A late Valentine...True Stories 5 blog
Category: Life

  No deep analysis here.  Just my reading for True Stories 5, the theme of which was "Love Blows"...

I'm so damn happy.   It's hard to write about bad love when you're as happy as me.  The woman to whom I am married, in eternal bliss, is Julie.  We are happy.  We are truly, truly, deeply happy.   She did throw a stool at me, twice, but there was alcohol involved, and I deserved it.  You might wonder how I got to this forever-satisfied, yoda-like austerity of the soul, this gleefully level-headed cool, calm disposition.  Well, I can't give Julie credit, though she is an angel.

No, It's something about going from getting the bad love to giving the good.  Sure, it's nauseating to be around such pure bliss, but stop the urge to puke on each other, dear ones.  For I've had enough bad love to sink the hopes of a stadium full of Obama supporters.   Here's a small taste.

Bad love from Monica, horse girl.  It's 1980.  I am 13.  We live in a subdivided orange orchard.  The local kids have fruitfights, like snowball fights, only using last year's rotten oranges, green-mold-covered bombs, as ammunition.  We run mean-spiritedly through the rows like colonial soldiers,  I'm with the nerdy kids.  Our fort is a pit dug into the hardpan in the old orchard, full of hotwheels and disassembled radios.  The other team has a bigger, deeper, fort, and it contains a stack of hardcore magazines.  When I sneak into the opposition's fort and flip through "Loose Lips & Rumps," I am mystified by what grownup men do to grownup women.   

Around this time, my love life is developing at breakneck speed.  I have recently discovered the pleasures and sins of onanistic exploration.  An only child, i believe masturbation to be my own personal invention, so I brag about it to my nerd pals one day, explaining: "If you hold your hand like this, and move it like this, you won't believe what happens – it feels so weird!"   They ridiculed me all summer for this; this is the last time I talk about doodling the noodle for many years.

At 13, I never stop thinking about Monica, from my bus stop, with the perfect feathered hair.   Afternoons, she plays football with boys in the horse-training ring right by the road.  Every day I try to work up the nerve to sit next to her on the bus but never do.  One day when I'm running from an orange battle our paths cross in the dirt service road behind the orchard.  She is on horseback.  I risk taking a slopper in the back of the head by looking up at her, into the sun, where the cotton, sweaty blouse allows passage of enough light for me to make out the peach fuzz on nape of her neck, the form of her arms and shoulders.

            Monica, will you go around with me?

            No, I'm going around with Andy.

            Oh yeah.  What about after that – if you stop going around with Andy, will you go around with me?

            Yeah, I guess. 

            But we never went around.  She went around with Duane after Andy, soon we all started calling it something else.  Monica avoided me after that & we never spoke.

            At this time, Julie Sparling, love of my life, is participating in a 7^th grade speech contest at the Plymouth Michigan Optimists' society meeting.  I won't meet her for 25 yrs.

Susan, the bottle blonde.  1988.  Age 21.

I called her after class.  Susan, my sexually adventurous girlfriend, didn't answer the phone at her apartment, which should have screamed "stay away."  I was too smitten to hear it.   In a playful chat by phone the night before, we had discussed "seeing other people."  It turns out I had missed the messages sent during that negotiation.  To me, love was truth.  I had faith in love like Yoko had faith in John, like Paul & Linda.  We had it all, just like Bogie and Bacall. 

Susan had said, If you really love me, and if I really love you, then no one can come between us, and this whole declaration of monogamy isn't necessary.  So let's not declare.  Perfectly logical.  Anyway, I thought we had reached a deep connection through the wire that night, because just after our talk, Susan shocked me by saying she was thinking she really wanted to "try anal."   She was such an adventurer!

I held this thought nervously the next day as I trudged through cinder gray slush, past the railroad tracks dividing campus from town, through the Safeway parking lot, to her apartment complex.  I knocked on her door and HE answered.  The grittier, better-looking, long-haired gypsy / graphic designer / coke dealer. 

He put up a hand, twitched his nose, "…look  …dude".  I was speechless for a few seconds, and then tears welled up.  He closed the door and I collapsed in a histrionic fit of quiet, pathetic weeping, leaning against the fake brick in front of her apartment.  I eavesdropped through the poorly constructed wall. 

    Could he tell we were…

    yeah, I think so

    well, what did he say?

    nothing.  I thought he was going to, you know, freak, but he just started crying.

    Crying?  (She laughed).

I'm late for work, a Thursday night covers gig at Sully's restaurant.  I sing every broken hearted love song I know, The Cure's "Pictures of You," Jim Croce's "Photographs & Memories," Ringo Starr's "Photograph", John Prine's "They Oughta Name a Drink after You."  

The waitress working the section next to where I'm playing is also the lead singer in a grunge/hippy band very popular in Michigan.  The local papers call her " a Sensual powerhouse."  But I won't actually meet her for another 14 years.

Worse love, with Pizza.  San Francisco, 1992.

I am twenty-five.  Melissa, my ex-fiance, is an olive-skinned bohemian, special ed teacher.  She likes henna tattoos and has a statue of nefertiti.  We moved from Michigan to San Francisco together but have called off the wedding after "the Patrick Swayze revelation."  It's really the stupidest thing you ever heard:  Melissa has dragged me to see Ghost, which is a stupid movie.  In the stupid scene where Demi Moore's stupid character is working with some clay, and Patrick Swayze's character's ghost makes love to her, I look over at Melissa, who is sobbing intensely. 

It's not that sad of a scene – what's the matter?

It's just that….it reminds me of times with John (Her Ex, a guy I don't know but recognize because he was the head of the Michigan cheerleading squad.  A gymnast, yes he looks like Patrick Swayze). 

Well, this is information I just shouldn't possess.  But that's not even the "Patrick Swayze Revelation" yet.  That comes a few months later, when I come home early, to find my bride-to-be in bed with Patrick Swayze. 

