The guy was about my age.He was too wise-and-weary-eyed to pass for undergrad, but too hairy and rumpled to pass for adult 9-5 square.

He was too colorful and resplendent and articulate to be mistaken for the working class man he was attempting to dress like.

He still had a soft baby-oil complexion under all the pseudo-teenage-terrorist fuzz.

Though his skin lacked the leathery Kristofferson quality, his dark, bagged eyes communicated big stinky clods of hard-won experience.

Experience not necessarily gained from epic adventures or torrid affairs with exotic women.

No, this man-boy had written all over him experience of the trite insanities of every day life when you’re a poor-as-hell road-dog songster who fills Sunday and Monday nights at places that aren’t even that popular on Saturdays.

And nothing of a great story so much has happened on your cold winter tour so far, just a hell of a lot of car trouble, inconveniences, insults, disrespect and degradation.

Club owners who forgot you were coming and didn’t call the sound guy in.

Audiences asking you to take cover requests of songs you hate more than life itself.

Long nights of driving down desolate cultural wastelands of interstate McDonald’s coffees and gas station doughnuts and KOA campgrounds and creepy cousins’ friends’ couches.

And on good nights, you just have the sinking feeling of suffocating boredom and overwhelming loneliness, questioning to yourself why this was your dream anyway.

And the fella unleashed his set with that in mind.

He didn’t have that lazy, practiced apathetic droop of a lot of hipsters pretending to be in pain.

He drooped and averted his eyes as he languidly introduced songs like a true, passionate idealist who is just tired as hell and is having a bad week and hasn’t talked to anybody he cares about in a month.

Lonely and sad. Like he wanted to blow the place away but tonight he just couldn’t pull it out of the hat.

Yet, the rambling boy kept at it, hoisting a little effort every few songs to sneak in a sharp sardonic quip.

And he opened himself up to possibly humiliating vulnerability by doing something I almost never see a serious performer do.

He invited anybody in the crowd who might have an instrument in their car to come up and accompany him.

And that night, Johnson City’s own Acoustic Coffeehouse awarded him with two drunken, musically clumsy buffoons. My friend and I.

We jumped on hand drums and backing vocals, maybe a few sloppy junkyard lead riffs and he lit up.

Possibly because he could identify with us.

We were just couple of souls as starved for an authentic experience as he was.

It wasn’t much, and we butchered his songs, but our whole table (which was one of three in the place), was cheering him on.

Afterward our other buddy decided we needed to pay reparations for our performance and offered the young dude a toke in our car back in the gravel lot behind the building.

Acoustic Coffeehouse always has two shows a night.

So we decided to sneak out in between to toke and dissect the set we’d just seen and get an idea of what usually promised to be the better, later show.

When my groups had played there we would take a break in the middle of our own set to do the same thing.

We would get a little more loose and rough for the people who stuck around and could handle it – the ones who deserved our best in the first place.

But I’d never gotten so personal with a performer.

Yeah, in Knoxville back in my ‘music biz whiz kid’ days it was customary to retreat with any Old City or Market Square bar performer to a back room or attic for the same purpose, but I was always a ‘suit’ to them.

I was only a shark circling, waiting to drop on them the thing I would require in return for gracing them with my presence that evening – the sales pitch for how I could exploit them further.

But here I was, simply a fellow artist, who understood or at least really wanted to.

And we were having a nice little conversation, smoking with the bloke as we looked up and this rangy, haggard looking older guy was standing against the wall of the adjacent laundromat staring right into the car.

“Can I have some?”

So we all leave the parking lot and go somewhere more … appropriate.

About five of us proceed to smoke the night away, talking of love and loss, art and politics, religion and family and hate and history.

And that’s a little something like what might happen any night at the beautiful haven for original and daring music that is the Acoustic Coffeehouse.

Any given night you might see someone as talented and fresh and real as Aaron Berg, our musical friend that night.

You might see owner Jim Benelisha up on stage sitting in on cello with a string quartet.

You might get stiffed when your band plays a show because of some disorganized accident.

But you’ll be offered sincere apologies, a tasty meal and some great craft beer to wash down your indignation.

You might see the worst group ever or one of the hottest underground alternative country groups on tour.

Or maybe even a titan of the genre like Arlo Guthrie, but it’s always going to be something worth being there to hear.

You can experience the camaraderie, the bleak but assuring sense that you might be in the only decent spot in the Tri-Cities that night.

And you might be with the only people who live in them that might halfway get you.

And you can take in the hope that one more show will give you the passion to get out there in the wild world.

Maybe you can see a little more and risk a little more and live a little more yourself.

Thanks, Acoustic Coffeehouse, for the seven years you’ve given me so far of taking chances and staying real and keeping it warm and cozy for the few of us wanting to come out of the cultural cold.

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