in the area. After a couple songs, I leaned forward and turned it down. ” You done punishing me? I hate that crap.”

“Not done by a long shot, Kid.”

We pulled into the gravel parking lot of a concrete block building that had a low profile plastic marquee out next to the road the said:

Red Carpet Lounge Presents:

The Tennessee Six

2 for 1 bottles & House Mix drinks

I looked at Eddie, this time trying to decide if he was serious. I dealt with a lot of country music, it was my job, but I really didn’t feel like sitting through a night of it in a back road, dive bar. I’d been in the place before, and it was going to take a lot of alcohol to get me to even use the restrooms, let alone listen to the music.

I looked at Eddie, ” Seriously, you want me to sit through this?”

“Well, this is where the pep talk comes in.”

Eddie kind of smiled, and right there, I saw the charisma that made him ‘Eddie’. of the ‘Cruisers. Most of the time, dealing with him across the bar, you couldn’t see it, he was just another customer, but I think he was going for that, there, at the beginning of his pep talk, he was ‘Eddie Wilson’.

“First of all, when we go in here, my name is Joe West, these people will never recognize the name, or me, but they might recognize Eddie Wilson and I don’t need that shit here, so call me Joe, got it?”

I nodded.

“Second, you’re carrying my amp in, my shoulder’s been bugging me and that’s your cover coming with me anyway, you’re my buddy, loading in some equipment since my shoulder’s fucked up.”

“You’re playing?”

“Hell yeah, nothing quite like a good old country guitar and a good old country song.”

“Dude, you’re Eddie Wilson, ‘Country Guitar’ ? What the fuck? You play circles around these guys.”

“Ever hear of a guy named Chet Atkins? He’d play circles around them all.”

We were getting out of the car, he was popping the trunk, the bright clean trunk light illuminated a guiter case and a tan Fender Pro amplifier. I looked at him once again as if a film crew were about to jump out and tell me I was being Punk’d, or whatever the crowd that still followed Eddie Wilson called it on whatever video channel covered him, but there was nobody. But there was nobody, the truth of it as that nobody really cared about Eddie Wilson any more.

Eddie’s time had passed, and unless he felt like prostrating himself before the public, cable supplied eye, he was done being in the mindset of the nation, and it seemed Eddie was fine with that. He patted me on the back and walked by, carrying the guitar and the gig bag.

“Come one, you’ll be surprised, it’s a lot of fun.”

“The ‘Tennessee Six’? Where’d you find these guys?”

“Well, I found them right here on a jam night, but they weren’t the ‘Tennessee Six’, that was my idea.”

“Your idea? What, you love Tennessee that much, but you still have Jersey plates?”

“Kid, in so many ways, I fucking hate Tennessee, but I love the name, and we got a nice little quartet going, so just come on in and enjoy one of Eddie Wilson’s ‘Post-Cruiser- performances. You can even write about it in your little blog if you want to.”

Walking up to the stage, the rest of the band was already setting up, two loudspeakers perched up on poles and a six channel mixing boar set off to the side of the stage. A nice, relatively wide vacant space was left in the center of the stage for ‘Joe’s’ stuff.

On the other front corner, a heavy set man with near white hair sat on a stool, shoulder’s curled over a Telecaster knockoff with two or three stickers on it from places like Tootsie’s Wild Orchid Lounge and Baldknobber’s Jamboree. He looked up at me as I sat the heavy amp down on the stage.

” Helping out the old man, are yee?”

” Well, he’s old, but he’s not my old man. Just a friend.”

” Well, no shit, boy. Joe says all his kids are grown and live back east, but they’re probably about your age. Just busting your balls a little bit, and Joe’s, lord knows he needs it.”

Eddie was just catching up. ” Didn’t get a chance to tell you before you started in, this one’s a little sensitive. ” He slapped me hard on the back. “And not real bright.”

Joe introduced me, the guitar player’s name was Ray. The bass player twenty years old, flannel skinned, sloppy bearded and sloppy haired, with work boots that still had metal filings from wherever he worked and jeans with grease from the same place. His name was Tim and he introduced himself to me over a round of shots he brought over from the bar.

