There we were at the Keller Williams show at The Foundry in Waynesboro, watching a Baby Boomer dance like he simultaneously had no bones and was being shocked by a taser.
The man had materialized in front of my wife, Caitlin, and I like a ghost from an early-era Grateful Dead concert, about 10 feet in front of a stage upon which Keller, shaggy-haired and shoeless, was banging on an electronic drum pad.
The crusty crowd, mostly Millenials and Gen Xers with a few Boomers sprinkled in, was giving the boneless man a wide berth, as he herked and jerked his way through a song about a stoner who boarded a plane worried that he’d left a doobie in his luggage only to realize, in the grand reveal at the end, that the doobie had been in his shirt pocket all along.
Being at a hippie-heavy show like this would’ve been par for the course 10 years ago, during my prime festival-going days, but now it felt kind of incongruous, like I had stumbled into an old friend I no longer recognized. A friend who now spoke a language I could barely understand, but still seemed familiar, in a distant sort of way.
This was a rare night out for us. Our 4-year-old son was staying with family in Powhatan, so Caitlin and I high-tailed it to The Foundry, a converted warehouse space attached to Basic City Beer Co., to soak in the nostalgic scents of body odor and patchouli. Caitlin had enthusiastically bought tickets as soon as she heard Keller was coming to the Valley, because we have a longstanding history with him: we used to see him at festivals like Camp Barefoot and Floyd Fest in our mid-20s, back before we grew into something approaching contributing members of society.
Caitlin is the bigger fan, and though I rarely listen to Keller, I have a healthy respect for his talent: he tours as a one-man band, using a loop station to record each instrument then tying those loops together until it sounds like there’s a full ensemble playing behind him.
The night we saw him in Waynesboro, he walked onto the stage in a dirty black T-shirt, black gym shorts and the aforementioned lack of shoes, like he’d just rolled out of bed, which was likely just a mattress on the floor. There were splashes of gray in his moppy brown hair, though his eyes still seemed young and lovely.
He’s been doing this weird thing of his for 30 years (he released his first album in 1994), and has carved out a small, successful niche for himself, considering he’s still able to draw hundreds of people to his shows at age 55. To watch him perform is almost voyeuristic in nature, like he’s just a dude in his bedroom making music for the sheer love of it, and there you are, staring creepily through the window. While Keller clearly appreciates his (very devoted) fans, one gets the sense that he’d be just as content doing his thing in the privacy of his own home … if it would pay the bills, of course, which I assume it wouldn’t.
Keller’s quirky brand of showmanship doesn’t seem to have landed with younger folks, considering there were few, if any, Gen Zers in the crowd, though there were a few glow stick-welding Gen Alphas on the shoulders of their Millennial parents. The vast majority of people seemed to be former, or perhaps current, festival-goers who’d grown up watching Keller perform at muggy summer festivals, and who were now rapidly approaching, or in some instances firmly entrenched, in middle age.
It did seem, if I may take an aside, that Keller’s fanbase occupies that curious middle ground between anti-establishment left and conspiracy-embracing alt-right … the kind of people who almost certainly would’ve identified as liberals in their freewheeling 20s on the grounds of free-love and unchecked psychedelic use, yet as they’ve aged, have come to understand themselves as libertarian, which is perhaps what they actually were all along, without actually naming it, probably because they were too zonked on acid and other festival drugs to define anything.
But maybe I’m making gross generalizations, projecting my own biases onto a crowd that wasn’t sporting any obvious signs of political affiliation, save one female Gen Xer proudly wearing a “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” hat, which shone like a pimple but didn’t attract much attention, negative or otherwise. People were too busy dancing like they had no bones and following the shoeless man on stage into spaghetti-like jam sessions about, among other things, “an infinite army of laser-toting Martians.”
The one thing it took me a while to settle on while watching Keller play under the hot lights of The Foundry was whether his one-man show was representative of his abject failure as a social creature or a triumph of musical autonomy. The act of playing music is, at core, a communal experience, a means of bonding with other souled creatures via a universal language of feeling. What, then, to make of a man who performs mostly by himself?
My perception of him swung wildly between two poles: (1) an indulgent loner isolated in the spotlight, barefooted and shaggy and likely stoned, and (2) an admirable creative who’s remained true to his unique vision for three decades, an artist’s artist, as it were, who performs for the sheer euphoria of self-expression. It calls to mind that old Kurt Vonnegut quote: “To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”
After mulling over these dual interpretations of Keller, I settled on the latter, more generous one, because as I considered the mass of people bobbing their heads and wiggling their aging bodies, I realized that Keller wasn’t actually playing by himself, or even only for himself…he was performing with everyone in the crowd, too, thus fulfilling music’s higher calling as a shared experience. Any negative judgment I’d formed of him, the critique that he was some sort of isolated freak, was merely a misplaced judgment of myself: I’ve noodled on guitar since the age of 13, but fear and self-consciousness has kept me from playing with, or in front of, other human beings. Keller was, in fact, the one connecting. I was the one who was not.
