A Bobby Bandiera Babble

I went east to the Jersey Shore to visit the guru in the bars where he played, with his more than a dozen perpetual fans, wrinkle-cream bleach blondes, grizzled hippies, and mandatory wiry wise guy in fully zipped Adidas tracksuit. He's been called The Human Jukebox, and it's true he channels every cover that he covers, going from Roy Orbison to Hendrix to Cat Stevens with complete and total change in voice.

But it's his guitar work that's his core. In his mid-sixties now, he does it with his eyes closed if he wants to, electric or acoustic, wa-wa or earnest Dylanesque plucks. He toured with Bon Jovi and played with the Asbury Jukes, but the day in day out life for him is standing up in a Jersey bar and working. Now that he's older (he's let the gray come in now), the guitar rests comfortably on the pillow of his modest pot belly, and he appears to be the least stressed person on the planet, just showing up for work, no big, and moving his left hand up and down the frets, strumming with the other, occasionally producing a wail with a lever below the mouth of his guitar.

The first night, we saw him at Jamian’s in Red Bank, a pretty bougie place where we couldn't help but remark that there was an unusual amount of middle-aged people making out, especially in the middle area of the bar, where people stood or sat on tall stools around tall tables; we came to refer to this is the "pheromone zone" of the bar. It was uncanny. Every couple that entered that space became unbelievably amorous. Early in the night, during the first set when we still eating dinner, a youngish couple—a tall man and woman in their late thirties—were getting it on in that zone. They left. Then an older very tan woman whose face had a tautness that suggested cosmetic surgery came in with a man with a bald head that folded into deep creases on the back. They were frenching each other; it was out of control, or it seemed to be since they were at least in their fifties. So, it's important to note, were we. But we weren't used to seeing this. Next another couple came in, a preppy sort of couple. She was tall but no nonsense in her makeup and dress, tan khakis, not trying to look edgy and young like the super-tan, taut-faced woman. But, boom, they sit around that table and it's hands on ass and everything. Finally, a graying man who looked like he could be a professor or accountant came in with a darked-haired woman who was small, a little beaten-down looking, like she's been in a long marriage with an abusive man (think Talia Shire in the first Rocky). Both were in their fifties, too. They entered like they were unsure they should be there at first. A half hour later they're doing something like the lindy bop in—you guessed it—the pherozone, which of course is fine, but they're doing it to everything from Tom Petty to Johnny Cash, occasionally sucking face in the generally hectic process and always, every time, high-fiving each other at the end. These two were clearly people who needed to let loose. I floated the narrative that they had had crushes on each other in high school but never had the nerve to declare themselves, she went on to enter the convent, and he entered a loveless marriage full of weirdness and honest longing à la Big Ed in Twin Peaks.

How to distinguish myself as cool amid so many like-aged people acting out Cialis ads or playing the aged groupie with flat-iron-decimated hair? Every so often, I'd get up from the table and go up to the groupie-zone (just a yard beyond the pheromone zone) to stand back and watch Bobby's guitar work. I was my own kind of cliche. Remembering how Bruce Springsteen used to, as a kid, stand outside the open doors of shore bars and zoom in on the band, absorbing technique, I was a 56-year-old with two private lessons under her belt and zero musical training standing there in a trance, my eyes on his fretting hand. So, really, none of us weren't a type or cliche. Except Bobby. Bobby was just Bobby. His Wiki page notes that fame eluded him. Fame couldn't elude Bruce, because Bruce's will to fame was unbendable. It didn't elude Jon Bon Jovi, although lately it winks at him ironically. And fame didn't elude Johnny Lyon, who didn't really know what to do with it, so he just left it in the foyer until, eventually, it left for greener pastures. But it eluded Bobby, or so the Wiki writer suggests. I'm thinking something can only elude you if you chase it, hard. I'm not so sure Bobby chased fame. He seems content to have raked in the dollars on tour with Bon Jovi. He seems content to go out to these bars and take things one step up from his living room. You get the impression that he'd be playing no matter what, so he might as well play for these fine people at the bar.

The second show we saw was over in Rumson. Now, Rumson's a pretty pricey place to live; Bruce and Patti's mansion is there. The median income is well into six figures, and a lot of its residents work on Wall Street. It's a very white place, too, with like .25 of the population being African American. Down by an inlet there's a bar/restaurant called Barnacle Bill's, and that's where Bobby was playing. Where the night before he played with two other guitarists, tonight he played with a bass guitarist and a drummer. My friend Jane, who's been living in Arizona and taking care of her mom for the past 13 years, knows Bobby and all the Asbury Jukes, having organized Jukefest: Three Days of Peace, Love, and Rock 'n Roll back at the beginning of the century. The Jukes manager told her to make sure she went to both of Bobby's gigs during her rare trip to the East Coast. I and Dana, another of Jane's friends from Pittsburgh, had met up with her for this visit. But when we pulled into the lot and heard the trio playing "Sounds of Silence," we were wondering if this was going to be the same playlist as the one at Jamian's—heavy on the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and due to a birthday request, an unwelcome Eagles tune. Not that any of these covers were bad; it was just that Bobby's best when he plays bluesy guitar.

Fortunately, Bobby changed things up considerably, really getting us off our feet with some Hendrix. That's when I did my stand-up-close-like-I'm-a-musician trying to vicariously absorb his second-nature guitar licks. The same core of a dozen fans was there, too, and I began to love them because I could see how much they loved Bobby, the music, and each other. LeBron and the Cavaliers were losing the last game of the NBA finals on the big screen TV above the bar. There was no pheromone zone at Barnacle Bills; I think the name of the venue alone made that impossible. There were a few old golfer-types at the bar. One of them kept hitting on me until I had Dana draw his eye (Dana's petite and super-stylish in the manner of the Bowie fan she is). Jane stayed at our table, up a level from the bar, until Bobby called her out. She wrote a note for me to hand him: "Jane sez Roy Orbison." He said he'd meet her request, but she had to come down. So she came to the rail overlooking the bar, and he channeled Roy Orbison before breaking into some Dylan, which really fired Dana up. There had been lots of folks dancing hard throughout the set, but the crowd was thinning out to the true believers. By the time we left, we felt connected to the Jersey die-hards, who wished us a safe trip home.

Bobby uses his thumb to fret the low E string, just like Hendrix used to do. Watching him, I vowed to get over my impasse at making chord changes. The impasse has gone on too long. When I got home the next day, I decided I was going to conquer the chord change impasse through faith: just move the hand from B to D without looking. It worked about 1 in 3 times. Just when I think I've got the calluses I need to keep fretting, I notice that I'm not pressing down hard enough on some string or another, and encounter a new level of tenderness in the skin on my fingertips. I don't know if I'll ever be any good at guitar, but at least I'm now getting inside music rather than just standing on the outside admiring the impossible miracle music-making has always been to me.