It's moments like that that makes lives worth living. It is the thing that you can get up and look forward to, that for once in your life you're not going to be just another face walking by.
Like I said, he's there every week, and I'll wager he'll be there tonight, up on the rickety stage the fat, red faced man running it handing him the microphone and the hush over the whole room as they wait, an electric hum penetrating the slack-jawed silence that hails the first tinny beats of the intro. Then, Boom-chicky-boom-chicky-boom-chicky-boom......'You keep sayin' you got something for me...(boom-chicky-boom-chicky...)...something you call love but con-fess...' and in a moment all those boots in that dingy, crammed bar are walking like never before, and shrill whistles stab the fuzzy air, a great cheer goes up, muffled to the street outside, and it's manly pats on his back and 'You go son', until he drifts to the bar and blends back in. Back into the little overlooked hole he fills day after day, you know he's there but you don't notice him, and you think that if one day that little hole was empty who would actually notice until it was too late. So he has to get up there and sing those songs because that way they won't forget him, that way he won't just be one more poor old, lonely drunk only remembered in pity and the obituary, 'piece of the furniture, he was'. In that bar he's alive, he means something.