Jimmy quits the band again? (July 16, 2004)

  

July 16, 2004

I didn’t even notice Jimmy’s name missing from the band’s website until Sharon mentioned not seeing it.

When I talked to Jimmy yesterday, he was surprised the John had left old photographs of him up.

All this is the usual band politics, played out in our 50s in much the same way as it was when we were in our 20s.

Jimmy said he doesn’t want to play in bars anymore.

John, according to Garrick, claim bars are the few places left where the band can play.

For most of our lives Jimmy has shown a distinct distain for the bar scene, rarely falling into the usual web of drugs, sex and ego.

During those years, he tended to engage in an uncomfortable dance, lured into performing, then becoming disgusted with the scene, he quits, only to get lured back with promises the band never intends to keep.

Garrick calls Jimmy lazy, and claims Jimmy can’t commit. But it is all infinitely more complex, clashing motivations and ultimate goals.

Jimmy wants to play but not before a crowd of drunken fools – like those we saw hooting and hollering at the Grasshopper when the band played there last week.

“I don’t want to be standing up there in a haze of cigarette smoke,” he told me before the band went on.

Jimmy doesn’t return to the band to relive past glories but is driven by some compulsion beyond ego or sex, a need to stir up a creative stew started in the band’s youth yet never fully cooked.

That Friday in the bar, the band came alive in a way it could not in any other venue, calling up internal resources they had learned by rote, the grind of regular bar performances having taught them all on some level something fundamental they could not have learned at home regardless of how much they practiced, something that worked down deep into their DNA and came out at times like these.

Yet just as fundamental is Jimmy’s dismay, this feeling of wasted time, this fear that he might forever get caught up in these cursed places, rolling songs up one side of a hill to watch them roll back down into a haze of smoke and a maze of drunken faces, each time Jimmy forced to push the music back up the hill until old age and death end the cycle.

Jimmy knows he can’t escape the curse totally. So, he’s arranged to play with his nephew Robbie, as if to subdue the craving that always draws him back into the band’s seductive arms. He’s looking for a less frequent fix and a far less hostile environment – once or twice a month, as a house band in some coffee shop somewhere that does not (in his words) require him to practice so much or work so hard.

And the others, who need his talent, simply shake their heads, removing his name from the website and wait out the time until Jimmy’s cravings for real performance draw him back into their welcoming arms, each of the band members (in particular John) hoping they don’t die before the cycle starts again.