Jimi Hendrix, Bluegrass Star

In front of the Pompidou Center, a pretty girl with a violin case took a position about fifteen yards to my left. She wore tight jeans and a black cowboy shirt with pearly buttons, and I kept one eye on her as she took out her instrument and applied rosin to the bow in brisk, short strokes. I finished up "All Along the Watchtower," nodded to the family from Peoria who had stopped to stare at me as if I were a roadside accident, lay down my Strat and went over.

She launched into something lively and Irish-sounding, her eyes closed, her head tilted thoughtfully to one side. I maintained my position as her entire audience until I was joined by a few skinny Parisian teenagers in black clothes, generating their own weather system of Gauloises smoke and attending to the music as if it were a philosophy lecture. When she finished, I tossed a few of my own coins into her case to set an example, but it didn't make much of an impression on my associates, who moved quickly on down the line toward the guy who was walking on broken glass and eating fire. That bastard always had the crowd, and it had crossed my mind more than once to think up something a little more dangerous for myself, too. I didn't know how he did it. The glass was real, jagged and sharp - I'd checked it out.

"I know some bluegrass," I said to her, when it was just the two of us. "You want to play together? We'll double our income."

"You do? What do you know?"

I knew exactly four tunes, all of them learned to help out my roommate with his senior thesis, "The Dave Katz Project." Katz had completed a music major without developing facility on any instrument, bravely working his way through the trumpet, the piano, and the upright bass, before finally settling on the banjo.

"'Sally Goodin'?" I said. "'Rocky Top'?" I didn't want to give her all four at once.

"'Sally Goodin'."

She came over to my spot and stood beside me as I slid my guitar back on. It was a mid-seventies model in a particularly ugly color called "Antigua," a kind of puke-and-cigarette-ash sunburst. It had a sawn-in-half baseball bat neck, and gouged into the back of the body was the legend "Satin Lives" - the work of some former owner with either poor spelling or a shiny wardrobe. I turned off my distortion and tried to get the cleanest, most mountain-pure sound I could. A few minutes earlier, I'd been blasting nuclear holocaust through that runt speaker. Now I wanted pine trees, moonshine whiskey, cold running streams. "There," I said, strumming a bright, open G.

"Wendy," she said, meeting my eyes briefly, without much interest. "I like to go fast." She stomped her foot three times.

The Dave Katz Project had always left me slightly depressed. We never went fast - it was like sitting for the sats. But Wendy took off like a bottle rocket. I thumped along, careful not to be too loud, trying to emphasize the bass notes and not let the pace drag. The Parisian teenagers came back. A small crowd began to gather.

The money rained in, copper, silver, even some notes. I asked her where she'd learned to play like that.

"Suzuki method. How about 'Cotton-eyed Joe'? It's just A-E-A."

When we'd done all we could to that one, a man with a bad hairpiece asked us if we wanted a job. He wore a suit and seemed reasonably believable when he said he could offer us seven hundred and fifty francs, plus room and board. Wendy's French was slightly better than mine, and among the three of us we managed to make it clear that the place we were going was a sort of retreat for les travailleurs of the...