“Everything’s on the house, except no shots when we’re playing.” Tim explained. “This is a sweet gig, 1st and 3rd Fridays every month and Spaghetti Thursdays. And that night we eat free too.” Tim bragged. I looked over at Eddie, who grinned even a little wider.

The drummer, who had spent most of the time since I’d walked up working on a broken high hat stand, came up and shook my hand. “Benny Samo, how’s it goin’ dude?”

Benny was a guy with a smile almost as wide as his face. He wore a dirty black mesh ball cap that said Zildjan on it, though a quick look at his kit didn’t reveal any Zildjan cymbals. I didn’t know a lot about the drums, but I knew that Zildjans didn’t warp crack or dent the way most of Benny’s cymbals were. He was a slight man, just a bit over five feet tall, thin, hair came out from beneath the ballcap with strands spreading down below his shoulders in retreating, graying, numbers. His face was lined like an old plain indian’s, and his wide smile revealed a set of teeth better hidden, but his cheeks were full and already slightly red from the succession of shots and drinks that Tim had been bringing back from the bar. It was pretty clear why the rest of the band was there early to set up.

Eddie’s part of setting up was pretty fast, with me plugging his amp into an outlet and his plugging his Les Paul into the amplifier. He was tuning the strings before I was done shaking Benny’s hand and hitting a few riffs right away, one of them straight form his first ‘comeback” album, which I recognized because it was on the bar jukebox.

Eddie could tell that I recognized and flashed a sheepish smile, then turned toward his band mates and went into a couple other riffs they probably knew better. I took that as a cue to go find a seat at the bar, there were several open at the time, and prepared for what I acknowledged to myself was something I might enjoy, despite the fact that I hated country music.

Getting the feel of a band’s sound is something that even most professionals, writing for Magazines like Rolling Stone, or SPIN, don’t often accomplish, in my opinion, and I’m not even going to declare myself as close to their talent for the genre, but I do have a bit of a feel from that night’s session. It’s a good feeling, but a little complicated.

Maybe it’s better to describe it by cutting away the frills around the outside. What it definitely wasn’t was your traditional weekend working country band, versions of which can be found in similar venues across the United States, in rural areas. These serve their purpose, putting out live music for a crowd of heavy drinking spectators, churning out the late night dance favorites, and the slow dances when everyone is starting to pair up and move out. Without prior knowledge, the Tennessee Six might be a closer facsimile of this, but from my perspective it was much more, and watching those around me, I could see it there too.

The songs were much the same as you might expect, at least during the first set, with some Johnny Cash, Toby Keith and Garth Brooks among the collection of standards required for every country band to play, but even those had a different flavor.

Part of it had to be Eddie and his Les Paul, kicking out rolls that might have come out of a Bachman Turner Overdrive song, coupled with his partner Ray’s more traditional, three chorded reverb twang. The contrast, coupled with two guys that weren’t playing a game of “who’s amp is louder”, was a lot of fun, and energizing to the rest of the band and the crowd forming in the ‘hole in the wall’ bar.

Eddie made a point of not being the front man as well, content to sing a couple songs and run his riffs when the moment presented itself. As I am not many things, I am also not someone that tuly appreciates music. I don’t drive around or sit at home exploring the nuances of different styles of music, I couldn’t tell Segovia from Satriani, but I knew when something was good, and those guys were playing some quality music.

That might have been the first time in my life I actually sat and watched an entire night’s set, even more than in the few concerts I’d been to, because it was magical. Eddie worked his Les Paul like an old man with his favorite tool. He went from traditional jazzy style to crunching rock power chords. By the second set, they were changing it up even more. Traditional old country  songs like “Sixteen Tons,” sounded like rock anthems, and rock classics like “Can’t Explain,” by the Who became toe tapping dance songs that had people on the dance floor, doing the four corners dance.

Eddie sat down beside me between sets, away from his bandmates, who were indulging in the free shots during breaks perk. ” Gotta get a little distance, or I’ll be playing like an old man.”

