Sights and Sounds-New Music breathes a New Life

Saturday night, I chose to stumble into the wilderness that is downtown Salem, ma and meandered into the Gulu Gulu cafe for an evening libation with low expectations on the entertainment as I frequent the establishment and am equally frequently disappointed by melancholy, morose guitarists who creepily weep their hearts out about masturbation or crack addiction or something else that makes a room full of waspy white people uncomfortable. Instead, I was met with an earful of melodic pleasure rarely met in any venue. This little dude with a flannel, flappy long hair shaped by the way he pushes it behind his ear and sideburns down to his jaw was spraying this powerful, hip, yet pleasantly unjarring music with only an absurdly long and lanky drummer on a snare. Being instantly turned into a fanboy, my girlfriend and I bought his cd for five bucks (which we elected to mark up from his offered three dollar price tag) as he shyly looked up at me through his glare-smoked glasses and limply shook our hands. We looked them (and by them I came to realize I mean him as it's really just one dude) up online (Lonesome red is his name) and then proceeded to follow them into their following gig in cambridge for a full set on Sunday. Being pretty much the only fans there, it felt like a show just for us. People pay hundreds upon hundreds to have their favorite guitarists and singer/songwriters play for them from hundreds of yards away on screens and I paid nothing to have this dude serenade my girlfriend and I for two straight hours. A big deserved high five goes to happenstance on that one--well played fate, well played. He was good enough that, I would dare to say, he renewed my faith in rock and roll to inspire that rebellious urge to tell my work to go fuck themselves and, subsequently, I felt the necessity for me to stay at the bar until nearly 1am just to hear the end of his set...on a work night!! Finding a gem like that in a shitty little cambridge dive or a semi-pretentious cafe in Salem, well, that's like finding filet mignon in your steak bomb--unexpected, possibly undeserved, but delicious nonetheless.