The Funk Odyssey

I’m sat abaft a fast-moving vessel, the good ship funk, surrounded by my merry men, a team of Absolute Monsters and we’re heading at great speed into an uncertain future. Well, I say uncertain, but that depends on whether our flight to Baltimore is any further delayed. Paz, a six-foot-two Indian, has been shepherding us through this Odyssey since we set sail from New Orleans and he having guided us this far has deposited us kerbside, bade us farewell and turned, teary-eyed, to head back down South.

Out here on the road, as we venture from one escapade to the next, we’re treading in the footsteps of those many great explorers whose exploits are found in the books of old. Tales abound of Mark O’Polo, the Irish adventurer who first brought Spaghetti to Dublin from China. Old men whisper low when gathered about the dying embers of a crackling fire and speak of the intrepid attempts by Thor Heyerdahl to cross the Magellan Straits in a shopping trolley armed only with a bacon bap (a hideous monstrosity that seems to have superseded the humble and perfectly satisfactory tradition bacon sandwich, don’t ask me why). Then of course there's Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan scholar who travelled over 73,000 miles across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia over a 30-year period using nothing but a senior citizens bus pass. I could go on, Vasco de Gama, Christopher Columbus, James Cook, Hanno of Carthage, Dirk the Navigator, etc, but I think you probably, by now, understand the enormity of our colossal sojourn.

Yes, when needs must, the good get going (or something like that), and so it is that heavy of heart, weary of er, mind, fleet of foot, um, knimble of knee, achey of bum (after a long drive this morning from Portsmouth in a Dodge van) I traipse o’er hill and dale with my happy ragtag gang of bandits in the vain hope that by nightfall, and by some miracle, we shall arrive safely at our destination - a Holiday Inn hotel somewhere in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There to set up camp and lay our heads, replenish our camels (I speak rhetorically here, of course; it’s been many months since they needed replenishing). There to try and communicate using arcane sign language with the locals in the vain attempt to trade used guitar stringsand expired backstage-passes for crusts of bread, chalices of Mead etc. There to boldly go forth with feet that have trod the corners of the earth, feet that have seen untold wonders, feet that have heard tell of derring do, feet that have tasted the bitter pang of, er, anyway, you get the idea..

Last night, the delighted throngs assembled en masse at Jimmy’s Jazz club applauded rapturously and cried with plaintive tones ‘Oh, play another one, do’ ‘Don’t you do any Elvis?’, ‘Give us another Bongo solo, post haste’ and ‘Is that it?’. All in vain, of course. On tour we have a scorched earth policy; we’d lain waste with our devilish tones and simply had no more to give. It was splendid, as was the previous night’s show at the Payomet Performing Arts Centre in Cape Cod. It would appear that the great unwashed of the vast North-East just can’t get enough of the Absolute Monster groove. They swoon at our odes, they bask in our fugues, they veritably froth at the mouth at our dextrous and extended twiddly bits (I’m referring to the free-form jazz banjo solos here, of course), and they generally seem to want more and more. In the words of Kool of Messrs ‘Kool and the Gang ’, “They just can't get enuff, of that funky stuff’ and who can blame them? Not I.

I alluded earlier to vittles. On trips like this, you have to grab them when you can. There’s no telling when your next meal might be, and vittle-grabbing has become something of a reflex action. Here, at the Oasis-like watering hole that the local herdsmen lovingly call ‘Boston Airport ’, I scoured the casbah until I found a ‘Starbucks’ Coffee shop. Duke Nellington, the bassman of the crew, was looking thirsty. “Yes," he responded, “a hot Latte… made with goat’s milk”. I know. It seemed odd to me too, but I duly put in the request and wasn’t surprised when the pretty Barista looked at me enquiringly and repeated, ‘Goat’s milk’?

I won’t deny that it had seemed like an unusual request at the time, and I confess that the smile that she had initially bestowed on me, one that I naturally at first assumed to be simply flirty, now seemed to be a smile of pity, and it glowed of the requisite humility demanded of a pretty Barista when dealing with a customer who appears to be an idiot. ‘Goat milk? she repeated and then wondered allowed whether it wasn’t actually Oat milk. Ah, yes. I realised my error and pointed out that it must be Oat milk with a silent ‘G’. That established, I returned, two such items, hot ones, held aloft, and now I sit with a slightly burnt tongue and wait the endless wait until our flight to Baltimore is ready for boarding and I receive the summons to join the scrum.

And so dear, Substackians, the Odyssey continues, at least until that distant day when, one prays, we can return to our Alligator and Mosquito-infested swampy Ithaca. There have been, as yet no Cyclopian sightings but now I think of it, I do recall several sound-engineers on a previous tour who looked they may have lived in a cave and seemingly had only one ear.

The epic continues and I shall bring you further installments. Tomorrow, assuming we arrive at our destination, we shall rest for a day and then on Wednesday, we reconnoitre and join forces with the Bonnie Raitt and her orchestra and who knows, we may be coming to your town soon. Till next we meet…