The Opening Act

by Glenn Burney

For Made up Words

Waiting in the green room, the singer couldn’t hear the opening act. The musicians played — very loud, shades of industrial — but he couldn’t hear them. He had a vague idea they were on stage (he even had a vague idea of where they were in their set list), but he really wasn’t concerned with them. Not that he didn’t care. Because he did. He did care. He even liked them. The four members of Sleep, a veteran French band with a cult following, had been a pleasure to tour with. Interesting, well-read guys in their mid-to-late 40’s who spoke perfect English and knew the locations of all the best bars in every city on their European tour. Old enough not to be moody or brooding, they made good conversation, didn’t try to steal the show, stayed out of the way and never took the singer’s favorite seat on the bus or in restaurants, i.e., the seat closest to the door. Because here was the thing: the singer, the main voice of the story, needed space.

Not that he was claustrophobic, for he wasn’t, clinically at least, but he liked the possibility of escape, the thought that freedom was only a few steps away. To be trapped in the rear of the tour bus, stuck in a corner booth on an inaccessible faux-leather banquette, far from the door, with the exit out of his line of sight, beyond a hop, skip and a jump away, this weakened his resolve to continue, dissuaded him from playing one more song, intimidated him from connecting with the audience who paid good money to come hear HIM.

It was a perfectly ironic feeling: wanting to escape, needing to escape and yet thriving on remaining visible and vulnerable on stage; wanting to escape and thriving on the tension of non-escape, not escaping; torn between staying and going, always making sure his options were open. On stage it was the same: a clearly defined set with limited time to speak allowed him to bear the sense of bone-crushing stage fright he felt. But that was part of the deal and he gave them what they paid for, knowing that X number of minutes and Y number of steps taken at a brisk pace would bring him straight back here to the green room, then to the bus, the next green room, the bus, a hotel, another green room and so on until he was back home in Nashville strumming the guitar on his front porch swing or his living room sofa, regaling his family with tales of the Old World capitals he had visited, the international fans he had met after shows, the familiar meals with exotic names.

They had arrived in Paris on a rainy January day, a cold damp misty rain that melted a body like acid and made any idea of sightseeing flagrantly daunting. The bus had arrived in the city at dawn from a show in Amsterdam. Whenever possible, the two bands slept on the bus in transit to cut down on hotel bills and conserve a great deal of their tour profits. He usually slept decently in the bus, but last night an alarmingly vivid dream disturbed his sleep and left him wondering. He usually didn’t question his choices in life or at least he hadn’t up until now. It almost felt as if life choices had been made for him since boyhood, as if life made decisions in his stead.

He had a distinctive voice with a unique color palette, a certain timbre, and he used it for maximum effect. Half-song, half-whisper, an aspirated melody, the very voice of Americana. He wrote, he painted, he sang and with these skills, he eked out a decent living. He had even kept his day job as a carpenter until finally, in his mid-40’s, he didn’t need to anymore. But still, thank God Obamacare came along; that wiped his brow clean of the one preoccupying worry in the life of an artist. Without a few top 10 hits, without a stadium filling tour, most musicians, 99.9% of them, survived on a modest living or earned their keep doing something other than music. It helped that his wife had a job too.

So he wasn’t apt to wonder about his decisions except that now, cruising past the crumbling road marker 50, he started to question if maybe, perhaps, there was more. If maybe, perhaps, there were some questions to ask. If music had only been his opening chapter and now he could begin a new one. The kids grown and out of the house, his wife busy with her work, an introverted artist has plenty of time to think. It astonished him that the energy of live music, the catalyst for becoming a performer in the first place, the force that had propelled him for his entire adult life, now sort of abandoned him. The rocket ship he had cruised upon had taken him into orbit and now he felt as if floating in the void.

How many eager 20-something music lovers would come out to discover him now? (None.) How many dives did he play these days, searching for an audience, a faithful public? (None.) What was music as a means of communication when he had no one new to communicate with? (Old fans excluded.) Should he attempt to begin all over again, write as if adult experience was novel? (Perhaps.) Why should young adults be the only ones to write songs of discovery when here he was in middle age discovering an entirely new phase of life? (He made a mental note of this for after the tour.) Surely this transition merited material and an audience too. He wasn’t looking for a break anymore; he had enough to remain modestly comfortable.

Music, he mused, was like life: a nice ride you enjoy for a while before you realize it leads nowhere and doesn’t turn back. There was no second stage to this rocket, no second stage to this tour. Music, life, rockets; they just burn to exhaustion and then drift, wayward observers of themself. And so, he wondered, looking at his calloused hands, at himself, at the shifting sensations in his body, at his fidgety mind, where did it all go, what did it all mean, what does it all amount to? To start, to continue, to endure. But for how long? Is most of life nothing more than perseverance? A treadmill? A waiting game? An act of abiding? Does anything happen? Does anything ever happen?

