The Story So Far

Once upon a time… There is some truth to what follows, and it is also fiction. And somewhere between the truth and the fiction there is the story of the “The Blue Monsters“. The names, places, instruments, events and histories have all been changed, maybe, and I will deny it all.

Everything came easy to Robert. Robert was the Golden Boy, such a credit to his family, basketball star, math wizz… There was great promise in Robert and they would give him anything as long as he remained that great credit. And, living in Chicago, music was a great evil to Robert’s puritanical family. They saw it everywhere. Buddy Guy, Willie Dixon, Paul Butterfield. Music was the carrier, the rat that carried the ticks of drugs, crime and violence that would infect and destroy their family. They would give him everything. They would protect him, as long as he would avoid sin.

“You’ll be an orthodontist like your brother. There’s big money in teeth.”

And, of course, dentistry suited the puritanical tradition of pain and suffering – gold caps inflicted for the purposes of clean living, perfect teeth and pristine appearance – upon upper middle class suburban mouths. But there was other pain and suffering that Robert was seeking. He became everything his parents could dream of, a straight-A student and a basketball star. But in secret he taught himself guitar and bass. And in college he would go to the blues clubs every weekend, drinking himself to stupification, listening to Buddy and Willie and Junior and Howling Wolf. Seeking that elusive pain, that was supposed to shoot through him like fire and kill the lack of feeling, the black suburban void and emptiness of success which consumed him. A pain that eluded him.

So he married young, did the right thing, put his guitar and his bass away, moved to Finland with a family, a hard-working compromiser, the image of normal, able to accommodate everyone because everything came to him easily and he always did the right thing, because he could, and so he never needed to accommodate himself. He never needed because he always had. And still he never found the blues.

And then he met Gerald, a mad harmonica player, an insane fool no one could love, struggling with an insane family. Gerald tried to do right. Oh, lord, he tried. Wanted deep down in his soul to be able to give and nobody seemed to want. Gerald could play and when he sang he belted out a melody with such emotion that it didn’t matter if the notes were all over the place. And Gerald could write songs with such truth it could make people cry.

And Gerald had the blues that Robert wanted, the pain that Robert had needed to give his life meaning, to make him feel. And Robert yearned for that, but knew he could never have it without destroying himself first. Because Gerald was a monster, so subtle it was indescribable in it’s horror, his life a nightmare somewhere between truth and fiction, and only the true monsters themselves could be the blues. It was their curse, and their gift from God.

And one afternoon some people and some instruments came together in a basement with a broken pool table and Gerald told Robert “Play guitar. If you play bass I’ll break your fingers.” And Robert and Gerald formed a band.