Over the River, Through the Woods

Hamfist played Tease in downtown Ashland last night, our go-to spot for trying out new and unusual songs. Can anyone say Lionel Ritchie? We never know what Jesse will bring to rehearsal, but no-one expected The Commodores. Yet, improbably, it clicked. Jesse kindly indulges my fantasies of being a bordello chanteuse and backed me up on the Julie London classic Cry Me A River. Even Tease was too rowdy for a song as dark and brooding as that. I'll save it for some late night around the campfire.

That's how I met The Kid, y'know. He showed up at the Colestin Campout with his guitar, started playing and didn't stop. It didn't matter what song we pulled out of the campfire archives, he knew them all. We played for hours. People started drifting off to their tents, but he didn't stop. It was my night to stay up and tend the fire, so I pulled up a chaise, wrapped myself in a blanket and settled in. I figured I'd doze until it burned down, but I couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, Jesse would launch into another song that made me sit up, turn around and say, "who IS this kid?" He had me when he he played the first notes of Ziggy Stardust at about 3:00 a.m. Like Bogey and Claude Raines at the end of Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I helped break down the gear last night and didn't leave the bar till almost 1:00. There was some pretty hairy weather on the pass and I had to drop the Tracker into 4-Wheel drive near the railroad overpass, where it usually gets bad. The transporation cops weren't making people chain up in Ashland but oddly I didn't see a single car or truck going up the hill. I had I-5 to myself, crawling along at 30 mph, listening to conspiracy theories on the AM dial. I love AM radio in the middle of the night, don't you? Last night, a "scientist" was propounding his theory that the recent earthquake in Japan is going to set off the entire Pacific ring of fire and result in a 7 point quake on the San Andreas Fault. He stopped short of saying California was going to fall into the ocean, but the implication was clear. He compared the earth's crust to a bedsheet. The fault slippage in Japan was like pulling a corner of the bedsheet so, naturally, the other corner in California would have to pop up as a result. The radio reception of his doomsday fantasies faded in and out as I crawled along the empty freeway in a white out. It felt very apocalyptic.

If the world comes to an end tomorrow, I'm glad that I had the opportunity to make music with my friends. I took a long detour away from making music and didn't know if I would find my way back. It means so much to me to have it in my life again. As a very small child, my earliest ambition was to grow up to be a singer - followed by my short-lived goal to be a tight rope walker. Clearly, I had more aptitude for the former, although, who knows? I'm not very strong but I have good balance.