I was giving him the crooked eye, “How long have you been doing this?”

“Couple months, started out as a jam night, but we just kept the few of us together, and the bar started offering to pay us and, well, the perks.” He nodded towards the rest of the band. “The third set can get a little sloppy, but that just means I can get away with more.”

“Throw in a couple ‘Cruiser’s’ songs?”

He shook his head, laughed, “Nah, but I actually did play one of the songs I did with Rock Steady, nobody recognized it.”

“No shit? I’m not sure if I can name ONE of the songs you did with Rock Steady, Sorry.”

“Not a problem, kid. I was a little bit before your time.”

“So why don’t you do some of your songs, or play with your own band again? You might not be as famous as you used to be but I know you could find better places to play than this one.”

Eddie finished off his beer and signaled for another. Behind us, the band was starting to take their spots, but he was not stirring, he was staring down at the empty in front of him. “I’ve tried that a few times, just wasn’t fun anymore. It’s not like I need the money, I’m not rich but I made some cash, both times, and I’ve always worked besides the show business stuff, too.”

“Then why this?” I held my hands out, gestured around at the crowded bar.

“Because this, this is fun.”

The third set did not resemble any usual Friday night country bar band show. The crowd, young and old alike, were not leaving, except to leave their seats and get on the dance floor. The songs were both the ones you would expect to hear, “Green Green Grass of Home,” and “Farewell Party,” by Gene Watson, but separated by songs you might never expect, in ways that you would also never expect.

“Green Green Grass of Home,” is one of those songs that I’d grown to loathe working as a bartender in a bar with a mostly country jukebox, and though it didn’t sound a lot different the way that Eddie and his crew played it that night, only the addition of him using a slide differed. The other guitar player, Ray, turned out to have a nice deep voice and a setting for his Telecaster that made it sound like a full bodied acoustic guitar.

It was the third song in that set, and when I first started realizing that I was watching something special. I’m not overstating this, it was special. There are certain times and performances by artists that writers love to set on a pedestal, early Dylan, Springsteen, or Janis Joplin or the Doors as the hit the blooming point of their talent, people wrote and talked about being spectators of those times like I felt right there at the Red Carpet Lounge.

That song, the way the band worked through it, no, the way Eddie worked them through it, probably without their even realized it, and the addition of his slide guitar, working around lyrics ingrained in the fabric of everything around us, like the Constitution, or the Lord’s Prayer, it all worked perfectly. I had a light bulb moment, whre I began to see how a musician really worked his instrument, and how the instrument was just a guitar or a drum set, but the sound coming out of them all together.

That was followed by a cover of a Springsteen song from the Nebraska album, “Atlantic City,” and it sounded as country as it’s predecessor. The end of that song morphed into “Cadillac Ranch, and then again into “Achy Breaky Heart” before people started realizing they were dancing to Bruce Springsteen, and again into Tulsa Time which turned anyone around that thought they were sitting down for a rest. I wasn’t even dancing and I was feeling a little tired myself, but there was no hope for rest with the next song, “Georgia on a Fast Train.”

Putting a little rock and roll into country music also wasn’t new, there were whole channels of it on XM radio, but something is lost when you start declaring something outright. I had the feeling that if the crowd weren’t responding, they would  have dialed it up or down to meet whatever the crowd needed, and the crowd responded in kind with dancing and applause.

“Ramblin’ Man,” followed, with a slow dance to the tune of “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” by Foreigner, but featuring as delicate a country lead as you could put on a song, and Eddie doing the vocals in a whiskey voice. “Tuesday’s Gone,” was next, with Eddie letting Ray take the lead.

On any other night, in any other club where a band was playing, I would have been sloopy drunk by that time in the evening, and the band might have seemed just as good at that moment as it was there, with hardly a buzz working, but sobriety brings back musical taste, and there would be no drop off in what I remembered about that night’s performance.

And then he winked over at me at the bar, and started a finger strum that quickly became familiar.