He shifted in his green room seat, suddenly uncomfortable. One of his bandmates was oafishly hitting on the very attractive backstage manager, a stylish young Frenchwoman. She wasn’t the least impressed or affected and the bandmate, the keyboard player, carried on like a teenage boy making crude jokes. He realized that a tremendous disconnect existed between their respective behaviors and that it was cultural: a Tennessee redneck and a Parisian sophisticate. The flagrant gap between the two countries came into focus and he fell through. And then the dream came back to him, the vivid dream from the bus.

He was floating weightlessly in a pool, in the center of it, more like treading water, upright, but not exerting himself. The pool was neither too large nor too small. The sides were right there, within quick swimming distance. And then suddenly his first love, his high school sweetheart, a knobby-kneed redhead long distance runner, appeared in the water in front of him, facing him. But she was not treading like he was, her weight must have been negligible because she seemed to stand solidly, effortlessly in the water, and without touching bottom. He reached out to her, overwhelmed with a deep longing, a sense of recognition, reunited at last. He felt as if he would merge with her and melt away. Become fluid. The feeling intoxicated him, edged him into a state of temporal gnosis, full-body awareness. Cut. She abruptly vanished and the pool became infinite, boundless, its borders non-existent, so that now he was treading water in the middle of the ocean. The horizon line, the limb, was all he could glimpse in every direction. Cut. In the next second, he stood dripping wet in a dark forest on a soft bed of pine needles. A group of adorable pre-school children surrounded him, bade him to sit with kind, welcoming gestures and then covered him entirely with cool, silty mud. Cut. He woke up not knowing where he was and for a few, very long seconds after opening his eyes — almost too long to bear — he could not piece together the story of his life and ride the self-stitched narrative back to the present moment. The morning continuity was suddenly and utterly shattered, leaving him disembodied, a nameless face in an endless crowd.

Gradually the movement, the bus, the lights on the motorway all made sense and his story fell back into place: he was a musician on tour in Europe, traveling from city to city with his band. Yes, that’s where he was. And then? What came next? Where was he going? Did he have a plot? Could a story ever end? What if it never even started? How is one to know when to step on stage and when to step off?

Apparently that time was coming soon. The backstage manager entered the green room, recalling him to his actual situation, to tell them that Sleep, the opening act, was playing their final song, barring an encore, and that they would be taking the stage in approximately 30 minutes, right on time.

The encore always did it, the joker in the mix. Would the audience respond with enough enthusiasm to merit another song? Would the band play on? The longevity of a show, a constant unknown. Some bands lived for live performances and played with no restraint on stage. They only stopped out of sheer exhaustion or a strict manager. As could be suspected, the singer didn’t care much for encores. Not out of a lack of eagerness or selfishness or even because he didn’t care for the fans. No, he was just shy and all the sustained applause after a concert made him feel uncomfortable; he just wanted to go away and be alone. Some things never changed.

As a boy, playing in the fields and forests and streams in Tennessee, he liked nothing more than to find a solitary spot, a high branch in a pine, a corner of a meadow, a rocky outcropping, a hidden eddy, someplace from where he could observe the world around him and bathe in silence. He was like that, a solitary creature. Not a misanthrope by any means, or a loner. He just liked quiet, particularly his own inner quiet. He liked to listen to the space between his thoughts, to the stillness at his center. Building a friend’s backyard deck, measuring, sawing, hammering, sweating undisturbed for a month felt like a respite from the world, a rare privilege.

His wife, a far more gregarious creature, didn’t mind that he sat alone in darkened rooms or stayed out at night for hours star-gazing because she knew he needed to explore the furthest extent of his inner life. His creativity roamed silently in shadows and he needed to track it down and harness it, corner it, lasso it and haul it in. That made him the man he was and she appreciated that man, she loved that man. He knew this about her, though he still sometimes wondered why she loved him. What had he achieved? He wrote songs that almost no one knew, songs about private moments, poetry actually, the kind that didn’t reveal an inner meaning so readily.

He could walk most anywhere in the country (other than Austin and Nashville) and no one would recognize him, especially if he went with an unadorned head. Because as a trademark, as a sort of uniform, he wore ridiculous agricultural supply caps for products he neither endorsed, used, nor cared about. It wasn’t like an athlete wearing Nike apparel and being paid for it. And now he was losing his hair and what hair he had left was fast going grey. How much time did he have left? The question couldn’t be avoided at his age, though he wasn’t plagued by health scares, only achy joints and a stiff back in the morning. His wife talked him into taking a few yoga classes to regain some suppleness in his “aging” body, as she put it.

But he had worked hard, physically and artistically. He had brought musicians together and had got them to give their best, in the perfect alchemy of instruments and voices launched on a five-minute voyage. Damn, it still felt good when it all merged and they communicated like lovers. And it still felt good when the music faded out and knowing satisfaction lingered in the air. That was perhaps what he appreciated most: the brief caesura, the pregnant pause, the atemporal suspense. It was odd, that moment, a feeling that everything was about to begin even though it came immediately after a song had concluded. A final note hung and dissipated, people held their collective breath for a few beats in recognition of finality, and then life resumed with laughter, conversation, applause or another song. As if the end necessarily begot the beginning. A death and a subsequent birth. A musical uroboros.

