I could have been in some dark bar in Nashville, well on my way to oblivion with my 5th Whiskey, crying into my glass about my broken heart or the man who-dunned-me wrong, though I was sober and at the moment not suffering from a broken heart. It was the evening itself that conjured up these feelings and imagery for me, as that was the vibe at Peri’s Silver Dollar in Fairfax on Thursday night (1/8/2009) during the monthly Singer/Songwriters in The Round and I felt it my job and my privilege to embody that ideal. This whiskey-drinking lineup consisted of Rusty Evans (Ring of Fire) , Danny Uzilevsky (Chrome Johnson), Rahman D’Amato (5 Minute Orgy) and Darren Nelson (Honeydust); 4 gritty, edgy men with sordid pasts who sang about lost love, loose women, politics and trains.

With the night falling on Elvis’s birthday (and, as we know, he may or may not be living it up in Vegas, depending if the rumors of his continued life are true), Danny decided to start his performance by singing Elvis’s “Long Black Train”, with the rest of the boys backing him up with all their various guitar styles. Rusty Evans continued the Elvis vein and sang “That’s All Right” while the young man who is his son, Danny U, took it up on slide guitar; I felt like I was in Graceland.

With the Elvis festivities over and done with in two songs, the evening started to get rowdy when Rahman cranked out his rock-star-on-acoustic version of himself and played some great songs about politics, ladies and love, both the good kind and the bad kind.

Darren Nelson, who by the way, helped me to appreciate the combination of white dress shoes with tattoos, sang with soulful assurance that life with whiskey and a gun is a good way to go. Also on the stage to facicilitate the beat was Ring of Fire drummer Chris Lockeed. It was a dream to hear Chris, Rusty and Danny harmonize and play together in such a comfortable way.

With all the songs about trains evoking images of sorrowful loners, drunks and the hope of something better up the tracks, I started to imagine what each of these four incredible singer-songwriter-musicians would be if they were a type of train:

Rusty would be a slow crawling diesel coal-train creeping through Nashville at midnight, it’s sad whistle heard all the way to the hearts of the heartbroken.

Danny would be another coal-car train but he’d be rumbling and threading his way in the wee hours of the morning through Texas, the whiskey hangover still present in the mind of the driver.

Darren would be a long, meandering cargo train with lots of boxcars filled with poets, loners and hobos heading through the heartland of Nebraska.

Rahman would be a sleek, high speed passenger train running between LA and NY and filled with pretty and fancy ladies playing strip poker.

(By the way, I used "whiskey" 5 times! Six if you include this last line.)