Dark Sides callin’ Now, nothin’ is real, she’ll never know just how I fe-el…

Riding home I looked away from Eddie into dark fields along the road. It was awkward, I felt like we’d just shared something very personal, and not only did I not even really know him, I didn’t know what to think. You get used to being disappointed as you get to know your customers in my line work.

For his part, Eddie wasn’t talking much either. He was staring at the road ahead, the ride back was taking a little longer and though I wasn’t completely paying attention I was sure that he was taking the long way, but I didn’t mind.

3. Now What?

Eddie came in on my Sunday afternoon shift, and I have to admit I was anxious to talk to him about the Friday night gig like a kid on Christmas morning. He took his usual seat, ordered huis usual drink, and though he wasn’t standoffish, he certainly wasn’t as excited as I was about it all.

Throughout the weekend I began to delve even deeper into the history of Eddie Wilson, and with a bit of digging, much of it was out there. I found a few sites that said he was living in our area, but most listed him as off the grid, some even had him posing as various public figures. In all, Eddie’s folklore rating was somewhere below that of the popular mythical figures such as Elvis, DB Cooper, and Jim Morrison, but enough to have garnered a few story spinners, even after his reappearance.

The simple truth is that if you dig deep enough, there are fanatic clicks out there for toe socks, or HR Pufenstuff, or Grape Squeeze bottles, but I couldn’t help but get a little excited along with the other shut ins of the world. Luckily, I had a living, breathing, off-putting, Eddie Wilson to temper my excitement back to shrieking mundaneity.

“Quite a gig you had the other night, Eddie. I had a lot of fun, thanks for taking me.”

“No problem, I have to admit I wanted to show off a little bit. For all you know, I’m not even THAT Eddie Wilson, at least from what you’ve seen.”

“Yep, you’re full of surprises.”

“That’s also the fun of it all, Kid. Surprising people.”

When you’re working a bar, at least a moderately quiet one, you can have a conversation over hours, one or two sentences at a time, gestures and shouts towards something. It’s not really talking, but it can pass the time. If you do it enough, you learn things about others you wouldn’t if you were looking them straight in the face and having a ‘conversation’.

That afternoon, between laughs, drinks, and football, I could tell a lot, catching the way that Eddie followed my actions around the edge of the bar after I made a comment, as if I would make a funny face or something to someone else after a compliment.

During the Bears game, after nobody had mentioned his gig for a while, he leaned over the bar and waved me over. “I’ve decided that it’s okay for you to write about it in your little blog if you want to.”

Later, after the game, when he was starting to list a little bit, he pulled me close again, this time speaking lower, not stage whispering, “Think you could show me how to do that? Write a little bit on that Blog thing?”

“Anything you want to do, Eddie. I’ll type it in for you, or just set you up with a password and user name so you can write a post yourself, no problem.”

Then he went ahead and gave me the go ahead to put up a post about Friday night.

I did a decent write up, of course leaving out the parts of how he made me feel like a musician again, but covering it from a spectators perspective. Then, I spread it around a little bit, setting up a couple trackbacks to some of the Eddie Wilson enthisiast sites.

I got a respectable amount of hits, but nothing too crazy, at least not that time. A few people contacted me through some forum posts I’d put up, asking if it was ‘for real’. and I got a few trolls telling me the regular troll lingo, that I was a pathetic, straw grabbing stalked or that I was delusional, or queer, or in possession of only a half decent sense of imagination because the write up I did was ridiculous.

The ones wanted verification got very little from me. I told them, Yeah, as far as I know it is, but “No,” I didn’t exactly check his documentation. “Yes” I suppose he could be a phony, and I did not intend to perpetuate a hoax. After a few back and forths with several cynics, I simply told them to go fuck themselves, turns out I have little patience for that, like my subject.

There were several responses to the post as well, all of the same ilk as those on the forums, but one of them, far down the list, stood out. It was from user, JoeWestatGreevys. “Greevy’s” is the name of the bar where I work. It was a one word response, “Rock!”. with the little emoticon of the smiley face with his hand raised high, flashing the “rock” sign.

