Chesting or The Little League Bounce Can Be Stopped

an excerpt by Ed Allen

If I weren’t so afraid of getting a DUI on my way home, I would be able to run the Wednesday night Open Stage show at McGoogleburger’s the way it should be run: drunk. But the best I can do is pretend, and try to let myself get pulled along into whatever kind of a night it’s going to be. I always start out my opening set with the joke that everybody should drink as much as they can, because live music sounds better when you are wearing your beer-phones—and that’s true, but there’s more to it than that. It really does get better. Alcohol clears a space in the room that pulls music into it, even music from kids who are so bad that you have to admire them for signing up to play at all. Then when they do get up there, sometimes, if it’s a good night and the crowd is into it and Gary’s P.A. system isn’t getting too much feedback, I’ve heard them play things that they do not know how to play.

Whether my not being drunk had anything to do with the incident of Chris Merrigan’s guitar getting broken I don’t know. But sober or not, it was at least partly my fault, and I’ve made my apologies, to Chris, to Gary, and to the police, though the only reason the police showed up was that they happened to be walking by just at the moment when Chris got shoved against the front door and the glass cracked.