Donna Summer’s Billboard Hot 100 number one hit single “Love Hangover” plays over the scratchy speakers of Woodstock’s beloved dive bar, Liquid Blues. If the world has a quintessential blueprint for small town watering holes, this is it. The bar is in a basement, smells like french fries (even though the kitchen has been out of commission since its roof caved in two years ago), the floors are sticky, ochre cakes of vomit litter the sidewalk outside, and a cast of usual suspects (“regulars” as they are known in taverns across America) bruise their elbows on the mahogany countertops like flies sucking the citric acid from a grapefruit’s teet.

I’d be remiss to come off as superior to these disheveled heroes, for here I am among them with my fists hugging the warm second half of a cheap beer. My back aches from a four hour slouch and my breath reeks like antihistamines. The bartender asks if I’d like another.

She’s sweet, forever young, and untouchable beyond the sloppy miles of countertop.

“Hit me,” I say.

Donna Summer sings like some Kewpie doll from the bottom of a Great Soul Canyon:

“If there’s a cure for this

I don’t want it, I don’t want it.”

I have no clue what the song is but I’m in love. Donna’s voice is a healing powder; some mystic dust sold to you cheap by a gypsy merchant. Her singing is almost free and I, like a snake charmed from its basket, wiggle in my chair as the drink arrives. My confusion about the song is assuaged however, when the baddest, raddest, histrionic, super sonic, double fisted, legend misted, lean, mean, Pabst Blue Ribbon drinking machine, and top of his class ace scholar of the Billboard’s Hot 100 charts walks in — Tony Jackson.

He isn’t much to look at… at first.

Maybe 5 feet 4 inches, unassuming, with sad searching eyes, and a posture like grilled asparagus; he presents like another “regular.” Nobody takes notice as he strolls in. The jingle bells on the door make a shrill splash, but otherwise it’s all pool breaks and broken bottles. Another night at the fated Blues.

Tony doesn’t talk to you. You talk to Tony.

He gets a beer and sits at a table facing away from all the action – if you could even call it that. Not much happens in this country bumpkin town, even in a spot as self-aggrandizing as Woodstock; what with its Bill Murray worship and cobblestoned ornamentation. Still, it’s one hell of a place to find yourself alone.

I sidle up to Tony and point at the speakers. He knows exactly what I mean.

“Oh,” he says, gulping his tallboy. “Have I got a story for you.”

Tony Jackson was born in 1962 in West Chicago. He grew up listening to music — records, radio, and blues quartets playing inside barbershops.

“It’s the movement of sounds,” he says. “Every time I feel it, it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”

His single mother raised him.

There isn’t much he can remember. It’s all about the noise, the changing melodies of every era. Brenton Wood’s “Oogum Boogum” electrifying his hips to squiggle atop of his uncle’s Chevrolet Camaro, or the gated drums revving up David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” changing the way he thinks about percussion in a song’s mix. Music has sheltered his life.

“Freak to freak,” he confesses to me after many a crushed lager. “There’s no place in this world for guys like us. Well, maybe there’s one.”

Guys like us. I’m flattered to be thought of as a freak. There aren’t enough.

It’s possible not many people would know Tony if it weren’t for his miraculous ability to recall the Billboard’s number one hit song on the day you were born. Go ahead, approach him and tell him your birthdate. Take a trip down memory lane.

But he isn’t a circus monkey. Show some respect and buy him a drink.

It may take a minute, sure, and he may even get the first guess wrong. I’ve seen it with many friends and relatives (hopefully not showing my “regular-ness” at Liquid Blues) but he will get it right. The man knows his music.

Donna Summer sings:

“Think about it all the time

Never let it out of my mind.”

We are seated at our table facing nobody in the bar. The lady has hollered, “last call” and the lights are up. It’s a miracle my head is still hovering above my shoulders. A ruin of crushed cans lay before us.

“Where is your home?” I ask him.

He laughs his laugh. It is guttural and infectious. Suddenly, we are all the butt of some joke. Who’s joke? Nobody knows. But we are all somehow in on it as his high-pitched cackle fills the room.

“Check this track out, man,” he says and walks to the jukebox.

Kraftwerk’s “Hall of Mirrors” comes sludging through the speakers. It is a slow, minor key dirge as performed by retro German synthesizers.

“The young man stepped into a hall of mirrors

Where he discovered a reflection of himself.”

The bar almost immediately clears out. It is just Tony and I and the bartender wiping down tables as the song marches on.

“Sometimes he saw his real face

And sometimes a stranger at his place.”

We know the bartender, or rather, she knows us, or rather, she knows we tip well, and so another shot is poured, and another clinking of glasses.

“He fell in love with the picture of himself

And suddenly the picture was distorted.”

The mechanical tenor of arpeggiated synthesizers bounce off the corners of the basement tavern. We discover ourselves swaying in a trance of electronic noises.

“He made up the person he wanted to be

And changed into a new personality.”

We are listening, together in a bar, alone in our souls. He asks me, “Is this weird, man?”

“No,” I say. “I love this song.”

“This slow, droney music, man,” he says. “It is weird, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but that’s why we drink at Liquid Blues.”

That great laugh of his. It’s an invitation to “the party.” The one that can only happen inside of one’s head.

He laughs, “This weird, droney music, man. Now… now I am home.”

A song doesn’t cost a dime. There are no rents or mortgages for music. Any noise really, the growl of a motorcycle, the hymn of a morning dove, it is free — God-given.

Tony is free. He doesn’t need four walls and a rooftop. He doesn’t need warm arms to welcome him home. The music is his chapel. Songs are his God, his love, his Sunday soul. He is a savant living amongst the cynical empiricism of today, reminding us that every tune is a portal to our hearts.

So, roll another number, Tony Jackson. Keep those tracks a-spinnin’.