Phish Freebird

 I forgot which band I imagined going into a version of "Freebird," the Southern Rock standard, which has a slow part for couples to hold each other, while they ponder the antagonist trying to explain to the girl that if he surrenders his freedom and settles down with her then it won't work, because his whole appeal is that he is as free as a bird.

I suppose the girl wanted to "tame" the guy in the way which is probably as old as the hills, she wants him to stop searching for the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, and to settle for her not-bad-at-all, actually, ass.*

But, the song became etched into my musical psyche in the sense that, when I first started playing the electric guitar, it was one of the first hills in front of me to climb.

Other kids, like Joe Carbone, played the electric guitar, having taken it up maybe 3 or 4 years prior.

Our first inkling that anyone in our high school played anything was when Joe, along with a few other kids from our school formed a band, called "Polarity."

They played at one of our school's idea of talent shows, a rousing, perhaps 20 minutes long, until Mrs. Gorton, an English teacher told them to stop.
Joe later told me: "Oh, that was all just a pentatonic scale," after I had asked him the sophomoric question of something like, where did he learn how to play the lead for Freebird on the electric guitar.

Sure enough, I found I could learn the chords and actually the slide guitar part, due in large part to its slowness, and then, I found that, if you did indeed play (mostly) notes from a certain pentatonic scale, you could assemble the phrases that the Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarists played. They probably played it the night before their plane went down, and were probably planning on playing it the next night.

The song can give you an 8 minute or more break from having to decide what songs to play; but the busker always has to read the listeners for signs, such as singing along, or fidgeting indicating if you should sing all of the slow part, or just cut to the fast part.

I was busking in Mobile, Alabame, sitting at a certain spot which was about 2 blocks away from where a busker "should" have been sitting, which would be somewhere along the short drag of clubs and restaurants that thrived on weekend nights.

Instead, I played in front of a clothing store that had two huge glass display cases, behind which were mannequins adorned in different guises of the clothes they sold inside. You actually had to walk down about a 30 foot hall, which narrows as it goes, with the glass cases on each side, to get to the front door of the place. The floor was marble.

They existed to keep Mobile in pace with New York, fashion-wise, and, the acoustics of the place were pretty amazing, and people returning to cars which they had parked past where I was could hear me because it was comparably quiet to the main drag. 

People would ask: "Why don't you play up there, where all the people are?" but they would also be dropping enough tip money while asking to allow me to continue where I was.

"I get so much enjoyment out of the sound here, I'm willing to sacrifice anything I might gain by being in a spot where there are a lot of people but they are drowning you out." A lot of those people might throw you a dollar, but that is because they are only getting a dollars worth out of you; like the guy telling the dirty limericks gave them. 

I've done that kind of busking before, the couple times I forayed onto Frenchmen Street, which is like a counter culture to the French Quarter, sitting just outside of it, touching corners where Checkpoint Charlie's bar is located. 

You have to have your guitar around your neck and be ready to play for people standing right in front of you. It's a different kind of entertainment, you are going for content over quality of sound. I've thought about setting the dirty limericks to some simple chords and going back to Frenchmen Street some night...

But, I wish I could remember which band it was that I chuckled over the thought of them doing "Freebird" in concert. 

 

*ass refers to the entire person, as in "I'd better get my ass down there before they close." This, I may be appropriating from African American culture, as that is really where I got if from,