The men’s room at The Filling Station might as well be an open sewer worthy of one of those nuclear cleanup crews. I swear to Jesus your chromosomes get scrambled in there. So, after my first set I go out behind the bar and piss under stars stretching to infinity, taking in cold, clean night air, the rush of traffic out on the Black Canyon Freeway a steady hum like a good bass line. The bartender, Raphael, has a cold PBR waiting when I’m back, my jangled nerves still popping from the first set. I pound half the PBR and miss the coaster when I set the bottle down too hard. Raphael darts in to put it right and wipe up the spillage when the bottle foams over.

“You ain’t sitting in your damn living room, hoss,” Raphael says. “The idea is to try and get most of it inside you for Christ’s sake.”

“Well, that’s the plan alright.”

“Well, your execution is a bit sloppy, Benny Boy.”

“You know, I had a gal tell me that one night in the sack,” I say, and we both cackle.

Raphael slides another PBR toward me after I pound the rest of my first.

“But that’s the last of the freebies, bro,” he says. “You got another set to do, and the natives are restless.”

I look out at the “natives.” Urban cowboy wannabes from the simmering Phoenix burbs clustered around maybe half of the tables. Blue collar men and women anywhere from low 20s to well past 50s drinking shitty Bud Light or not much better Coors Light, their cowboy hats pushed back on their heads to try and appear jaunty. Folksy. Salt of the earth because most of them work with their hands. Cigarette smoke drifts up into a blue cloud hovering below the ceiling. Saturday night at The Filling Station is their paltry attempt at release from the quiet desperation of dreary lives and boring jobs.

“Nobody pays much attention to the second set,” I tell Raphael. “They’re too drunk to give a shit.”

“But you’re getting paid,” he says. “Where’s your notion of professionalism?”

“Back in the first set, I reckon.”

“But paid is paid, bro.”

“Well, if you can call it that. Fifty dollars don’t go too damn far these days.”

He stares at me and wiggles his nose, something I’ve noticed he does when he’s perturbed.

“You’re too damn direct for your own good, Ben.”

I nod slyly and grin.

“I reckon I am. For sure. But that’s just part of my charm.”

He smirks and moves down the bar, wiping it clean with a cloth.

“You and charm are the two sides of the Grand Canyon, my friend.”

I arch my eyebrows.

“Man, that’s way cold—like, well digger’s ass cold.”

“Or cold as a witch’s tit?”

“That, too.”

“Life’s a bitch,” Raphael says over a shoulder. “I’ll leave you and your charm to it.”

“Mighty white of you.”

Now, Raphael is part Jamaican and proud of it. He fancies himself a bit of a wannabe Rasta man. He pauses to shoot me a glare but quickly softens it. He knows I’m just messing with him. It’s part of how we pass the time. He ducks a couple of pint glasses in the sink well. I like the sloshing sound they make and wonder if I could make my guitar sound like that.

“Second set, Ben,” he says, looking up. “Like, tout de suite before I lose customers.”

“You ain’t got all that many to begin with.”

He winks.

“Maybe the word’s out you’re playing tonight.”

“Now it’s a party,” I say, forcing a grin. “That’s low, brother.”

“Tell you what, dude—after your set, I’ll give you another freebie brewski. Maybe even a Heineken.”

“A Heinie? Wow. Now you’re reaching for the top of the redneck shelf, my man.”

“True rednecks don’t drink Heineken. But what the hell—only the best for our favorite troubadour.”

But I’m no troubadour. I’m just a guy with a crap day job in a music store, a battered Fender Telecaster, an old Fender amp with some knobs missing, and music dreams greater than my ability to play them.

The thing about the second set is that it doesn’t matter all that much if I’m even sloppier than in the first one. For starters, my amp is dialed into this funky, fuzzy tone that’s muddy and if you nick strings that you shouldn’t, or flub a chord, the sound gets mostly covered by the distortion. Only another player—a good one—would probably hear the difference. The Filling Station isn’t exactly a teeming hotbed of great guitarists, and the audience is drunk. They just want some electric noise that resembles music. Dive bar ambience. I can supply that. Within limits.

A young blond gal in tight britches and a blue denim shirt freckled with sparkly sequins comes up to the little “stage,” which isn’t more than a carpeted bump in the linoleum floor, before I can even get myself situated and check the tuning of my guitar.

“How are you tonight, darlin’?” I say, careful to add the requisite twang to my voice.

“I’m doing just fine. How about you, Mr. Ben?”

“Just Ben, and, baby, I sort of have this here gig to do.”

She beams me her best urban cowgirl wannabe smile. It pushes her cheeks up and reminds me vaguely of a chipmunk.

“I heard your first set.”

I cringe slightly.

