I Am The Blues

Yep. That’s me. I’m the guy. I’m the guy with a million and ten reasons to be miserable about my own life.

That’s also a 1970 album by Willie Dixon. I didn’t want you to think I was stealing ideas without giving proper credit. I’m stealing ideas and giving credit at the same time. But I am still the guy they wrote about in all those songs with a million and ten reasons to be miserable.

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And I don’t mean “go to the pub on Friday night and groove to

” target="_blank">Johnny Winter open for George, and Johnny Winter shouldn’t have to open for no one, and nobody in my town knew who he was so I just walked out in utter disgust before George got halfway into his chicken dance.

�the blues” I mean “

” target="_blank">the blues ain’t nothing but a cold gray day with full orchestra and brass punctuating deeply into each moment of pain” blues. And that goes beyond Ellington and Winter and any music. It’s something so deep in the body it touches the soul. It’s like someone kicked you in the stomach. It’s like the scream that just won’t come. I’m the guy with a million and ten reasons to live and die, and I’m the guy they invented the blues for. At least that’s the way I feel.

Depressed about who I am and my place in the world. Yesterday it stopped me cold. I was in practice. You see, it is just Eric and me. I do harmonica and vocals. It’s taken me five years to work myself into a place where I could be happy, where I can finally control the tones and the emotion. And then I am sitting, watching Eric do a solo and vocals of a Jason Isbell song and it just washed over me. What the hell was I doing? All the could have beens that never were and all the “is”s that just aren’t good enough, and every inch forward is two inches back. I could just disappear and no-one would know.

And without the music… I’m just a dysfunctional man living on a dysfunctional planet, just some foreigner living in a crazy country, going through the same crap every year for different people. I’m the guy in all those movies who they ask “Can I see your papers?” and if he doesn’t have “papers” then big trouble’s coming. I’m tired of dancing-for-the-man. And just who is this “man” anyway? I sure wish I could figure this one out, because I would love to give him a piece of my mind, but whenever I talk to somebody, it all turns out to be someone else’s fault.

Because my misery sure ain’t MY fault… well, maybe it is, but wouldn’t it be horrible if it was? Would it be worse if my misery was all my fault or if my misery was in the hands of the people around me?

So what do I do? Go live in the woods in a log cabin and live off berries, mushrooms and tree sap? Then how would I pay my cell phone bill?

So I am the blues, or at least I was. But that was yesterday. And yesterday was Sunday.  Nothing else to do on a Sunday so I just let myself crash… and I needed it. Crash and Burn. And we learned a new Anthrax tune.

So, you know, I am the blues… sometimes. But not forever. And touching the blues ain’t so bad, if they don’t kill you. The blues is part of the hell we have to live with, after all.