Country folk blues

My wife saw him first. He emerged from the Metro Mobility Bus, struggling slightly with his guitar. Metro Mobility is the door-to-door bus that helps the infirm or disabled get around these twin cities. It was good news to see him, this old man, walking slowly, but ably enough. It meant that The Open Mike Night at the Riverview Cafe would be a good one.

Fairly speaking, Open Mike Night at the Riverview Cafe is always pretty good. And despite the old man's auspicious arrival, this Open Mike was one of the least interesting I have seen in awhile. Always suffering from an old white man syndrome, Thursday's Open Mike was at its worst in this regard. I don't have anything against old white men, especially as I'm working my way to aging into one, but we were wall to wall with them here. We might have been two hours into the show without an exception to the demographic, and for the whole of the night "fiftyish" would have qualified any singer as a mere babe in the woods.

That might not have been so bad if it weren't for a problem of musical sameness rearing its head too. Start to finish was crowded up shoulder to shoulder with songs of deep Americana: Country Folk Blues. Dirge music, rust belt Union Songs, sad tales of broken down cars, lost dogs, and love gone wrong. This was dusty stuff, and though a notable proportion of the songs were written by the performers themselves, there was nothing in them to show they weren't all songs from the 1930's. I'm not saying this music doesn't interest me, but a little emotional variation, an occasionally different genre or tempo, can exert a powerfully refreshing quality on the listener's ability to absorb, to feel, and to see.

Poignantly, things started steadily improving only as the crowd thinned down, better music to a smaller crowd. We were a little looser with wine and beer, more forgiving, and clearly bettered by a dwindling count of audience members who were anxious about their own upcoming performance. By the time the old man came on I doubt there were more than a dozen of us out watching on the cafe floor. The old man hooked his guitar up just like everyone else did. The night's host set the sound for him, and the old man sat down and played. It was every bit Americana; Old folk blues just like we'd been hearing most of the night. But here it was suddenly revealed. Split open. This was how it was supposed to be done. The lyrics were all heartbreak, but so was his voice, beautiful, cracked, burnt hard in an old fire, but clear. No dirge these songs, because on the refrain that voice of pain and age and sorrow turned. It soared up piercing and giant and sharp. The feeling filled up all the pain so high that for a brief second it floated into heaven, up to that place where something catches in you and your heart leaves the room. For one weird, soaring moment it leaves the world and it leaves all of time.

Then it comes back, drifting down. The old voice again. The old man, no polish or fame. No following. Everyone taking it for granted. This is how art usually is.

Nothing to see here. 

He finishes up. We applaud. He unplugs his guitar and shuffles off. Just another one of the night's performers. Maybe in another world, a world more just, roadies are packing up his guitar for him. The limo waits for him backstage at Carnegie Hall or at the old Ryman Auditorium. Maybe in another world he got everything he deserved, and so did you, which, at the very least, is a little more than you have now.

Your reception at the Riverview Cafe

We were at the Open Mike Night at the Riverview Cafe again last night, and I finally figured out the key to the audience response. I think it took the first really bad performance to put everything in perspective for me. From there it fell into place. A young man took the stage and announced that he was going to perform some spoken word poetry, but first he would tell us a little about himself. Then he told us some not particularly interesting or illuminating things. Then he performed his spoken word poetry, which was in the nature of bad rapping without music.

The audience was completely silent and respectful. Well, except for my wife and I, who, cleverly, stood in the back with the drinks we just bought and talked amongst ourselves. But here's the thing: the Riverview audience is never silent and respectful. Even the best performers work through a cloud of chatter and noise.

And so here is your key, should you ever decide to perform at The Open Mike Night at the Riverview Cafe and want to know what people thought of you:

No matter what it will be noisy and people will talk during your performance. Don't let that get you down. But the more that people like you or are impressed by you the quieter it will get. However, if it gets fully quiet and respectfully attentive, it means everyone hates you.

My wife and I, sitting at the front table are exceptions and are harder to read. If either or both of us go to the bathroom we're probably not wild about you, and if we step to the back of the cafe together you're in real trouble.

Outside of that it's going to be difficult to tell, especially since we are, in all other cases, quiet and respectfully attentive. So if you wanted to know you'd have to ask us. And most likely we'd tell you.

