Music-not unlike sex, dope and humiliation-has healing powers. Its creation and appreciation is as instinctual as laughter. We use that same innate
joie de vivre
to create the places where we listen to music-environments where our love of rhythms, beats and melodies can be unleashed. Whether it's an***image2*** outdoor amphitheater like Paolo Soleri or the inky hues of Evangelo's, where we listen to music says as much about us as the music itself.
The Santa Fe All-Stars have a gig at Tiny's Restaurant and Lounge every Wednesday during August. The band's recent show at the Santa Fe Bandstand (where they killed it) solidifies my desire to see them twice in one week and write a profile about the band playing at one of Santa Fe's most beloved venues. But my purpose is trumped by something I never expected to happen.
The $3.75 bottle of Budweiser I'm nursing and admittedly bought because-in my own deluded sense of reality-I thought it would help me "blend in" with the crowd, leads to the bigger realization that I've never been inside Tiny's, even though I have a vague recollection of its décor and clientele. I expect to walk into a stygian room with gnarly red glass candleholders on café tables, vinyl lounge chairs and creepy older people on the prowl for sketchy car sex. I get none of that; it's bright, convivial and there's not a pinky ring in sight. Elvis liquor decanters sit beside Laurel and Hardy decanters, which are beside the hundreds of other decanters that line the wall. And there is, of course, the music from the All-Stars. The band is quite literally flawless in its delivery, though the name still drives me bat shit every time I hear it because it reminds me of a Little League softball team. The band meanders from Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt covers to slow waltzes and foot stompers. The room fills with local musicians as the night goes on.
"This can be any place," local drummer Mark Clark says about the bar/restaurant, noting the deliberate absence of all things Santa Fe. He's right. Tiny's doesn't resemble anything else I've seen here. The place even has a disco ball and bordello-style watercolor prints on the walls above the booths.
"It could be New Orleans," I think to myself, and realize that this is the thing that has been eating at me for three weeks and the reason I have what
professional psychologists call a mild freak out or a "monkey falling out if its tree" episode.
Aug. 29 marks the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in Waveland, Miss., which subsequently sparked the floods that destroyed my home in New Orleans; it's the reason I moved to Santa Fe. I had gone for a run on the morning of Aug. 27, 2005. When I returned to my house, my wife had packed my bags.
"Walk through the house and take anything else; we're leaving," she said. I laughed and entertained staying home through the storm. We had gone through this before. Every year for five years we had evacuated because of a hurricane threat. We had even attended a hurricane party at one of our favorite bars and got hammered while the wind and rain ravaged the trees outside. So I left everything. By the time we finally returned (two months later) more than 500 hundred books, three acoustic guitars and my entire music collection had been soaking in toxic water for more than three weeks.
The reminders of the flood are beginning to appear everywhere-in opinion pieces, editorials and the recycled television footage from 2005 that shows the mayhem at the convention center in New Orleans and at the Superdome. So now I'm at Tiny's listening to four of the finest musicians in Santa Fe (Joe West, Susan Holmes, Sharon Gilchrist and Ben Wright), hoping that listening to some music and putting some ink to paper about a stellar band in our midst will realign my head.
After a brief set break, local musician Pete Williams joins West and Wright onstage to play the upright bass for "House of the Rising Sun." Their rendition is so sparingly beautiful, it causes something I've never experienced in Santa Fe: complete silence from the audience. The scene and the sound dig deeply into the confines where I've stored the memories of those fucked-up days after the hurricane and flood: The violent sounds of gas generators, the rotting-food smell that permeated the city and the mountains of warped and muddied lives draped in front of houses in ruined heaps. I have to leave the room before breaking down and making a scene.
It's been a year since I moved back to Santa Fe and the outsider feeling is almost gone. My first evening at Tiny's won't be my last. The term "locals' hangout" is mentioned often in casual conversations; I wonder how many of us at the bar are truly local-and why it matters to qualify ourselves or any place in Santa Fe in this way.
This is home and the sound it creates spills through the bars and the streets like a new flood, replacing the damage from the one before.
Santa Fe All-Stars
8 pm Wednesdays in August, no cover
Tiny's Restaurant and Lounge,
1015 Pen Road,
983-5050