Stupidly, we decide to keep sharing an apartment.  We have frequent, joyless sex, and fight almost constantly.  More fighting, more fucking.  In our grueling, near silent coital chore, we commit to the task for inhumanly long sessions without ever coming.  It is by far the worst sex any two people have ever had.  She leans back, closes her eyes, and proceeds as if her goal were to use the coarse locks of her private region to erase me, ineptly rubbing away our pain, literally sanding away at the bare facts of our lot.   I am a musician and she a teacher, living in SF, where I posit that rent-control is a factor in a real psycho-economic endemic: no doubt thousands of young couples are having terrible sex because they can't afford their own apartments! 

After,   the silence festers until the doorbell rings.  I jump up to grab my wallet. 

I ordered a pizza

You what?

You know, the round, doughy thing covered with grease and cheese?

Shut up!  Real classy, that's Romantic.  This is why we don't flow!

              No need to be bitchy about it – it's the one thing you said we could afford to eat.

"You called me a bitch" she huffs as she pulls her turtleneck over her thick black hair.  I hate turtlenecks.  I then engage in the oldest, stupidest argument ever: 

"I didn't call you a bitch, I said you shouldn't act like.." but she's answering the door.  She jerks the door open, grabs the pizza out of the deliveryman's hands, and flings it at me as hard as she can.  Mid-air, the box releases the hot pie, which expands in flight, the toppings and sauce spreading like a big red greasy net.  I'm half-dressed, standing in the doorway, and it hits me in the chest, sticking for a second to my favorite grey shirt before dropping to the floor.  My first response is to ignore this completely, for I know this is the sharpest counterattack.  I reach for my wallet on the counter to pay the pizza guy, and Melissa runs at me, swinging her fists in the air – it's an attack I've seen before.  Not hurtful, just sort of a banshee burst of frustration and anger.  When she reaches me she slips on the pizza and is suddenly at my feet.  I firmly (but gently) press her face in the giant lump of pizza on the floor.

Pizza guy says "Um, You don't have to pay for that"

At that moment, Julie Sparling, the love of my life, whom I have not yet met, is a thousand miles away, teaching drama and directing "Oklahoma" at Gig Harbor High.

Time marches on, dear ones, and I continue to do dumb things, on my non-linear path to meet the great Julie Sparling.  I marry, I move to Portland, I divorce.  My band is on a variety radio show in SF one day, and guess who the other musical guest is?  Julie Sparling.  Our paths finally cross.  Could it be a magic hand has thus far kept us apart and has now deemed us ready for good love?  It doesn't exactly feel magical.  But I have no other explanation.

1:51 AM - 4 Comments - 5 Kudos - Add Comment

Turning 40, feeling 16. Tales of lust and lifesavers.
Category: Romance and Relationships

(This is a piece I wrote for 'True Stories' - a reading series in Portland.  Check it out sometime, or www.liewireradio.org!)

I turn 40 next week.  Every so often, a new lesson drops like an empty whiskey bottle out of the sky, like a totalled station wagon landing on my head.  But some lessons take a while to sink in and become useful. 

 ..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

So here's a coupla rules I've learned, by category.  With some context for each one.

Rule category: Social Class, Sex, and Respect:  Rule:  Kiss the girl.  Context:  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Christmas 1982.  My parents have just relocated the family from Fresno to Pittsburgh.  I will never have another friend.  I will never get laid.  At the moment, I hate my parents for this, and I've stayed home alone to feel sorry for myself while they go out to dinner.  I hear a short series of tuneless chimes and realize that this is the doorbell of the large tudor in the Fox Chapel hills that I have been living in for one full week.  I open the big front door to a fuzzy sweater decorating the round breasts of Marianne Sciallaba, a red-haired, full-lipped, tight-pantsed, camaro-hot wet dream.  This is a surprise visit – she Marylin Monroes "Welcome wagon" and strikes a pose, eyes closed, lips protruding, sparkly pink fingernails tweezing a tiny sprig of mistletoe above her head.

It's clear what I'm supposed to do at this moment.  She has removed her knit cap and big, wet snowflakes the size of fake eyelashes are crashing and disappearing into her hair.   I have an immediate erection, which isn't saying much, since pretty much anything gives me an incurable woody in 1982.  Anything: Sears Catalogs, the sight of a girl's wrist, my one-armed Spanish teacher, Good Morning America, Velma of Scooby Doo groping and panicking "my glasses!  I can't see without my glasses!"... 

Steam is rising off Marianne Sciallaba in the stark white light of the front stoop.  I hesitate ineptly.  She looks both brazen and vulnerable as she breaks her pose and smiles at me.  She lives in the adjacent, working-class neighborhood, Blawknox, a gritty industrial township on the Monongahela.  She is in my homeroom.  The way she feathers her hair, and the goodie comb in her back pocket, really do it for me, but I haven't flirted with her.  She has a distinctively "willing" look that excites and terrifies my virgin libido.  I have been promised, or rather, warned, that she "really puts out" and that she can "suck the chrome off a trailer hitch."  This image baffles and tantylizes me and my still-un-sucked hitch.  My neighbor across the street, 16 year old virgin Steve Gallahan, son of Reverend Gallahan, has told me this.  Scott, who is also class president (and as I later find out, a total deuchebag), has seen her hanging out at the mall and has trumpeted her trampiness and Blaw-knox-iness to me several times in my first week at Fox Chapel High.

Marianne Sciallaba is forbidden ground indeed, a fantastical arena of candy-coated naughtiness and wreckless, sexual mystery.  I want to have big Italian sex with her, I have seen this happen on HBO, I want to smell the thick, biting juices of what I can only describe in retrospect as a spicy putanesca.  

Standing there on my stoop, I instinctively look across the street and am shocked to see that Steve and the Father Reverend are watching me from their living room window.  Scott has his arms outstretched and head cocked as if to say "what the heck is going on over there?"  In a panic, I lose all sense of what is right and wrong in the world.  I close the door halfway, thinking somehow that the Reverend can see my erection.  I tell Marianne a lie, that my parents are home and that I'm not allowed to have anyone in the house right now.  I tell her to go home, I'll get her number in home room tomorrow.

