Blinddog Smokin'

Monday October 21st, 2002 @ 8:54 PM

 “The days come and go and they say nothing, and if you do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

I memorized that quotation many years ago and have used it countless times and in a great variety of ways ever since, probably in a past TTW, but seldom do I fully appreciate or use the gifts of any given day.

We Americans are a spoiled lot by anybody’s standard. We have come to expect our days to be full of material gifts and we whine over the most trivial of disappointments. That we have a program on television like the Anna Nicole Smith show tells me that our values are reaching a disgusting nadir.

Our children demand expensive electronic games and gadgets and profess to be unable to function in life without them. They have become skilled in laying guilt trips on parents who equate love with material purchases: “Joey’s parents bought him a techno marvel-surround sound-wrap around vision-three dimensional-cyber cloning-virtual reality-warp speed-Satan worshipping-hip hop playing-million gigabyte-video game with its own refrigerator and heat sensing back scratcher, plus–it that will guide him through puberty and do his homework all at the same time whether he’s awake or asleep. Our children’s bedrooms are a snake-pit of extension cords.

I was born the year after World War II ended. The first of the babyboom years. I went to grade school before anyone had a television. I was forced to get my entertainment by playing in the back yard or the City Park and using my imagination. In the winter I actually read books. The library was a place of great joy to me. I don’t want to sound self-righteous. If I had the techno-gadgets available today when I was a boy, I’d have become addicted just as fast. But I fear we are collectively becoming desensitized to the most beautiful gifts life has to offer.

I make my living, meager as it is, performing as a blues music artist. The entertainers at the very top of my chosen genre of music sell only a few thousand records a year with the exception of BB King and one or two others. The hallmark of our music is the ability to be genuine. To instill heart and soul into each note. To allow the listener to feel the emotion and character of the artist. Most music charts revealing top sellers and influential music don’t even list blues music. Record stores allot only a tiny shelf space to blues, some none at all.

The rage these days is techno music where machines synthesize sound and computers measure every beat and note to precision–the antithesis of blues where phrasing and heart play hugely important roles in the end product. It is hard to get a young person today to submit to the discipline of mastering a real instrument. They want thousands of dollars worth of techno turntables and synthesizers and computer cards.

To accompany this synthetic sound are lyrics often obscene, Satanic, murderous, sexist, and certainly vulgar. The other day I drove by a blues club where we play and it was half full at best while just around the corner was a theater where a hip-hop band was playing and it was noisy and overflowing with many young people waiting on the sidewalk hoping for a chance to get in. I have seen this all over the country. Last March in Salt Lake City people were standing outside around the block in freezing temperatures waiting to hear an advertised satanic cult band while we played to thirty people at a blues club right across the alley.

I read a book one time that said it wasn’t good for the human soul to be surrounded with plastic flowers and fake bricks and zircon jewelry. I believe that principle holds true across the board. Try reading the label on some of the foods you eat, it reads like a chemistry formula. No wonder we have a nation of cancer and clogged arteries. This cancer I’m afraid has invaded our souls.

I could go on to moralize or write a diatribe, but why? Mankind is playing out a Saga in a scope far beyond the call of my tiny voice. What I can do is be thankful and recognize and use the gifts each day brings to me. It is so easy to do just the opposite: to lament my lack of success, to complain about how hard it is to obtain meaningful gigs anymore, to wish that I had a nicer house, a better car, a measure of status in my society.

Blinddog Smokin’ just returned from a little tour of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Over the long miles I was able to read deeply into several wonderful books with the luxury of nothing else to do. I’d look up into splendid sunrises and sunsets, majestic mountainscapes, passive farm scenes, and billowing Old Testament clouds with their intermittent rays of sun spearing through to the Autumnal earth. I smelled rain on the freshly harvested dirt of Eastern Kansas, and smelled it in another way in the thick forests of Western and Central Arkansas where frogs sang in mighty choruses in the gloam of a stormy twilight.

On the way home we drove all night through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona where we told stories and laughed until we couldn’t catch our breath. We had spent three days at the King Biscuit Blues Festival along the Mississippi River where a Fall moon rose up out of the swamp trees and crossed the sky over tens of thousands of people sitting on the levy listening to the heartfelt music of the best the Delta land has to offer. We had gone down to the gospel stage and “got the ghost” among hand waving black folk who smiled at us in love and welcome.

Most of all, we had experienced the love and appreciation of our fans. In Cherryvale, Kansas, our greeting included a huge spread of home grilled steaks with all the trimmings. We slept on the floor of a bail bondsman’s office complex and awoke to a hot breakfast he cooked in his kitchen and sent on our way with baskets of fresh fruit and muffins and leftovers. Our memories include standing ovations and warm hugs and handshakes, tears in the eyes of fans who wouldn’t see us for another year, and the sincerest of smiles by those truly glad to see us again.