By the time the next gig came up, I was anxious to see what kind of turnout we would get. It was two weeks til the next Friday, but then he would be playing the next Thursday, “Spaghetti Thursday,” as his bass player put it.

We rode out there together. The Thursday night before the gig he’d simply leaned forward at the bar and quietly said, “Pick you up here tomorrow night again?”

Many people would take offense at someone assuming that they will be available without going through all the regular formalities, but in many ways this was part of the ‘conversation’ that can happen across the bar.

4. A Night with Eddie Wilson

That night, we had to park in the grass field behind the gravel parking lot of the Red Carpet Lounge, because the lot was full already when we got there at 7PM. The bar itself looked like an overstuffed purse, with people hanging around just outside three opened doors that were around the main dining and entertainment area, and the views through the doors show crowds standing around the tables and bars.

Walking through the parking lot, I saw a few out of state plates, one with an old retro bumper sticker on it, “Eddie Lives On the Dark Side!” I pointed to it and Eddie laughed.

Overflow crowd, or maybe just people wanting to be outside to smoke were around each of the steel doors on the sides of the dance floor and stage area, and these people stirred as they watched the two of us coming in from the back end of the parking lot, waving their fingers and cigarettes in our direction and murmuring in small groups, but nobody got as stupid as rushing up to us or anything, or even offer me a hand carrying Eddie’s heavy ass amplifier.

Instead, several clusters of midle aged men wearing the same clothes they wore when they were 20 cocked their heads from side to side and studied Eddie and I, trying to decide if he was for real, and who the hell I was. Of course, if they read the site, they knew, but real life and the web seldom cross paths, I could very easily be a middle aged housewife, of ten year old hyperactive juvenile delinquent.

The tables of mom and pop groups that had watched the first gig were not gone, but they were sprinkled around a very different, and not local, crowd of the 80’s lost youth. Bandanna headgear and studded black belt buckles were the norm, along with motorcycle boots, jeans, sleeveless shirts, and leather jackets, open because they couldn’t zip them up anymore.

A decent proportion of the new visitors were ladies, in varying ages and types. Some of them were much like the men, wearing their clothes from the 80’s with varying degrees of success, but there was also a contingent of younger girls there that quickly took over the dance floor. Eddie would later explain their presence at the show as being the “daughters of his male fans, wanting to hang out with their dads.”

The place wasn’t completely packed, but there were at least twice as many people as there were the last time to start. The bartender was running at full speed, giving me both a dirty look and a grin as he emptied pout his tip jar so that he could fill another, before we even set up.

The guys in the band, they looked at Eddie as strangely as the people standing around the dance floor, it was Ray that spoke up first, kind of leaning over Eddie’s shoulder as he got plugged in and tuned up.

“‘There somethin’ you haven’t been telling us, Joe?”

Eddie sat back on his stool and took it all in. “Well, Ray, maybe there is, but, does this mean you don’t want to play?” The last part, he said into the microphone, with Ray nodding in realization that the show was about to start, and taking his part.

Ray looked out at the crowd around him and said, ” I just asked our guitar player here, ‘Joe West’, he told us his name was, if there was anything he felt like telling us before we went and played some music for you folks.”

Everyone cracked up, and were rewarded, as we were all treated to an evening with Eddie Wilson.

With the ‘Monkey out the bag,’ so to speak, and a bar full of people there to see ‘Eddie Wilson’, you would think that he would have reverted to form, and played all of his old Cruiser hits, but that wasn’t how it went that night.The ‘country music band,’ theme wasn’t just dropped, any more than it had been the week before when he explored several styles in the country music sound.

Still, Eddie couldn’t resist starting off the evening with a bit of a tease. He went into the guitar riff he’d played the week before that mimicked the piano kick off of “On the Dark Side,” and the bar went crazy, then abruptly cut it off, much like Ray Davies in the Kinks Live album, following withan off-hand, “Aww, we aren’t going to play that one tonight,” in his best britich accent, but then reverted to his own voice and looked out into the crowd.