“Yeah, darlin’? Just how’d I do?”

“I reckon you did just fine.”

She glances up, suddenly aware of the track lighting. It highlights some brown roots on the crown of her head.

“Well, baby,” I say, “that’s gratifying for sure. I’m here for y’all. Two nights a week and no cover. How about them apples?”

She twists a lock of chemical blond hair between fingers.

“Do you play other places, Ben?”

I like how she lingered on my name, to tease. I shrug and grin like maybe I’m Jimi Hendrix used to babes making a fuss over me.

“Here and there, baby. I’m over at The Lamplighter in Glendale sometimes.”

“Yeah?” she says. “I’ve never been there.”

“Well, you ain’t missing much.”

“Maybe I need to broaden my horizons.”

“Maybe so. I couldn’t say. But I do have this gig to start, baby. Second set and all that.”

She cocks her head to the side in what I’m sure is her best seduction mode.

“Will you play me something by Glen Campbell? Pretty please?”

Now, I only know one song by old Glen—“Try a Little Kindness.” I lean far more to vintage rock and blues than country. But I got to give due where it belongs—old Glen is a mighty fine guitar player. Above my pay grade for sure. He lives here in Phoenix somewhere, so I hear. Not in my neighborhood. Old Glen lives in the other Phoenix.

I try to sound enthused.

“How about ‘Try a Little Kindness,’ sugar? Would that suit you?”

“That’d do me just fine.”

“Thought maybe it would.”

She winks “seductively” and brushes my elbow with her hand before heading back to her table. Once she sits down, I can barely make her out through the blue haze of cigarette smoke and dim amber house lights. That’s probably for the best.

For me as well as her.

I manage to get through “Try a Little Kindness” okay without any chord mishaps. It’s not a hard song to play. My voice won’t go as high as old Glen’s, but the natives won’t hold that against you so long as it resembles the original enough that they know it. The chemical blond—Darla—stood and clapped and then a few other folks politely joined in. It was the level of applause you might hear when someone gives a boring speech about farm tractors.

But then it happens. The inevitable in a bar like that: someone yells out, “Free Bird.”

Now, “Free Bird” is a legendary song by a legendary band. No doubt. Skynyrd was the top of the heap. Well, before their plane crashed, anyway, and Ronnie Van Zant went on to that great choir of singers in the sky. The song is the anthem for Redneck Nation.

But it gets played too much. It kind of loses its luster over time. Still, rednecks always want to hear it. They crave it. It somehow fills them up with, what—hope? It’s some sort of redneck emotional release, especially when they’re drunk. The song builds slowly, increases in intensity, and reaches an amazing crescendo. The first time you hear it, you’re blown away.

But that crescendo builds because of amazing guitar weaving by Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, and Steve Gaines (Steve didn’t make it out of the plane, either), and while I can play the chords, the solos are difficult. Beyond most of your average garage band guitarists. Old Allen plays the extended solo and it’s from another world. From beyond Mars. Behind Pluto, maybe.

If I could just play “Free Bird,” the way it’s supposed to be played, like Allen did, then my luck would maybe change. I do think that sometimes. Maybe I’d get my due and go on to play better gigs. Maybe even get noticed by an up-and-coming band needing another guitarist.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, baby.

Another voice emerges out of the blue haze of cigarette smoke: “Free Bird!”

“Not sure I know that one,” I say into the mic, chuckling to make sure they know I’m kidding. Like I said, I can’t quite make out that chemical blond through the haze and dim light, but I feel her eyes on me like twin spotlights boring in hot.

“Free Bird,” someone else yells.

I’m good and stuck now, with no real way out. I glance over at the bar and see Raphael. He’s stopped dunking glasses and leans against the counter, watching me as intently as I imagine everyone else out in the great blue haze is. I play a few random barre chords that don’t sound bad together, to get my hand going, warmed up, and then I launch into that little opening chord progression for the song—G to D to E minor. I play it slowly and thankfully it rings out clearly. I linger with it to really establish the song for them. And to buy time. Or waste time, depending on how you might view it.

I sing the slow, opening lyrics:

If I leave here tomorrow

Would you still remember me

But that’s not what everyone wants. Anticipation is the key to that song, but most drunk rednecks don’t do anticipation well. They want the payoff now. They crave deliverance from their dreary lives yesterday.

Free Bird! Free Bird! Free Bird!

I play that chord progression again. And again. I sense impatience growing in the room. There are murmurs, coughs, shuffling feet. It’s like I can play and hear every other sound in the room at the same time. Maybe that’s some sort of acoustic illusion.

Or delusion.

The moment is now irreversibly at hand, and I must face the consequences of having decided to try doing the song at all. After a few more times with the cutesy chord progression, I launch into what little I know of how Allen Collins plays on that record—that I know how to finger, anyway, and I hunker down into that solo groove and manage to go blind and deaf to the audience, just me and the guitar.

