Time
Paul Prue at Strange Brew

He says his guitar's a time machine: a steel guitar, old and ornate and strange, glinting red in the dim light. I don't know; it could be. The notes twirl out of it, fat and sweet and falling in long slow spirals, pure and deliberate blues.

I've been chasing music all week-strange, since the city's full of it. Went to Chantilly's but Chantilly's was closed, locked down by the police. I was at The Bomb Shelter on Wednesday when Dying Fetus and Kataklysm packed the place, but I was only there for a few minutes-had someplace else I had to be. Friday the lines were crazy all around town, with everyone being careful about capacity since the Rhode Island fire, and I didn't have the stamina to wait.

Now it's Sunday and I'm at Strange Brew; should have started here, maybe, since they have so much music, music made here every day. Paul Prue is working the blues from the center of the room. The train has stopped. People talk, but also listen.

Between songs Prue talks about history, the history of songs and people, as if talking about history was the most natural thing, as if we all casually chat about the 1930s while we're waiting in line at CVS. He smiles and laughs while he talks as if he's flirting with the audience, his black cap slung low over his forehead. Then he launches off into another ancient blues tune, each, in his hands, as bright and new as the stained-glass windows he makes during the day.

Every bar has a few followers, and some are like little communities. Strange Brew, though-people love this place. Just being here makes them happy, and sometimes they talk about it even when they're not here.

Tonight the crowd is skewed a little older than usual, more late-middle-aged, here to have a few drinks with their friends or their spouses, get something to eat. Listen to some blues.

Prue plays an amazing Willie Brown song from 1923, a song that spins wildly out of his shining metal guitar, a low, crazy dervish of a song. The next song is calmer, plunking and crooning. Then more history.

Manchester, with its struggling cover bands and shifty DJs, with its grunge and metal fandom and Cher ad nauseum, with its dance clubs and Irish bands and jazz quartets and occasional women's chorus, is a part of that history.

There was an act before Prue, and there's a band coming on after. I wish I could stay.

-Dave Karlotski

Dave Karlotski can be reached at hippo@hippopress.com.