Grandmother Magma (companion piece to "the cold")

Answering an ad I’d found on a community bulletin board, my bass guitar case in one hand, I ride my beat-up 6-speed bike across campus and north of town to Cathe’s house.
I chat with her after our greeting in her foyer, her calligraphy materials spread out in the adjacent living room. Single Mom of two grade schoolers, she writes the songs, while she and Neicie, whom I am about to meet, sing. Perky, up-beat, she reminds me of a young Doris Day. I will listen tonight, she tells me, and can fill in as I see fit.
The rest of the band files in within the hour, and we congregate in the basement, full of equipment and a sound system. Neicie, looking matronly in a long print dress, wears medium length dreads wrapped in a paisley rag. Jeff, the guitar player is a tall, young man with long, greasy hair. He is schizophrenic, I think, judging from his unintelligible, evasive patter. He riffs endlessly on his Stratocaster before, during, and after songs, heavy distortion making his licks somewhat indiscernible.
Quigsley Schmooze, the drummer, a diminutive man in crisp suit and tie, arrives late from his work as a CPA, his real name, undisclosed to me in the month during which I played with Grandmother Magma.
They take me through 4 or 5 of their original numbers. On the first, Neicie sings operatically, with her deep, round voice, “I can’t stop loving everybody…..” At each end of that refrain, I play a little one-note bass lick to emphasize. Bump-ba-bump-ba-ba.
Cathe shows me “Hard Drugs”, with her Hammond organ intro, in full Doris Day mode, she sings the ditty-like, “Done a bit of weed, a line or two of cocaine. But I promise you Momma, I’ll never get insane…” The whole band comes in loud as she sings the chorus, “I won’t do no hard drugs…hard drugs… Momma…no hard drugs….”
For “Motherlode of Love”, Neicie recites her own intro, “….In this room…tonight…is a rarity, one of an endangered species……. – A woman in love!” Once we are full flare into the song, Cathe growls the chorus, “I’m tellin ya boy…you hit the motherlode of love….”
They cite The Roches as their singular influence, but I hear shades of blues, 60’s pop, and a little Neil Young. Of course, with Jeff soloing nonstop, it sounds like 80’s big hair metal jam night at the local bar. When he drives me home, I found out that, in the absence of his axe, he has to talk nonstop to drown out the silence. It is kind of scary, how little sense he makes, especially because he is so animated, gesturing with his hands while driving.
There are only 2 or 3 more rehearsals for me. Other interests and a heavy workload at school lead me to quit the band I have just joined. A sweet regret, like breaking up with my first love, dogs me down the years. My bass, donated to a music school, my guitar, mostly fallow in a corner of my apartment, call to me in some low ebb tide of time and desire.
Maybe I will return to playing more regularly, get out to play at least a couple of open mics here and there. But this wistfulness over long ago choices may never amount to much. Responsibilities engulf the creative soul, arthritis begins to creep in. That’s okay. There are other people who can and have filled these abandoned shoes in a much more satisfying way.
I find a lot of quirky folk-rock bands on the web and in the CD bins these days, preaching about loving everybody. Maybe not in those words, certainly not with deep, operatic tones.
I am just grateful to have once seen something so odd, so rare, and so endangered from the inside out.