Wilco

On my comprehensive, extremely well thought out list of the hundred greatest albums of all time (which I haven't created yet) I would certainly include Sky Blue Sky by Wilco. It's sad and soulful and all those things I like best in music. And though if you roam about the critical landscape on Wilco you will not find Sky Blue Sky much revered, it should be noted that those are just opinions. I'm dealing with facts here.

But I'm not here to discuss the objective brilliance of Sky Blue Sky. Or maybe I am. We'll see...

On Thursday nights at The Riverview Cafe Open Mike Night the variety of performers do roughly 50 percent covers. But these tend to be very smart covers. If it were all just hit songs and best of pieces it wouldn't be The Riverview at all. There we get deep covers, old covers, even odd pop covers that you might think couldn't be covered. Americana is popular, like maybe an Oh My Darling Clementine. The other night there were three John Prine covers. But everything from Folsom Prison Blues to a First Aid Kit song might show up. Most weeks of the open mike we see one old guy perform, possibly a bit less ancient than he looks, whose slightly broken voice can surprisingly belt it out at times. He did what I long assumed were well crafted historic country classic covers, old standards from the heartland that I somehow missed over the years. Only this week did we find out he wrote all his own material. It can get like that at the Riverview, the covers sound like originals and the originals sound like covers.

One of our favorite performers, who looks a bit like Richard Dreyfuss as Richard Dreyfuss looks now, and who might cover anything from a Foreigner song to The Traveling Wilburys with enormous vigor, did a beautiful job on an older Wilco song called Passenger Side.

Hey, wake up, your eyes weren't open wide
For the last couple of miles you've been swerving from side to side
You're gonna make me spill my beer,
If you don't learn how to steer

Passenger side, passenger side,
I don't like riding on the passenger side

And this is just it about a good cover, they illuminate rather than reflect. Because these performers make such excellent choices I not only immensely enjoy the songs I hear, but they become new to me. I see them better. I can be especially slow to notice lyrics, but the way people do covers at the Riverview almost always wakes me up to them. And what a clever piece of character is there that Jeff Tweedy has written. Pathos, empathy, and sheer ridiculousness:

Roll another number for the road
You're the only sober person I know
Won't you let me make you a deal,
Just get behind the wheel

Passenger side, passenger side,
I don't like riding on the passenger side

Our Riverview cover was done in a high, reedy un-Jeff Tweedy sort of voice. Oddly enough it came right after our Richard Dreyfuss singer had done a close to dead-on Roy Orbison singing Traveling Wilbury's song, no small feat. It took me a couple of verses to even place the Passenger Side song and who it was by. But from the start I was well enough spellbound by how cleverly it was written.

Should've been the driver, could've been the one
I should've been your lover, but I hadn't seen...

Can you take me to the store, then the bank?
I've got five dollars we can put in the tank
I've got a court date coming this June
I'll be driving soon

Passenger side, passenger side,
I don't like riding on the passenger side


Such a great song. 

Just like you, the only thing I like better than wit and cleverness and pathos and foolery is when all of the sudden, it isn't. But that's Sky Blue Sky and comes a bit later in their career. 







 

Dear Hubbard Street Dance

Dear Hubbard Street Dance:

Lately I have been vying against artistic greatness. For one thing it's hardly ever there when it's supposed to be there. For another thing it's so much more rare than anyone suggests it is. And then to make itself more troublesome, even when it exists it appears mercurially, visible only to some and perhaps to them only for a time.

So on Thursday nights I go with my wife to The Riverview Cafe, our neighborhood cafe, and we watch their utterly scrappy, charming, expectation defying Open Mike Night. Wonderful things happen there. Battered out people stand up and sing weathered songs until their own guitar playing illuminates them from inside, like a candle hidden in hands. Ukeleles, harmonicas, bits of electronics, old people, people for whom nothing ever worked out, tired people, plucky people, working people, lost people, all out there, barely watched, on a flat stage all alone with their 4,000 hours of practice, making music for free. And it's surprisingly good music. It can go all the way to teetering onto being brilliant music. It walks regularly down the middle of the road of art, not dressed up, without fanfare, like the splash of artistic mastery is the god given right of every human being born to the gift and curse we refer to as The World.

I don't need a TV or a concert hall, CDs, books covered in glowing quotes, museums. Famous people are not required. We all have our own little bit of genius, eh Hubbard Street Dance?