In McPherson, Kansas, we played to a full house on a Sunday night where people knew they had to get up the next morning to go to work. Again the club owner met us with a feast before we played. We stayed in this little town three days and slept in their houses and ate their food and drove their cars and even got invited to the Movie Theater for free. My hostess took me to her sister’s house to learn how to make pottery and gave me all I could pack into our limited space in the van to take home with me. Her husband painstakingly wrapped every piece so it wouldn’t break. Another lady sent us on our way, each with his own loaf of banana bread. Another, spent days creating a collage on canvas of our images as she had seen them over the years in Kansas.

In Oklahoma City Miss Blues got up at 3 A.M., to prepare all day a feast for us before we played that evening. Barbecued beef ribs, roast, beef brisket, three kinds of corn bread, fruit salad, regular salad, sweet potato pie baked with honey instead of sugar. What a blessed soul she is.

When I lament not having much in life compared to my neighbors who drive fancy cars and take vacations to exotic tourist towns, I stop and remember Emerson’s quote and realize I am a man most blessed. I have a loving and devoted wife, four gorgeous kids grown up to be healthy and prosperous adults, two fun and loving step children, my first grandson with another due in December. I still have my parents and my siblings, and I have you fine people who like to read my writings, and many of you let me know that to my deep gratification.

Each day allows me the time to read and write, to engage in fun and creative endeavors, to make music, and to love my fellow man who is in such desperate need of loving in this world of terror and uncertainty. I maintain tremendous good health for a man my age and every day bringing me that gift is a day to be savored.

Blinddog Smokin’ has two fans, one in Chicago, another in Nebraska, who are dying of cancer. A relatively short time ago they both took their health for granted and had plans for old age with their loving mates. Now it appears neither will see that time come to pass. It touches me profoundly to report that both of these human beings wanted a Blinddog Smokin’ song to be played at their funeral, but I suggested that we really don’t have anything fitting.

I played softball for years in Chicago with the one man. We were in our twenties and I remember him so vibrant and energetic and agile. His wife tells me that there were many things they planned to do and put off for another day. They will never get to do those things together; the gift was carried silently away.

The Nebraska fan approached me only this last summer, not knowing anything about his cancer at that time. He and his devoted wife took me aside and gave me a package. It was a beautiful and very expensive sixteen hole chromatic harmonica. It took my breath away. I can’t afford such an instrument. I don’t think they really could either. But there it was with a message of thanks attached for the many hours of enjoyment I had given them in music and in this Tales Told Well column. He named me “The Blues teacher.” I was overcome with surprise and deep gratitude. This was from a man I seldom even saw in our audiences. I had no clue to how grateful this man was for whatever transcendence Blinddog had provided him over the years.

On a business and political level, America doesn’t reward its musicians. We lead a meager and sometimes desperate life with hope as our beacon. But on the grass roots level, America loves its musicians and gives to them a poignant heartfelt appreciation that brings tears to my eyes.

I watch our performances on those special nights when people who know and love us come to let us take them somewhere over the rainbow. It is our job to lift these farmers, mechanics, teachers, businessmen, housewives, truck drivers, etc., above the mundane to a plane of human potential that only the dynamics of inspired music can transcend. They realize whether consciously or subconsciously that they aren’t animals, or machines, or numbers, or anything relegated to anonymity or insignificance. They are human beings with the unique powers of emotion and love, full of wonder and mystery, able to exhilarate and remember. Those days are so special because we are your gift and you are ours. This is my way of not letting you slip silently away, because none of us knows how many days we get on this earth.

Carl

*Blinddog Smokin’ now has a manager, Ronald Chew, an attorney on Wilshire Blvd in the L.A./Hollywood area. He is a very nice man with a big perspective and scope of our potential. He doesn’t think small. He has recently gotten us a headline gig at BB Kings club at the Universal Studios in Hollywood.

*Blinddog Smokin’ will be featured on the cover of Southland Blues Magazine in December. This is the leading Blues publication for Los Angeles and San Diego and should open doors for us. The publisher has become a friend of mine and is very supportive of the band. He is a sincere and hardworking man whose humble and honest demeanor goes contrary to the Hollywood image and gives hope to those of us who want talent and character to win in the end over hyperbole and Machiavellian politics.

*Look for all new Blinddog Smokin’ promotional material to be out soon. We have invested in a top graphic artist, David Vaughan, who loves the band and works as a labor of love as well as money. This will be the most professional and artistic image we have ever portrayed and hopefully will mark the beginning of a new level in our opportunities.

*Jason “12 Fingers” Coomes has had a new custom guitar designed and built by Scott Platz and it will be the subject of its own Tales Told Well if Jason allows me to write about it. It is a mysterious guitar with a lot of mojo inherent in it for certain reasons and it is destined to be the stuff of which legends are made. I doubt you will receive the story of this guitar with indifference. You will love it, hate it, be fascinated or repulsed, but you won’t be indifferent. Jason will be receiving it sometime in the next month.

*Our congratulations to the King Biscuit Blues Festival volunteers in the little Riverboat town of Helena, Arkansas, once again you have made your festival an experience to remember, the best there is. Readers of TTW would do well to consider this experience in years to come. Some things exceed anticipation. Don’t go if you prefer plastic flowers to the real thing. This festival is what the blues is all about.

