Singing Into the Abyss

At seven o'clock sharp, Cameron Mitchell, the MC for Club Helsinki's open mic, introduced the first act, a fellow about my age, who clambered up the steps and rooted himself onto the stage, firmly clasping his battered guitar, beaming with amber light. After some string twiddling, he belted out Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, exultant in his past acid-laced youth, pretty much on key, ending the song ecstatically, if inaccurately, "Remember what the doorman said, feed your head, feed your head".  

My son Geoff leaned over and whispered to me, "I hope they're all like that." He, his wife Kim, two of their boys, and Michael and were seated around a table a level up from the stage. Michael, my grandsons and I were eating; my son and Kim were not: they were there to perform. 

Every Tuesday, anyone can sign up for open mic starting at six, but it's prudent to arrive by five or five-thirty, since the time slots generally fill up right away.  The music starts at seven and ends at eleven, with each performer playing two songs for a maximum of ten minutes.  Geoff and Kim had gotten there after the slots had been booked but were told they would probably be able to play, so they reserved a table and we showed up a little later with their boys to have dinner and watch their debut. 

My son and daughter-in-law met at Music and Art High School in Manhattan 30 years ago, Geoff accepted for painting and Kim for singing.  Except for the essential college break-up, they have been together ever since. Now that their three sons have reached ages of, if not reason, then a certain measure of self-sufficiency, they have decided to resurrect their youthful talents. After practicing for several months and accumulating a cache of about 100 songs, they were eager to perform publicly. This was their first gig. 

Hudson is not only a foodie, art, and antique town, it's also a place for good music.  Fine local musicians and singers show up regularly along Warren, Hudson's main street, to perform in restaurants, book stores, farmer's markets, and even street-facing apartments, where agreeable residents open up their place to the public so their friends can have an audience.

Club Helsinki, however, is the town's best-established venue for rock, blues, and alternative music.  A block over from Warren on Columbia Street, it serves good Southern comfort food and hosts important musicians, gifted professionals just starting out, and, once a week, the open mic hopefuls. The owners moved the club to Hudson a few years ago after entertaining people down the road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts for 15 years.  They bought one of Hudson's old gorgeous brick industrial buildings and carved out three beautiful rooms: an event space upstairs and on the first floor the restaurant and night club, which can be closed off from each other or opened up and connected by a graceful dark wood carousel of a bar riding between them.  The club itself has three levels of dining tables circling half the stage and a wholly professional sound and lighting system, which enhances all its musicians – from the famous to the anxious and the brave during open mic.

Cameron, who is not only the evening's MC but also a co-owner of Helsinki, is assisted each week by C. Ryder Cooley, who wanders the stage between acts, fixing wiring, adjusting mics, and making the newbie musicians more at ease. Strapped to her back is a stuffed bighorn sheep's head named Hazel, who stares bleak-eyed at the audience while Ryder does her various tasks. At first sight, I dismissed Cooley as deeply pretentious, ("Oh, god. A local girl being cute with a dead animal.") As the evening wore on, however, Hazel evolved into an eccentric but effective punctuation point for Ryder's own impressive musical gifts. Over the course of the evening she strolled in every once in a while to sing and produce strange and beautiful songs on the accordion, the ukulele, and the saw.  (I Googled her afterward and saw that when she's not helping nervous musical newbies on Tuesday night, Cooley is a performance artist as well as a song writer and talented player of weird instruments.)

And she wasn't the only good performer. Unfortunately, the acts following the White Rabbit singer were significantly more skillful and professional than his.   Geoff and Kim were told they would be playing around nine, and as the evening presented one good act after another, my son became increasingly anxious. Even though Geoff has played the guitar since he was seven he had never performed publicly, When he and Kim were finally called up to play, he later described his reaction to being on stage as holding a guitar for the first time. I thought they sounded fine, skillfully performing two covers from Wilco and the Grateful Dead.  I noticed Geoff screwing up his face a couple times at some tricky chords, but he made no major errors and Kim was relaxed and easy. She was having a good time.  When they got back to the table, Geoff was silent.  His stage fright had been unexpected and disturbing.  After they returned to their home in Queens, he wasn't able to look at this guitar for a few days.  Kim was undaunted, however, and Geoff realized he had to get back on the stage, so two weeks later they were back in Hudson for another attempt.

This time they arrived to sign up on time so that they were officially slotted in.  We reserved a table again for dinner.  That night after the opening act -- a bearded fellow playing David Bowie songs on a battered electric guitar -- Cameron read a text from Ryder, who was taking the week off in the North Woods, in which she complained that Hazel, lacking even a phantom tail, was unable to swish off the flies and there were no cats, but plenty of mice.

The musicians for the most part were not the same as those who performed two weeks before.  An exception was a young man from Brooklyn with a pleasing Eddie-Vetter-like voice who sang and played his own songs and was noticeably more relaxed this time, a good sign, I thought, for Geoff.  Again, as during the previous event, nearly all the performers were competent, skillful, and occasionally thrilling.

An appealing feature of open mic night is the on-and-off again appearance of local solid musicians (including Cameron on keyboard), who jump in to play throughout the night, collectively jamming as an improvised band or playing alone as soloists or as back ups to enrich the sound of other less experienced solitary musicians. 

Aaron, a young bass guitarist with excellent long hair, was particularly generous with his time and talent, deepening and strengthening the tunes for a number of homegrown guitarists, fiddlers, and singers.  One was Joan, who, with her r 

ound glasses, curly gray hair, and frumpy linen skirt, looked like everybody's third grade teacher. With Aaron unobtrusively backing her up in the shadows, she stood wide-footed behind her large acoustic guitar and forcefully strummed out and sang two original songs. I particularly liked the first, which involved trapping garden pests – mice, chipmunks, voles, moles, and woodchucks – taking them down the road and dumping them in the neighbor's yard.

Another excellent singer/musician regular, wrapped in dark clothes and so incredibly skinny that he looked like black lightning, introduced an original piece that he described as a love song.  Funny and haunting at the same time, it spoke for every love affair stuttering to its end with the refrain, "We're half way cross the river. Why shoot the horses now?"   

Our kids followed the lightning man. With the first few notes, I knew Geoff was relaxed and handling the guitar with his usual skill and competence.  He also has a genetic facility for picking out cord progressions and arrangements for even ordinary songs that resonate with the heart. That night Kim's sultry natural voice and physical ease played off against his focused attention, vibrantly revealing both the musical tension between them and the harmonious rhythm of their long affectionate marriage.  Another Wilco.  Another Grateful Dead. Applause.  One of the other musicians complimented them.  They were happy.  I was happy.

Certainly since the late fifties, American culture has danced, swayed, raved, and hopped on its music, and the musicians that come to open mic, performing spontaneously and unrewarded, exemplify the aching joy, anger, and grief in their home made songs that, for better or worse, underlie the currents of our nation's fantasies.

 "We wish we could play here every week," Kim said after we had gotten back to our barn. "We're going to work up some original songs," Geoff added, "for next time."  And when they're back, I'm bringing a crowd.