Save That Song for Tuesday

Feeling defeated? The Victory Music open mic can save the day.

Photography by Sharon Styer

See, I’ve got this trick knee I wrecked skiing in college. Years of manual labor took a toll. So when I stood up one day in February and my leg turned to stone, it wasn’t surprising. Just depressing. I’d need to see a doctor to see another doctor to get an MRI to see another doctor. Rain turned to snow.

Thankfully, it was Tuesday.

Tuesday? Yes. The day on which for more than twenty years Tacoma has gathered to talk and laugh and eat pie and strum G chords and sing, and to share the fun over the airwaves on KVTI, 90.9 FM.

It sounds a little cute, and it is. But on this night I needed cute. I needed old men in flannel reading Popular Science. I needed Dutch apple and a scoop of vanilla. I needed the kind of coffee that sits on a warmer on the counter, midwestern-weak and bitter, like mom’s — all you can drink, but get it yourself. I needed simple songs played and sung simply, without irony or apology or pretense. I needed verse-verse-chorus, wash, rinse, repeat.

I needed the Victory Music Open Mic at the Antique Sandwich Company.

Antique Sandwich is the kind of place you can’t just walk past, even when you can walk. The windows are too big, the light inside too warm, the old-fashioned bar too old-fashioned, the customers too happily musing over cups and plates and articles about new advances in filtration. And on a night like this, Tuesday night, when it fills with musicians and listeners and the mood is like a sitcom Christmas — at the end, when they all make up — you can’t leave.

I got a coffee and fastened myself to a stool against the wall, opposite the bar and stage. Players tuned. Someone noodled on the piano. A couple of guys tried harmonies in the corner.

And now, coming to you live . . .

Roy sang gospel a cappella. Colin did the Mountain Goats’ “Song for Denis Brown.” Val was late getting to the piano; he’d been on the phone with his grandbaby, who was listening “out there in radioland. I love you, sweetie!”

A man at a table up front, alone, expressionless, well dressed but disheveled, stood up between sets and made for the door, an unlit cigarillo dangling from his lips. He returned ten minutes later with a grocery sack. He sat, reached into the bag, pulled out a quart of chocolate milk and filled his glass.

“Now this young lady came by a couple of weeks ago and took us all by surprise,” said the MC. The young woman in question took the stage with violin and guitar. In Levi’s and a T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves, she was every pretty girl I’ve ever seen in Columbia Falls, Montana. She played a Jewel song, then Bob Seger, and then went into 4-H mode, flat-picking “Blackberry Blossom” and sawing on a rag she “used to play in fiddle contests.”

We heard flamenco and Celtic, ragtime and blues, a song about Gary Ridgway, an ode to a lover in Eugene. A guy calling himself Tacoman, or Taco Man, or Taco Van, I couldn’t be sure, started like this: “If you were at a party in Puyallup and you recognize me from that party in Puyallup, then come up here and play the guitar!” His first song began, “It doesn’t matter what kind of shoes you wear if you’re going to run on the pavement.” And it only got weirder, and better, from there.

There was time left at the end, and the MC asked a young woman, Shannon, to do a few more. Dressed like Emmylou Harris, in cowboy boots and a skirt, she sang in a plaintive alto, sitting, strumming loosely, legs crossed with the crossed foot aloft, boot dipping and twirling in rhythm. Only a few of us remained now, clearing tables, straightening chairs. She closed with Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart,” then Val slid behind the keys, his grandbaby long asleep, and took us back into that cold, cold night.

Victory Music Open Mic, Tuesdays, sign-up 6:00pm - 6:30pm, music 7:00pm - 10:00pm; $3 adults, $1 children, $2 Victory Music members, musicians free, 5102 N. Pearl St., Tacoma, 253.752.4069.

Since 1969, Victory Music, a Tacoma-based nonprofit, has worked to promote acoustic music throughout the Pacific Northwest. Visit victorymusic.org to learn more.