“Folks, y’all aren’t from ’round here, are y’all?”

Another round of laughter and cheers. “Well, I’m guessing word got out that ‘Eddie Wilson,’ was playing in this band here tonight, and that’s only sort of half right.”

“I am Eddie WIlson, ” he looked over at Ray, who was smiling. “Sorry, Ray, I fibbed.”

“But the part that’s wrong is that this isn’t my band, it’s theirs,” he pointed to the rest of his band members. “And we have our own thing, you’re welcome to check it out. I think you’ll like it. Don’t expect a roll down memory lane, I quit doing reunion tours about ten years ago. Still, I think they’ll let us slip a few oldies in here and there, among the ones we do already, like this one. “

Eddie looked over at Ray and kicked off “Folsom Prison Blues.”

At least to start out with, the set was even more country music than the week before, but as someone who swore he’d never listen to the shit on purpose, I can attest that it was more than enjoyable. Eddie seemed to feature his band mates more than the week before, and they responded, he would later tell me, “Well, hell yeah, almost everyone plays better for a bigger crowd.”

Eddie did take a little time to show off on a guitar duet type renditon, altering leads with Ray, for Don WIlliam’s, “I Believe in Love.” The he let Ray belt out a few in his deep voice, “Behind Closed Doors” and “Lay You Down,” by Conway Twitty, without saying another word, declaring to those that still sat in the crowd yelling “Play On the Dark Side!” between songs, that he meant business about doing THIS band’s music. I had to agree with him, some of those guys needed a little slap on the head, them and the ones that kept chanting, “Ed-Dee, Ed-Dee.” That was nice the first time, but it got old fast when it was so out of context and so pervasive.

I found myself rooting for Eddie to play even more country songs, and it seemed he did. After all, who were these upstarts to come in and act like they could dictate the music just like that. Even realizing that very much of this new fan base was my doing, I felt like the old guard, wanting to keep the status quo, and also, I thought it was cool that it happened that way. I even parlayed it into being included in a few extra rounds of shots with the band after the last set.

For the first and second sets, Eddie took a back seat and let his band go into one country standard after another, adding only the unfamiliar roar of his Les Paul as his own signature, and though the chanters turned into hecklers and then got a little subdued, nobody left, because damn it, it was good music. Even some idiot that drove there wanting to see some long lost rock star he might not even be able to name a song by can appreciate good music, and the nice set of young ladies that never quit dancing and nearly caused a rumble whenever the band shifted to a slow song.

I recognized a few of them from the week before, and of course from the jukebox back at my own watering hole, but they seemed fresh, and the energy in the bar was so high that they could have sang the pledge of allegiance and got the dance floor jumping. Eddie kept a low profile throughout most of the night, though in the music beneath you could hear his hand on the wheel driving the band.

He sat down beside me after the second set, at around 11:30, and turned around on his stool, staring out at the crowd in the bar. For the most part, they were all keeping their distance, trying to decide what to make of him. I figure they are like me, they like their long lost rock stars from a distance. Perhaps the reality of an Eddie Wilson in a room with them was too foreign. I think I’d feel the same way about a Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain, after they are dead, you can sort of let the reality of what they were fall aside and they become mythical.

Nobody ever claims to see a fat Elvis of the early 70’s , with an eskimo pie addiction and so out of shape he croaked after a racquetball match, on his toilet. Nobody wants to remember that Cobain was spiralling out of control and that the man was miserable, even if they can hear it in every one of his songs. The angst act was working back in the good old grunge explosion, but it would be as tired as the still living Cult’s act in the bright lights of the 21st century. And Morrison managed to overload the media back when there were three channels and everything was in print. Even dead he commands internet space, alive he would make Paris Hilton look like a choir girl.

I don’t know if Eddie represented anything like that to any of the people in the bar that night, but there was something that brought them in, I actually saw some Georgia license plates, and it had to be a little unsettling for some of them to see him. Like the dog that finally catches a car. There were also many many rumors about Eddie’s aversion to attention away from the stage. One of the coolest moments of the evening came while he was sitting there with me at the bar between sets, a simple case of a fan walking up with a pair of shots, quietly, respectfully, waiting for Eddie to turn and greet him.

