Eclectic Company: The Greatest Gig I Almost Never Hear

Last night while otherwise occupied in Minden, Louisiana (where my Louisiana Originals Company was performing to an appreciative crowd of theatre-goers), I missed country stars Reba, George Strait and Lee Ann Womack sell out the CenturyTel Center in Bossier City outside Shreveport (and Reba kick George Strait’s butt, I have it on good authority, from the gal at the jammed IHOP wearing the tour t-shirt over her tank top despite the 96 degree heat at midnight!). I had already known I would be missing ‘80s rocker Joan Jett and the Blackhearts fill up the Legends Theatre at Diamond Jacks Casino, also in Bossier City, because the billboard had been winking at me all weekend as I’d driven back and forth from my hotel in Shreveport to an early morning performance at Webster Junior High, down to Alexandria to promote my other troupe, the Visionaries Company, playing in a theatre there, and later to Christopher’s event space in Minden for an evening performance by the Originals.

These days it’s rare that I miss two events I’d like to attend on the same night. Lake Charles’ busy calendar of social events usually offers more than a couple of musical must sees each weekend, but I’ve determined to confine myself to live performances, and I can always slip out of one performance and into the back row of another and catch some of two artists when the occasion arises. Of course, back in the day when I was writing about music all the time, and going out to hear music five or six nights a week, I often went out at 8 pm and caught as many as four different gigs, going from concert to performance space, to club, to after hours venue, stumbling out of one dark cavern or another like a mole into unexpectedly glaring morning a dozen hours later. That was New York City, and while clubs are less numerous on the ground than they used to be, there is still more going on there than any one person could get to almost every single night. But when I’m in NYC these days, I rarely go out to concerts or clubs, just to go out. It has to be someone I really want to see to get me out of my comfy jammies in front of the TV set, or my favorite sushi bar, or most likely, the audience of the best little theatre on Broadway.

Of course, I have also missed loads of events by being in the wrong place at the right time. I didn’t see the Beatles at Shea Stadium (too young), I didn’t see the TAMI show (too young and in America, while the concert was being filmed in London), I didn’t make it to Woodstock, either time (first time I was too crowd shy, so I went to the warmup show at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts on the Tuesday prior, and was home in Far Rockaway, New York long before the muddy weekend; the second time, while I was almost in the area trying to buy a house in Woodstock, 10 miles down the road from the festival site at Saugerties, New York, my friends were working on it, as was the hospital nurse called out for major trauma and emergency needs that weekend, who also happened to be the owner of the house I finally bought, and they all warned me away). I missed the Folk City 50th Anniversary Reunion because I was in Lake Charles, while it was down in the Village in New York. I know I would have loved to be at each and every one of the events I regret having missed, because live performance is what really floats my boat, especially in a crowd of like-minded enthusiasts.

But the concert, or more accurately, the jam session, that I most regret having missed almost every year since its inception, is the annual Old Farts Reunion of the Greenwich Village, Washington Square Park pickers, the urbanites and college kids who used to sit around the park’s downtown fountain on sunny days in the 1960s, showing off their rural rhythms and roots learned from the real deal old-timers and the field recordings and the rare commercial records that they found pawing through the bargain bins in small music emporia throughout the northeast. Those are the people with whom I first heard and played the music I love most, my comfort sounds, and I miss them all.

Each year, the reunion invitation goes out by email on the New York Bluegrass and Old Timey Music listservs, and steadily aging fans of string band music dust off their guitars, mandolins, fiddles, banjos and even a few bull fiddle basses, in anticipation of hiking down or driving in from the ‘burbs, or subwaying or busing or biking it over to the recently refurbished park (thank you Mayor Bloomberg), and its fountain, access to which Jeannie Meyers has managed to make possible each year by acquiring a gathering permit (rain date location is the Parkside Lounge on far east Houston Street).

Every famous and infamous bluegrasser and old timey musician that ever came out of or through Washington Square Park makes some kind of effort to come, including Izzy Young who flies in from Sweden and Tom Paley who might be in from England, and those in North Carolina, Georgia, California, Florida, and other points of the New York diaspora. Each year old friends play old songs with new twists, old songs rub up against some occasional new songs in the same genres, and old hatchets are buried as old wounds are balmed with the heady discovery that old fingers still work and old voices are still penetrating, muscular, and delightfilled.

I missed the reunion of the Dueling Banjos by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell last year, as well as the actor John Goodman sitting Buddah-like on the fountain as a spectator. I missed the last public appearances of several old pickers who died after the reunion. But what a way to go: after the high of the reunion, there are few heights left to climb. I plan to get there one year. Really. Maybe next time.