"The Map Room was a place where any band, no matter how rinky-dink, could book a show. My band, The Living Room, had played there countless times, blasting out ear-shattering rock and roll for whomever wandered in from the street. There was no set time to stop; the bartenders didn’t have anything better to do than to listen to you, and there was no management to pull the plug."

Aaron Brame, a Memphis writer and musician, has written a book about his experience playing in The Great Depression, a Memphis garage band that relocated to Baltimore and attempted to tour the nation and make it in the rock world. Aaron’s book is insightful while at the same time humorous. The book is available at local bookstores around town or by contacting Aaron Brame directly. Here is an excerpt from the book titled ‘Great Depression: The Rise and Fall of a Mediocre Rock Band.’

~ • ~

Great Depression: The Rise and Fall of a Mediocre Rock Band
By Aaron Brame

I don’t remember what brought me to the Map Room that night, but I remember I was drunk. And I had to piss.

I walked down the dingy stairs to the decrepit cellar of the club and was accosted by a guy in a cowboy shirt who had tattoos all up and down his arms and longer sideburns even than me.

“Hey, man,” he said. “You play piano, don’t you? For the Living Room?”

“Yeah. That’s me.” It must be said I was a bit flattered.

“I tell you what, man,” he said. “It would be cool if you wanted to come sit in with us at our next show. We’re playing at Barristers.”

I paused, a bit wary of bands that wanted piano players. I’d met a lot of them.

“What’s the name of your band?” I asked.

“The Bicycle Thief.”

“OK. I’ll do it.”

And so I joined a band simply because they were named after one of my favorite movies. The story of the Bicycle Thief would unfold over the next year and a half. Dale became my best friend and most trusted colleague for roughly a year and a half. I moved to a city I had never visited in order to play with him, traveled 4,000 miles and dropped a fortune on the road trying to make our little dream come true. We enjoyed some great success in certain arenas, crushing defeats in others, and in the end, the band, our friendship, and our goals disintegrated in one beautiful acoustic show that we played in a sushi bar in Southwest Baltimore.

This is our story.

~ • ~

The Map Room was a little 24-hour coffee shop on the long mall of Main Street, in Memphis. They sold some damn fine coffee if you were to drop in during the day, and plenty of bottles of beer if you were off work or just had to have a cold one. The building was built on three floors in 1890, on what was once the bustling heart of downtown Memphis. When you walked in the Map Room, it was cool and quiet, with businessmen sipping coffees or munching sandwiches next to punk rockers wearing chains. The walls were bookcases, filled to the ceiling with volumes for sale on consignment from the only real independent bookseller in town. A tiny stage was at one end, and the whole thing was encased in enormous windows that looked out onto the mall, where the trollies crawled by under the oppressive tedium of downtown life. The ceiling, however, was the coolest thing about the place. Set into the baby-blue plaster were twenty-four ornate white ovals, each containing a bas-relief cameo of a naked women.

By the time I was finishing college, the Map Room was a place where any band, no matter how rinky-dink, could book a show. They had music there damn near every night of the week, and with four or five acts on any single bill, it was easy to get yourself on there. My band, The Living Room, had played there countless times, blasting out ear-shattering rock and roll for whomever wandered in from the street. There was no set time to stop; the bartenders didn’t have anything better to do than to listen to you, and there was no management to pull the plug.

At the back of the club was a sunken staircase, which lead to a filthy basement with floors that were once made of white tile but now were a dull grey due of the packed cigarette ashes and beer and unrelenting footprints that had covered it for years. From there, you’d turn a corner to a claustrophobic set of unisex bathrooms, with no soap in the sink but plenty of graffiti on the walls. It smelled of urine and disinfectant down there, and also of old, old building. This basement is where I met Dale when he asked me to join The Bicycle Thief.

“The Bicycle Thief” was a cool-ass name. Vittorio De Sica’s film, The Bicycle Thief, had always been one of my most beloved films, and I assumed that if this guy with the sideburns liked it as well, joining his band seemed to make sense. Also, I thought it was pretty punk to join a band because of a 1947 Italian movie.^[1]

The guy with the sideburns was named Dale, and he showed me where they practiced. On one side of the nasty basement was a dark wooden wall with a padlocked door in the middle. He set the combination on the padlock, clicked it off, and pushed the five-foot door open.

Inside was a shocking mess of musical instruments, cigarette butts, liquor bottles, and filthy detritus all over the place. The trash was stacked against the walls, into the corners, and on top of a red sofa that had been collecting dust for twenty years at least. One bare bulb swung from the ceiling over a drum kit. Everything else was dirt-packed carpets and disused furniture. There was perhaps a four or five foot square that had been cleared with someone’s foot. There was just room enough against one of the walls for my electric piano.

A few days later, after my poetry workshop, I showed up for rehearsal. I was shocked to be introduced to a forty-year old drummer and a nineteen year-old cello player. There was no bass player in sight. And I was also shocked to find that I would not be playing piano for these guys. Dale handed me a flat lap steel guitar with a splintered bridge.

“I can’t play this.”

“You’ll figure it out. It’s a 1957 Gibson. I got it at Rod and Hank’s for 350. How fucking cool is that?”

“Do you know how to tune it?”

“Tuning, schmooning,” he said in his get the hell outta here voice, which he augmented with a Bojangles dance.

I sat and listened to a few numbers. Dale wrote sad, sparse songs with tempos so slow as to be nearly unchartable. There was no tapping of one’s feet to this music, which was a hundred and eighty degree difference from the rowdy, too-drunk rock and roll piano that I had been playing for the last few years. Still, though, there was something pleasing about his music. It demanded a bit of an attention span, and then paid off with satisfying idiosyncrasy—the cello going crazy up and down the neck, some rudimentary march rhythms, or Dale screaming his head off into the microphone to a slow, slow drum beat.

I felt awkward down there, listening to them run through completed songs. Where was my place in this odd band? We had less than a week to practice before I was going to play with them, and I was sitting there with an instrument I had never played before. I didn’t find this amusing.

“Dale,” I said, “I don’t have a slide on me. How do you expect me to play this?”

Fortunately for him, the practice room was crammed to claustrophobia with trashed, forgotten and destroyed musical equipment. He found an old Danelectro guitar in one corner and ripped the pickup from the body. He handed it to me. It was steel, smooth, in the form of an oversized lipstick tube. I pulled off the wires hanging from it and used it to play my new instrument.

¹I found out later that he had never seen the film and, as far as I understand, he still hasn’t.