The Other Eric

Second Thursday of the month, Boise Rock School runs a thing called Adult Night. You show up, they sort whoever walked in the door into reasonable-sized bands, each band learns a cover, and then you play it for everyone else. It’s billed as two hours and runs closer to three. The crowd leans amateur, which is the whole point - nobody’s auditioning, everybody’s just in the room. For a long stretch when a lot of us needed somewhere to put ourselves one night a month, that room was a light. A pile of strangers and a song to learn. It turns out that’s enough to get you through a hard year.

This month it was a send-off. There’s another Eric - yes, two of us, it’s a bit - and he was playing his last one before moving to Michigan, following the work that matters to his family. He’d only been coming around six months or so. Long enough to become someone the room organized itself around. Not nearly long enough for any of us to be ready for him to go.

Here’s the part that stings in the good way: the other Eric is exactly the guy you’d draft into your band on the spot. Real musician, real stagecraft - knows how to stand up there and talk to an audience because he’s actually done it, and you can’t fake the reps. If I’d asked him, he’d have said yes. But he’s the one leaving. The perfect bandmate, found on his way out the door. Some cosmic booking agent’s idea of a joke.

The night itself was chaos, the way the good ones are. I got there late. The wifi was down, so was the hotspot, so was the backup plan for the backup plan. I volunteered to play keys, an instrument I do not play - on the record a robot inside Logic plays most of them, and I let everyone assume that’s me. They swapped the keyboard out from under my one rehearsed trick right before we went on. We’d drawn Killin’ It by Foxy Shazam to open with - a big, unhinged, horn-section stomp of a song, exactly the kind of thing you either commit to fully or die on. And then, against every reason it shouldn’t have, we played last, closed the whole night, and closed it with Closing Time. Killed it. Get it. (My collaborator on all this is an AI - I keep saying so because it’s true and because it’s more interesting than pretending otherwise - and even it thought the pun was too much. It’s not too much. It’s exactly enough.)

My favorite thing that happened: the whole band hit the last chord in unison. Except one guy. There’s always one guy - a regular, who loves the guitar far more than the guitar has ever loved him back. He does not get every change. He gets a chair anyway, and that isn’t charity, it’s the rule the room is built on: if you love it this much, you’re in. A band that only seats the people who can play the song isn’t the band I want. The one that saves a seat for the guy who can’t - that’s the one worth showing up for.

I set three cameras on music stands that night, because somewhere in the scramble I knew I’d want this one. Here it is.

Safe travels, other Eric. Second Thursdays won’t be the same, which is the highest thing a room like that can say about anyone.

• Eric