And then I saw your dance company one Saturday night at the Northrup Auditorium. And oh, right there, greatness. Greatness, Hubbard Street Dance, just as I'd pleasantly forgotten it.

My Back Pages, Hope is the Thing With Feathers, Pluto and Proserpina, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, The Entombment of Christ, one doesn't generally stumble upon these at the local cafe. Seven billion people in the world, you'd think this greatness stuff would sort of pile up. But no, one can hunt for a year and come up blank on greatness. One might even love art and still forget greatness in all its confusing depth, and then walk into a theater somewhere and see... you.

Here is a funny anecdote for you, Hubbard Street Dance. In all the many dance performances I have ever seen, my eye strained to pick out the best dancer on stage. There is that call to greatness again. How we hunger and how easily it ruins us! All those wonderful, wildly talented, hard working dancers, and I strain for something more. You, Hubbard Street Dance, come onto the stage, a group, pairs, solo, shifting, and for the first time in all my watching of any dance in my whole life my search ends. Like that, dissipated, a great solid thing like a puff of white steam disappearing into air. There, simply, on the stage, is the best dancer: 

All of them.

And there is the best dance, where there is no dancing, no move, no construction, no linking one part to another, nothing that betrays that it is dancing, that it is a dance. There is the best dance: where it is, for the first time I have ever seen, simply all one, whole, and unbroken.

I try more and more not to look for it. But I will take greatness when it comes, for rare and beautiful things cannot be slighted at the peril of our souls. And I will be grateful, and thank you.


Thank you,


F. Calypso

Third thursday

My wife and I missed the open mike night at The Riverview Cafe for a museum event tonight, but at its heart it was all the same.

We are members at the Mia, which is also known as the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. It's a brilliant art museum in an all over sort of way, but is particularly excellent in its Asian Art collection and in the major traveling exhibitions it somehow succeeds in snagging. Currently up is Delecroix and his influence. You like Delecroix, don't you? Scads of Delecroix?

But we weren't there for that because tonight was acquisition night, the highlight of the member year for me. There were free drinks (I had two gin and tonics) and an incredibly tasty spread with cheeses, fruit (fantastic pineapple), little caprese things, and heaps of grilled vegetables with aioli. This was followed by the curators briefly presenting on the highlights of the museum's new purchases from the past year or so. It all put me in a very agreeable mood.

None of the new purchases were big deal ones, no matter how the curators were inclined to spin it. Which is to say that I, with my moderate art knowledge, hadn't heard of a single one of the acquired artists. But everything was certainly very good, excellent even. And so that is exactly where it was all the same as open mike night at The Riverview Cafe. Everyone was very good. Indeed, after the evening's presentation ended we dispersed out into the greater museum which was open as part of their Third Thursday event. On Third Thursday the Museum stays open late, has bars and live music. And here too it was just like I end up feeling at the Riverview Cafe. We wandered about, heard a band, and saw hundreds and hundreds of pieces of art, some casually and some under closer scrutiny. I become wonderstruck, a rube, some sort of Grandmother. "Oh my!" I exclaimed. "Everyone, through all of history, was so talented!"

Another Riverview Cafe story

Tonight was an especially good show at the Riverview Cafe Open Mike night. There was an unusually diverse mix of styles and a couple of standout performances. No one was bad, but then they never are. 

Some people wrote their own songs and some people sang other people's songs. Some people did one of each, and a few people managed to sing fast enough to squeeze in a third song. Covered artists included Johnny Cash (the same song for the second week in a row, but by different people), Patty Griffin (Twice! Two different songs. Two different people), Stephen Foster by way of Neil Young, R.E.M., The Who, Roy Clark, A song Hank Williams made famous but didn't write, and Ray Charles. A performer we'd seen before did a song I liked about The Peshtigo Fire, a huge fire I'd never heard of that was in Door County on the same day as The Chicago Fire. It had this really nice line in the refrain (I'm afraid I don't have it exact in my memory), something like:

Some people jumped in the Peshtigo River,
But that was on fire too.

Well, you know, the lines are always better sung.

There was also an unusual run on comic songs tonight. A really terrific ukulele player, who played it like a blues guitar, did some damage to his blues songs by being too funny, and a woman did a couple of specifically comic songs of an NC-17 rating that sent a couple people of delicate sensibilities into the back hall. These funny songs were kind of close together and when a crusty old duo we'd seen before came on and started a song that clearly looked to be funny I immediately thought to myself "Uh-oh, I guess I don't much like funny songs." 

