Mid-January. It is dark, cold, and the wind is blowing snow all around Chicago. Django Reinhardt makes me jealous and the roadie jacket I’m wearing as I type this in my never quite warm enough garden apartment is a bust.
When I came to the city from the Delta nearly six years ago, it was mostly out of hubris and a fear that if I stuck around I would wind up like some bitter old alcoholic who could’ve done better, but ended up living on the wrong side of the tracks and surrounding himself with people equal in life’s station, but without so much as a hint of opportunity to do better. I was more than game, mind, and giving in to this fate is still not entirely out of the realm of possibility. But to have more than a prizefighter’s chance of avoiding such a scenario, which, granted, sometimes doesn’t seem all that bad, I had to take a chance, make a move, shake some action, whatever.
Many great times were had throughout those 23 years. But, to me, my life at the time seemed almost like someone deliberately living out one of those overdone and addled memoirs (minus the crack) where the protagonist falls from the good graces of a middle/upper middle class upbringing to the pits of government dole hell, proudly stumbling from one noble and comical foray of ill advised attempts at rock and roll cool and humiliation to the next.
One specific episode from this era that comes to mind is the time me and my ‘the Dig’ band mates went to a restaurant located right in the middle of Indianola’s Highway 82 drag, which functioned as the crux of the town’s look and see who all’s out and is there anything or anyone worth staying out for social planner. The restaurant, which we dubbed “Bayou Shitty,” was of the sort that changes ownership and titles on a nearly annual basis, but because of its location one rich kid or rich man’s wife with more money than sense after another was always waiting in line to buy it and fail miserably, replete with all the standard, hushed accusations of tax fraud and/or alcoholism. The proprietress at that particular moment in time, who was actively cultivating a reputation as a dead beat with money brazenly bouncing her employee’s checks, let local bands play in the bar area and, if she knew you or your parents last name, would turn a blind eye if you felt the urge to sharpen up in the kitchen area.
Some god-awful wanna be JB and Phish jam band was playing an acoustic set that night and, since we were kinda friends with the guys, they gladly let us play a few tunes during one of their breaks. I was half full with the belief that our band would one day pile in a tour bus and burn up the real rock clubs across the US of A, but completely full of booze and kitchen sharpeners as a means to avoid passing out from fear while playing. Swaggering, we took the make shift stage and played two of our newest songs that would later end up on the album, “Ladies and Gentlemen…the Dig.” We tore it up, relatively speaking. The ersatz jam band was so put out by our performance that they only played maybe two or three ramshackle songs before packing up their gear and heading home for the night. We thought we were badass and, I guess, that night we were. The patrons agreed and made sure we didn’t have to pay for booze the rest of the night.
It was during this brief moment of revelry that we sat down at a table with one of our band’s biggest supporters and his girlfriend, a true wild card who loved to eat piles of sleeping pills and guzzle booze, a real life Lifetime Original Movie. Or Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, take your pick. Together, they were explosive and, unfortunately, that night I was the one who got hit with most of the shrapnel.
Mitch Warsaw
Capture Squad "Sounder" EP