Turning the tape recorder back on I hear myself ask Adam what soul was.
“It’s that part of music that finds that consistent part of everybody. There is a spiritual side to everybody that can only be fulfilled musically and to me, soul finds that part and satisfies it. It’s about playing with conviction, about trying to celebrate being human.” I pause the tape and Kuwait comes back to me. A country where public demonstrations are banned and thus any type of gathering, live music included. Government permission only. I turn the tape recorder back on and hear the interview, an interview at times drowned out by the festival on the other side of the wall, thousands of people gathered to listen and dance. They, and all the bands that day, tried to reach every single one.
“But it’s a learning process man,” Adam said. “We’ve been doing this for 8 or 9 years now. So I think where we’ve gotten to that point where it’s about how much you’re willing to go that extra mile for your shit, for our shit. Our plan from here, now that we’ve got this new album we’re working on, man it’s going to be killer, a full horn section, not just the sax and trumpet you saw today, but flugelhorn, flute, a lot more. You know, the plan is to finish it, it’s taking awhile, then press like 3000 CDs and take it to college campuses and just give them away for free. Let the word spread from there. Word of mouth because you gotta know the name to look for it on the internet. And we’re not about the scene you know, we’re just about the sound.”
It is a sound that those of us lucky enough, now in retrospect, to catch Old Man Brown work that sweaty magic in the Full Moon Saloon or at the Hot August Blues Festival, anywhere, can reflect back on and smile with. We can look back and hoped they tried to follow Ian McKaye’s words: “If you play it long enough, hard enough and honest enough eventually some one will listen.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Adam said after I quoted his line to him. “It’s harder than that. But I do have faith in the general American public. There’s still enough people out there who know their shit, who listen. And with no one making money anymore record companies will eventually have to start investing in people like they did back in the day: based on talent.”
And listen we do. From across the trans-national, trans-govermental boundaries of the internet, from the pockets on the wings of a stage, from beer can littered festival fields, from the concrete slab dance floors of general admission, we listen and hope that each time the performer gets on stage that they’ll light the night up with that seamless groove and find their own pocket amongst our heroes and the fallen. That after the stage lights rise and the buzzing in the ears begins that they’ll climb back into the van and head out down the road for another gig. Another attempt to tighten the sound, the feel of it, another chance at finding the right words, so that somewhere down the line they’ll capture it on wax for history. And in capturing it for history they beat the devil just a little bit.
Because we have to wonder how much of what is captured is a reaction against a certain time period. How much of Old Man Brown’s organic sound was a reaction against the commodified advertisements and tabloid fodder passing as music for the past twenty years?
“I think….well it’s a tough call because we just do what we do because that’s what makes us feel the best,” Adam said. “I’m glad that it is counterculture and I am glad that it is counter to what is going on in this industry for the most part right now. But I’m glad I am a part of the forces that are trying to put roots music back to people. Music has a history and we’re at a point where there’s the shit you hear on the radio and then there’ the shit that has evolved from the music that has come before. There’s music that doesn’t rely on the roots and then there’s people who know what’s going on, who know the roots. It’s sad in a way, but at least it’s not completely dying out.”
The end of the converstaion. Tape recorder silent: notebook at my side making about the same amount of sense as it did months ago, when I first got the feeling. The Full Moon Saloon is gone, Edgar Allan Poe is gone. The night spreads itself out over the ghosts of both and looks in the window across the bar from me and levels its eyes with mine. The shot glass is as empty as my pockets. The jukebox is still dead. The blues never left. I hope this isn’t an elegy. We need good soul music or music for the soul now more than ever. I need it.
It’s snowing.
It’s cold.
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