Rock Gods #300: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

You can’t say it wasn’t as advertised. “An Evening of Acoustic Guitar With a Guy Who Can Barely Play” featured Barry Blitz—the aging punk once known as Sonny Blitt—attempting solo renditions of punk and hard-core tunes he’d written decades earlier.

“for this show,” Barry announced, “I really do wish I could play guitar better. But if I could, these songs would never have been written. I’d rather be known for the dozen bad punk songs than the immortally lousy prog rock operas.”

Here, here. The show was decidedly ramshackle. We stopped counting broken strings at seven. It got so bad that Barry had borrowed, and snapped at least one string, on every guitar in the joint; those generous singer-songwriters who were scheduled to play after him were frantically restringing and tuning—but not too obviously, lest Barry borrow and bother their axes again.

Acoustic chaos, verily. But the joy of this stop-start-smash-grab set was in seeing Sonny Blitt settle into himself. There was a time when Sonny was the most solipsistic, self-centered, shamelessly self-promoting music-ass in the scene. But time wounds all heels, and the erstwhile leader of the Blats has appreciably mellowed.

Sonny Blitt is the guy who, when his band disbanded under him a few years ago, took it upon himself to spraypaint “Sonny Blitt is God” on club walls and alleyways around town. He had a ways to fall, vanity-wise.

This night, he hadn’t dyed his hair orange, or pierced his cheek, or done his nails, as in the old days. He had no band behind him to berate. He had no handmade merch to hawk, no home-recorded tapes or disks to push. He had two new songs, one of which was called “Nu Sawng” and the other “Newer Song.” The Blats oldies

“I don’t care anymore,” Barry informed me after the set, with characteristic emphatic repetitiveness. “I just don’t care. Don’t care, me. I just want to play. Play. Play my songs. My songs. Play my fucking songs.”

Then he passed out.