03/07/2022
Story published in 2010. I thought we were all impossibly busy then…
BLUES TIME
A guitar player in a touring Blues band “woke up this morning” in 1975. He begins his day in a hotel room that looks like most 2010 hotel rooms. The most obvious difference is a picture-tube TV with a k**b for volume and a channel dial and extended antennae to pull in the local channels. There’s no remote.
He reaches for the phone on the night table next to his bed. It has a dial, no touch-tone buttons. He sticks his finger into the second-last finger-hole and spins the dial for 9 and gets an outside line. He dials 0 and the 0perator announces herself, always a woman. He resists a reflex to say, “Hi, how are you today?” recites instead, “I’d like to make a long distance call and charge it to my home phone.” He tells her the number he wants to call and his own number and a few seconds later, he hears the phone ringing. The band’s manager picks up. He tells the manager he got a call yesterday from a musician friend with a gig back home and he wants to check to see if he’ll be touring on April 28. The manager says he’ll indeed be working in Pittsburgh, and he writes that down in a small “At-a-Glance” notebook calendar.
Next he calls his friend with the gig through the operator but there’s no answer, not even someone he can leave a message with, and he’ll have to try again later. He’ll be playing tonight, 300 miles away, in Dayton, Ohio. He looks in the address book that shares his back pocket with his calendar and finds the phone number for a woman he met last time he was in Dayton. He makes the operator-assisted long distance call, but the phone rings about ten times before he gives up and hangs up. There are no answering machines (seven years in the future) though some musicians from New York or L.A. have answering services, live people who take messages for them when they’re not near their phones. He hopes the letter he wrote to the woman last week got through and that she will show up at the club tonight, happy to see him.
He wonders how modern life ever got so crazy that he has to spend up to half an hour on the phone a couple of times per week to keep his business and social affairs moving along. He appreciates the phone as a tool, but he doesn’t enjoy using it.
The band meets in the lobby and carry their non-rolling suitcases to the van. They bust some eggs at the first Union 76 truckstop on the highway and then they roll. He is very grateful for a new technology: it’s now possible to record vinyl records onto cassette tapes at home and play the cassettes on the road through portable players (they have piano key mechanical controls and a single speaker, cassette Walkmen and boom boxes are five years in the future) or cassette players that are just showing up in newer cars. The band’s 1975 van has one. He inserts his cassette and they listen to Jimmy Rogers, Lowell Fulson, Jimmy Reed, Tyrone Davis, Little Walter, and Lil’ Son Jackson, rather than cheesy radio or nothing.
Following a route planned with a Rand-McNally road atlas, five hours later they arrive at the club where they’ll be playing and set up their equipment. Then they check into a hotel that looks just like the last one to get a little rest before the show. He reads a paperback novel because he enjoys the worlds beyond his own that he finds in books. After a chapter, he dozes with the book in his hand. He wakes, showers, dresses, and meets the band to go play the Blues music he loves with all the soul and desperation and redemption he can find. The woman he tried to contact didn’t show up and he takes a stool at the bar for a nightcap after the show. The waitress tells him she likes his music.
As the club begins to empty and close, she counts her tips while they laugh and flirt. He invites her to come back to the hotel with him. They’re consenting adults brought together by soulful music, there’s a lot of that going around in 1975. Some of you are the result. Before she leaves the next morning, he gets her phone number. He wishes there was a better way to stay in touch with her long distance than by phone or mail, but that’s in the future. He actually does write letters to the friends he meets on the road, which is more than any other musician he knows ever does. His traveling lifestyle makes variety easy but intimacy hard.
Smiling from his good night, he hopes the future will bring him more of the same, a simple, spontaneous wish by a man in his mid-twenties who enjoys his life. He peers into the future to imagine who he might be when he grows old. He knows he loves playing Old School Blues for cool music lovers and can’t imagine that it won’t be a lifelong commitment.
By 2010, it is safe to say he was all-the-way right about that.
He tries to project how the world might change around him and his nasty old Blues. Our phones might travel with us, perhaps like the “wrist radio” that cartoon detective Dick Tracy had in the 1950s. It could be cool to call someone wherever they were. He can’t conceive of the Internet, an electronic network, but to be fair – in 1975 only creative scientists and science fiction writers and readers imagined or projected it. He guesses that technology’s progress will also bring comfort, convenience, and ultimately even more leisure time to pursue what he loves.
By 2010, it is safe to say he was all-the-way wrong about that.
In 2010, he “woke up this morning” in a hotel room. It mostly looks like those he’s stayed in 3,283 more times since 1975, but who’s counting? He reaches over to the night table for his smartphone, which has been recharging while he was. There is a hotel phone next to it, but he hasn’t used one to call anyone in over ten years – except occasionally to ask the hotel front desk why the wi-fi doesn’t work. Now he doesn’t even carry his laptop on the road anymore, he can do most of what he needs to do on the pocket-sized smartphone.
With the informed perspective of a business traveler/troubadour on the road for almost forty years, he appreciates that it’s an amazing device. He can stay in close touch with his wife several times a day which is great for their marriage, check his e-mail, thumb and send his replies, Google anything and have 186,059 links in .032 seconds, post to his Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace accounts, take new photos and videos, display old photos and videos for the entertainment of his friends, and hear and see almost anyone perform on Youtube from 1930 ‘til last night. He can exchange text messages, call anywhere in the world, get news and weather with the exact information he seeks without a TV, commercials, or newspaper. He can carry with him and listen to thousand of songs of his choice, hook into satellite radio, check flight information and reservations, check weather and road conditions, keep an updated calendar of his gigs and commitments, move money around from his checking account to pay his credit card and house bills, and keep track of business and living expenses for taxes. All this, and he’s not even interested in the sports, video games or fart-sound apps that are loved by a whole lot more people than love the quaint Old School Blues music he adores more than ever.
Right after the smartphone’s reliable alarm wakes him, he uses its other functions -- in bed, sitting on the toilet, at breakfast, and for the rest of the day while he travels (except while he drives, which is just too risky) to his next gig. His sister on the other side of the world e-mails that she’s been so busy she doesn’t know where the last two weeks went. His friend who helps him keep up with social networking calls and remarks that she doesn’t know where the last two decades went. Another friend texts to apologize for not getting back to him about some important business for the last month, “just too much happening to deal with anything in real time anymore.” And then, just before showtime, a little ding from his smartphone’s “to do” list reminds him that he too has been in “time debt” as well as money debt, for years. Some of his “to do”’s will never be done.
He wonders how modern life ever got this crazy when he holds this miraculous time-saving tool in his hand. He LOL’s to remember thinking the same thing about a hotel phone in 1975.
In 2010, the harder he works, the more he has to do. He turns off his smartphone; well, at least he sets it to “airplane mode” so he can turn it on again quickly later without losing a minute of his life staring at it while it boots up and downloads new revelations.
He smiles at the welcoming audience and picks up his guitar. Then his guitar picks him up, it fully reclaims his soul. He plays some Old School Blues, a style which was already old in 1975. He and the audience find a feeling in 2010 that transcends the constant crap of 2010. After the last encore he feels unburdened and he defiantly resists a reflex to check his smartphone. Instead, he’ll hang out with the audience and give them even more of himself while enjoying their compliments. It’s still 2010, but at this moment, it feels like 1975.
