Doing the Business of Heroes

I am sometimes struck by a band. Recluse hit me between the eyes last summer. I knew the guys from my years in the city, or at least I knew two-thirds of them. A few days into my trip back to New York, I sat on the sidewalk outside Don Hill's, a dodgy venue known to be rough around the edges, the kind of place where mediocrity or worse is almost a requirement to play and where the only people in the crowd are friends of the band playing and are likely to leave as soon as their friend's set ends. There, on that sidewalk, several red bulls deep into a wicked caffeine crash, I sat with laptop on my knees. The trusty little thing was blasting "Highway 61 Revisted" as loud as a twelve-inch Powerbook can blast anything, and I was hoping the music would keep me from nodding out on the sidewalk and awakening with my wallet pocketed by some inconsiderate and poor musician. I made it, with a little help from the true Dylan, made it to listen to the set of the three piece and was blown to the back corners of the crowd, where I furiously and successfully figured out how to record those rock heroes with the tinny microphone in my laptop and make the thing sound okay. So I wandered from corner to corner, computer yawning at the sticky ceiling, until I found the spot to get them, the best acoustics, which happened to be in the door to the men's bathroom. There I stood for the rest of the set, and I only had to move once to let a man do his business as I stood there doing mine. - Dylan