My faith in rock was renewed once again just now as I was walking home from teaching my class. Some college students were sitting on a front porch with guitars and playing “Wild Thing” by the Troggs. It occurred to me that when my high school band played that song way back in the 1980s, it was already 25 years old. It was fun to play because it was easy and catchy and it made people dance. So on one hand, maybe it isn’t surprising that it has lasted into the current generation of musicians. But then again, that means the song is now more than 50 years old, and kids are still playing it.

When I was a teenage rocker, songs that were 50 years old were not even on my radar. Sure, these days I regularly perform songs from the 1920s. And though I may have heard some songs from that era on Looney Toons cartoons, it would never have occurred to me to sit on the porch and play them on the guitar with my friends gathered around. Rock and roll was all there was to me then, and the form had been around only 30 years. Songs that were ancient to me then were mere babes in the woods, younger then than I am now. Those same songs are now qualified for Social Security benefits.

Other music forms sometimes come more into popular focus–hip hop, neo-folk, and alt-country come to mind. But rock always sticks around, always comes back. Long may it prosper.

I’m in the process of uploading some old demos and lo-fi oddities onto Soundcloud for posterity. Here’s my page. Keep checking back as I add more stuff to the page.

The older pieces in this bunch were recorded on an analog Fostex 4-track cassette recorder. In retrospect, I’m surprised at how much I got out of that thing. The newer pieces were done with various digital multi-trackers. And of course, the PopCanon and Exes fragments were done in a professional studio, engineered by the great Mike Rotolante.

I’ll be posting a few selections on my Facebook fan page here and there.

I used to be really into the blues. Like really, really into it. If you remember Ralph Macchio’s character in Crossroads, I was very much like that when I was fifteen, right down to the mullet haircut and cheap fedora. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. I couldn’t get enough of that stuff. But then, somewhere along the way, I did have enough.

It was probably partly because the more I learned as a musician, the more the potential of blues became limited for me. It was also because I was never comfortable with the idea that privileged white people like myself had what it takes to really play the blues. I got tired of trying to fit into that mold, and I got extremely tired of watching and listening to other middle class white musicians playing Clapton-like solos over a 12-bar blues progression and singing about how hard life is, then going back to their day jobs as attorneys. The blues for my white suburban experience became garage and punk rock, and I left the blues far behind.

You see, the old blues masters earned it. These were blue collar guys, or often even lower on the socioeconomic scale than that—itinerant farm hands who were just barely not homeless. Life for them actually was hard. But on a Saturday night, they could put their resources together, get some cheap whisky and some old guitars, and they’d let loose.

Gip Gipson is that kind of a blues man.

At Gip’s Place in Bessemer, ten miles down County Road 18 from my neighborhood in Birmingham, on any given Saturday night, there is an old style blues party going on—working class people drinking cheap beer or hooch and living it up because it’s Saturday night, and that’s just what folks do around here. I felt a little like a tourist or a voyeur at times, but there were a lot of other tourists there like me too. Many of the performers there are the same white baby boomers that drove me away from blues music in the first place. They are, most of them, well trained, expert, and experienced musicians. I can appreciate watching them play for sure, and I was having a good time. It was pretty much what I expected.

What I didn’t expect was what happened after the headlining act was done. Gip himself comes out, helped onto the stage by an assistant. Gip is 90 if he’s a day. His Facebook page says he’s a gravedigger by profession. They have to help him into his chair, hand him his guitar, adjust the microphone for him. He has a little paper shot glass, and the assistant pours something from a mason jar into it. Gip downs it, and then launches into his first song.

He plays a very old style of blues guitar, a straight off the farm kind of finger picking where he drones a simple bass pattern with his thumb while plucking out a rough melody on the higher strings. The melody of his vocal line matches the melody he’s playing on the guitar. There’s no “blues scale” or “12 bar blues chord progression” for Gip. He plays one chord until he feels like moving to the next one, and I’d bet he doesn’t know or care what that chord is called by studied musicians. He has at least two strings out of tune, and he’s foggy from drink, inconsistent with his tempo, but it’s still somehow amazingly listenable. It’s because he has earned it.

And because he is there, still alive despite everything, against all odds, he represents so much that is today extremely rare to find. And it’s Saturday night, and that’s just what he does on Saturday night. He is selling transcendence at $10 a head. It’s a bargain. I’ll never be a blues man, but I’ve rediscovered what I initially loved about this music.

After a couple of songs, he looks longingly at his empty shot glass. My friend Ian goes up the stage with his flask, pours a little whisky in the cup, and now Gip is his best friend.

Ian asked Mr. Gip how he learned to play the blues. He said that he had been travelling with Robert Johnson (yes, that Robert Johnson), and they were in New York. He was talking to a woman and said he was from Perry County, Alabama. At that, the women slapped him. “That was the moment,” Gip said, “when I decided to become a blues musician.” It’s possible that none of this is true. It doesn’t matter much.

At two in the morning, all the other musicians have packed up and gone home. Gip is back on the stage, and there are five of us still sitting there in awe. He’s still doing shots of whisky. He’s selling us on Jesus between songs. He will make it to church on Sunday morning. He never misses it.

This should be a once in a lifetime experience, but somehow it happens every Saturday night. For now. The way Gip looks, this might not last much longer. And it’s just one more thing about Alabama that is full of mysteries and wonders.

Ghost Herd is playing twice in January, both times in the same week.

On Tuesday, January 17, we are playing the Radio Free Birmingham series at Bottletree. For this, we’ll be doing a shorter set with three other bands (tba). There is no cover charge.

On Friday, January 20, we are playing at Das Has with our sister band Results of Adults. The cover is $5. RoA will go on at 9. We will go on at about 10 or 10:30 and play a long set. Here is the Facebook event.

I’m playing a benefit show tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon at Bottletree. The proceeds go to Desert Island Supply Co., an organization that provides creative writing workshops and writing tutors for kids in Birmingham. I have been a volunteer with DISCO since I moved back to town last year.

The idea of the show is that all the bands are to pick 4 songs to play that they couldn’t live without if they were stranded on a desert island.

Here is a really nice write-up from Birmingham Box Set. I still haven’t decided on all four of my songs.

Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door. It starts at 2pm and goes on until midnight. I play at 4:30 pm.

Come spend the afternoon and evening stranded at Bottletree tomorrow. What songs would you want to hear?