CC looked out over
a sparse crowd. On the one hand they were 50 or so paying customers. For a
Thursday night in a city not really known for a happening music scene since a
brief flash a couple decades back, he supposed this was okay.
The crowd had a lot
of younger people. He wondered if he was some sort of ‘nostalgia act’ for a
second. But how could that be? Sure he had played one a couple of albums by one
of the bands that ‘defined’ a scene that bubbled at a small club in New York
back in the mid-70s. Sure, one of those songs was “one of punk’s greatest
anthems” [whatever that means]. But that band had self destructed after two
records. That singer had gone onto something different and had accidentally
killed himself about the time this burg had its flash as a hot town for new
music. While one should not disparage ones audience, he wondered what they had
come for. Were they thinking that somewhere on his guitar or in its case were
molecules of air, sweat or nicotine direct from a small sweaty room circa 1978?
Paul Kantner’s hollow body Rickenbacker might have some remnants of 60s
nicotine, ashes or maybe even some genuine Woodstock mud in it. But his guitar?
He doubted it.
But a lot of the
other people who were there in that scene were succumbing to the things that
happen over time. Hell, all of the original Ramones are all ready dead. Only
one made it into his 60s. People love connecting to a past that they “missed.” Some of these people may have been kids when
the CBGB scene was going on, but probably too young to remember or get what
that had been about. More interested in Saturday morning cartoons and top 40.
But the handful of twenty to thirty year olds off to the left of the stage, the
ones that would bounce up and down when he played “The Anthem”? He shrugged. Maybe
they’d traced back the heroes of their heroes the same way kids had tracked
down Buddy Holly, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf when the Beatles and Stones
cited them as influences. And now they were here trying to make the connection
the way that people tried to connect to a mythical past at Paul McCartney, Who
and Stones shows now.
