Audio + Typed Short Story: Luckily, Not Good Enough

Sweetman Podcast

I’ve got this (silly) idea for my next book — by which I mean the one after the one that is about to be released. I’d like to catalogue various low-key failures in my life via a set of autobiographical short stories. Vignettes, really. I have some audio recordings of some of these too, so I’m occasionally sharing them here with both options — you can listen to the spoken-word version (with my primitive soundscaping) or read the story below. Or both, you know, read-along-as-you-listen…

Anyway, here’s the truth story of when I was very luckily not good enough…

Some 20 years ago I got a friend to drive me out towards Porirua to rehearse for a Jimi Hendrix tribute act. My car had been stolen, my drums too (they were in the car). The local guy we hired our PA from let me rent a kit for the weekend for $20. Amazing eh? I had the rehearsal and a couple of gigs, I made enough to pay petrol for my mate and the cheap-as-chips hire fee and actually it was a pretty good payday (had to wait to get a new car).

But the thing that I’ve just remembered is that the Hendrix rehearsal went okay; the bass player was pretty good and I thought I did fine as well. I played as many of the songs from memory as I could and if I didn’t know it I just gave it a nudge, which you can do on the drums, more so than on most other instruments. The lead singer and guitarist — The Jimi Hendrix for this experience — was good too. He rolled around the floor at one point, had the guitar up over his head.

We had a beer after and a get-to-know-each-other chat and he explained that he really liked to get into the showmanship side of things, said he’d be doing more than just what we saw then. He liked to really get into character as well and explained that when we played he had big plans for huge venues. H e’d be dressing up as Jimi. A big wig he said. And he liked to paint his face black…

I didn’t do any gigs with his group. I can’t say it’s because of any moral fibre. I’d love to say I was too good for blackface but perhaps, even more luckily, I wasn’t good enough.

A couple of years ago I recorded a few of these stories, with crude musical backing, and released an album or two on Bandcamp under the name Second Storey Teller.

Here’s an earlier Audio + Typed Short Story, about another kind of failure:

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