another blast from the past

I received a phone call today that was totally unexpected. Steve, the keyboard player from a band I played in over 30 years ago, called me out of the blue. I had recently been in touch with one of the guitar players from the band after a mutual friend died. Apparently Steve heard about that and asked for my contact information. Steve lives here in Memphis!!! He is a studio musician and wanted to know if I still played the guitar and sang AND if I would like to join him and some mutual friends in a jam session.

Wow. I didn't know what to say! I haven't played my guitar in a while and I don't even know if I have the time or the energy to do something like that. But I must confess, it took me back to those days of learning new songs, then rearranging them, which was a specialty of Steve's. I remember performing a super-fast version of Carlos Santana's "Evil Ways" with me singing a harmony to the entire vocal, then morphing into a slow song that was written by Doug, the guitar player, with lyrics by me. We were performing in a local talent show and we won. But the hours we spent crafting that two song performance, trying different ways of putting them together, stand out to me as such a memory of the creative process. Five guys and me, in a basement, smoking and arguing and playing music. It was a heady time. It was fun and magical. It all came back to me today.

I finally agreed to come down and just hang out a bit. What can it hurt?