Thinking of Maddog
Tuesday October 19th, 1999 @ 8:38 PM
Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well
Life on the road is dangerous. Blinddog Smokin’ has sent a half million miles of center stripes to disappearance in our rear view mirror. Living in the Rockies puts us on icy highways, in blinding blizzards, and on snow-covered, hairpin, mountain byways. We drive all night after a gig, sometimes as much as 1200 miles or more to make it home without having to pay for a motel and to have a few more precious hours with loved ones.
In six years, the four of us have had many close calls, and only one accident where a young, pregnant, girl ran a red light and collided with us in an intersection. None of us has ever had so much as a scratch–not until Sunday night.
Andy “Maddog” Miller, our bassist, was heading to Denver late at night to visit his girlfriend who lives there. From what we know at this point, a U-haul truck came up fast behind his little Datsun pickup and passed, then swerved in and cut him off sending him into the ditch. Apparently, he flew from the truck landing hard, breaking his pelvis, parts of his back, and skull.
He lay in the ditch unconscious for a long time. He became semi-conscious a time or two and tried to drag himself to the road, which was dark and deserted at that hour. It was extremely cold. He passed out a final time and when they found him, he had a pillow under his head. It seems that someone must have stopped, attempted to help him, then went to call the police and ambulance.
I was called the following morning by Andy’s sister, Taffy, and told the bad news. You can’t ride half a million miles with someone, with an adventure at every stop and much storytelling in-between, and not get to know someone in a profound way. My heart was beating hard as she filled in the details.
As I write, Andy is in the intensive care unit at the hospital in Longmont, Colorado. They will not let us visit him. They are using morphine to kill the pain and we are waiting for a full report on his condition, especially concerning any internal damage or hemorrhaging. He has been able to speak and he can move his fingers and toes.
Andy was in great shape and it probably saved his life. He is an avid hunter and fisherman and climbs around in the mountains on his days off. This past year he has been training hard with weights and had just gleefully announced that he had set his all-time bench press record.
As you might imagine, we are all deeply saddened by this news and pray that he won’t have permanent damage or disability. We must continue our tours without him, but it won’t be the same, and we will miss his talent, sense of humor, and diligent hard work. He never shirked his responsibilities, was punctual and reliable, and deeply believed in our goals and aspirations.
Andy is an intelligent and tough minded individual who will fight hard for a full recovery, of that I can assure you. He was a scholar in molecular biology in college, and is well read, and conversant in many subjects. Always a quick study, he sacrificed his own band six years ago to join us as a bass player. He had been a lead guitarist, lead vocalist, and frontman before that. In his supportive and less glorious role with Blinddog Smokin’, he has never bitched or whined about anything. He is a guerilla fighter, and a well-seasoned one at that.
Carlzharptalk is read now by people all around the globe and many have never seen Blinddog Smokin’ or met Andy Miller. They only know of us through the adventures in the harptalk. But it doesn’t matter as a road musician makes his music for everybody who appreciates it and lives a brutally hard life of sacrifice to make that happen.
Right now Andy, who has played his heart out to masses of people, is all alone (but for his closest relatives), in much pain, confused, and frightened by his prospects. In one way or another, he has touched most of your lives if even just a little, so if you’d like to return that touch, I will print any e-mail you’d like to send him (even just a short “get well”), and take it to him just as soon as they let us visit him. It may not seem like much, but we all know how important it is to feel like somebody cares when trying to recover from trauma that seems for the moment anyway, bigger than you are.
I will send an update just as soon as we have substantiated word, and will continue with a regular Carlzharptalk, probably next week.
Posted by Carl