A Coeur d'Alene Night
I drive to Coeur d’Alene Sherman Avenue North Idaho resort town.
I’m looking for people hungry to live their dreams, willing to go public and show us all that music is there to be performed, not just written about or talked about and certainly it has to be in order to be heard. I want willing citizens of sound. I think I’ll find them on this dark night. I drive to hear a show lead by Michael Slupczynski, a courageous mid-life music man who’s just recently left the security of a good job to live out his belief, “We only go around once, so you might as well go to a Rock Camp!”
Most everyone who joins me that night lives in a generation of people struggling with a job-oppressed economy. Their lives are threatened by loss and painted with difficulty. We need music. We need musicians who will tell us in song that there’s another way, a better way. I call it going for show; it's the phenomenon you discover in any location where musicians play and sing when they have little credential but a lot of will.
Going for Show: the concept represents my bent toward attaching to the likes of Michael Slupczynski, an electric genius of IT background gone wild on guitar, in hopes that I may understand some part of my self through the complex struggle of too-short a time to live, and do it all. I want to understand that part of the collective soul pulling on the hearts of a few whose dreams would otherwise remain frozen or encased in the unbelief of job security.
Michael, I sense, represents this story enigmatically. He’s stepped out. He’s stepped up and others are following him. His bold, planned actions to change his life from that of another wannabe into one of somebody-who-did-it represents what we all secretly want. Michael Slupczynski is a leader in the collective desire to be free, to be an icon in the memory of humanity, a kind of uncommon example in the fulfillment of purpose. Most everyone secretly desires to manifest a dream into reality, an imprint placed somewhere back in embryonic memory. This is what Michael Slupczynski, stepping out, represents.
Michael is organized, very organized. It’s an illuminating and distinguishing characteristic few musicians have. He’s certainly not a drug culture reject, more of a main-stream transplant by personal choice. Having attached himself to music, specifically blues and classic rock through state-of-the-art electronic gadgetry and guitars, he’s been a musician since the age of 5, responding methodically to a life-long call.
I watch the precision with which Michael picks and strums and slaps out notes in lead-guitar support of Reese Hodge’s forced vocals. Michael strums, fingers, raps and picks out intricate notes, emphasizing now and then an accent by slapping an open fret in a way unique, I think, to him.
That unique slapping movement executed in perfect time could become his trademark. Who wouldn’t remember a guy like that once they witnessed his surety in this musical gesture?
It is talent and precision just like this that will allow Michael Slupczynski to shine brightly amongst peers and stars alike when he attends the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp in Hollywood
One has to wonder what pulls area musicians like these onto the stage of life in jam sessions such as the one I witnessed this night at the Moose. They come off the street, out of the network of humanity, unassuming all. Who would guess such talents lie hidden away from common knowledge on the streets of time? But they come. They come because they have to, I think. Their songs are in their hearts. They are musicians because they have to be in order to live and find happiness, or solace. Their selected expressions of music course through their souls unchecked by doubt, pulsing in their blood like corpuscles. They play and sing because they have to. It’s their way of reacting to life, or of taunting it, telling it like it should be. Certainly, it’s demonstratively better and far more relatable to others than violence. They scream and hammer and bellow out ballads to make sense of it all.
Michael is perhaps the unwitting leader of this musical seminar. The audience loves it because these guys are performing for us, taking our place like ball players because we’re too timid, too shy or too undeveloped to do what they’re doing. Their vibrations reach into our emotional depths, tapping different levels for everyone watching and listening.
Laying the foundation of rhythm masterfully is drummer, Johnny Woz. Slupczynski is lead guitar with some vocals. Reese Hodge sings painfully over his bass guitar, carrying melodies simultaneously with bass rhythms. In trio, they enunciate crisp electric sounds that move their audience of wannabes to full involvement.
Michael soulfully wails, “In this place…in this place…in this lost and lonely place…I stood alone.” He’s lamenting for all those who sit in the audience, sipping beers and wine, because we all feel like that on some personal, private level.
Michael’s fast left-hand fingers dance and slide over frets so fast you can’t discern the chords. How his right hand knows what strings to pluck, when, is the mystery of performance and the reason for endless practice. And then he throws in that statement, that smooth recognizable slap on an open fret, corded from above, hitting it perfectly in the exact moment of time, his whole body involved in a synchronistic statement of this musical discussion.
How else can I describe what my eyes see and my ears hear?
Then Jeff Goodman steps up to his double bank of electric ivories to keyboard a rock organ into the blend. At Reese’s call they jam a song written by Spokane
Now the sign-up for jamming sheet expands and those who want to play are not so reluctant. Such a list is my key to those I capture in photos.
Goodman wears a baseball cap, making it very difficult to illustrate expressions hidden behind black-rimmed glasses. No matter, his fingers tell the story in rolls, slides and chords.
Steve Harris, another top musician, and a partner with Slupczynski in NW Skyes stiffs an emptied beer glass to the table exclaiming loudly, “Magic is happening!” He’s right on! The room is rocking. The muse has arrived.
Michael slips again into the structure precisely when Jeff recedes into the background of supporting chords, then Reese goes vocal again, his tall body swaying, his feet stamping out Johnny’s rhythm.
I feel lucky and blessed at the same time to sit here jamming in my own way on my writer’s notepad, finding interpretations I would never remember otherwise. It doesn’t matter that I’m not a music critic. I didn’t come to critique. I came to take note and tell about, to photograph and enjoy the scene and later blog about it for any and all who would be curious to learn about such talents, their instruments, and who might want to discover where they emerge on the scene and disappear again into the network of communities surrounding musician nights. Doing so, I am dancing with them in their sometimes lonely tunes, screaming with them through their oft times honest statements of unrighteous lives lived lamenting lost loves and hard work. O, my!
Johnny Woz supports every song with perfect beats in a complicated language of rhythm. Wearing black shirt over black t-shirt, he’s a dark rebellious figure pounding out a solid foundation for each song. Over his chest on the outside of the undershirt are two gold chains one carrying a medallion. I’ll have to ask him about that, what it means. Somewhere near my ear, Harris comments correctly about Woz, “He’s the foundation. It’s all about voices and color. He gives us that.”
I watch with minor amazement as Woz mindlessly chews gum while rolling out intricate paragraphs in the language of drums accented with splashes of cymbals. How Woz or anyone of these musicians knows exactly when to hit what note defies logic to innocent ears. Years of patterning their nerve and muscle responses, I’d guess; nevertheless their musical timing and synchronistic blend seems incredible to me. I drive home satisfied and happy to have attended the show.
Most of all, I remember how Slupczynski carried the night, pulling, encouraging and tying all those who came to play into a sequentially orchestrated rock concert and I am satisfied the hour-long drive each way was worth every inch of road trespassed out of commitments elsewhere.
I’ll come back again.
# # # Dwayne K Parsons
