I heard a band last night
so loud
I’m still hearing them
this morning

which is fine if they were a
punk band
but they played after a
poetry reading

in an unplugged format featuring
three dudes
on an electro-acoustic, a Strat
and bongos

who redefined the concept of unplugged, as
The Who
in their heyday played at a much
lower volume

even though The Who were playing
large arenas
and these guys were in a small room that barely
sat 40.

I thought it would be rude to stick balled up napkins in
my ears,
so I just hoped against the odds for some kind of
amp malfunction

which never happened, and then kept futilely praying that the
next song
would be called “Turning Down the Volume” or maybe
“Barely Audible.”

My friend Dave leaned over and yelled, “Just because it goes
to eleven,
doesn’t mean that you have to always play it
at eleven.”

At one point I loudly confessed to anyone who could
hear me
that I, being omnipotent, was unilaterally deciding to
ban music

from the planet and vowed to go to home and
throw out
all of my CD’s and replace them with a single CD of
inaudible whispers.

But this morning, I grabbed “Basher: The Very Best of
Nick Lowe”
and listened to cranked up in the small chamber of
my car

and wondered why I’ve never heard
any band
ever do a cover of “Heart of the City,” and thought how
someone should,

and sat their in traffic thinking who would be the
right band
to cover this song, then listened two more times
listening closer

to how on the first verse the narrator is just looking for
“a home”
and then in the other verses it’s “a lover” then
“the beat,”

and how “a bird in the hand, is worth two on
the street”
is an even better line when you realize what “a bird” means to
a Brit,

thinking how Lou Reed may have sang words about heroin, but on “Big Kick,
Plain Scrap,”
Nick Lowe makes a lone guitar convincingly mimic the sound of the needle
going in

and loving how on “36 Inches High,” in the first 2 verses he sets up the phrase
“get over”
just to be able to pull the rug out from under the phrase itself in the
last verse

and felt glad that I didn’t really possess powers
of omnipotence
and ban all music on a whim – that there still was music to
be heard

So I guess the moral of the story
is simple –
it’s good to be in a band; just don’t be in
THAT band.