captainsblog | Jun. 9th, 2018

Never mind not expecting to win tickets to anything, much less a solo performance by the lead singer of the Spin Doctors who I couldn't have picked out of a police lineup 48 hours ago. That was luck. The event itself was pure joy.

We really are blessed here to have, in both Buffalo and Rochester and many places surrounding them, a veritable borgaschmord of venues for good music. And not just the big arenas and ampitheaters for the huge acts (although we have those, too), but places where you can hear every note, get every word, and often interact with the performers between sets or after the show is over.

Never, however, have I had anything remotely close to how cool this turned out to be.

Abilene is a small bar a few blocks off of the main drags of both Rochester’s one time retail capital and its current arts oriented “East End.” It inherits the lineage of clubs in that neighborhood like Jazzberry's, where Eleanor saw Dizzy Gillespie perform years ago, and Milestones, which followed in that space. It was torn down for an appellate courthouse, of all things, the one I toiled in a couple of weeks ago. (Just checked the decisions, which were posted Friday afternoon. Yup, lost again, without any substantive statement of why from the appellate court. Well, that’s done. Let the record reflect I argued the appeal before we got the dog.)

Abilene is in what must’ve been just a house at one point, with a small bar area, no tables (to match the no food), and one of the smaller stages you will see:

Behind the bar, you see the bobblehead of Fred Costello, the same one I have on my desk; a sign saying “everyone is welcome here,“ which doesn’t specifically reference any orientation other than music appreciation but you still get it; and the bartender himself, Glenn, who I was on a first-name basis with by the end of the evening. I immediately gained cred with Glenn by noticing that a friend of ours, Tyler Westcott, had played there the night before, and telling him that I had seen Tyler previously at Sportsman's, a very similar venue in the city of Buffalo.

Seeing Tyler at Sportsman's was cool. Seeing Kinky Friedman there was also cool (the Kinkstah has played Abilene as well, and there is a poster behind the stage to prove it:) But none of those experiences were as amazing as meeting Chris Barron with the crowd of only eight people, counting the bouncer but not counting Glenn. (Or Chris, for that matter.)

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Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I finished my official Rochester work day before four, and Chris wasn’t scheduled to go on until 830. So I cranked out a bunch of work until around seven, then grabbed dinner at a local delicacy place, not expecting that one of the other patrons would be bringing his breakfast with him:

I guess it beats losing his breakfast, yo.

I thought about stopping in Mount Hope Cemetery to check in on Freddy and Susie and the other dear departed residents of local history, but instead I just headed into downtown and found a parking spot near the venue. That’s when I remembered: this was Eleanor‘s old work neighborhood. Sibley Tower was a mere block from where I had parked the car. Many a night in the 80s, I parked a much crankier car near that very spot, waiting for my beloved to get out of work. It's being turned into luxury apartments and techie gig space, as is the onetime palatial home of the long-merged-away Rochester Savings Bank:

Nearby, a classic old downtown Lutheran cathedral, with a Little Free Library out in front (full of romance novels, not Bibles) and this locally drawn art in the window:

By the time he left for the Land of Make-Believe, it was time for me to join the Land of Music. I was the first to arrive from the radio guest list; at least one other guy came in from the show after I did. He made seven; the eighth, a friend of two others, came in early in the set. Chris saw the crowd and the stage, and said, "Fuck it." (The first of many times we would hear that word during the night;) He left the stage, grabbed his unplugged guitar, and played his entire set for us from in front of the window next to the bar's red entry door-

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The songs? A bunch of new ones from a solo album he just released. It's called Angels and One-Armed Jugglers- a title he (and everybody else) hated until they didn't. It's gotten great reviews, including, now, from me; I had to Amazon it because, sadly, he forgot to bring merch for the table. (His 19-year-old daughter seriously broke her arm last weekend and he was still pretty verklempt about it.) And he played the two most famous Spin Doctors songs, because, as he said, why wouldn't you play something that made you so famous unless it was "Achy Breaky Heart" or something? (I snuck a sample of him singing "Two Princes" onto my Facebook page, which might or might not work if you were to click this and then click on the first comment.)

The stories between songs were the best, though. He only had the one guitar with him, but he has 25 at home. He'd never counted; when his new bride (herself an amazing singer-actress) moved in, she took the census of them- and then built him a giant guitar closet to hold them all:) He's now admitted to having this addiction; not long ago, he heard word of a Manhattan record shop selling a rare and wonderfully-provenanced L-200 guitar. You've heard one of them; the opening strums on George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" come from an L-200. He wound up getting it from the estate of a deceased guitarist, in exchange for $1,500 and a couple of traded guitars from the closet, because the family knew he should have it.

He spoke of touring with the Rolling Stones- and how initially awed he was to be in their presence. The older band's minions told him: approach Keith carefully while he's playing snooker. Tell him you want to get him a Guinness. Then he might speak to you. He did, he did, and thereafter he forever did; they became fast friends. Chris asked him why he still endured the life of a road rock artist when he'd already made billions of dollars. "Because it's fun, mate," he answered, "and because I get to play every night with Charlie Fucking Watts!" Quite a step up from a story Eleanor and I once heard from a jazz performer about finally getting to meet the Great Frank Sinatra- whose only advice to his young would-be mentee was "Eat something. Ya look bad."

Chris explained several of the songs on the album. (Some of these stories also appear in an interview he gave a few months ago.) He prefaced "Saving Grace" by just saying, "Don't fuck with me- because if you do, I might write a song about you." One of the audience members thought he was referring to us- the other radio winner was bugging him a bit about explaining the weird line in his Wikipedia entry about growing up in "a house with a giant rock in the basement." But no- it's just a song he wrote about an asshole. As opposed to the other song on the album he wrote about a zombie- "In A Cold Kind of Way." The inspiration for that was a goofy zombie film called Warm Bodies- and he knew it had to be written as a traditional love ballad rather than as the usual punk-out shite usually associated with the species. The saddest and realest was the story behind "Too Young to Fade"- a song written about, and posthumously to, former Blues Traveler bassist Bobby Sheehan. Spin Doctors got their big break off of Chris's longtime friendship with John Popper, and Bobby Sheehan proved himself even cooler than John, which is not an easy thing to do.

I've heard dozens of cool stories like this from small stages- from John Pizzarelli about his meeting Frank Sinatra, and many others from the likes of Lucy and Antje and Kinky. But I've never been told them just standing a foot from the bar, clinking glasses and bottles with the performer every time he raised his glass (I bought him his last beer of the evening;) and having him thank and shake hands with every one of our eight as we left the venue.

This wasn't a concert. It was a master class in guitar. And I will always be richer for it:)