The buzzer sounded, the lovely backstage manager knocked on the door and entered the room. The singer’s bandmates set down their phones, their books, their magazines and got to their feet. False alarm, the opening act did play an encore. Maybe because they were a French band with a long history and a cult following. Still at least a twenty-minute wait. He checked his watch. Maybe they could rush it a bit and go on in fifteen? He had planned for the bus to be ready to depart at 11:45PM and they had a long ride to Geneva and bad weather ahead. No time to shilly-shally. Schedules to keep. Managing a tour took too much energy and there was very little room for waste, either time or money. So fifteen it was, enough time for the audience to grab a beer. Besides, everyone was ready anyway. The stage crew would have to turn it over a little faster than usual, please.

Yet a false alarm always startled, unsettled, like a last second stay of execution. Well, maybe not that dramatic but one did mentally prepare to take the stage and open up to strangers. The process required an acceptance of the thing to come, a shift in cognizance for future events, and when that state of mind was abruptly fractured, it jarred the singer out of his focused awareness and left him anxious. So much for the myth of the self-possessed alt-country musical cowboy hero: bump his guitar and he forgets how to hold it.

He turned to the sideboard, where a bottle of Jameson stood with a dozen glasses, an ice bucket filled with quickly melting ice, bottled mineral water and fruit juice. Up until now, he hadn’t been tempted by anything more than water, though his bandmates had been popping beers from the mini-fridge with frequency. Now though, he couldn’t conjure any moral reason not to pour himself a glass of whiskey, creating a momentary breach in his pre-show carapace. He dove through the breach in a flash, before any words of self-judgment could assail him, and poured a nice, chunky, more-than-half-full glass of the whiskey. Swilling it in his mouth and then melting down his throat and warming his belly, he felt the tension ease away. Like that, his worries abated and his left hand, which he had been unknowingly clutching in a tight-packed fist, relaxed.

He laughed to himself, a soft little sigh, and mused how he intentionally avoided writing songs of the whiskey-drinking, lonesome cowboy variety, the stereotypes and standards of Nashville. He had done a good job of keeping his head above water and not falling victim to the vices of show biz life. A grounded wife and solid family helped with that. So did having a 9 to 5 for 20 years. (And if Jack London earned his keep as an oyster pirate, he didn’t see what was wrong with carpenter.) But it could have been so easy to write songs of divorce, binge drinking your blues away, heartbreak, prison, southbound trains, pickup trucks, cashier jobs, the lives of the downtrodden and on and on. But no. He found a calling elsewhere, in the fragmented lives of words, visions of life seen through the interstices of enjambed phrases. He didn’t plan it that way, he just wrote as he painted: by feeling, by piecemeal, by exploratory touches applied over time. And by padding along like this he emerged at the other end of the tunnel with a song that often sounded like no other, a unique creation. He realized he was an iconoclast though he didn’t assume to make an effort to be one. An effortless iconoclast, put it on his tombstone.

The whiskey warmed him nicely. His neck softened and allowed his head to roll a rubbery circle, to loll around like a summer afternoon snooze. He smiled and laughed again. It was all so silly, all these charades, all these games we play, personas we put on, acts we perform for the pleasure, the amusement, the fantasies of others. Deep down he knew it, didn’t identify with the name he went by, the singer-songwriter persona, it was just something he did, which luckily provided him enough to live on. There wasn’t a song in his repertoire that he really cared about. In fact, there wasn’t a song in the whole of country western civilization that he really cared about. Sure, he liked certain things in this world: Don Williams’ I Believe in You, Buddy Holly’s guitar sound, Johnny Cash’s voice. He still appreciated the resolution of a chord progression, the closure of it; but he didn’t actually care. If it all faded away tomorrow, if the whole damn show suddenly stopped and the next act started, he’d be fine with that. He’d welcome it even, welcome it with open arms.

Already, when he sang he was aware of a still center point somewhere within him that generated a feeling of infinite calm, like reaching out for his girlfriend in the dream. Each time he experienced that calm, his heart swelled with satisfaction, it rose up on an arching violin line and reassured him that everything — just so — was perfect by default. No tinkering or manipulation of his doing would improve it. Perfect by default. Sometimes he was even convinced that the songs he sang weren’t even his own, they just came to him when he was ready, like personality quirks he got to know over time.

The whiskey laugh caught him like a bump in the road when the final buzzer sounded. The opening act had finished. The stage crew had flipped the equipment. His bandmates were ready and out the door. It was time. Fuck it. Sing or be sung. Step out there for the thousandth time and live like the main act had already finished and gone home. Closing time. You can’t sit and wait in the green room forever, he thought.

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