White Male Desires Profoundly Intense Ambivalence: The Bluebird

It has now been over ten years since I began making the trek to the Bluebird C@fe. My first trips were in the middle of college. Sometimes I came by myself, and other times I had as many as three friends with me.

We would leave Athens at 1:00 PM on a Monday and arrive at the front of the room just in time to get my name on the list for the 0pen mic night. Usually, however, there were enough people in front of you who didn't get to play the previous week that you left only with the experience of having been an audience member and a slip of paper that moved you to the front of the line the next time you came to play. So in essence, you had to make the ten-hour round trip once just in order to get the privilege of playing your two songs the next time you made the ten-hour round trip. Nevertheless we did it several times during college. We were usually home by 1:30 the next morning, and we usually (read "rarely") made it to class the next morning.

Over the years, the place has alternately thrilled and disappointed me through no fault of its own. Just as the industry ebbs and flows, so does the quality of the artistry that it produces, and thus also does the intensity of fascination with said artistry and the venues that offer it. I was back there tonight to hear a friend and c0-writer, on a night that normally doesn't bode well for crowds in Nashville. I heard some very nice stuff, and had some realizations about the business and my place in it or not in it that will remain private.

All that is to say that my appreciation for the little joint is on the positive end of the curve right now. I will probably go back soon, perhaps with you. Maybe you'll even stop in to see me there someday soon.

But if you never make it by, hopefully you will at least get to drive past it to see it in its own environment. Though I'm sure this is a mountain of a molehill, I have always found the setting of the Bluebird to be a highly appropriate symbol of the relative insignificance of even the biggest participant in the business of music.

First, the view from the front of the unofficial mecca of s0ngwriting (Sorry... you can't read the banner for the glare... It says "The Bluebird C@fe").

And now the view from fifty yards away, still within the confines of the strip mall in which the Bluebird sits (It's the little blip of light shaped like a backward "7" just to the right of the center of the picture).