Now With 100% Less Alchemy
We went out to dinner Saturday night with good friends of ours, a couple who we don't get to see very often.For my stomach, as it turned out, it was a very bad idea. You'd think a barbecued chicken breast wouldn't be Chernobyl, but you'd be wrong.
I was sitting with Gloria in the lobby and we heard this languid guitar music coming softly over a speaker. "I could definitely play that on Expert level," I said.
Our friends showed up and we followed the hostess to our table. This restaurant has a cavernous main room, absolutely huge, and when we walked in we all we heard was acoustic guitar. It was the same music we heard in the lobby, but now it was ten times the volume.
The waiter identified himself and gave us the standard five-minute tour of his life, then he asked us if he could do anything to make us more comfortable. "Turn the music down," Dan said, and the waiter gave him kind of a strange look and said he'd try.
So we were sitting at our table, trying to have a conversation.
"SO HOW'S MAGGIE DOING?" I asked.
"SHE'S GREAT," Dan said. "WHAT ABOUT ELI?"
"JUST FINE," I said. "HE'S A FUNNY LITTLE KID."
It wasn't just us. At every table, people were shouting to be heard above the mind-numbing volume of the acoustic loop. Even worse, the loop consisted entirely of popular songs, so it wasn't even original. It was acoustic elevator music.
We continued in this vein for about another ten minutes. That's when my eyes drifted away from the table--and saw the horrible truth. "IT'S ALIVE!" I cried.
And so it was. At the front of this giant room, almost totally blending into his surroundings, was a guitar player. That lame acoustic loop of popular songs was a lame live set of popular songs.
He was probably an excellent guitar player. There are probably a thousand excellent guitar players in Austin, and half of them can't find work. I have a friend who is one of the best jazz guitarists in the city, and he doesn't even play because the pay for jazz guitarists is so bad. Or you'd have to do gigs like this.
So this guy is sitting on a stool, and he's almost totally frozen. He looks like an animatronic puppet, because nothing is moving except his hands. And he's playing every song so slowly that it's the musical equivalent of pushing a giant rock up an endless hill. He's an acoustic Sisyphus.
"He has a group," I said. "It's called The Lethargy Experience."
Somehow, no matter what song this guy played, he played it at the same tempo. Blackbird and Won't Get Fooled Again? Same tempo. It would take a few seconds for your brain to convert the song to its non-euthanized version, but then you'd realize that he had, in fact, played both Sympathy for the Devil and Puff the Magic Dragon at the same speed.
He had a CD for sale. It was titled Killing You Softly With My Song.
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