The High Note Bar

Jan 10th, 2018

Climbing staircase, my heart beats a crescendo. My senses come to me. Sound: the band’s playing. Steel strings strummed and plucked, gut-bucket bass reverberating my insides, the horns hammer hard the melody, kick drum-washboard syncopation, held together by the white hot fury erupting from the fiddle player’s bony fingers. Sight: A ballroom bathed in red and golds with a trim of full notes and half notes. Beautiful people: bikers and cowboys, hippies and hipsters, flapper girls and folk singers, jazz swingers and bluegrass pickers, a bearded man in a chicken costume, and everyone on the high side of cool. Many are moving rhythmically to the music while other stand back and listen in admiration. There seems to be a million miles of dance steps in the floor boards. A lengthy bar that has the elegance of antiquity with a splash of wild west, very American. The burlesque bartender drips tattoos as she slings suds with a flare. Her timing is impeccable. The stage, a picking porch, creeks of home grown chord progressions, Illinois seasoned barn wood built not only by the sun but the souls who have played on it and the music that it’s helped grow. Scent: I smell elevated wines, guitar cases, guys with beards and black t-shirts who work fifty hours a week and like to drink dark fancy beers, women's perfume, rattlesnake boots, whiskey barrels, vinyl records, nag champa, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Touch: the shoulder of the person in front of me, I say “pardon me” as I squeeze and squirm through the bodies, soaking in their humanity, returning smiles, I place myself smack dab in the middle of the crowd. I want to be here, at the High Note, with these people, to feel it all again when the next song starts.
Mar 19th, 2016