The distance tonight to those silhouettes in chairs at tables with their wine glasses and other vessels, is eons and lifetimes. This solo has no garish thrashes or tearing or crying, Travis lets it lope. It’s a quiet room tonight, with special guests, a Rock Star and a Premonition among them, though he does not know it.And anyway the notes have a life and death of their own, over which he has no control, so he doesn’t have to drive them too hard. They have birth pangs, come alive in the moment to look around in glee and shine at the crest of their waves, only to fade slowly away in to silence—the physics of acoustics is the acoustics of life. We fade like notes and never disappear entirely, drifting off forever, always there for someone willing to listen hard enough for the sound of our own big bang. Entropy is the real enemy here.

For the staccato plucked note, among forgotten brethren, their fate is the infinite abyss of lost memory; the idea-black-hole at the center of the brain; the bottom of the whirlpool that is silence. His song is lonely now; his song seeks company and for the next few strums of the acoustic, the sound of its mellow wood, it needs a call to the full moon—are other wolves out there? So he does. As his pinky comes off the top note of a G chord, he howls—awful in its lonely plea. And he calls refusing to believe that there is no one around near to really hear him. Oh, they hear the cry—some even shiver—but are they listening? This part of the solo—at the dusk of an old century—is everyone he is waiting for, and everything he is. In August of 1995 he finishes this guitar solo, his calloused fingertips peeling up wet off the strings, and though he has left vibrations in the amplifier holding out, he is not there.

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: admission, concert, defeat, guitar, solo, Travis Fleeting