It ended up being one of the most charming songs of the night. Again here's my best, not as good as the original, rendition of a few of its key lines:

I think my cat has feline dementia,
I think my cat has feline dementia,
He wants to go outside,
Then he wants to come inside,
Then he wants to go outside again.
I think my cat has feline dementia.

Again, much better when sung, with a good, low key, blind harmonica player accompanist, so you may have to take my word for it that it was delightful. 

But perhaps that last little story is the best way to sum up The Riverview Cafe Open Mike Night, really on pretty much any given night. You start out with a little feeling of "Uh-oh" and then you end up charmed, if not downright amazed.





















 

The Riverview Cafe saves my life again

And the shadows fall and I think I am writing in pure darkness. Who can read anything I write when it is too pitch black in the world to read and when all of light is owned? I grow bitter about the precise ways fame fails to visit me. I imprudently complain about all the people not reading what I write to the very people who are reading what I write. I am faithless. I have worked all my life as an artist, and I have achieved only...

Art.

So I go to The Riverview Cafe on Thursday night. And everyone is a genius. Greatness nips at every singer songwriter's heels. How many people do my wife and I hear sing and play? Maybe twenty or thirty. None of them are remunerated, none long remembered, none lionized. No ones ship, or maybe I should say train, since they sing about them so much,  is ever coming in. Oh, all of them are gifted enough. All of them try hard enough. Everyone of them deserved something more. And why not. You may take this as a hard argument against God, or you may take it as the best way to love God, but

Everyone everywhere, through all of time, deserved something more.

Spare me the black tongues of realists. I'll have none of that cold acceptance that passes for pragmatic. "Life's not fair." is the devil's version of "Everyone deserved more." Let's start with that then: Everyone deserved more.

And so everyone playing at The Riverview Cafe deserved more. They deserved to be able to see, to walk again without pain, to be young again, to have someone hear their lovely voice and put them on a great stage and give them so much money they don't have to work in some grinding job. They deserve an old fashioned record contract, love, a fresh start, and more applause than such a modest audience as ours can produce. Sometimes, sitting there, I actually wish I could clap louder. But even though I swear they all deserve it, I don't believe that in those shining moments, on that unglamorous and raggedy stage, any one of them cares. I can't see them caring at all. Sometimes I even look for it, hear it whispering around, but every time I look I find that all of that deserving more dies dead on the stage. No one cares. For two songs a person, ten minutes maximum, no musician, no singer, cares that they deserve more. They have whatever there is to have. Their piece of art.

Oh how I like listening to them. Oh how my heart is restored.

Some of the performers are okay that night, some are completely wonderful. That's the way it goes. Maybe it's just that night, and those who are great will later be merely okay, and someone okay may, in three weeks time, play a song more lovely and touching than I would ever imagine hearing, for free, in such a humble place. And then too they may never play that song again.

Did you know that genius belongs to everyone? 

Genius belongs to everyone. That's what they sing to me, on Thursday night, Open Mike Night, at The Riverview Cafe, when they save my life.

Peaunts Movie

It is very rare that I go out to see a real live movie in a real live movie theater. I cannot bear the strangers sitting beside me, and I dread anyone taller than 3'11" sitting in front of me because I was born with a minor birth defect that prevents me from seeing through peoples' skulls. Furthermore it is a small torture to me any of the unreasonable sounds my random movie neighbors are inclined to make, like breathing, or smiling. But I live mere blocks from a beautiful, old style, art decoish single screen theater on a grand scale, showing discount, almost ready to come out on DVD movies. So sometimes I am overcome with an impatience to see a movie and my wife and I go, despite the difficulties involved.


And that is how we found ourselves at a Saturday afternoon showing of The Peanuts Movie.


Curiously The Peanuts Movie was everything I heard the new Star Wars movie was; a piece of homage fan fiction, updated, but as much as possible in the spirit and tradition of the source material. And when I say source material I mean the heyday stuff. While Schulz did not savage and mismanage his own creation like George Lucas did his, there is no doubt that the latter years, focusing an awful lot on Snoopy's brother Spike, in the desert, with a cactus, did not have the richness of the strips that were consistently brilliant in the sixties and seventies.


