Week 65: Guest Post by Ben Mace

My buddy Ben Mace is going to be guest posting this week. Thank you Ben, it's nice having a week off. Here's Ben now.

ERE I AM JH

Sup NAP...

Ben Mace Private Detective...

Anaconda's brother in alms...

Told CA I'd start guesting for him form time to time; give him some more of
that boogie time which has become so precious after the birth of his
beautiful bundle of snakes.

So just sos ya know it aint cause I think I have something brilliant to
say about music or nuthin...

So, well, here goes nuthin...

Last Saturday I worked my usual door/barback job at the The Cave and we
were expecting NC blues legend Skeeter Brandon to play to much fanfare and
a ten dollar cover. It being the cave he of course went into the hospital
for his diabetes and canceled and instead his backing band played a funk
set led by guitarist Puncho after arriving two hours late to an anemic
"crowd" of fratty types Groves and I managed to talk into staying by not
charging them even a five dollar cover until they were good and drunk. A
couple of my buddies, who are in bands themselves made derogatory remarks
about the music style, which to be honest seemed more directed at the
perceived audience, and split (to see a cover band... more on that later).

Sitting in the back of the cave was D. D is an older Chapel Hill
personality, not super well known even to most of those who hang out at
places like the cave. In the late seventies and eighties D toured the
world as both a rodie and backing musician for well known blues and funk
acts as well as playing in a diverse set of local bands ranging from
progressive jazz rock to possibly Raleigh's first punk band. Now D has
his problems (hey who doesn't) and now lives with his mother in the black
section of town so in spite of his history he is often mistaken for just
another drifter wandering rosemary street. When the band began to play, D
was laying in the back with his radio stuck up against his ear. He looked as
if he was coming down from something or trying to cover up being asleep.
In fact he was listening to the playback of a song he was writing while
waiting for local rocker Stu Cole to come and meet him. After D wandered
up to the bar on about the fourth song, the bongo player wanted to get some
beers and almost without provocation D jumped in and proceeded to play the
entire set for the next two hours on one instrument or another. It was
amazing and so tight it never even occurred to me that he had never met
these people before. Remember this was a tight band, they were used to
touring Europe backing Skeeter. Watching D get out the funk, knowing the
diversity of his own compositions and how they tend toward the
arty/progressive side and thinking about how my buds dismissed the "frat
music" something caught in my craw. In D I was watching some notion of
professional musicianship that is often missing from many of the musicians
I know around town. I saw the same thing in film and theater (which I am
involved in) in England where I lived for four years. There, actors,
writers and directors worked. It didn't matter how derivative the
project, you worked all the time to hone yourself while making time for
the more personal projects you hoped to someday be known for and you did
it even if you had a trust fund. Weirdly so many of my friends here
equate being a "serious artist" to a rather dilettant attitude that views
making college students dance as irrelevant and spending most of your time
working shitty jobs and getting high so you can reserve a few fleeting
bursts of energy solely to some grand project or other. To always want to
to jump up and make average people dance is to live and breathe music.
I'm somehow not surprised that I tend to find D's compositions more
musically interesting than average.