Rapunzel’s
Utopias are funny places. They emerge unexpectedly; any plans to create them crumble. They are like fine weather or a close, sudden friendship: inarguable and generous. Settings can be utopic one day and banal the next. In Berlin, I consider Tempelhofer Feld, an airport that has been converted into a city park, consistently utopic, which is to say, it astounds me, silences me, and quietly fills me. I want nothing more than to keep staring. The fading old hangars, the weather beaten air traffic control signs, the Queen Anne’s Lace next to the smooth concrete runways.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon a utopia with my friend Janet: a little café in Lovingston, Virginia, called Rapunzel’s. We were there for the weekly Open Jam, (“appropriate for musicians of all ability levels”), hosted inside a sprawling bookstore/café/theater, with battered books crowding the bookshelves. In the front of the room was a circle of chairs, in which about ten men sat, each armed with a guitar, mandolin, penny whistle, electric guitar, harmonica, or fiddle, and occasionally a combination of the above. Their ages ranged, I would hazard, from 25 to 65. As we grew closer, my skin puckered: they were playing Gram Parson’s “Sin City,” and they were playing the hell out of it.
Janet and I shyly nudged our way into the circle. Seated, my goosebumps grew: the harmonies were as fierce and tight as a lover’s quarrel; the mandolin danced around the guitars like a dog darting in and out of the woods, panting, returning to the trail; and the face of the man singing the first verse of “Long Black Veil,” as the others waited to join in on the chorus, was full of a wincing joy.
In between songs, the players exchanged banter with the deftness and teasing competition with which they traded solos. Behind me, a grandfather bounced his baby granddaughter on his knee. At the café counter, teenagers who looked hip, wise, and kind beyond their years chatted and doled out cold beers and hot coffee. The jam was conducted in a round robin style, so that each person in the circle could lead a song of their choosing. Janet and I went for classic Gillian Welch numbers. Another participant selected “Dead Flowers,” and informed everyone that it was “fucking poignant.” He was right.
As a kid, I listened to country music nonstop, thanks to my uncle, a country music promoter, who would send me CDs I fell in love with: Allison Krauss, Wynonna Judd, Mary Chapin Carpenter. When we would visit him and the rest of my mother’s family in Mississippi, the four siblings would sing four-part harmony to Baptist hymns. Later, in college, an ex-boyfriend from Lousisiana tuned me into Johnny Cash and Lucinda Williams. In the last couple of years, my tastes have strayed more to electronic pop and indie rock, and it’s been restorative, over the last few weeks in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to return to the music I grew up singing. And it felt like my musical meanderings came satisfyingly full circle last night when one of the musicians led the group in a masterful cover of Sun Kil Moon covering Modest Mouse’s “Neverending Math Equation.”
Utopias are hard places to leave, and Janet, Roger (another friend from the residency), and I lingered long after the circle had scattered. It was like forcing yourself out of a hot bath, and we all had the same woozy look as we walked to the car.