Of course, I never do.  I'm ashamed of my infinite lameness.  Soon she moves her welcoming wagon on to other trailer hitches.  We never have hot steamy Italian sex.  We never even hang out.  I end up running with a different crowd, a lovely bunch of geeky kids who drink and gather around the piano to sing Bye Bye Miss American Pie.  For the remainder of High School, I pathetically pine for Marianne whenever I am drunk.  25 years later I can articulate the lesson:

When a girl offers a kiss, be courageous and respectful, and kiss her.  Balzac actually wrote about this lesson much more eloquently:  "Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love."

A few more rules, and the consequence of breaking them.

Category:  Alcohol:  Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, 1985.  Avoid spending large portions of your teenage years in a near-constant inebriation at the hands of Iron City Beer.   When you do reveal your drinking hobby to your family, you should not do so by projectile vomiting on your parents while they are in bed. 

Category:  Domestic Disturbances:  San Francisco California 1988:  NEVER order a pizza in the middle of a histrionic fight with your crazy college girlfriend.  When the pizza arrives, she will grab it out of the hands of the delivery person and throw it at you.  As it flies through the air, the pie will come out of the box, and it will hit you the chest, spoiling your shirt.  It will drip down to the floor in slow motion as the delivery person freezes in the doorway.  You will say something rude, which will cause her to go into a ballistic rage, screaming at you and rubbing more pizza sauce into your shirt and face.  Do not, under any circumstances, take revenge by grabbing your girlfriend by the hair and shoving her face in the pile of pizza toppings on the floor at your feet.  This will frighten the delivery person and the neighbors, and it will be difficult to convince the Police that nobody has been hurt.

Final rule:  Know the way of the great Sanchez:  it's ok if people are laughing at you, as long as they are laughing.  Bill Sanchez is the roadie and drug dealer for a band I front in the 90's.  He is 350 pounds, manic, a terrible rapper, and is VERY macho (but with a tender, obvious vulnerability and sweetness about him unmatched by any giant Mexican gangster you've ever met).  His official title in the tour bus is "fun coordinator," or when we are using our dwarve names, "Smokey."   I don't smoke pot because it makes me stupid & paranoid, so where other guys get cool dwarf names like "Stinky," "Crispy," and "Hopeful", mine is simply "Prick" – the only nickname I have ever had, to this day. 

"Fun coordinator" is important role. Under all his layers of gangsta gear, Raiders hoodies, and fannie packs, Sanchez is a true ladies man, except that he has never made love to a woman.  But this doesn't mean he's lacking in wisdom in that department.   He always buys postcards at the gas stations and sends them to many girls he hopes to romance. 

More than anything, it's Sanchez's capacity to diffuse tension that makes him valuable on the road.  He is fearless in this department – he would jump into absolutely any situation, regardless of his lack of expertise, and either bungle it hilariously, or fix it completely, leaving everyone laughing with relief.  This two-edged skill is never more apparent than during the great rhythm feud of 1997.  Our bass player and Drummer both fall for the same girl, Suzie.  Now understand that this is the worst thing that can happen to a band.   Lead singers and keyboardists can fight over women all day long, but the rhythm section simply cannot, or the foundation of the band collapses.   Needless to say Suzie has us all pretty worried. 

For a whole summer of simmering tension, Sanchez plays his role of pacifier, a regular gangsta Jimmie Carter armed with pot, videogames, trivia, loud releases of gas, and anything he can think of to keep the topic off of the looming drama over the rhythm section's rivalry.

Things come to a head one night after a sucky show at the Rivergate theater in Cleveland.  Abbott, the drummer, has had a good day; earlier, at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, he has jumped onto Jon Bonham's drumkit, and gotten us all thrown out of the Museum, a feat he still brags about today.  After the show, we're killing time at the Super 8.  Chad, the bass player, is in my room where I'm trying to watch the news, and Chad's in the middle of a story about Suzie.  Seems she's a bit of a stickler for odors, and is very self conscious.  According to Chad, she won't let him perform oral sex on her unless she first inserts a peppermint life saver into her vagina.  Just as I am striking my forehead in disbelief, I notice that Abbott has walked into the room and has been standing there for a few minutes.   He and Smokey had just done 1 hour photo at Walgreens and are holding the photos of Abbott on the Led Zepplin drumkit, Abbott getting dragged off the drumkit, etc.  

Abbott sets the pics down on the hotel furniture and pauses.  "Suzie always lets me choose my own flavor" he says, staring Chad down.  We wait.  "Oh yeah, what's your favorite?" Chad asks in a mocking tone of disbelief.   The two stare at each other hard.  Sanchez edges in between them, sits down on the edge of the bed and asks for the remote – "Does this dump have some mofo ESPN azacktion or whazzat?"     But this isn't enough.  The tension lingers like… a life saver.   No one answers the question.  I have the remote in my hand, but I'm looking for it anyway.  "Stinky" the sound guy pops in giddily announcing "we got an on-screen beaver-shot on Channel 42".  By this he means aquatic mammals, and that he has found the nature channel and is happily making garlic ginger tea, but he wants us to think that he's talking about pussy.  The beaver thing is a regular joke of  Stinky's.  Usually it gets a groan.  Not tonight.   Smokey tries again, lovingly mocking Stinky:  "C'mon guys, there's beaver on, let's look at the animals for Jason"  I throw in "those DAM animals…"  Silence -- nothing breaks the stare-down.

Sanchez, sensing the need to diffuse, bites off half of his king size payday bar and says, and with utter innocent sincerity, "allright, guys, about this candy in the pootie thing – what you gotta do -- what I always do" (and with this we all knew he was lying), "what you do is ya git youself a baby ruth bar and you put that in there."  More silence, but now we're looking at each other, instead of staring at our shoes.  Sanchez is actually serious here, he is truly an embodiment of East Oakland's  Doctor Ruth:  "Then you gotta suck out the nougat, and you got the chocolate, and the peanuts…"  Before he finishes, we are all laughing really loud.  Somehow, the Suzie situation is put into perspective for good that night, and is never a source of tension again.