I play what I can of that solo over-and-over, faster-and-faster, and my deafness lifts enough that I hear some stomping feet and hands slapping tabletops in time. I keep playing what I know, which is only a fraction of what Allen truly plays. But repetition is kind of now on my side. That’s all the natives really want or need—something electric and repetitive.

Free Bird!

That it barely resembles what Allen plays no longer matters. It’s no longer about “Free Bird” the song. It’s all about “Free Bird” the idea, fueled by alcohol and dumbass cowboy hats and shiny boots and sparkly sequins. Freedom, I suppose, is what they somehow hear in my meager playing. Freedom from eight to five.

Freedom from life.

Then I surprise myself because I have run out of all the “Free Bird” I can play. I’ve milked that tiny, pretend solo as long and for as far as I can, even to a drunk redneck audience. I need a door out, a good exit that won’t make it seem like I just leaped off a teeter-totter, desperately trying not to crash and burn, and I find it in that one little genuine blues lick that I know well enough to play for anyone.

Thanks to a touch of vibrato and some timely bends, I can extend that lick quite a while and I run though it skillfully and it somehow manages to latch on to the end of what little “Free Bird” I was actually managing to play, and then, at a moment known to me only through instinct, I pull out of the riff, a long bend making it ring out, my exit as crisp and emphatic as a gymnast dismounting a balance beam with panache.

I leap to my feet, my Telecaster slung low like a weapon finally out of ammo, smoke curling from its barrel. It’s as quiet as a tomb. Not even a nervous cough. Someone claps, the loneliness of the sound momentarily embarrassing, and then the room erupts in hands clapping hard and even a few hoots and whistles. Drunk rednecks all now one voice, and I think it’s the loudest applause I’ve ever had.

Michael Loyd Gray is the author of ten published books of fiction and more than sixty published short stories. His novel The Writer in Residence (Between the Lines Publishing) was released in April 2026, and his story collection The Space Between Now and Then (Silent Clamor Press) will be released on May 22. Regal House will bring out his novel Emperor of the Mundane in 2027. Gray earned a MFA from Western Michigan University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois. His novella Donovan’s Revolution won a 2025 International Impact Award for Contemporary Fiction, a Literary Titan Gold Award, and a 2025 Book Excellence Award for Fiction. His 2019 novel, The Armageddon Two-Step, won a Book Excellence Award. In 2008, his first novel, Well Deserved, won the Sol Books Prose Series Prize. He was born in Arkansas, grew up in Illinois, and now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with three cats and a lot of electric guitars.

 Quadrophenia is my favorite album of all time.

Pete Townshend’s masterpiece was released by The Who in 1973, when I was a freshman at Transfiguration High School in Baltimore. For the next four years, I listened to it everyday, sometimes just a song or two, often all four sides. Preferably stoned.

When it wasn’t on the turntable in my parents’ basement it was in the glove compartment 8-track player of my father’s ’66 canary yellow Mustang. Turn on the radio, there it was, usually the single Love Reign O’er Me that closed the opera about a confused teenage boy finding his way outside his parents’ door.

It was always, as the lyrics said, “in my head” and there it remains a half-a-century later, atop the eight-to-the-bar foundation laid when I saw the Beatles on Sullivan about the time I learned to write my name.

Lead singer Roger Daltrey wonders, “Is it in my head or in my heart?”

Both; then, now, and forever.

Townshend was writing about the mod scene in London and Brighton Beach in 1963, and I was living it a decade later in Crabtown as a “freak” à la Zappa; hair too long to be a mod, Ziggy Stardust ascendent.

The parallels between myself, the story’s protagonist, Jimmy, and the kids I ran with were palpable. 

The opening cut—“The Real Me”—is a quintessential Townshend power-chord grenade. As a Gemini, I took it as my theme song. It speaks to joy and confusion, highs and lows, love and lust in concert with faith and doubt while introducing storylines unfolding in my home in real time.

Daltry roars, a cappella: “Can you see the real me? Can ya? CAN YA?”

Half a beat later, Pete’s ’59 Gretsch 6120 launches the song proper, chords entwined in cascading ribbons of John Entwistle’s bass. Behind it all—rocket and booster in one—the fury of drummer Keith Moon.

“I went back to my mother, I said, ‘I’m crazy Ma, help me,’” continues Daltrey. “She said, ‘I know how it feels son, cuz it runs in the family.’”

I’d been deep inside of Quadrophenia for months before my mother—nearing forty and buffeted by misfortune and tragedy in the lives of people she was close to—“tripped out,” as my father called it. It was a clean break with reality, the word bi-polar not yet commonplace.

