Lucky

Lucky Peterson works the crowd at the Starlight, June 8, 2012

We're lucky for a lot of reasons in Waterloo Region, one of them our deep connection to blues music and its best performers.
Last night, too few of us took advantage of this good fortune when Lucky Peterson came to town.
It's not that the audience at Waterloo's Starlight Social Club didn't appreciate Peterson's high-energy performance, a show rounded out by his wife Tamara's soulful vocals, and Waterloo native Shawn Kellerman's stellar-as-always guitar-playing.
It's just that the crowd was too small to really catch fire, thus denying the bluesman and his band a decent payback of energy.
More crucially, the crowd was probably too small to have generated the kind of income a professional musician not only deserves, but relies on to pay his band and cover touring costs.
So it was with some angst that Peterson, who is 47 and has been performing since he was 3, addressed the crowd during the show's last two songs.
"We've got CDs and T-shirts for sale," he said, and then he said it again.
As the blues fans filed out to be replaced by a much younger dance crowd, I approached the bar to get my wife a glass of water. I sensed someone to my right, and when I looked, it was Lucky Peterson.
After we shook hands and I thanked him for a great show, he looked at me intently and, with a hint of exasperation, told me that "no one's buying any CDs."
He drained his can of Bud in as little time as it took him to order it, then returned to the stage to gather his gear. To get there, he had to run a gauntlet of young women dancing to the DJ, essentially oblivious to the big man in the shiny jacket,  not to mention his musical achievements.
I mentioned our conversation to my wife and, chastened by Peterson's words, we bought a CD. We then found him in the shadows at the side of the stage, where he sat heavily, winding cable with practised hands.
"Peace," he wrote on the CD liner, then made sure we found his wife so that she could sign it, too.
The dance beat thrummed on, the young women still oblivious as we left to walk home.
Sometimes, I guess, we don't know how lucky we are.

Sign on a tavern wall in Tweed, Ont., June 2010