6:53 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

OOPS (Out of Place Syndrome)

I wrote this piece for a True Stories benefit show.

True Stories is a series curated by my dear friend Courtenay Hameister in which authors an musicians reveal their most embarrassing moments and share insights in a candid, intimate setting, which is then podcast.  More on that later.  Here's the hastily-assembled piece.

 ..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

I went to a wedding last night.  It was a second wedding, and JUST a little dangerously close to the 1^st.   Nothing too deviant:  the groom's children were all grownups, and considerably younger than the bride, so there were friendly family relations all around.  But the timing was a little weird, and among the friends who knew wife 1, well, there was a little…tension.  Despite our love of the Groom, and our optimistic acceptance of the new bride, I think everyone was suffering from OOPS, or out of place syndrome. 

I suffer from Oops in most situations, really.  I'm suffering from it right now, in fact, though rationally I know I shouldn't.   Oops is a manageable ailment, mine is well-tended with the just the right amounts of distilled spirits.  I can handle Oops. 

Julie and I drove all night to get to this wedding, having routed ourselves a 12 hour drive from Qunicy California, where we were playing the High Sierra Music Festival.  The High Sierra is the biggest music festival in California, primarily a hippie shindig, with Scandinavian dreadlocks and some of the deepest natural armpit odor cultures this side of  the Rennaisance.    There, Julie was stung by a bee, and I personally had a huge outbreak of the Oops.   It felt like we were trapped for two days in Heironymus Bosch's depiction of Inferno, alternating between the 6^th layer of hell, "Drum circle at 4am" and the purgatorial "I wish I hadn't drank that last thermos of Redbull and Vodka AFTER smoking my first marijuana in 5 years." 

Amidst a sea of world music and jam bands, the High Sierra features just a few songwriters like myself, and one particularly Oops-y southern rock band, the Mother Truckers. Their lead singer was taken aback by the Nor-Cal tribal debauchery in the pit of flesh before him, and actually stopped a song mid-way through the intro, saying "Look, if you got a dick, keep your clothes on, OK?"  We heard this from our tent, a quarter mile away from the main stage, and the moment sounded so absurd that we laughed hysterically, feeling a strange sense of connection with the Mother Trucker. 

Despite suffering from acute Out of Place syndrome, the band heroically continued, before an elated crowd of some 10,000 unwashed, largely unclothed 20-something hippies.  And the good vibes did continue, despite the frank, pervasive difference of perspectives at odds there on the thoroughfare…

The festival was very kind to us.  I finished playing my last set at 2am and immediately hit the highway to drive back to Portland for the wedding.  Sleepless and mesmerized by the rhythms of I-5, around 6am, I remembered my LAST outbreak of the Oops.   It was at my own rehearsal dinner, for my own second wedding, when I first met my wife's Julie's family.  I'm forever scarred from this.

Julie comes from a huge family of boisterous, loving, protective people.  I am an only child, like my mother, and my extremely small family is scattered across the country.  A big family dinner for me was me, my folks and our dog Wendy.  Going to dinner with the Sparlings however, is like going to Cirque d'Soleis, with a choir, on speed.  At the rehearsal dinner, it was me and 25 Sparlings:  three generations, several teenagers, some little kids, and Julie's 4 older siblings.  Julie's brother's gay husband John cornered me right before we sat down and welcomed me to the family, asserting that HIS large Italian family would kill me if I ever broke her heart.  He was wearing a gorgeous Dulce and Gabbana shirt. 

We sat down, with me at the mid-section of a 25-person table, between Julie on my right, and her mother on my left, across from Dulce and Gabbana.   After everyone had ordered, a few people started moving around the table, to catch up with each other and meet me, Julie's new husband-to-be.   I stayed put, and immediately got a little trapped in a conversation with Julie's mother Emily and her oldest Brother Bob.  I think we were talking about Bob's job as an engineer of plastic parts for trucks, but what happened next drop-kicked that conversation forever into Oops-induced forgotten-ness.

Feeling a little out of place, I remained locked in with Bob & mom, while I reached to my right and grabbed Julie's knee, looking for a little familiarity, connectedness, but more than anything, hoping she'd rescue me from my own dull interview on automotive subcontracting.  Her lack of response signaled to me that she, too was engaged in conversation.  Not wanting to look away from the elder sparlings, for fear of seeming disinterested, I removed my hand from the knee.  A few minutes later, I tried again though, only this time a little more emphatically, knuckling her thigh under the table, where no one could see.   Again, no response at first, so I very playfully did what anyone would have done while suffering from Advance Oops syndrome compounded by life-threats from a gay Italian, I grabbed her crotch.

The response was:  "Hello!!!"   The entire table was silenced by the loud exclamation,  and all eyes widened in my direction.  I swung around to face the woman to my right, who was NOT Julie, but instead, her 17-year-old, niece, Bob's daughter, Heather. 

Heather is, as Julie puts it, a buxom, yet slender teenage girl, so my new family had ample reason to question my motives for the grope.  Worse, this had not been a mere friendly tap of the groin, but a full-on, five finger cootchie clasp.  Have you seen Alien, where the creature latches onto the guy's face?  The only horrified response I could muster was to bury my head in my napkin.  Julie's mom asked if I was ill.  Julie looked quizzically at me from across the room.  Dulce & Gabbana, having quickly pieced together what might have been going on, leaned back, crossed-armed, with a knowing look and to this day he STILL looks at me this way).   

But the worst aspect was this:  besides the forgivable confusion of identity, my erroneous under-the-table gesture betrayed my disinterest in bob's job, plastic parts, and although we're now friends, to this day, he will not talk to me about any aspect of the Detroit auto industry.

The dinner continued, though, and life went on.  Three years later, it's almost behind me.  And then last night I was asked to lead in the making of toasts at my friend's wedding.  I was petrified, my champagne nearly leaping out of my glass from Oops-related hand-quaking.  I managed to muster some heartfelt, slightly embarrassing stories about the groom, bride, and complete the toast without any sleep-deprived slip-ups or inappropriate touching.

