Blogging Jerry Douglas At The Belly Up

August 26th, 2006 at 07:00pm Michael Conniff 2

11:51 PM Another "Strength In Numbers Number. I think now I've just got to listen. That's always the best thing you can say about anybody. Goodnight and good luck.

11:25 PM "A Remark You Made" by Josef Zawinul of Weather Report. My favorite band back in the day. I'm just going to listen for a while.

11:15 PM I'm thinking Derek Trucks last summer at Snowmass, Jerry Douglas here tonight, and Robert Randolph coming back at JAS over Labor Day weekend: something magical about a slide on a guitar. Now "Hide and Seek," "a song I've been playing for a very long time."

11:06 PM "This is nice. Is it really a basement? I've never been in a basement like this, with wide-screen TV." Guthrie Trapp from Pensacola on the guitar. Doug Beloit kicking it on drums from New Orleans. Todd Parks on the bass from LA. "Mr. Gabe Witcher on the fiddle, folks." Now a Mark O'Connor tune written with "Strength In Numbers." "A band of lightweights." Named for a guy named "FutureMan."

11:01 PM He comes out and he blows the roof off. Worth the wait. "Is it snowing yet?.... We're going to play some tunes but there aren't any words... We're going to play a song called 'Wild Rumpus." And it is.

10: 54 PM Game on and Jerry is hot. So's the drummer.

10:53 I'm thinking this is "the running." That's what sports reporters call it when they have to write the story as the game unfolds, because they are too close to deadline to do it any other way.

10:51 PM Now almost an hour after we thought he would start...but whatever, dude. We're watching surfer movies, now. "This is a good idea," she says. She means the movie to keep us distracted. Point break and all that. You'd have to be a surfer to understand. I'm not. I'm wondering why they wouldn't be showing Warren Miller right now. Catch my drift?

10:24 PM Now I get it. We wait up all night so we can come in from Basalt to see Jerry Douglas and instead we get an opening act, a well-meaning and out-of-tune opening act, that will remind us how great Jerry Douglas is going to be once he gets his dobro out here. Shows you how hard it is to be so damn good. Jerry Douglas has played on over 1,000 albums--I know, it sounds impossible...but there it is, and I'm looking around the Belly Up at the pictures on the wall trying to figure out who he's played with. Leon Russell? Yeah. Kris Kristofferson? Definitely. The Chasidic rapper? Maybe not, but why not. Might as well play with anyone.

I'm going to try to stay positive here but if this opening set goes on much longer I'm going to turn into a pumpkin.

10:07 PM So here's the thing. I'm here now///but I realize that I;m going to have to do this in reverse chronological order, in the dark, literally, like that movie "Mememto" where everything happens backward. And I think about the novelist Milan Kundera, who talks all the time about chronological displacement, where the guy dies in chapter seven and comes back to life in chapter nine--that kind of thing. This is leaving me discombobulated and disoriented to begin with....