I grew up with music as the heartbeat of my days. Tunes from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s formed a soundtrack that flowed from speakers in the family dining room and the portable cassette player I carried everywhere I went. By my late teens, I was a full-fledged 1960s fan—right down to the bead necklaces, bell bottoms, and tie-dye.
I had a particular fixation on Michael Nesmith, the tall, lanky Monkees guitarist with a Texan drawl and a green wool hat. I couldn’t get enough of his country-rock style: songs layered with acoustic guitar, pedal steel, banjos, and bass riffs, and christened with obscure titles like “Propinquity” that rarely had anything to do with the lyrics.
Some albums had an ethereal quality, as if Nesmith had tapped into a realm beyond instrumentals and lyrics to lay hold of essential truths. I felt a deep, almost spiritual connection with those songs, and yearned to play them myself. So, in my early 20s, I took up guitar.
Equipped with a shiny blue Indiana Nappanee and a well-worn Fender Redondo, I set out to embrace my inner folk musician. Playing Nesmith’s music led naturally to writing folky, enigmatic, emotional compositions of my own. Sitting wrapped around my guitar for hours at a time, I attempted to make sense of life’s struggles by weaving bits of myself into every tune that I wrote, sang, and played.
When I got it in my head to perform those tunes in public, open mic nights seemed like a good place to start. I made my debut on the Upstate New York music scene under the fluorescent glow of café lights at the local Borders.
Open mic transformed the bookstore’s café from reading room to music venue: a home for people who, like me, used songs as a framework for their emotions. Some coaxed ambient tones through the speakers with a gentle touch. Others beat their instruments like weapons and howled red-faced into the microphone until strings snapped beneath their fingers.
And then there was me. Self-taught. Inexperienced. Uncertain. Feeling in over my head yet moved to share my compositions and end on a Nesmithian crescendo.
A flush rose in my cheeks as I played, my heart pounding with a sense of inadequacy amidst a sea of sophisticated talent. I ended each set emotionally and physically exhausted. Yet I was exhilarated enough to keep going back—and intrigued enough to seek more strange and wonderful hubs of music and passion.
I was looking for something Nesmith’s music hinted at and that open mic seemed to harness, something other that reached so deep, it seemed to touch my soul. It swelled around me at Borders each month, an all-encompassing reality I wanted to climb inside and never leave. But the swell inevitably ebbed away, leaving behind a hollow sense of desolation.
The desperation to grasp that reality again was so strong that it seemed perfectly reasonable to drive an hour north to another monthly open mic. So I made my way to Caffè Lena, an intimate hole in the wall tucked at the top of a narrow staircase between two shops on Phila Street in Saratoga Springs.
Dim, cramped, and crowded, Lena’s has played host to some of music history’s most iconic artists—including Bob Dylan. Dozens of musicians converge on the open mic every month, drawn by its longstanding reputation and eclectic atmosphere. I quickly learned that I had to arrive early to secure a spot in the lineup and stand in the shadow of musical greats as I performed on the small corner stage, framed by windows with shades drawn against the streetlights’ orange glow.
The lengthy roster meant I often found myself driving home long after the world had gone to bed. As I traversed the near-empty highway, introspective thoughts ran parallel to the evening’s tunes in my mind, and I had a sense of being borne along by the other: a poignant undercurrent I recognized but still couldn’t name.
An undercurrent that, to my surprise and delight, manifested in coffeehouse form when Slow Jed’s Mud House opened in nearby Averill Park. The bright yellow building standing smack in the middle of town, just 15 minutes from my house, begged to be explored. How could I resist?
I knew I’d found something special when I stepped through the teal blue side door into a whimsical space painted in shades of red, green, and purple. Its atmosphere of rich espresso scents and sweet chocolate fudge overtones enveloped my days, as I proceeded to spend the majority of my free time at the shop—starting with the Wednesday evening open mic.
Each month, a raised platform by the front window rang out with folk and folk-rock tunes performed by everyone, from a 20-something couple articulating emotional trials with guitar and djembe to a pair of friends covering geeky ‘80s tunes on accordion and mandolin.
Jed’s slowness offered a cozier, more intimate experience than Caffè Lena’s crowded clamor. For the first time, I met musicians who didn’t intimidate me, others who weren’t afraid to share their struggles in the framework of music and lyrics. Our connections grew into genuine friendships as the months went by, and I finally started to feel like I belonged.
And yet the hollowness lingered, an ache I could never quite fill. Jed’s encapsulated the ephemeral other more than any other open mic I visited, but didn’t avert the yawning emptiness that dogged me after the last strains of music died away. I was still looking for the transcendence that first touched me in Nesmith’s tunes, a transcendence I believed would lead to wholeness.
A transcendence that music, integral as it was to my life, could never provide.
—
Jed’s has long since closed, and Borders is no more. Caffé Lena remains, fortified by its musical legacy. My guitars hang, silent, in black zippered cases on a stand in the corner of my bedroom. I haven’t been to an open mic in years; haven’t poured out my soul through burnished strings and cryptic lyrics; haven’t engulfed myself in that strange, otherworldly combination of fullness and emptiness.
My heart rests elsewhere: in God and the fullness of Himself. While I spent my early 20s pursuing fulfillment and healing and truth in an endless stream of musical highs that left me hollow, God patiently pursued me.
He was there when I wrapped my life in lyrics, decked myself in tie-dye, and poured my emotions into microphones. Sometimes I sensed His presence and tried to grasp it through the words of the Bible or capture it in the strains of a song. But mostly I ran, chasing a vision of home, of belonging—of salvation.
I was chasing an illusion. The transcendence and wholeness I hunted in the dim recesses of coffeehouses and between the grooves of Nesmith records could only be found by submitting myself to the One Who is above all and Who loved me enough to keep after me even when I insisted on blundering in the other direction. When I finally came to the point of surrender, the need to experience the all-encompassing other began to fade, replaced by the presence of something—Someone—with the power to overcome the struggles to which music could only give shape.
But not every open mic was a futile quest for an empty shadow of deliverance. Some moments stick with me, fond memories of atmosphere and emotion and song flowing together in a rare apogee of elation.
Like the night I found myself in the middle of an impromptu jam at Jed’s as closing time approached. After open mic ended, the most talented duo of the evening suggested all the performers play a final number as a group. We pulled a collection of mismatched chairs into a circle, fetched our guitars, and kicked off a round-robin-style performance of the Band’s “The Weight.”
Intimidation rose in me as others sang verses and riffed solos. I was the type who practiced for hours to perform a handful of songs. Playing off the cuff cast me into the realm of uncertainty. I feared I would fall short of the collective standard and be exposed as an amateur unable to make a meaningful contribution. The body of the Redondo weighed on my thigh, my arm resting on its bulk while I strummed, waiting for my turn despite feeling woefully unable to make a meaningful contribution.
But something happened in those moments that I’ve never experienced before or since. Regardless of talent or background, music made us equal. In that circle, I wasn’t an inexperienced, emotional 20-something on a musical journey of self-discovery; I was a musician among other musicians, weaving melody and harmony into a collective whole. In those moments, the other flowed from us and through us, not an overwhelming wave that threatened to drown me but a pulse that recalled the music-soaked days of my childhood and reverberated through the room like a heartbeat.
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