Warblin’ in the Wind

Picture a warm autumn night in the California gold country. A pale yellow moon floats above the foothills. From a suitably darkened tavern on the main street of this little town comes the plink of a banjo, the moan of a fiddle, a shouted chorus of “Flop-Eared Mule.”

An audience of about 200 has crammed into the Coyote Creek Cafe for a performance by a comedy folk band called Doo Doo Wah. The flier promised “special guests,” and the tiny stage is jammed with musicians. Their names and outfits match the rustic flavor of the music. Cactus Bob. Muddy Barnes. The Prairie Flower. A Kenny Rogers look-alike scratches out tunes on a washboard. Another fellow, Logs LaVine, beats drumsticks on a gnarled log.

Halfway through the show, all but one of the “special guests” have been summoned to the stage. He sits at a nearby table, secretly hoping he has been forgotten. He is a musical novice, clearly out of his league. He has been invited only because he wrote the liner notes for the group’s new album--and because his friend in Doo Doo Wah has urged him to confront a paralyzing case of stage fright.

“This will be your breakthrough,” he has been promised. The would-be warbler, hands held under the table to hide the trembling, is not buying it. He wants to run, bolt, skedaddle, vamoose, to give away his guitar to the sidewalk panhandler outside, retreat to his motel room and find a baseball game on TV--anything but climb on that stage and sing badly before 200 strangers.

How do I know what he’s thinking?

I know because that special guest is me.

*

I took up music a couple years ago, right before I turned 40. Though I was older than even the oldest knuckle-baller, the dream of discovery on some sandlot diamond seemed overripe. In the supermarket of fantasies, music offered a much longer shelf life. Part of the decision, too, had to do with California. All my life I’ve watched people come west to reinvent themselves on our golden shores, to seek out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elusive second act. Why should transplants have all the fun?

Before gaining admittance to the tower of song, however, there were some trifling obstacles to overcome. For starters, I could not read a single note of music and was incapable of keeping a beat. And the only instrument I had played was air guitar. And while I did like to sing, the only time it ever sounded any good was in the shower.

This meant the pain of guitar and voice lessons, waiting my turn at a suburban music academy with a roomful of pint-sized prodigies. They gazed up at me with a mixture of terror and awe, as if Igor the Giant had enrolled in their kindergarten. It also meant many renditions of “Kum Ba Yah” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” until even my own children would evacuate the house at my first tentative “How many roads. . . .” And it meant working with a young ponytailed instructor who sometimes barely could hide his bemusement. One day I happened to tell him I had grown up in Fresno.

“I’m from Fresno too,” he said. “What high school did you go to?”

“Bullard,” I said.

“Wow,” he said. “I went to Bullard too. What year did you graduate?”

“Seventy-three.”

“Wow!” he said, “I was born in ’73.”

After that, I wasn’t able to touch the instrument for a week.

*

And now it is Wednesday night in Sonora, and from the stage comes the dreaded call: “Let’s bring up our friend . . . “ I stumble up. Someone hands me a guitar. I am asked what I want to sing. For weeks I had rehearsed all sorts of songs, from George Jones standards to the twisted compositions of Doo Doo Wah. Now my mind goes blank. I cannot recall a single number. Finally I hear my voice squeak.

“How about ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?”

The crowd considers this high humor, laughs. Someone in the band groans. My only ace in the hole is that a month before, at the L.A. County Fair, I’d heard someone perform a drastically abridged version, changing Dylan’s lyrics to make a crass joke about chili beans. Anyway, it seems suitable enough for the occasion, and mercifully quick.

I sing it all in one breath, gasping at the end. I keep my eyes trained on the ceiling. My fingers won’t work. I forget about playing, and instead hold the guitar at arm’s length, a foreign object. I finish to polite applause: The amateur’s humiliating clumsiness often will be appreciated, if only as a backward reminder of the easy grace of the talented.

Later one of the real musicians would come up and kindly lie: “Hey, I liked your, uh, thing.” Looking back now, however, a few days removed from the crime, I can say with no false modesty that I was truly awful. Still, I did it. I got up and sang. Sort of. In a way. Nashville, don’t be nervous.