When is it really truly afterhours at this sort of dive, this unsorted sinner’s den, this sordid saloon, where the char of hide-and-seek fish fry smokes across the baseboards, breaking off and carrying the burn-out splinters with it, as it blows towards main street, armed with a smell so rotten, so vile, that industry flees the scene just as fast as it came?
It’s a ghost town, almost overnight. Now they’ve all cleared out; now it’s time for a bit of fun, not to mention madcap and mayhem. Now, in the interest of delirium, four hands with their twenty butterfingers, give or take, bang away at crumbling ivories, watering-holed up in the bunker with a screwdriver or two, chiseling at the dry-rot at the speed of a narcoleptic cinematographer’s crank: one millimeter at a time. Echoes of butcher pianos carouse up and down - mainly down - the lowly avenues of main street, accompanied by that fish smell I mentioned earlier.
Now where was I? The answer is it’s never really truly afterhours in this den, so long as the old upright “keeps working night and day.”
More about: Phree jazz phor Phree people
