Gigantic.27

The HBO Special

Iowa City in the twilight of an autumn evening. Two recently expatriated New Yorkers walked lazily toward downtown, Dave and me.

“I’m gonna duck into the computer lab,” Dave said.

“You don’t have a computer?”

“Yeah, but they have free email.”

“Free what?”

“You know, so you can send messages to people on the computer.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

It was 1992. I had already made one big technological leap by acquiring a beige computer with a dot matrix printer, both sitting underused in my basement apartment.

I continued to The Mill on Burlington Avenue, there was a monthly open mic night. Poets mainly, some short story writers, and the occasional tortured folk singer. A real scene, actually. Everyone trotted out their best stuff, and the crowd was totally supportive.

Workshop was getting off to a rocky start. I was fast concluding I lacked the DNA to swim in this gene pool. Sincerity, work ethic, erudition, pretension, whatever the required combination of factors, I was missing something.

Still, I liked open mic night. All my new friends were here, and the beer was good. I was on my third or fourth, watching yet another acoustic attempt at a Dylan cover, when inspiration struck. I saw my opening.

The following week I came prepared. When the host called my name from the scribbled sign-up sheet, I took the stage, Silvertone in hand. With complete seriousness, I performed the seminal disco hit “Shame, Shame, Shame” by Shirley & Company.

It was completely out of left field, but also strangely satisfying on a deep level. Everybody flipped the fuck out. It’s like they’d been waiting all these years for someone to sing a disco song with an electric guitar, they just didn’t realize it until that night.

Encouraged, I returned the following month with the mushy 70s ballad “Falling” by LeBlanc and Carr, except I played it with distortion pedal cranked. Again, fantastic reaction.

The feller who hosted the night (I think his name was Shannon) quickly deduced that, whatever I was doing, people were into it. In addition to the sign-up sheet, every open mic night always had two featured performers. He offered me a spot.

Instead of writing fiction that month, I developed a setlist of unlikely cover songs. Cyndi Lauper, Abba, Hank Williams. To round out the set, I included one of the few songs I’d managed to write the chords and lyrics myself. A beginning.

Thrifting was plentiful and cheap in Iowa City. I found an outfit for the evening that looked like something I would’ve worn in junior high, and pulled the disparate songs together into a conceptual show I called The HBO Special.

The night of the show, pin-drop silence during each song, people losing their shit in between. You couldn’t ask for a better show, somehow tailor made for that moment. It could’ve lived on as a happy memory and that would’ve be a.o.k., but a couple of things happened that morphed The HBO Special into something that kept going.

One thing, my friend Dave had recorded it on his boombox, which had a surprisingly good built-in microphone. Using a similar tape-to-tape boombox back in my living room, I duplicated it dozens and dozens of times, wrapped each cassette in a xeroxed cover, and distributed them to friends. My first effort at something resembling a solo album.

The other thing, the evening had been recorded on video for the local cable access television station. Usually, they’d play it once or twice, then swap it out with a video from the next open mic night. But for whatever reason Shannon stopped filming open mic nights and just left that particular video at the station. Apparently not having anything else to play in that slot, the station just kept playing it over and over. And over.

I’d walk into my other favorite bar, The Foxhead, and the bartender would point up to the little screen hanging over the bar.

“Hey Adam, you’re on again!”

There I was, 80s outfit with Silvertone guitar, strumming and singing away. I couldn’t explain it, no one seemed to get sick of it. I couldn’t get a good reading in workshop to save my life, but I could walk down Iowa Avenue and get a high five from someone I didn’t even know.

None of this, of course, was part of my plans for Iowa City. Moving from New York to the midwest to play cover songs doesn’t exactly sound like a good career move. But, it turned out, playing open mic night at The Mill set the stage for the near-future in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.

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