Great November

It was a random Thursday evening.  Back in 2003, maybe ’02, a few friends and I went to our usual Thursday night bar, The Shamrock.  The Shamrock is one of those dirty little bars that you would never want to tell your parents you go to.  It isn’t the worst of the worst, but it is pretty bad.  You leave smelling like stale beer and cigarette smoke, but you are guaranteed to have a good time, since that is the only perk of the place.  Thursday nights are Reggae nights.  It is open-mic, so you can hear some great stuff, or some really bad stuff.  This Thursday was special.  We were sitting at a table a little to the left of the room facing the stage.  There were maybe 15 other people in the place.  Since there were so few people in the room, everyone in the room noticed when two HUGE guys walked in with this other small guy wearing an over coat.  We couldn’t really see who it was, but we joked that they were football players, which in Gainesville, FL, is highly-probable. 

 After a couple of people, the little guy that came in with the two huge guys got up and walked towards the stage.  It was dark so we still couldn’t tell who he was, but he gets up to the stage and asks in a heavy Haitian accent what he needed to do to get on the list.  The lights by the stage were on him, and we immediately knew he was, Wyclef Jean.  He was very polite and insisted that he got on the bottom of the list.  Fortunately, there were only a couple people ahead of him and they played very quick sets (except for this one guy who insisted on playing as long as he could).  Wyclef walked to the stage when it was his turn again, he didn’t have a guitar, and asked to borrow one.  People flew to find their guitars.  He started to play his set, an acoustic set.  He was in town for a show the following night at a major venue.  It was the greatest show I had ever seen.