California Dreamin’
Wednesday December 26th, 2001 @ 8:52 PM
Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well
I knew there had to be a tunnel ahead because the old country song by C.W. McCall told of wiping out the top of his truck full of chickens, leaving the entrance full of feathers. Wolf Creek Pass is one of those journeys so harrowing that one can’t see the spectacular scenery over his white knuckles. That is if you happen to be driving an old motor home in which your own amateur mechanic self bled the long unused brakes.
My faithful little wife followed behind in the little car that the motor home lacked the power to tow up the mountain. I could see the silhouettes of lampshades, computer parts, and garden tools about her head in the rear view mirror. Linda had lived her entire life in Wyoming and now with everything we owned crammed into our car and the moving van Jason Coomes drove ahead of us, a new and strange world immerged far below in the green valley emptying out into Pagosa Springs.
That day and that Mountain pass were symbolic of the transformation Blinddog Smokin’ was making in its volatile sub-cultural history. A touring band exists in flood-lighted bars and on midnight highways. Until they are famous, they are nothing but a few moments of noise and energy in your town and then gone.
Good bands light up like ascending fireworks in the night sky. They climb as fast and brilliantly as they can, bang hard in search of the ultimate “ahhhhh” from their audience, and then fall in shimmering desperation, lingering as long and gloriously as possible until a new band streaks by them skyward to its own destiny. Very few explode with enough radiance to remain in people’s minds over the years.
BDS spent going on nine years in the vast stretches of Kansas, the back roads of Arkansas, the streets of Podunk, the mountains of Montana, and the empty winterscapes of Wyoming. We realized that the apex had been reached where sagebrush and pine trees serve as quiet surrogates for a listening audience.
Since that inglorious day in July of 1993 when Jason and I had joined forces in a backroom bar in Wheatland, Wyoming, we have seen our fans come and go. The reckless youth are now married with children. The old girlfriends are now just old. The revelers have replaced whiskey with wheatgrass. Some got religion. Some got sick. Some died young. Some moved on. Some see the world differently these days.
Since we recruited Chicago Chuck from the concert hall in early “94″–Andy got hurt. I got married. Chuck’s beloved Great-Grandma died and a million miles of center stripe passed underneath our various vehicles.
All four of my children graduated from college, three got married, now one expects my first grandson in April. I can get into movies and restaurants as a senior citizen now. I first played with Jason Coomes in another band when he was just old enough to get into a bar, now he is thirty-three. Twelve-year-olds from gigs in the city parks who worshipped Jason as a Wyoming guitar god are now old enough to drink in bars.
Gone are the old clubs. The Ohio Club in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where Al Capone gambled and frisky ladies gamboled has burned to the ground. We had special times there. The room was a large Omnibus box. Upstairs in the back. Red lights glowing through the cigarette smoke. All eyes on us. No distractions. The rare spirit of human communication through shared ambience and groove hung in that place like a benign incubus.
The Crow’s Nest in Salina, burned. Yahoo’s in Cherryvale, of which I wrote the Cherryvale Transcendence, sold and changed. Panama Red’s, our first gig in Wichita, long gone and most forgotten, as is PJ’s in Idaho Falls. The Bar Bizarre in Ft. Collins is now an old folks home.
This is a fast changing world we live in. Faster than ever before in history. One hundred years ago the entire society rode horses and walked much as they’d done for the previous 5900 years of recorded human existence. Now we bitch if our computer memory isn’t upgraded yearly and fantastic machines fly into tall buildings and people worldwide can watch each other by transforming images into dots and sending them at the speed of light to be reassembled on a TV screen in someone’s living room.
When I was a boy no one had a television. When I became an adult, no one had a computer. When I first played music with Jason Coomes at the Buckhorn bar in Laramie, there was no Internet.
I thought of these things as I approached that singular horrifying hairpin curve on the downslope of Wolfcreek pass. To miss it is too be airborne on your way to a spectacular death. A chilling metaphor of the BDS career path–change direction, or die.
Wolfcreek pass was the veil through which we passed to the other side. Once at the bottom, Wyoming and the past seemed far away and our decision irreversible. We entered a small lonely road to the enchanting but ghostly Four Corners country. The sun set as we left Pagosa Springs and headed into the backcountry. Darkness swallowed our caravan consisting of a large yellow moving van, a small black car, the Ford Van and trailer, and the motorhome, now towing the little blue car again.
That moonless night we played our last gig before California, a wild biker rally on an Indian Reservation. Several thousand people waited. We had been traveling for thirteen hours, but the unruly and excited crowd filled us with adrenaline.
Something happened at that gig. Our weariness made us sort of crazy. The huge crowd pumped us up like Kamikazes. With the knowledge that we were done with nearly a decade of winter roads and a closed chapter in our book and sensing California on a new Horizon, we exploded on the giant Camel Stage and drove the masses into a crazed state of being. Women showed their breasts and hidden tattoos and threw panties, and guards pulled them off the stage. Men reached to slap our hands vigorously, almost maniacally. It verged on spiraling out of control. The noise was deafening, and people’s eyes were scary. It was frightening, dizzy, and delicious. We’d never played a gig with that kind of frenzy.
