The Dark Star

"The Dark Star Open Mic Night"

So I drive to Darmstadt, right? I drive there - 188 km- find a place to park my car (hahahahahaa ahahahahahaha) and go into the building that houses the Irish pub where I am gonna play a couple songs at this Open Mic. 



Fuck it.



Dudes. 

It was sick. 



No…

I mean it in the way the word was intended to mean...

It really was ill.



There were pale heads floating about in dark clothes and angular dyed-black hair, you know, like it was Emoville, and their feet weren't touching the ground when they walked.

They were already dead, dude.

Ghosts.

Corpses.

And cool as fuck.



And they all floated around in twos, not singles or threes, and just thinking about the significance of that made my ears melt right off.



At the open mic night there is a massive stage that could have used a good vacuum back during the Carter administration.

It sat like an alien bunker at one end of this giant underground basement, see. On this stage there is enough room for the entire Darmstadt Tabernacle Choir, all of their next-of-kin and the donkeys they rode in on. It is so large it’s curvature parallels that of planet earth.

There are two huge JBL speakers on each side of the stage - like stoic sentinels a hundred feet apart.

There are three rather large fold back wedges on the stage, too. There is a keyboard, looks exactly like the one auntie Rae used to cart with her everywhere in the early 70s in the boot of her all-terrain vehicle.

There is a drum kit. There is a bass guitar, a lead guitar, an acoustic guitar. There are overhead lights, stage lights, side lights and still enough room left over for my neighbour, Frau Dombrowski, to reverse her son’s long wheel base van through. 



The only thing there is not on the stage are actual musicians. None of the floating heads, turns out, are musicians.

I said none. 

And what's worse, there’s no audience.

The cavernous dark room felt like a deserted abattoir still under construction. Like I was Kurt Vonnegut and this was slaughterhouse funf but ‘cept I was five years too early. 



After ten minutes or an hour or maybe two hours a dude who turned out to be the organiser/sound guy oozed up through a crack in the floor and started hooking up leads and the microphone and then he asks over the mic if there are any musicians and anyone who would like to kick off the show.

It sounds like he is announcing the next train station. “Next stayshun plfeodng ldge g nldgin glgsdog fsjsdf”

WHIRRRRRRR BOOOOOM.

The show is supposed to start at 9.00pm. It is now already 10.30pm and I got a two hour drive home. Since I am apparently the only musician in the entire city I offer to open the "show". 

I say to the dude "How many songs should I do?"



He looks out across the empty acreage of pubattoir and says, kind of like a character in a Stephen King novel: "As long as you want, mate."



He was Irish, see. That’s where we got the word.



Fuck.

I played six or seven songs, who cares. Some people arrived. I assumed they were all musicians and would go on after I got off. 

I got off. I packed my guitar away to soundly sleep. I left the building, not saying anything to anyone. I got in my car and I drove 188 kilometres home.

In the morning my wife raises her eyebrows over her coffee. “So, how was it?”

“Don’t ask,” I say.