7:07 AM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

The night I opened for Springsteen.

The Night I Opened for the Boss:  a vivid dream

(Spoken rhythmically, rapidly and excitedly, over music.  Parentheticals, except italicized ones, are read aloud.)

Last night I dreamed I was opening for Bruce Springsteen (Music starts).  It wasn't the E street Band, not some huge stadium or "shed" as they say; it was a modest –sized ampitheater in Cleveland Ohio, 1995.  And I wasn't the opener, exactly – there were like 17 acts on the bill – an autoworkers' benefit, with John Cougar,  Billy Joel, and a new lesbian version of the Blues Brothers.

Actually, I wasn't on the bill at all.  But I knew this guy Garcia who was roadie-ing for Mellencamp. He once bought some weed from a guy that I loaned my car to, and I remembered that they had sort of blown my speakers, so man, I was SO in there, backstage passes and all. 

After the 16^th act, they said the boss was gonna take the stage.  I am one gigantic Bruce fan so I was right there in the wings, as close as I could get, waiting for the man to come on. 

The MC of the show got up there and was killing some time – the sun was going down behind the city, over the Cayahuga, and the clouds were on FIRE, bright orange on blue, you know, all silvery and stuff, you could almost hear them shimmering in ecstatic anticipation.   I overheard someone yell from the direction of Mr Springsteen's dressing room "keep it going for another 10 minutes, he's watching the sunset with Patti!"

The MC looked up at the sky, then over to the side stage, and he was in some kind of a panic, let me tell ya.  His eyes caught Garcia, who kinda shrugged back at him. 

This is when Time stops (music suspends), and Garcia does something that makes me forget those car speakers forever.  Garcia, a GENIUS, grabs me by the arm and walks me out on to that stage, right up to the Boss' microphone.  He turns around to the MC for a few seconds as I stare at the crowd.  Before I know it, the MC steps up, all nervous, and says (big announcer voice) "ladies & gentlemen, isn't it a beautiful sunset?  Please welcome a personal friend of Mr. Springsteen's to sing a song written especially for this occasion!"  The crowd roars.

I stand there for a second, thinking "what am I going to do about a guitar?" and outa nowhere GE smith walks over to save me (you remember GE Smith, don't you?  He was in the Saturday Night Live Band and he played with Hall & Oates, and I think he might have toured with Tina Turner or somebody).  Anyway, GE Smith frickin' hands me a beautiful guitar to play – and it's plugged in and everything! 

I have no idea what song to do, so I figure I'll just start PLAYING, and the guitar will tell me which song to play for 5,000 anxious, drunk Springsteen fans. But this is GE Smith's guitar, and apparently he doesn't talk to it the way I do mine.  AND, it's in open tuning, so what comes out sounds like a six year old picking up his first set of bagpipes. 

The sunset's like half over, and while I'm standing there sweating, tuning the guitar, I try to get the crowd on my side:   "You know, I wrote this song for Bruce Springsteen – it's a tribute,"  --polite clapping--   " … But tonight I'd like to dedicate it to the auto workers."  Big cheers, and slow chant of ambiguous rocking approval from two guys in the far back:   "free Bird"

I hit the opening chord. 

And I start an old song I wrote called  "You can't be Lonely when you're livin in New York City" –

I'm playing the intro, which is kinda plaintive & trancelike, (bliiin, bliiin, bliiin) and I'm about to start on the verse, when lo an behold Billy Joel  jumps up and starts playin piano.  I'm like "bleeen, bleeen, bleeen" and Mr. Piano man himself is playing with me.  Only he's going like BLANG BLANG BLANG and totally overpowing the opening of my song. 

Matter of fact, he throws in some chord changes that aren't even supposed to be there, I mean, this is MY song, and frankly, the stuff he's putting across isn't workin at all.  So I give him the eye, like "don't do that again," and Mr. Tell Her About It looks back at me, misunderstanding my nonverbal reprimand as meaning something like "man, that so totally rocked!"- so as I'm stepping up to sing again, he's like "BLANGETY BING BLANG, BLANGETYYY BLING BANG" all over the ivories, and takes this huge solo in the wrong place.  

So I stop and I say across the stage, "Man, you're making it hard for me to start my song, can you please stop doing that?  I mean stay out until the chorus or something, and you know, get a feel for the piece    …ok?" 

This definitely quiets down the crowd.   

Mr. "Innocent Man" looks down and kind of becomes invisible and cool, while I stand there realizing that I look like one giant glowing asshole, silhouetted by the last rays of the sunset. 

I finally get the song out, and it goes pretty good – there may have been a few converts, even.   And the Boss himself might've caught a little of it from the side of the stage.  I give GE his guitar back, and I mouth "thank you" to Garcia as I leave the stage.  The announcer comes on and says "let's give a big hand to him for playing his heart out under this beautiful sky, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. JOHN BRUNDERSON!" 

I don't correct him.  Instead, I look over at Bruce, hoping he'll give me the "way to go, kid" eye, but he's fussing with Patty's in-ear monitor, and they're like staring at each other, in love, and I think, you know, that really didn't go so bad.

(Sung)  You can't be lonely when you're livin in new york city

You can't sing the blues to me over the phone

Cuz I'm lonely, living in California

And I'll lie to you to bring you home

6:34 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

The Story Behind "John Hartford" and Myron Nelson

I got a recent stew of emails asking about that song (apparently it's in rotation on a radio station in California).  I used to play it every show, and told the story behind it.  Since I'm giving it a break for a while, and people still ask for an explanation for the song, here is the full-fledged version.

But first a little musing on "topical" songs... I've written a few and censured myself on several others.  

Picture a slow-moving herd of singer-songwriters (that one with the bushy hair and cowbay shirt is me).   Hear their whining call.   They respond to stimuli with song --they sing of 9/11, for example.   Katrina.   Iraq...  -But wait... they (we) aren't doing that!  Not the successful ones on TV, not even in coffeeshops (generally speaking).  Why not?  Because the industry is intricately tied to public/corporate notions of today's "fair and balanced" social mores.   "It's wartime."  "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists" percolates.   Strangely enough, the administration and the media aren't the ones who dulled the teeth of the entertainment industry (much as they would love to do so).  I think the music industry has tucked away its own fangs because it's simply NOT POPULAR to protest. 