The morrow brought the desert sun. Miles of barren earth formed a vast purgatory that further removed us from the past. The exotic majesty of Ship Rock presented itself as the bellwether of the high desert, helping define direction and distance for our little cavalcade as we lost ourselves in heat and thought, memories and anticipation. Through the day we all became separated by the distance and that night each band member was on his own. We would awake knowing that nighttime would bring–California. No gigs. No fans. No home.
The gateway was Needles where it was 117 degrees and the natives were glad that it was at last “cooling down.” I ate a dozen of Dole’s sugar-free Popsicle’s and comforted my little wife who stared big-eyed at the shimmering mirages on the California desert. I knew it was not the California she’d been hoping for. She must have been thinking the words of one of Charles Dickens’ characters, “Whatever shall become of us?”
Three and one half months have passed. I live in San Diego now. The band is scattered about Southern California. We brought a high-octane music machine to be launched like a second stage rocket to maintain our ascendance and to magnify our burst and prevent the shimmering fall to obscurity. We had cut our teeth on a brutal decade of touring and honed our wares in Memphis and the Delta where the ghosts of Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy drift in the mists of the Mississippi. We were ready.
But life does not separate its chapters like a novel being written. It demands that the in-betweens be lived and suffered and experienced. No one knows us in California. LA is tinsel town and everyone wants to be a star. Club owners are stoic and unimpressed. A thousand bands wait at their doorsteps like cats wanting an open can of tuna. The best clubs cater to the nationally famous acts and treat the rest with indifference. Bad clubs have bands lined up like cattle at a watering hole, offering to play for nothing. Telephone calls are screened and ignored. No one calls you back. Promotional packs are tossed in the garbage with the ceremony of a dirty diaper.
But we are the ones who threw down this gauntlet and willingly entered the trial by fire. If we have what it takes in the big leagues, we must find out. All else is vanity and provincial thinking. To kick butt in your home town in front of your friends and neighbors may feel good, but it is only a bean in the whole enchilada. To rise to the top in this profession requires that you kick butt in every town or get out of the game and go work in a music store and talk about what you could have been, or perhaps go live with your mother, to be depressed, watch TV, and become bitter.
Now is a time when self-examination is forced on us. I will soon be a grandpa and many of my friends have already retired or live a life of solid security and repose. I have three old friends who are millionaires living within an hour of me. I cast my lot with a blues band from Laramie, Wyoming. The hour is getting late for me to win this game. The security of my future hangs in the balance. They don’t know us out here. None of the wonderful nights of fire and magic that some of you have seen us have are believed. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what everybody says…”
I choke down occasional panic and resign myself to endure and preserver. Slowly we progress. A small fan base has formed in the West LA region, readers of TTW from years past. Southern Cal’s best Blues Club hires us regularly in Long Beach. A club in the heart of San Diego’s entertainment district, jammed with sailors, marines, students, and hardcore blues fans has picked us up in January. A Casino with a stage bigger than most people’s yards is putting us on in February. The schedule that had been choked with gigs for many years is starting to blossom once again.
Chuck entered a huge contest and was declared by Guitar Center, the best drummer in the Southwest United States. They gave him a $4,500 set of Pearl drums. Jason is cutting heads at blues jams around Southern Cal and making quite a name for himself. Roland gets pick-up gigs with high-paying high-powered bands as a bassist. I grind metal and paint and build around the house in this gorgeous weather and glory in the hearing of birds singing once again.
It’s been strange not playing. BDS played over 1600 gigs together. My ears that ring twenty-four hours a day have begun to heal a little. My body, ravaged by road miles and bad sleep and fast food, is feeling restored and vibrant. I can read a book without vehicular draft and I even feel more spiritual and connected to the things of God and nature, which is hard to do in rooms where alcohol is the social matrix.
I feel anxious to get back into performing and recording again. The opportunities in California, while not easily obtainable, are virtually without limit and the rewards are tenfold. We have vowed not to play the shit circuit in this new chapter. We are competing against the best there is. “Iron sharpens iron.” We aren’t starting out here in the garage. We paid enough dues to have earned a ticket to the ball and we are either going to shine and climb, or go out blazing. The arena is not to whimper, or to shrink, but only to test the metal.
So here we are. Climbing a new ladder with its top in the clouds. The bottom of the ladder sits at the end of a road. The road goes way back and disappears on horizons painted on our memory like vistas in a movie set. The road has formed a stable foundation for us–a substructure of love, support, and communication over nearly a decade of time given freely to us by people like you.
I recently looked up an old friend of mine. He has done quite well for himself. We rode around in his elegant car and talked of when we were young, ambitious men, thirty-five years ago. He tried to hide it, but he looked at me with pity in his eyes. I guess being my age and being in a blues band that isn’t famous is about as low as one can get above street person. I knew that out of compassion, he was going to offer me a job. I didn’t want our relationship to come to that so I asked, “How many people do you know who receive an ovation at the end of a day’s work? Not only from their friends and relatives, but from strangers in all walks of life?”
He stopped the car. Looked at me as if for the first time, and replied with resignation, “I can’t buy that. Can I?”
When I drove away in our little blue car with rust on its edges, I thought, “Welcome to the artist’s world, my friend.”
Carl
Posted by Carl