A HOOTENANNY HOOT

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (11-12-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     I'm writing this before the election results are in, but no matter which way it goes, it's been a stressful week. One of the things that can help us cope with life ups and downs is music. My friends Phil and Athina had a small, socially-distanced outdoor hootenanny this year, and it was nice to get (sort of) together, armed with only our guitars, our voices and a guiro, whatever that is. Oh, plus an urn of mulled cider. The most important part of any hootenanny is just enough alcohol to make the rough edges that originate in my guitar smoother by the time they reach your ears. If you're planning to mull anything over, mulled cider probably won't help, but you'll be less likely to notice.

     First we had a lovely harvest supper, with a butternut squash soup for starters. Right away you've already covered three of the major food groups with the butter, the nuts and the squash. But there was also a tasty pot roast, and yummy purple carrots that looked like an eggplant drunk-dialed a chili pepper and had a baby. The feast put me in the mind of a Thanksgiving celebration, except that nobody could think of anything to argue about.

     We sat down to play some rock and roll standards, some Tom Petty, some Stones, some Beatles. We sang "Helplessly Hoping," which seems like a good song to play while I'm waiting for the votes to be counted. We even tackled Bowie's "Space Oddity," which sounds better on acoustic guitars than I thought it would. When I was a kid I thought the lyrics were, "...And the papers want to know who shot you where...." It was a song about a space shot, after all. Why don't I just come out and admit I was not an exceptionally bright child?

     Somebody started to play the Beatles' "All You Need is Love," and the drummer in me had to stop the guitar player in me to ask, what meter are we doing it in? The song was recorded in an abstruse rhythm which sounds to me like two measures of 7/4 time followed by a measure of 4/4 and then another measure of 7/4. Everyone looked at me with a blank expression that seemed to say, "this is the last hootenanny you will ever be invited to." The Beatles wrote the song because they wanted a theme that everyone could understand, and apparently a rhythm that NO one could understand. To play "All You Need is Love," all you need is love, love is all you need. Plus a metronome. And a slide rule.

     If you want everyone to forgive and forget at a jam session, just break into the chords to "Country Roads," and that's exactly what I did. Henry Deutschendorf, better known as John Denver, heard the husband and wife writers of the song play it for him after a concert, and he helped them finish it. It was written along Clopper Road in Maryland, before it was filled with the strip malls that are there now. "Strip Mall Roads" doesn't sound as good. John Denver invited the two songwriters to sing on the version that became a huge hit, and the rest is hootenanny history.

     I launched into a solo on the guiro, which as it turns out is a ribbed hollow gourd. No matter what you do with it, a Santana song automatically comes out, and it's up to everyone else to figure out the rest. I did my part. I helpfully refrain, "Oye como va," and then yell to the guy on my left, "Take it!" leaving him to figure out how to pronounce the rest of the verse, which sounds in English like "Cheetos, where no boingo czar, oy." It makes more sense in print than I thought it would.

     There comes a point in the evening where I know I'm not going to be the designated driver, and that point was when I was unable to figure out how to use the guitar tuner. It's a small electronic device that's supposed to make it easier to tune your guitar, not harder. Luckily, there is an inverse proportion in physics such that, as the amount of available cider decreases, your tolerance for out of tune guitars increases.

     We played well into the evening. Standing around the campfire, I realized that so many ashes had blown onto me I looked like the last days of Pompeii. I sat back down in my chair, lest I cause anything to burst into flames. Due to the mulled cider situation I could legally be identified as an accelerant. We strummed on, democrats and republicans, settling our differences during the chorus of "Friend of the Devil." It can happen.