***
I rolled out of bed the next morning at 8 a.m. and walked into the sun-drenched living room of our bungalow in Staunton’s West End, the original hardwood floors creaking under my calloused feet. Our house was still our house, that much was clear, but there was something softer about it that I struggled to define until it dawned on me in a brilliant flash: our home had never been this quiet. Our two dogs and our oft-rampaging son were in Powhatan, and as I sat on the sectional couch we’d purchased on a no-interest payment plan from Grand Home Furnishings, there was no child baying for milk from his bedroom, no titter-tatter of unclipped dog nails on the hardwood floor, no chocolate lab tail pounding the ground at the slightest noise or movement. It was like I had cotton in my ears; it seemed impossible that this was the same house we’d lived in for almost two years.
I had to wonder: is this what retirement would be like? A quiet, gentle, existentially boring sort of non-stress where nothing demands your attention and your day feels as empty and open as the West Texas desert? The silent nothingness became almost paralyzing: with no dependents to construct the parameters of our day, what were we supposed to do? Create our own meaning? How? Is this what life had been like before we’d become parents? Back when we’d roam the festival grounds until three in the morning, then wake slowly, dragging our acrid bodies out of our tents as the rising heat warmed the canvas?
I suppose that is the way things were, but we’ve been parents just long enough now for domestic life to feel like the only life we’ve ever known. Just long enough to dull, perhaps even eliminate, the memories of the people we once were and the ways we used to spend our time, before it all turned so wonderful and hectic, so beautiful and loud.
***
Caitlin and I originally had great plans for what we’d do with our rare kid-free day (perhaps a trip to the spa, maybe a hike), but what we did instead was lounge around the house, soaking in the stark silence, reminiscing, here-and-there, about our festival-going past. We chatted about how many times we’d seen Keller together: I was sure we’d gone to several of his festival shows in our 20s, but as we pieced together the timeline, I began to doubt that assertion.
We’d seen him together in Austin, that much was true, but the more we talked, the more I realized I had no firm memories of seeing him in a festival setting. Through hazy-brained deduction, we concluded that we had, in fact, never seen Keller at a festival together. Caitlin had dated another guy named Michael (dubbed Michael 1.0) right before we got together, and it was that Michael she’d seen Keller with, not me (Michael 2.0). My memory had failed me once again, as it often does, and this deterioration of the remembered past was a problem that would only worsen as time tumbled forward, my previous selves growing more hazily defined as I rowed closer to wrinkly skin and retirement.
Caitlin took a lazy shower while I stood in the kitchen waiting for our fancy Nespresso machine to spit out a perfectly foamy cup of coffee. I thought about Keller and his one-man show: under a different set of circumstances, could I have harnessed my affinity for music into a Keller-like success story? Could I have been the guy on stage sharing my art with hundreds of people? If I wasn’t so bone-deep terrified about performing in front of anyone, my wife included, could I have become a guy people paid money to see? Maybe, I thought, but at 35, the best I could hope for now was playing to a disinterested crowd at an open mic … if I could work up the courage to do even that.
For years, I’d prescribed to the Holden Caulfield view of artistry: “If I were a piano player, I’d play in the goddamn closet.” I’d taken a perverse sense of pride in that ethos, that I was somehow more honorable and dignified by keeping my creativity to myself. I couldn’t help but think, after noticing the splashes of gray in my hair in the microwave’s reflection, that I’d been viciously misguided, that by holding musical joy so close to my chest, I’d been strangling myself, or at least cutting myself off from moments of connection I could have experienced had I chosen a more open existence.
I sighed, and took that first glorious sip of frothy, domesticated coffee. My life was still good, a success, even. I was perfectly content with where I was at, despite never having the chutzpah to lay it all bare on-stage. I had my Yamaha acoustic guitar and $40 Goodwill keyboard in our home office, and that was good enough. Had to be good enough. Making music alone still brought me some semblance of connection … if not to others, at least to some vague thing greater than myself. The universe, God, whatever you want to call it.
There are many paths to take, and this is the one I’d taken, by both choice and non-choice, the latter of which is, of course, still a type of choice. I carried my strong cup of coffee into that unnervingly quiet living room and laid on the chaise portion of our payment plan-purchased couch. I began reading, half-distractedly, an article in Time about the rise of the far-right in Germany, like a responsible and informed 35-year-old citizen/father who wears shoes in public and keeps his music to himself, for better or worse.
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband, and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag. He can be reached at [email protected].
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