Souls at play

Jan. 10, 2008

Dear Leslie,

In my 20s I craved something to do in Cape Girardeau on Sunday nights. Familiar cars filled with equally desperate people streamed down Broadway. Bands sometimes played at the clubs on the Illinois side of the river, but the Sunday night darkness had to be deep to draw most people out.

When Bruce Zimmerman began playing at the Port Cape restaurant bar on Sunday nights 20 years ago I was living in Southern California, so sea change in the city's musical environment escaped me. Bruce was a respite from the loneliness of Sunday night once I returned to Missouri.

When the band began playing alternate Thursday nights, going to Port Cape on Thursday nights became like seeing an old friend. I suspect the friends who meet there feel the same the kinship in the room, a communal well returned to again and again.

Bruce, Ralph, Danny, Don, Kenny and Les have played rock 'n' roll together so long that they react when Bruce arches an eyebrow. The regulars at the tables only a few feet away know the songs almost as well as the band does.

The small room fills with an aliveness becoming hard to find in an increasingly virtual world. The only time that matters is kept by the drums. The soul comes out to play.

Music charges through our bodies like a burning fuse. The saxophone squeals, the guitar bites, the bass kicks us in the butt, our hearts beat to the drums. It insists we come to life.

"True listening brings us in touch even with that which is unsaid and unsayable," the Irish poet John O'Donohue says.

Before the many years in front of an amp permanently damage his hearing, Bruce is cutting back to the first Sunday night of each month. Ivas John, a spectacularly talented young blues guitarist from nearby Carbondale, Ill., is taking over Thursday nights. His band has been alternating with Bruce on Thursdays and already has the familiarity of a friend.

Sunday night Port Cape owner Doc Cain rolled out a 20th anniversary cake before Bruce and the band began playing. The band's old keyboard player Scotty rejoined them. He plays a keyboard the way a surfer rides a wave.

The joint was full. The band played like this moment would not come again. Applause greeted almost every solo. It felt good to be there.

"Life is not hurrying on to a receding future nor hankering after an imagined past," the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas writes in "The Bright Field." "It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush. To a brightness that seems as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you."

The woman who runs the kitchen came out and danced. She never requires a partner.

The band played "Like a Rolling Stone," an anthem that still gives baby boomers chills. This time even more.

Bruce has been the Atlas of local guitar players, long holding the local rock 'n' roll world on his shoulders, enduring long after most gave up. Atlas left behind black holes.

The clubs on the Illinois side of the river are strip clubs now, but a new band called Whiskey Creek begins offering musical salvation at Port Cape Sunday night. Let the communion begin.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a reporter for the Southeast Missourian.