There's a good reason that blatant prostheletizing is unpopular.   Who wants to hear a whining pixie/scruffball lecture them that they know better than the talking heads on FOX?  Protest music is singing to the choir, so to speak, right?  Who's going to have their mind changed by a song?

It's not that simple.  Songs trigger the individual and societal subconscious.   They may facilitate solidarity.  They raise questions.  If they're good, they entertain.  "John Hartford" is a song about 9/11 that doesn't mention 9/11 at all.   It was an accident, I promise.   It wasn't meant to have a "message,"  but I guess in retrospect, the message is "don't be paralyzed by fear." 

It was June 2001 when John Hartford died.  For those who don't know his work, he was a warm, deep dry, funny, burl-covered log standing alone in a plastic theme park.  He wrote songs about steamships, his wife's boobs, gently loving thy neighbor, dope-smoking grandmothers, dancing in the bathtub, etc.  He did an astounding one-man show, and he played well with others (he "ripped," in fact).   He was a steamship captain.  During the Vietnam war, he made beautiful albums of thought-provoking, mildly provacative tunes.  His career was diverse and continued through his death (he acheived new heights of popularity for his traditional "Down from the Mountain" and "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" soundtrack).  I never got to play with him.

In Sept., the world trade center towers fell.  I was travelling in a band, flying back and forth from Portland to wherever the band was (I had to come back every week to attend classes).  A week after the event, I was flying home on an empty plane.  The pilot, from behind his locked door, announced that he would be taking an "unscheduled course change" and that he had procured special permission from ground control to veer from our northbound path and fly east for a few minutes and then west again...

Why??  It was just after dark.  I was sipping coffee.  His announcement frightened me and everyone else on the plane for just a second, until he finished his sentence:  "because I want to show you something."  The song tells most of the rest of the story:  in his 30 years of flying, he claimed, he had never seen a more spectacular display of the Aurora Borealis (northern lights).  By flying East, he allowed the handful of passengers to the left of the aisle to see the amazing glow; by flying west he showed it to those on the right. 

Not a dry eye on the jet.  When we landed, everyone wanted to thank the pilot for his act of heroic normality.  The door was locked, this was the period when pilots were protected by three layers of intense security. 

After a few YEARS of research with Southwest Airlines (conducted by my parents), we found the pilot, Myron Nelson.  He turned out to be a bigger hero than we thought.  He flew to a couple of my shows with his daughter.  He gave me a 1938 lap steel, which I now use in the studio frequently.  He took me flying when I was on tour in Arizona.  

I had been sitting on the empty plane wondering what John Hartford's reaction to 9/11's events would have been.  I was trying to write him an ode of some kind.  I was guessing that he would have pulled his steamship, or tourbus, to a stop for a minute. 

And Myron came over the loudspeakers....  That's the story.

10:00 AM - 4 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Some old thoughts on touring. Rethinking these.

"What was touring like?"  I imagine my children asking in 25 years.

"Well, in my day, music was a popular, romantic industry, upon whose branches swung the low-hanging fruit of rock and roll legend, passionate inspiration, down-home charm, bleeding hearts, all the other things kids loved back then." 

"What the hell does that mean, grandpa?"  (I'll be an "old" father, so there's plenty of confusion there).

"Look, it wasn't all that interesting, touring.  Lemme tell you about a typical work day.  It was --"

"Work?"

"Yes, my little sycophants.  Lots and lots of work, bein' a professional rock and roll musician.  I had a hernia by the time I was 29.  When I toured full-time, my typical daily cycle went like this…"

And then I tell them the real nitty gritty.  It puts them to sleep and makes them feel sorry for me.  Knowing the truth, they never ask again. 

I begin:  "Midnight:  calendar day begins.  I'm midway through a second set at a club somewhere.

1am:  in an explosion of passion, music, and gracious love toward the crowd, I strike the final chord of the show.  The best part of the day is either just before this moment (if it's been a good show) or just after it. 

2:30am:  If all goes well, the final piece of gear is painstakingly loaded into the transporter (truck, trailer, or trunk).  The club pays us, and we pay the bar tab; hopefully the former dollar figure is larger than the latter.

3:30am:  With luck, good routing, and successful tour management, I and my band / staff (performers, soundpersons, driver, merchandise person, etc.), are in hotel beds, trying to fall asleep.  Talking heads, soft porn, movies edited for television.  Internet.  Re-stringing and wiping sweat & grease off guitars.  

11:30am:  Wake up.   Pile in to the van/bus.  Wait for the latest member of the team.  Take off.  Directions discussed.  Stops planned.  Doubt expressed as to whether we're driving in the right direction.  Suffer through tales of sexual "conquest" from various members of the team. 

1:30pm:  truckstop # 1:  take a scintillating tour of all aisles of the Flying J or Chevron station.  Fight temptations galore, including fake cappuccino, Jeff Foxworthy CDs, books on tape, boxes of perennial pastries.  Wonder at life's deeper quandaries:  why does one brand spell it "doughnuts" and the other brand not.  Newspapers are not available (except USAToday, which is NOT a newspaper).  Several types of muscle-building magazine are, however.  Try unsuccessfully to have a bowel movement, after waiting in line behind my comrades.

3:30pm:  truckstop #2:  Having thought ahead, I sprint through the glass doors and am first to the 'loo.  Success.  Some others have run across the street and scattered between Arby's and Taco Bell.  I stick to the truckstop and am drawn to pies in a rotating fridge.  Is that a chocolate sprinkle or a mouse turd?  I gamble and purchase a piece.  I eat two bites, offer the remainder to a traveling companion.

5pm:  I arrive at soundcheck, a bit late, slightly anxious, and with one leg asleep from propping it against the seat in front of me for 3 hours.   I get out of load-in and much of the heavy lifting by scheduling a radio interview that can happen "only at this particular moment."  I'll more than pay for this fib at load-out.   The interview fulfills my every expectation:   "Who were my influences?  What a creative question!"