“Dude, had to do at least one shot with the one rock and roller that read Rimbaud.” The guy didn’t look to be a literary type, wearing a bikers jacket, with a shaved head, extra metal scattered around his face, and trimmed, pointed soul patch beneath his lip.

Eddie nodded approval, and took one of the shots. “Well, I normally stay away from shots, but this offers an occasion for myself. Who knew I’d still have a fan that ever read Rimbaud. Here’s to another season in hell old friend.”

The guy walked away after standing there a while longer, not really offering any more to say, and with Eddie seeming kind of lost as well. I turned to him after we had turned back to the bar. “WAS he an old friend? You never met that guy before tonight, have you?”

“Hell no kid, it’s an expression, like that idiot that ran for president used about every other sentence. But, if he got any of that album, and thought enough to point it out now, twenty years later, well, yes, he is my friend. Hell, he IS my brother. I was in a band with a bunch of guys that I thought were my brothers and they never got it at all. “

“You’re gonna talk about your old buddy Sal like that?”

He looked at me, but with distance in his eyes, “Good Ol’ Salavatore! Yeah, well he was my brother too, he just never got Rimbaud. In fact, I think he spat on the floor in some interview I was watching when they mentioned Rimbaud, and Season in Hell. ” He shook his head and stared at the floor for a moment then popped back up.

“Shit kid, you’re bringing me down, what’s wrong with you?”

I shook my head, “Sorry, don’t know.”

“Can I go back and have some fun now?”

“I don’t see why not.”

I’d like to take credit for what happened that last set, for energizing him so much that he went back to the stage and turned his little four piece bar band into a stadium filling sensation, but I would have no idea how to do that, I just know that we had a little fun, and Eddie did the rest.

He plugged in an leaned over in each of his band mates ears, whispering, then looking them in the eye, with each of them nodding, Tim the bass player throttled his bass in a Gene Simmons stance, perhaps giving away what they were talking about. Eddie went back to his place, and picked his stool up off the stage, half tossing it into a corner, where someone grabbed it.

He hit a couple of effects on his floor switches and began the finger picking riff that mimicked his biggest hit, “On the Dark Side,” as he had at the beginning of the night, but this time it sounded better, and he didn’t stop. The bar went crazy, and everyone’s lighters and cell phones came out. He extended the moment as long as he could, with most of the lighters getting too hot to keep holding and then went into the song.

He didn’t disappoint, the song was as much a part of him as the big hunk of Old Michigan steel in the back of the parking lot, even if he didn’t take it out very much either, and if he ever cut it short, you wouldn’t make me believe it. It was a true movie moment, an anthem for what he used to be, what a jersey boy can aspire to when he’s plugging away in the garage, and how far you can take it.

After that song, the bar, and the lives of each and every person in it were in his hands as if he were the pilot of a jet we were flying on, and nobody wanted to leave. I was wondering where he would go from there, usually they save those big songs for the end of the show, but he had at least an hour left when he finally took “On the Dark Side,” home.

Luckily, there was only about a breath’s worth of time before Eddie started up “Rock and Roll All Night,” by Kiss, with as shear a guitar sound as had maybe ever been heard in that particular location. It was hard to believe that the sound was coming out of the same set up that had just been playing “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” not thirty minutes before, but it was.

Around the dance floor, as many fans as were flailing their arms, dancing and reacting, others were staring at the spectacle of it, slack-jawed. Nobody was mad that he wasn’t playing country any more for the same reason that there hadn’t been any complaints about the country, during the songs at east. Good music is good music, and energy is contagious. Even the staunch hard core regulars that came in to do their four corner dance and two step were either dancing, waving their hands, or watching in amazement.

