All music mattered after 9/11.

In 2001, I ran an open mic night at a local music club. Sept. 13 was the usual night and the owners debated having the open mic night at all that week. I told them to go ahead. That night we had more people come in and sign up to play music than to sit and listen. One person came in and sang "Imagine" by John Lenon acapella.

2 days before, I was the classic stereotype of a musician. Asleep face down in the pillow with guitar beside me on the bed. My girlfriend ran into the bedroom and woke me up yelling that the world trade center had been hit. With the rest of the world, I watched as the second tower was hit, the pentagon was hit and Flight 93 went down. For the first time that I know of, cable tv stations were going dark. QVC went off the air, MTV and various other music stations switched to the newscasts of their parent companies.

When the announcement that all flights were grounded and U.S. airspace was locked down, I went in to work at the local newspaper. It was my day off, but I knew we were going to be putting something out about it. I would've worked for free that day.

10 years later, some things fade from memory... What I was wearing, what I did when I got off work. One thing I do remember is not playing any music for two days.

I had nothing to say through music. At the open mic night, I can't remember what I played. I do remember letting other musicians borrow my guitars for a few songs. I remember one large jam at the end of the night for one reason. No one said anything. Drums were beat, guitars and bass were strummed, piano, flute, harmonica and sax got in on the action. The music was upbeat and normally a spoken word poet or a freestyle rapper would jump on the mic, but not that night.

Maybe for that brief time, everything that needed to be said could be done by a note or a chord. A minor, F, C, G. On Sept. 13, that was how a bunch of musicians talked to each other. That was a great conversation.

*image from CNN

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