Ghost of Kalamazoo

we come into a town we don't know, or maybe one where we have seen the area around the venue before... some awkward bands show up who sometimes look at the ground, or sometimes want to know what the best rock venue in your town is to play so they can set up their event there. we watch maybe a handful of small nervous and innocent people show up, but neither of us really talk to each other and we carry our weighted equipment past them and are sometimes brushed by the often disinterested and desensitized sound-man or door-man who quotes us the process of calling the night complete, but isn't interested in a conversation or sharing experiences and stories... you really cannot blame them though, they've submitted themselves to the company of total strangers nightly who are gone more quickly than they arrived, but we try our best.

we carry our stuff in, often in a rush to set it up and set back to a cold drink and rest on a wooden chair with hope that maybe someone will show up... we toss our experiences out into the public every single night possible with hope that someone may understand the message... we play to a room more often filled with smoke and clatter than conscious people, people who go home and forget the names of the bands, forget the instruments that composed the sounds, forget how far they may have come, and sometimes even forget the evening entirely... but they may have had a good time. you then carry your weighted equipment out the door, maybe down some narrow, dark, aging steps. sometimes all of this in the freezing rain when you have forgotten your jacket, or the soaking rain and the van smells like mildew, rust, and aluminum... cramming your wet bodies and your wet guitars into it...

but then there is one person who comes up and tells you something you will never forget for the rest of your life, and you realize that you have seen and experienced something completely unique to that particular evening, and it is beautiful. you realize that you have crafted something ambitious, personal, evocative, and to your personal life even maybe revolutionary.

in that moment the rain flows like stanzas from an aged poem handed to you on a piece of paper from someone you just met in a town, on a street, you had never known...

The Potomac Accord, St. Louis MO