6:30:  I've changed strings, twiddled knobs on my amp, and am in the middle of soundcheck.  The venue is a cavernous echo chamber made to sound uglier by my gnawing hunger and raging headache from eating nothing but pie.  Dialogue sample:  "Uh… my monitor isn't on, I think.  Can you turn it on?  It IS on?  Well, it doesn't sound like it's on." 

7:30:  Soundcheck mercifully ends.  "Bar Food" meals are offered at a discount, or even free.  Maybe there's time to cross the street to the sushi place, but that will surely blow the per diem.  Nothing aids in the enjoyment of a good meal like a vague time deadline, and the smell of your own stale clothes. 

9:00:  Showtime.  The minor mention in the Picayune seems to have attracted just enough people to cover expenses.  All I have to do now is give an honest performance of my material.  My songs that I wrote.  Should be easy, but there's one catch:  I did the same thing last night, and the night before, and the night before that.  Hmmm…how to keep in interesting?  My colleagues seem to handle this with various substances and extremes, but I don't respond well to these.  Almost every night, certain songs trigger the torturous dialogue:  "am I really up here, doing this again?  Stop complaining, your're lucky.  Lucky!  Most guys would give up their whole lives to do this.  In fact, that's what I've done.  Hmmm."

10:30pm:   Set Break.  Avoid temptation.  Change sweaty shirt.  Tolerate conversations with  "geisers."  These are people who speak to you as an individual person, but keep saying "you guys are…" and "I saw you guys at…" and "you guys are fucking on fire tonight, dude!"  Hence, the name, "geisers."  Again, I remind myself that I'm LUCKY, dammit.   I get a phone call on my cell from a distant relative whom I have left off the guest list.  Damn. 

Midnight:  Calendar day ends.  And begins.  Repeat as long as you can stand it.

"You guys still awake?"

They're not.  But I continue anyway. 

"I guess I got some great memories out of it.  Remind me to tell you sometime about Mark Abbott getting thrown out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.  And the time I borrowed Huey Lewis' pants.  All good stories, but all in the fullness of time, my little scrungemuffins."

I turn out the lights, and go to bed feeling I've lived a rich, lucky life.

5:13 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Like having a bum around the house, and then some

Larry David may have said it best:  "why would you want to have a dog?  It's like having a bum around the house."   This was the sit-com version; the reality of the canine-human bond is much deeper and darker.

I'd add:  "a bum you eventually have to put out of her misery." 

or:  "it's like inviting an innocent being into your home, falling deeply in love with them, all the while fully intending to kill them a little more than a decade later." 

Today I said goodbye to the bravest, most valiant soul I have ever known, the superbly intelligent mutt, Medford.  In order to end her pain, I had to play god for a morning, with the help of an overdose cocktail of sedatives, and a very gentle vet at Dove Lewis.

Until she was about 13, she dove for sunken items in lakes and streams (up to 8 feet deep!).  She fetched hats that fell into ravines.  She consoled.  She sang.  She barked at intruders, until her hearing went.  This may have had something to do with the diving, or amount of loud music to which she was exposed, or maybe just old age.

In 1991, my first tour through Oregon, I saw her in a pile of puppies in front of a Fred Meyer in, you guessed it, Medford.   A year later I got another mutt to keep her company, but she never accepted the animal as kin, rather, just an annoyance.  Stryker, the second dog, not as smart nor sturdy, lived to a ripe old age and met his maker after tweaking his neck to chase a cat under a couch.  Medford never missed him for a second, but rather, soldiered on for another 18 months before her hind quarters simply stopped working.

At age 16, it was difficult to prove her the wonderdog I knew her to be.  She no longer tickled the ivories (yes, she could play the piano on command).  She no longer could distinguish between "squeakie-shoe" and "squeakie-meat" (two almost-identical toys with almost-identical names, yet distinguishable by Medford, on command).  In fact, she couldn't get up without help from behind.  She pooped in her sleep.  She slept in her poop.  She stared blankly into space, and slept deafly through the fireworks that once sent her into a ghandi-esque under-bed protest.

She outlived a marriage, and most of the friendships I've ever had.  Julie was her favorite, and mine too.  Once Julie came into the picture, there was always chicken soup on the kibbles to make them more paletable, and olive oil for the coat. 

Medford has gone on to being one with the universe.  Her body will benefit science, whatever good can come of a lumpy, old, stinky mutt.   I thought it would be easy to put her down.  What was I thinking?  

Thanks for your sympathy.  That's what blogs about dead dogs are for, right?  I put a pic up of Med on my pics page, if you never had the pleasure.

11:53 PM - 3 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The floors have been refinished at the Bazaar Cafe.

Sunday, 8am.   The Bazaar Cafe, SF, CA. 

A long entry, sorry.

Les, the owner of the Bazaar Cafe is tireless and timeless.  Is it the red wine?  Is it Makiko, woman who quietly, gracefully curates the chaotic gallery of Les' life?  Is it the swarm of musicians who are constantly buzzing around his rare, priceless gem buried here in the outer Richmond District of SF? 

He just had the floors redone at the cafe.  Floors I've stomped on countless times, drink in hand, cheering my heroes:  Mario DeSio, Ira Marlowe, Ed Haynes, my friends and musical comrades too numerous to list.  Floors at which I've stared in  moments of doubt & daunt, or just trying to choose the next song. 

I drove past three of my old SF apartments this morning, and I'm caked with stinky, mushy mud of melancholic memories.  Three places, little stucco boxes, that I loved in and wrote songs in, and then for one reason or another, decided to move on and leave behind.  One because the thing with the girl didn't work out the way I planned (oh, the stupid things I've done).  One because a thing with another girl was working out so well that we both decided that a better little box awaited us just a few avenues to the south (again, so stupid - but one learns).  And then the last one, where I lived until I left town for Portland in 1999. 

