A Dream I Had

The sun is coming up, the party is over, and everybody wandered on outta here (or curled up and fell asleep in a shadowy corner) and I’m afraid this old Smith Corona pica typewriter is just going to make a clackety-clack racket, the bell ringing at the end of every line like the end of each round in a boxing ring, my heart taking a beating with the bliss of it all, an evening of underground cabaret that began at 5pm and turned into an all-night affair, sleeves rolled up, it seems we seldom came up for air, a group of friends passing around musical instruments into the wee hours, the sound of our holy laughter and that familiar voice (I know that voice) singing words and vowels, cussing consonants, leaning into the RCA microphone, the saxophones and clarinets blowing through these songs to mourn the still-ravaged streets of New Orleans, to resurrect the lost hymns of our childhood, the hymns with the names that taught us words could be beautiful: Softly and Tenderly, Let the Lower Lights Be Burning, When the Roll is Called Up Yonder.

And a theme that recurred in a lot of the old hymns was the idea that the world would be reborn with the sound of a trumpet, and we’ve all heard those great American trumpet (and horn) players—Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Stan Getz—and we’ve been wondering about the sound of that trumpet in the old hymns, Is it real, Is it a metaphor, What, exactly, is on God’s iPod?

And me, my first memory, the sound of a trumpet at a tent meeting revival, I was sitting on my mother’s lap, I remember that bright brass bell, that eggtooth blast waking me up, snapping the world into focus, piercing the womb of distant muffled things, stirring my conscious mind, the sound of a trumpet! and I remember the small wooden stage at the front of the tent, strings of bare lightbulbs, my sister Grace’s braids, and me forming my first real thought: I need to be where the sound is coming from.

And so Brad Jones scoured the broken-bottle-strewn back alleyways of Nashville and found an arresting array of misfit co-conspirators, one (Neil) walking with a cane (a muted trumpet in the other hand), one (Jim) a jazz ensemble unto himself trapped in a single pair of shoes (a bass clarinet poking out of his handbag), and Chris and David with an armload of stringed instruments. And life slipped us a Mickey, a drummer who’s not afraid to rattle a tire chain or shake a quart of Quaker State 10W30 near an old Shure microphone, and Brad would pick up any one of his hollow body basses, and we threw this party, and we played these songs, and others made welcome appearances, Tony, Devon, Rick, Matt, Lindsay, Byron, and it got late, later, and we kept playing, and the sun came up, and this typewriter is making a bloody-mary-for-breakfast racket, and I don’t have anything left to say, I left it all in the piano, or pulled it out of a nylon string acoustic, or leaned on the singer who was drunk on it, tangled up in it, messy, we left it all on the studio floor.

And we were caught up in the joy of it, that’s all, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, caught up in the undeniable sadness and crazy joy of it, who cares if it’s a dog and monkey show at the end of the day, because some nights you can’t help but believe in a God who wants to get inside the song itself, it doesn’t matter if it’s an old country tune Patsy Cline is singing on an old jukebox, it doesn’t matter if it’s Lightnin’ Hopkins grumbling over a timeless blues riff, it could be Satchmo, the dignity of his voice and the joy in his horn, it could be Tom Waits kicking up the dust on the hardwood floor of a grange hall at some imaginary revival meeting, but what ultimately keeps us all coming back is the mystery of the song itself, God bless you, thank you, why not?

So we hope you like the songs, we hope they unfold like an underground evening of lost midwestern cabaret, a little private party good enough to last the night and longer, the sound of a trumpet to wake your world.

Turn it up.

Linford Detweiler, June, 2007