Mom was taken somewhere while me and my brother Danny (two years younger than me, also a WHO fan) were at school. She was away for about a week, maybe two. We weren’t told where she was. Our Polish grandmother (Mom’s mom) came to take care of our youngest brother—my parents’ mid-life surprise—Victor, just a toddler, and keep an eye on me and Danny as best she could.

Among many lines from the double-LP that could have been lifted straight out of the Alvarez family script at the time circa was one line so apt that, although the album sold 1.2 million copies, I felt it was written for me alone.

“ . . . my dad just left for work, he wasn’t talking.”

This was rare for Dad, a cheerful-by-nature man given to happy whistling, rarely raising his voice. When the silent treatment was on it was usually because he’d “had it up to here,” with me, raising his right hand to the middle of his throat.

My shenanigans, I’m ashamed to admit, included dipping into the prescriptions Mom was given to stabilize her. The candy jar prize was that party treat, Quaalude, its name a combo of the words “quiet interlude.”

Jimmy—who celebrated “uppers and downers” in the memoir that was Quadrophenia—would have done the same.

I never questioned Dad’s decision not to tell us just what was going on. I was busy being sixteen years old, visiting the married woman down the street each day after school for a glass of milk and a slice of cherry pie, writing it all down (including transcribing the lyrics of Quadrophenia) in journals my folks apparently never read.

In the cul-de-sac where I came of age during Watergate, it seemed as though half the housewives were taking amphetamine marketed as diet pills while the other half swallowed Valium with tap water to handle wave after wave of Pleasant Valley Sundays.

We partook of both, staying up around the clock arguing the merits of The Who versus Led Zeppelin versus Robin Trower. As Jimmy proclaimed, “out on the street again, leaping along . . .”

A big weekend night with 10mg (robin’s egg blue) Valium would see me and a friend “coming to” with our dates in a church parking lot hours later, having traveled nowhere very slowly.

Against all of this—some he knew about, some he didn’t or didn’t say he did—Dad juggled an emotionally fragile wife who became mentally ill as if overnight; a couple of otherwise good sons who fled the house as often as possible; a toddler with no more idea of where his mother was than we did; his own septuagenarian parents; and a demanding job on the industrial waterfront that was anything but 9-to-5.

If I’d pondered Dad's choice not to let us in on the details of the crisis, I might have thought “What’s there to say?” Now with more than thirty years of sobriety, the answer is “everything.”

And then there’s the line that summed it all up: “Getting high you can’t beat it.”

Some twenty-five years after my teenage wasteland, I took my then sixteen-year-old daughter Amelia to London for a month, staying with a friend who worked as a foreign correspondent covering U.K. finance.

One Sunday afternoon, Amelia wanted to go to the huge flea market that is Portobello Road in Notting Hill. I brought a book and that summer’s journal—1997—and chose a bench with a good view of the passing world. I told her to have a look around and meet me at the bench in an hour.

As I sat reading and writing, I looked up to see a tall, bald-headed man with a large nose walk by with a take-out container of food.

“Pete?” I said.

The man stopped, “Yes?”

“Pete Townshend?”

“Yes.”

It was him, my hero long before I was old enough to realize that the tugboat engineer whom I’d long ago given fits was and always will be the true hero of my life.

“I LOVE YOU!”

Pete smiled and I stood up, nervous and babbling that I’d listened to Quadrophenia every day throughout high school, that it was my handbook for being a teenager but there was one line over which I’d stumbled for years.

“Which one?” he asked.

“Getting high, you can’t beat it.”

Townshend looked at the ground and said he’d been trying to “make amends” for his celebration of drugs for some time. Anyone with passing knowledge of recovery knows that “amends” is code for figuring your shit out.

“I’ve got seven years,” I said.

“I’ve got four,” said Pete, lighting up. “How ’bout an ’ug.”

And there we were—me five foot seven, Townshend an even six feet—hugging in the middle of London on a bright summer day.

I told him I was a writer from America and he invited me to his home around the corner for an interview. But my daughter was due to meet me at the bench and—in a world without cell phones—would have no way of finding me.

“I’m sorry,” I said and watched the King of the Mods disappear into the crowd.

Rafael Alvarez is the author of the Orlo and Leini tales set in twentieth-century, ethnic East Baltimore. He’s currently writing a biography of the New York City bluesman Robert Ross, and can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.

TVBR Weekly Reader—Rock ’n’ Roll

Do you have a Rock ’n’ Roll album that changed your life and influenced how you still listen to music? Or, an album that’s become indelibly connected with a time and place in your life? Write it down (up to 2,500 words), and if you think it says something TVBR editors would like to share with our readers, submit it here on our Submittable portal!