There's no room in this city.  When they redid the floors at the Bazaar, they had to rent a truck to hold all the furniture during the work, drive the truck away, and back again.  You SF's lack of space most regularly when you're looking for a parking spot (average time before someone leaves and opens up a space is about 20 minutes, I've found).   If you didn't have drums and guitars in your trunk, it would make no sense to have a car here (a good thing to not have, they say).  On a musician's budget, there's especially little room.  The places you can afford to live, eat, play, and walk your dogs has dwindled steadily since I first moved here in 1987.  

One of those places is the Bazaar Cafe.   The Bazaar is the antithesis of typical music venue in SF.  The norm: best summed up by one old soldier who literally bellowed at my band, before soundcheck: "you gotta pull in 200 people tonight or you're not coming back to play here again!"   Here, incredible music happens every night, for 20-40 people.  I've never seen it anything but packed (one folk quartet easily accomplishes this if they each bring a fan and a girlfriend or two).  It's ALL about the music.  There are a few nice house guitars, in case of broken strings, or if an open mic night struggler has a faulty intrument.  A nameless, generous benefactor.  And there's a piano.

Not that the music is ALWAYS good.  But it almost always is.  Not cheesy shit that turns out the yuppies to sit with their heads on each others' shoulders like they're at a summertime Sting concert (Dan Fogelberg opening).  No, real, unique takes on stuff.  Or Les won't have you back.  Amidst all the post-9/11 pomposity and sensitivity, I played a night here with a few other writers.  Ed Haynes sang the best response to 9/11 I've heard yet:  "I've got Anthrax, baby - sleep with me tonight.   I'm a'courtin' at a heightened pace..." and so on. 

In Portland, there's more space.  It takes a long time to find or build a community like the one I left, but now I feel we've done it.  Julie, and all the musicians and friends at Mississippi Studios have filled the huge hole I feel when I think about all my favorite singing/drinking pals from the old haunts.  Ed Haynes moved to Portland, too.   Last night Ed & I did a sort of reunion show at the Bazaar.  Ed shone.  Ira Marlow got up and broke my heart with an old favorite, a tearjerker about youth & hope & etc.  This morning is the afterglow.  My morning drive through the old haunts assures me that I did the right thing.   

Les just walked in and is going on about some local writer I just have to hear, so this blog is over.   He just rifled through five boxes of CDs that nobody but Les cares about.  He has put the CD on the stereo blaringly loud, and half his morning customers just walked out, shaking their heads.  I'm about to get an earful.

The floors at the Bazaar:  they're Redone, not replaced.  I recognize familiar gouges, favorite black, rusty nail holes, places where chairs, or the piano, have been dragged without lifting.  You can't keep redoing the floors forever.  And you shouldn't expect to enjoy a floor without scars as much as one with.  

10:14 AM - 3 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Sickness in Death Valley, dates, coyote

..Death Valley.  1am. 

Can't sleep.  We're all sick with the flu, in the most beautiful spot I've seen in a long time.  Thanks to Neil's hearty grip on the wheel, we drove straight through from Santa Cruz to Death Valley without stopping (yes, there was music-making at a lovely ex-bank called Cayuga Vault).  When we woke up in heaven, we were all completely paralyzed with the flu. 

We had just enough time though, before the wretched disease completely threw us on our backs for 48 hours, to see Travis' parents' DATE FARM.  Middle of the desert, these people farm dates.  They are also helping maintain a small stream by pushing for its designation as a Wild & Scenic River, and by simply taking care of it.  Cool folks. 

Dates are a big topic, lots to learn.  The trees are dangerous, have strange, primitive sex lives (aided by humans) and I've learned more about them than I dare relate to you in my delerious, flu-ridden state.   On my pics page, there's one of  Travis showing you some ripe dates, ready to be shaken from the tree.  The old clothes keep the birds away.  Another pic (same place) shows Travis again, in the sorting room.  He grew up here, doing this.  And running around barefoot on the rocky, thorny hills & cliffs. 

After lots of date-talk and delicious date milkshakes, we got a special trip to the hot springs, which are in the middle of a big open plain between two rocky ridges.  We were the only ones there, on a saturday.  In fact, we have yet to see another human being since we left the highway, except Travis' parents and their groovy staff at the ranch.  The path to the hotsprings is marked by a sign that we just couldn't take seriously (see bottom row of pics on my pics page).

"Mud mites?"  yeah, sure!  In a way, I guess we cursed ourselves by so foolheartedly admonishing its warning.  Same as when we said "aw, those 'check engine soon' lights just come on sometimes for no reason!" and kept singing songs of the seventies at the top of our lungs while we were lost in Gilroy.  As you can see, we enjoyed the mudbath/hotsprings without hesitation, and nobody was bitten.  And the van is still going.  ..

But we are super-sick.   Ooh boy, gotta go.

A large pack of coyote visited us around 3am today.  They yipped and hollered and cried.  I am ready for them to visit again - I put two mics out to record them.  If I succeed, I'll put it up as a song tomorrow on my music player thingy.

Exhausted,

Jim

12:09 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Revisiting Life on the Road, Medford the wonderdog

I'm leaving this morning for my first "tour" in some time.  Actually going with a band this time, the incredible Miraflores.  Three of the sweetest, smartest, and most innately talented fellows you'd ever want to share a long vanride with.  We have scheduled 5 days off in Death Valley to work on their new record, and have packed up the mobile recording studio into their van. 

At 8:19am, I'm sitting in the recording studio, full of anticipation for the trip, but have a few appointments to make before I depart:  Lewi Longmire has some last minute edits on his record, Ashleigh Flynn and Hillstomp both have the same.  I have them scheduled for 8am (yes, somebody's late), 8:30am, and 10:30am.  Leaving at noon.

It's all going to be beautiful.  The stupendously sparky and talented Raina Rose is flying in to sing harmonies on this tour.  The lovely and genius Megan Slankard is joining us in the Bay Area.  George Cattermole at the General store will be unable to contain his excitement.  I'll say this and only this:  these gals are WAY better looking than me or my old bandmates.

Here's my problem:  I'm nervous about my d