Last night I went there to see a friend's band play, and we stood outside on the occasion of the Leposavic saint day, drinking Jelen out of cans and eating pleskavica out of a perfectly greasy paper wrapper. My friend's band setlist is chosen for the masses but the musicians are really top notch, including my favorite kind of bassist, perfectly in-the-pocket, dead-on drums and dueling guitarists with chops. Some of these guys would be heroes of the scene in Houston, heroes for their pure devotion to their sounds and instruments.
I've long ago gotten used to hearing thickly accented Kenny Rogers and Stevie Wonders as they might have sounded muffled and ringing harshly behind an iron curtain. Still this singer has a different problem, one of not really understanding all the words, and instead substituting wordlike phrases and sounds into lyrically critical moments, so that when he says, “Please allow me to intro doom ice elf, I'm a man of wealth and taze...” I am disappointed, yes: disappointed, and I find it hard to believe that he is anything like the devil. But this is just me, my feelings, not those of their crowd of entertainment-starved teens, and this band stood in front of the municipality building hammering out hits while five-year-olds in party dresses performed somersaults in the grass behind them, and they honored Saint Vasily Ostorzhsky with energetic performances of works by Lenny Kravitz, and Eric Clapton and other minor poets of distortion and assorted junkies, while the night previously, as has happened for more or less three hundred years, high on a cliff in Montenegro, the box containing his relics was opened and the Saint was honored for his anti-Papal fervor and Turk-evading dedication with the presentation of a new pair of shoes.
After a while we were distracted by friends, who convinced us to walk with them up those streets graffitied “New Serbia” to a club named for Belgian comic book character cowboy Lucky Luke and it was a tiny place, the walls covered in wooden beer signs like any pub in England but unusual here, and crammed with people. In the very back there were three musicians, at least I think they were musicians. The singer and guitarist might easily be mistaken for a homeless man, and the percussionist might just as easily be mistaken for a clerk at a New Age shop selling healing crystals and tarot cards, and the accordionist might simply have been a football hooligan, but they were hammering out well imagined remakings of plenty of classic material, Johnny Cash twice even, and the audience was jumping and singing along, and pretty soon so were we. This fellow's accent was strong but the words were meaningful—I agreed with him, yes, I thought: Viva Las Vegas, and this gaunt-cheeked bearded homeless man did seem to know full well what it was to have fallen into a ring of fire, and his deep understanding gave me pause during which I might be forgiven for wondering how this place came to be here, and just when Nova Serbia was founded, and where it had been for the last three years, and where I had been for the last three years too, and just how did I come to be here, in this unusual place within unusual places.
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