7 PM, Woodville, Wisconsin...

and the main street is quiet. A cluster of cars, like horses in time past, are angled nose first around the Wildwood Bar and Grill. There are a thousand Wildwoods in Wisconsin, shelters of a sort, where beer is served by the the better looking women in town, or some guy named Frank, and you can laugh until the evening forces you out into the cold.

Passing through the bar the door opens to the stage at the front of a building, attached but separate, with a Budweiser poster as the backdrop. The seats themselves are empty but on the stage a local is already singing. The local has the long gray hair of a man who star has already passed, but so have we all, the people who wander in to sing on open mic night in Woodville.

There's the former boat mechanic who lost some of his hearing plying his trade in the bottom of tourist paddlewheels but still finger picks with passion and sings old country songs to a nearly empty room. A lady with a willowy sweet voice who somehow found her way to the rump of Wisconsin from New Zealand fills the air with minor chords and songs of lost love. A few people drift in and out while the local plays master of ceremonies as a ceiling fan with fluorescent bulbs wobbles in the rafters.

We were the first to get up, my partner and I, three songs prepared and a towel for sweat. Fifty years ago and a thousand miles south our music would have been in the thick of things in a room full of men with red arms in overalls dancing with ladies holding their hair up with bobby pins. That's who we are, a band out of time that's grabbed onto music from people long gone and plays it for others who talk while we sing. Yet that's how it goes and three songs became seven and then a call back that made it around ten doing whatever we could, on the fly, unrehearsed but alive.

When it was done they clapped for us and we for them when they played and all of us vicariously for the people who should have been there, who would have heard us had not our star passed in the night. Somewhere out there a caravan of semis and buses full of performers and roadies and "people" will drive through to the next place down the road and thousands will pay for three hours of being in the presence of the famous. That's okay, we'd like to be there too.

But tonight we're in Woodville where we pack our own gear and no one asks for an autograph. There is a kind of music here as well, the freedom to play with our hearts, the freedom to be two guys combing music's cemeteries in hopes of a Lazarus worth bringing back and playing even if the audience is talking and the beer drinkers next door have their gaze fixed on the lovely behind the bar.