After that song, stepping back and releasing his grip on the guitar for second, letting the blood run back into his fingers after gripping so hard when he hit the power chords, Eddie looked around at the crowd, transformed from the guy that had sulked about his old friends into the near demi-god of modern times that was once Eddie Wilson, as much in his element as a person could be.

Next it was “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” by the Who, with Edie throwing in some more of the finger picking to fill in for the lack of a keyboard, and it worked, even with the twang in his partner Ray’s power chords. The set was a tour of rock anthems, with only a few unfamiliar to me, but all of them maintained the energy that he’d pumped up in the opening song of the set.

Eddie didn’t turn into a roaming, preening attention hog, but there was no doubt that last set whose band it was, if there ever had been in anyone’s mind. I’d known it from the moment I heard them play, and had little doubt in my mind that the rest of his band mates ever thought different either. Eddie had thrown his stool away so that he could stand up and take over, he didn’t need to run around the bar to make his point any further.

The finale of the regular set was , “Alive,” by Pearl Jam, with Eddie grinning at his own cliche in the younger Eddie’s lyrics. He took a couple swigs off a fresh, cold beer, and did two more as an encore, first, a melodic one from his “Season in Hell,” album, and then getting his stool back to play, “New York City,” off his ‘comeback ‘ album with the band he formed in Seattle, Rock Steady. It was a nice mellow end to an up and down, enjoyable, crazy evening, and it had seemed that when Eddie grabbed his stool and sat down, the entire bar did so as well, with him. Out of breath, and reflective, we all listened as Eddie sang a song he wrote about his home coast, while he was in exile from the fame he’d made.

On the ride home, I asked him about the way he did the last set, and he made sure I knew that it wasn’t an accident. ” You might have noticed that in that set, I broke two of the cardinal rules of showmanship, and I did it on purpose.”

“Rule Number One: Save your best for last. Although it can be argued that by waiting until the last set I was doing exactly that, it can also be said that by doing my ‘one hit’, I was shooting my wad too early. Most of the guys I was touring with and for when I got sick of it were like that. they would tell me, ‘Just play whatever the fuck you want for your first fifty minutes or so, and then play the big one last, or everyone is gonna leave.’ Bullshit. That’s just chicken shit crap from people who think they have nothing new and good to offer the crowd.”

“Rule Number Two: Always leave them wanting more. Also can be argued that I did this but also that I left them drained, ready to go home, and weary from so much activity. You meet a girl and leave her still wanting on a regular basis, she ain’t coming back, Kid, crowds are no different. You leave that girl exhausted and spent after every visit, and you’ve got something there.”

As he said that, I was picturing the crowd as the band wound down and the lights went up. His own description, along with a line from Bob Seger, “the echoes of the amplifiers ringing in your head,” described them. The crowd didn’t look so much tired as it was spent, but not Eddie, he was alive like I’d never seen him before, despite the fact that he was done performing. He actually carried his amp back out to his car himself, as he talked to one of the people that had come from out of town to see him.

After a while, he came back and sat on the stool beside me at the bar, with the rest of the band and the owner. Most of the crowd had made their way home, and the staff was busy cleaning up around us. You cloud see it on the face of the rest of the band, and even more on Eddie, the look of near euphoria that comes with having a performance like that, the reason most of them still keep playing. It was so powerful, even I felt it, there at the bar and al the way back home listening to them talking.

The car ride home was filled with many monlogues like his speech about the Rules he broke. He was riding high, for that entire ride, and though he was often personable, he was more outgoing, more full of life than I had seen him before.

“Wanna know the bad part of this kid, is that no matter what, I am going to wake up tomorrow along with everyone in that bar, and it will just be what we did last night. The energy, the pure magic, that I think I feel now will seem just like me fooling myself a little more, one more time, and damn it, I should know better.”

But he shook his head and gave me an even broader smile, “But right now I don’t really fucking care kid, THIS is why I play music, THIS is why I never completely left it, and THIS is why I wrote the songs, played the shows, and stepped up to make it rock. “

// 10,572 words so far and I’m tired of scrolling down. Next part starts fresh on the main page. If you’re with me now, follow me along.