But first, let me say that the filmmakers here did something very clever. They showed a new modern cartoon short film featuring some kind of not cute squirrel creature with an acorn, that was so restless, and humorless, and desperate, that every shred of peacefulness in the Peanuts feature, when it finally came, was double the relief. At least I think that was the filmmakers clever intention. I can't figure out any other reason for it.


And let me also say that I was surprised to find that people still go to the movies despite the fact that one can view the entire history of cinema at one's leisure in one's own home on a large, high resolution screen. There is something sort of sweet and old fashioned about that. The theater, which is a large one, was very full, and my wife and I were nearly the only ones there without kids. During the only weak parts of The Peanuts Movie (some extended sequences with Snoopy pursuing the Red Baron) I looked around the audience and found it bobbing like a mosh pit at a 1990 grunge concert.


So I kind of loved the movie. But it did have a few minor drawbacks as well. The Charlie Brown main story particularly spoke to me. All my life I have publicly been most like Snoopy. I have wished I was most like Linus or even Schroeder. But watching Charlie Brown this time, well, suddenly it all came clear: Charlie Brown, c'est moi!


What I loved:


1. A mostly low key core traditional story retelling (Charlie Brown and the little red haired girl) with all the traditional characters in their most traditional settings (school, home, skating rink, neighborhood, parks).


2. Uses many of the old gags, but usually in fresh, natural, plot relevant ways (Peppermint Patty sleeping in school, Linus philosophizing advice with Charlie Brown, Snoopy's writing ambitions, Lucy working as a horrible Psychiatrist).


3. Includes many updates, jokes, and mild modernizations that were in the spirit of the original. Charlie brown choosing a shirt is an excellent gag along these lines. Sally cashing in on her brother's celebrity was charming, modern, self referential, and consistent. The kids use old style phones with cords, but there was curbside recycling in the neighborhood.


4. The voice work seemed more naturalistic and true to life than the old shows and was the better for it.



What I liked:


1. Computer animation that still captured the feel and prettiness of The Peanuts, albeit with a small loss of expressionism. The small touches of hand drawing were a sweet homage to the source material as well.



The few smaller problems:


1. The red baron sequences go on too long, and are too action heavy in the direction of what ruins every Pixar movie (that is, a 40 minute chase sequence). Fortunately, in this movie it's probably only 5 or 10 minutes too much of this, but if they dared to slow the pace on this movie just a smidgen more it would have been much the better for it. Also, this series of Red Baron vignettes feature a poodle named Fifi (think Fonzie's girlfriend Pinky Tuscadero). Never an original comic strip character, Fifi made me wistful for Snoopy's pursuit of Marcie as a French barmaid and the interconnection of fantasy and neighborhood reality that it brought with it (we get a small reference to this at the end).


2. While the settings are pretty and Twin Cities-ish (important to me!), I think the neighborhood skews more towards an idyllic suburb than to a city neighborhood, losing some of the particular charm of the original strip's semi urban setting.





And that is my Peanuts Movie review. Best animated kid movie of 2015, that I saw, I mean, out of the two that I did see. Four out of five stars, but I'm giving it officially five stars because of grading inflation, in an unethical attempt to improve its Internet average up towards what I think it should be, and out of a slight fit of pique that it wasn't nominated for an academy award.

Bob Dylan at the Riverview Cafe

As you probably know, Bob Dylan and I occasionally hang out on the Thursdays when he's in my town. Due to nostalgia mostly, and perhaps because of an old family connection or two of his, this happens as many as half a dozen times a year. But also sometimes, when he's in town, he just sort of shows up at places that I mentioned during the time we were hanging out. At most he might nod at me once when I run into him at those spots, but he generally keeps his own counsel and a very low profile.

So I wasn't shocked to see Bob Dylan at Open Mike Night at The Riverview Cafe.

