October 2024

In college I took a course with Paul Boyer, History of American Thought, 1859-Present. Why 1859? That's when Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which I had read in high school to impress a girl, though it was like eating sawdust, and the girl in question never knew I read it. I'm not sure what this says about either fitness or selection. I digress. The point here is that I sat in the back of the lecture hall every day with a long-haired stoner kid, and before class we would talk about music. He had interesting taste, which radiated outward in concentric circles from the Grateful Dead. One day he said that Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark were coming to town to play the East End, and he would go. Tickets were twelve dollars. I didn't go, because I was broke. That was April, 1996, and Van Zandt died the next New Year's Day.

A decade later I got to open for Guy Clark, and would see him here and there at festivals, looming, owlish, taller and more gaunt every time, smart as hell, and funny. But I missed my chance to see Townes. My friend said I didn't miss much. Apparently Townes fell backward off of his stool. With a few pleasant exceptions, you don't want to meet your heroes.

I cut my teeth on my parents' record collection when I was eleven or twelve, on a hand-me-down Sears turntable with a built-in cassette deck. I'd go down to the basement and grab anything that looked interesting, and those records would lead me to others. I went from Twist with Chubby Checker  to Highway 61 Revisited by the time I was fourteen. 

At seventeen I heard John Prine. At eighteen I heard Townes. At twenty I dropped out of college and got a job on a fruit farm, and started writing songs, or what resembled songs, and for a while devoured the Texas folk and blues of Townes and Guy, Willie Nelson, Willis Alan Ramsey, Lyle Lovett, The Flatlanders, as it were literature. I bought a used cassette copy of Ain't Living Long Like This by Rodney Crowell in the little record store in my old hometown, and I wore it out, driving the twenty miles to and from my job at the farm. 

Last month I was standing in the kitchen doing the dishes when I got a text from that same Rodney Crowell. A mutual friend had sent him my new record, and he'd liked it, and she put us in touch. I knew he was coming to play nearby, so I'd told him I'd come down to catch the show. Now he was writing to say, "Don't be surprised if I call you up on stage tonight.” I assumed he was messing with me, because we'd never met. As someone who likes to mess with people, I admired this impulse. But then a few hours laters as I stood in the back with a beer, humming along to Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight and Until I Gain Control Again, Rodney called me up on stage and handed me his guitar, and asked me to play a song. It was a strange, gracious thing. The sort of thing you think might happen when you're twenty, and wish would happen, and if it did happen would consider evidence of your inevitable, incipient fame, and you would be wrong. At forty-eight it was another feeling.

I was a little beat up from the road and the album release, my mind what Billy liked to call ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag. I was tired of thinking about flights, van rentals, hotel rooms, and how it all works, or frequently doesn't, trying to keep a band on the road. My ambivalence about the business part of show business had got the better of me for some days in row. But then Rodney called me up to sing and I thought, well, hell, my life makes some kind of sense.

I got down from the stage and went back to leaning against a pole in the back of the club, and a little old lady came up to me, and took both my hands in hers, and with her eyes wide, in the voice one uses with a small child or a foreigner, she said, brightly, "YOU... need to make a CD!"

I told her I'd get right on it.

WEST COAST – In November the band convenes in Los Angeles to start a tour up the coast all the way to British Columbia, Canada, with stops at McCabes Guitar Shop in Santa Monica (11/1), Lost Chord Guitars in Solvang (11/2), Sweetwater Music Hall (11/3), the Arcata Playhouse in Arcata (11/4), Ashland Folk Collective in Ashland, (11/5), Mississippi Studios in Portland (11/6), the Tractor Tavern in Seattle (11/7), Trout Lake Hall in Trout Lake (11/8), Juiceboxin Centralia (11/9), the New Prospect Theater in Bellingham (11/10), and the Dream Cafe in Penticton, BC (11/11). Our electric guitar, the Minnesota maestro Erik Koskinen, opens the tour everywhere but Seattle, joins the band on electric guitar, and usually drives the van.

MIDWEST – In December the tour picks up again in the upper Midwest, and we'll close out the year with shows in MI, IA, WI, MN, and IL. Then it's time to sit still for a while, maybe get in a late hunt or two, keep refining my pasty recipe, get back to living.

READING / LISTENING – Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety; W.S. Merwin, Unframed Originals; Identity, Milan Kundera; Kevin Barry, The Heart in Winter; Craig Lesley, River Song; Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC, Robert Gordon, It Came from Memphis; Bryce Andrews, Holding Fire; LISTENING: Tokyo Is Dreaming / Sack of Cement, John Convertino; Latin American Folk Songs, Chago Rodrigo; The One and Only, Roger Miller; Sex and Gasoline, Rodney Crowell; Essence, Lucinda Williams, In My Own Time, Karen Dalton, Save it for Later, Martha Scanlon and John Neufeld; Failer / Total Freedom, Kathleen Edwards; The Birth of the Hot, Jelly Roll Morton; Aimless Love, John Prine.

FRIENDS – Bo Ramsey and Kevin Gordon both have new recordings out. Kevin's new record, The In Between, continues to set the bar for both writing and recording, as he's been doing for twenty years with his great band, and for my money he's one of the best working in Nashville, or anywhere. Bo Ramsey released two EP's in 2024, one called Sidetrack and another called On the Range, reprising some of his own older songs, and some by his old friends, and like everything else Bo ever made, it's long on groove, with an understated elegance, and a deliberate, clear-eyed cool. 

TEES – We still have Universal Fire tee-shirts for sale in the store, and you should buy one, now, for thirty dollars. Or, maybe just stream my songs fifteen thousand times on Spotify, and we'll call it even. The second thing will take you about eight hundred and seventy five hours, so you should start now.

We'll see you out there.