Ferocious Zealot's Solo

Friend off early to the station.  I’m glad I’m not on that train.  I don’t want to go anywhere.  This friend slept over.  He had trouble getting a flight out during National Holiday.  All the flights out to anywhere had long been booked.  He left our house early for the South Station to get a train heading all the way south.  From there, he was able to find a flight home.  “Do you need any cash,”  I asked?  “No.  I’m good.”  “He later told me his card wouldn't work at the station ATM and he rode for ten hours with no loot to buy food with.

Last night we'd talked about him making dinner and my wife making dinner and going out to dinner, but in the end I decided to make some spaghetti and meatballs with some lentil veggie balls as well for my older daughter.  Garlic bread and eggplant.  It wasn’t bad.  The red wine went well with the meatballs, in my mind’s memory.

Red wine also lends itself to loud rock n’ roll if its the right kinda friend.  We retired to my office where we could turn up the volume.  He played  something on Youtube.  I did as well.  He'd mentioned a cover band he'd seen do Chicago when he was last in the Philippines.  "Have you seen the show at Tanglewood from 1970?" Before long we're there with everyone else, under the summer stars. 

Terry Kath in particular is majestic to watch.  Long hair, lurking, blue jeans but man can he chew up the fretboard.  I queued to a mid-point in “Better End Soon."  The anti-war anthem has a remarkable break, where he rises from the flute solo, shedding scales and rhythmic fills faster and faster like moulting Smog, till all is quiet.  And Kath speaks to the audience and the nation suggesting that all the people out there, who work hard at a forty hour week and think they're free in this land.  Free because they can work all the time.  Hey, you know, you're paying for this war.  "You are paying for the war so they can carry it on some more, with your bread."

Widely noted as an undeservedly underrated guitarist, Kath came to an untimely end at his own hand, seven years later, as some of the band's more regrettable legacy was being recorded.  This evening though it's all his show and there are no compromises.  The band effortlessly follows his call to pick it up and change the world, steadily filling in and quickening the pace.  "Do it for your kids!"   And his Ray Charles growl and ferocious zealot's solo all suggest the intensity of someone who thinks that if they just played hard enough, he might actually arrest the bloodshed, from there under the stars in 1970.  

"Can we hear the '25 or 6 to 4'?" Asks my friend.  "Let's."



Sunday, 10/01/17