Thursday night is an open mike night there, and sometimes my wife and I get a cup of wine and spend the evening. I don't perform, not being a musician, but I enjoy the unadorned Americana of it all, the art on the street, famelessness of it. It is delightfully not for profit, ridiculous, battered, homely, and secretly deep and holy. That doesn't mean that when I saw Dylan show up my heart didn't skip a beat. I'd sure like to see Dylan sing two songs for a crowd of 20, especially when my wife and I would be ten percent of that crowd. And I was struck by the weird and wonderful quality that, though he is one of the mightiest musical legends that will ever walk our land, he simultaneously fits well into the scattering of crusty, glamour-free old people who populate the Riverview's open mike night. As great and insanely brilliant as Dylan is, him sitting on a stool up there with a guitar, playing maybe Blood in my Eyes, with only part of the crowd paying attention, would fit in and show not a single seam or splice or gray hair out of place with any other Thursday night there.

But no, Dylan didn't play at open mike night. He just hung around. One person did play who was so good you had to notice, saying he hadn't played anything for 4 months. He played a song he wrote that reminded us of Lucinda Williams and that Lucinda Williams would have been proud to have written herself. Dylan heard it, as he heard everything that night, looking at his phone a lot, sitting in one of the upholstered chairs, drinking something, I don't know what, chai maybe? He politely applauded like he did for all the performers. I applauded too. Dylan kept his brimmed hat down low and talked to just one person for a minute or two the whole time we were there. Besides me I don't think anyone spotted him that night in the guise of his notoriety. He received no special treatment and mostly seemed to be killing an evening. Everyone is entitled to kill an evening, and there are worse ways to do it.

Did I pay extra attention that night to the old man in a hat and sweatpants who also happened to be Bob Dylan? I guess so, a little. What did it mean that a cultural legend plopped down at The Riverview open mike night, sat in a chair for two hours, and drank a chai? Maybe nothing. Maybe it meant nothing, and I could have told you about any number of old men, doing roughly the same thing. I could find a thousand of them in any cafe anywhere. But any of those people I would have had to describe to you from scratch. And I would have had to find an excuse for writing about them. I would have had to have a point.

I would have had to make it interesting. That's a lot of work, and not likely to go well. But Bob Dylan? That it happened to be Bob Dylan took care of all that for me. Though don't ask me how.

The greatness of America

I have been carrying around something I heard from a linguistics professor a few months ago. He said that people everywhere, all throughout history, have spoken more than one language. It is part of human nature to be multi-lingual, and what we see in America, where so many people can only speak one language (this super cool one I am using right now!), is a historical anomaly.

I don't generally take aspersions cast against my people very hard, but when they apply directly to me as well I don't find them entirely comfortable. I only speak one language. And though I could bluster through the whole thing on a Quality over Quantity argument, I have remained uneasy. Unconsciously I have cast around for a compensating genius of America, something that would let us Americans say "In your face Europe!" or "In your face Africa!" or "In your face Asia!", but in the way of friendly competition as opposed to our fallback of bombing.

For months I came up dry and all we could do was kill random people around the world in frustration.

But last night I went to The Riverview Cafe. My wife and I bought some wine and settled down at a table to watch the ever entertaining Thursday night open mike night. As far as I can tell the rules change slightly based on how many performers show up. You can sing, or play, two songs on busy nights, three songs on more moderate nights. There's a time limit too. The excellent host/soundman strictly enforces those limits.

I looked around the room with trepidation. My shamefully judgmental, image conscious nature escaped from its holding cell and expected disaster. The assembled crowd was not glamorous. I faced an old man whose mouth hung gaping open. An obese woman who yelled inappropriate things brushed her hair obsessively in front of me. A weird, super folky guy with a comb over prepared his harmonica and emotionally got in the spirit with thin blonde woman who was a dead ringer for the lead singer of the Muppets rock band (that's Janice, then, of the Electric Mayhem), but aged on another 30 years or so. Old people, street people, people with bizarre chins, all there waiting for their strange moment in the spotlight.

And, huzzah, everyone of them was good. Old people, crazy people, creepy people, they were all at least pretty damn good!

Take that!.... someone.

Out of every caricature came a person. The catalog of songs was deep. Songs that were covered were unpredictable in choice and approach, and the ones that were written, at their best, went so far as to approach greatness. People who could barely seem to talk could sing. No one abused their harmonica. And everyone could play guitar.

Everyone could play guitar.

And there we are saved and can stop bombing and assassinating the world. We are lost in the hegemony of our language, complacent in our cultural domination. We are smug in our power and psychotic wealth. We are weird, uncouth, self-destroying, and savage. But here, in America, every last one of us can play the guitar.

Take that, World.