Last Friday’s singing telegram gig was rough.

The air conditioning went out in my car, which is not ideal in August. I drove to Harrodsburg with the windows down and a birthday balloon bouncing around inside the car.

Somewhere along the way, the Hershey bar I was supposed to deliver melted.

The data stopped working on my phone Wednesday night. I spent hours on the phone with Verizon tech support, which took away from practice time. It still wasn’t fixed.

No data meant no navigation, and I didn’t know my way around Harrodsburg well enough to wing it. Dad saved my ass by letting me use his old Garmin GPS.

Remember those?

With the Garmin leading the way, I made an emergency stop at Dollar General to replace the melted Hershey bar and continued on to the gig.

The assignment included “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley.

I had learned it the day before.

This seemed perfectly reasonable because my runthroughs at home had been legendary performances.

Then I played it in front of actual people.

I absolutely butchered it.

There’s a strange phenomenon that occurs in music where you can play something perfectly fifteen times in your living room and then suddenly lose all understanding of the guitar the moment another human being is watching.

I played the chorus of “We Are the Champions” by Queen, fulfilling the song requests.

Elvis to the rescue.

I launched into “That’s All Right,” a song I know quite well, just to prove that I didn’t suck.

Fortunately, nobody seemed to care.

The family was happy. The birthday boy was sufficiently embarrassed, which was the whole point. His little sister was rocking out.

So maybe I didn’t butcher the gig after all.

That day, rock & roll meant driving through Kentucky with no air conditioning, following an old Garmin GPS, carrying a Dollar General Hershey bar, and Rickrolling a stranger on his birthday.

And you know what?

They laughed. The kid rocked out. I got paid to play guitar.

Then I put everything back in the car, rolled down the windows, and started the hot drive home.

It’s a mighty long way down rock & roll.