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Country Bar Restrooms
A semi-religious experience
We hadn’t been long at the bar, our bucket of Miller Lites begging for consumption, when my son-in-law excused himself. It gave me a chance to peer at my bar peers while listening to a singer I didn’t know perform on the subdued-lit stage.
His name was Cam Pierce, and he was dressed like you’d expect a young man trying to make it in the country music biz to dress:
A tall cowboy hat that at once stayed on but seemed ready to engulf his head. A stiff Wrangler-style gold-brown western jacket and just a shade off matching-colored jeans. Of course, cowboy boots. He wasn’t bad, though definitely unmemorable. We must have heard him play eight songs, and he kept telling the crowd of sixty country fans what genre he was about to switch to next. From traditional country, to alt-country, to something folkie, and then, a Blues number, something he said we all understood.
Maybe so, though at a bar charging $25 to get in, with buckets of 5 Miller Lites costing another $20, what, really, did we understand about the blues? What I understood in that moment was that every song Cam sang sounded pretty much the same,despite the supposedly switching genres — slow, deliberate, his voice nearly a whisper, as if he was channeling Charley Crockett. And if so, not a bad way to go, but something upbeat might…