Posted by Carl

Tuesday February 26th, 2002 @ 8:53 PM

Walking around the bend in the road I looked back up the hill. Pink luminescence glowed through the thickness of forest. Sunset in an Arkansas summer is long and luxurious like a rich woman’s bath. I came upon a dirt side road disappearing into the long shadows of evening. A hummingbird whirred by my ear and vanished down the side road. A squirrel scolded me from an unseen perch and the first cricket of the evening beckoned me from the gloaming.

I hesitated, looking around to make sure I could find my way back. But the woods were lovely. I entered. I smelled the rot of bark mixed with wildflowers and moss. The sun brushed the treetops with strokes of brilliant gold and I found myself mesmerized by nature’s intimacies. I strolled further and further down the dirt road paying no mind to my steps until roots begin to present themselves and my way narrowed to a crooked path.

I was walking to ease my mind from years of troubles. I once had a wife, a family, a career–much promise, much hope. It was 1994 and I had nothing left but the blues. On my shoulders was a decade of guilt, remorse, and regret. Instead of using my sorrows to find illumination and strength, I wallowed in self-pity and self-incrimination. The loveliness of these woods was giving me solace.

The rays overhead gleamed intensely before the far horizon cut off the last vestiges of the sinking globe. I was surprised at how fast the forest darkened. I no longer heard the sounds of birds and squirrels. From far away came a chorus of frogs to replace them. Crickets answered in counterpoint and a firefly appeared, and then another. But even with the night creatures stirring to life, the woods seemed ominously silent.

My eyes adjusted quickly to the loss of light while a red glow still painted the space between the branches, though dull now, and benign. Still I wandered on, the path becoming no more than a deer trail. The woods were deep.

Suddenly I no longer felt alone. Something was in these woods. Had I heard an unnatural sound? I turned and looked back. Nothing. I studied the forest and listened. I continued on but slower. Do we have a sixth sense, I wondered? Can we detect brain waves from intelligent beings in some similar manner to radio waves? Was I detecting something-or someone? The feeling became very strong. I began to focus on whatever was out there and on nothing else.

Should I go back? Yes, definitely. How far had I come into these woods? I realized that I could barely make out the path anymore. Was I lost? If I went back, was whatever or whoever behind me? I stopped again and turned full around. I stared at each tree. Twilight was turning quickly to no light and there would be no moon until later. My eye seemed to catch movement. I stared intently at a large tree where I thought I’d seen it. Something was there. I realized that I was barely breathing. Fireflies danced. The silence of the forest had become large, like the trees had become larger with darkness.

Then I saw something that should not have been there. A great shiver swept through my body. Toes! I could see the toe ends of two shoes standing behind a tree about forty yards away. I was sure of it.

I did nothing. I just stood there and stared at the toes. I believed them to be some kind of running shoes. They did not move. What should I do? Somebody had been following me. Then it occurred to me that it was probably one of the guys in the band. Andy or Jason. It wouldn’t be Chuck– he didn’t like the woods. Andy was a woodsman-a fisherman and hunter, although it would be like Jason to play a joke on me. I decided to call out and let them know I was onto them. “O.K., Jason, or Andy, I know you’re there. Come on out.” My voice startled me given the previous quiet. I waited. Nothing.

I spoke again, only in anger this time, “Listen Andy, or Jason, I don’t think this is funny. Get out here or you’re going to make me mad.” My voice rang through the forest, being the only significant sound. Then I suddenly went cold. I realized that Jason and Andy wore Chuck Taylors and neither had a pair of shoes with the kinds of toes at which I was looking.

Could it just be a pair of shoes someone had left behind that tree? Maybe I was not seeing shoes. Maybe they were rocks or plants that seemed like shoes. The increasing darkness was obscuring the lines and I decided that I was getting paranoid. I couldn’t stay here all night. Still, I decided not to go back along the path by where I thought I had seen shoes. I turned and walked deeper into the trees. The woods were dark.

I walked very slowly feeling fear well up in my throat. I regretted having given up my view of the toes. I knew that if I turned around I would not see them again. Where was I going? Somehow I had to find a way out.

The urge to turn around and look became very strong. What if someone was behind me? How close was he now? How would I know unless I looked? I knew that I had to look. It was driving me crazy. When I turned this time I did it all of a sudden, and there in the path not thirty yards back was a clown.

I heard myself gasp. The clown had stopped when I turned. It stood there staring at me through eyes heavily painted with evil markings. This was not a clown for children. He was dressed in yellow and blue and wore a jester’s cap with three tassels. He was every bit as tall as my six-one and big-boned as well. He had no expression on his face, save the macabre paint. He said nothing. I said nothing. My heart was pounding like a sledge against my ribs. So focused was I on my problem that I could no longer smell anything or hear the sounds of the forest creatures. I could only stare.

Now undoubtedly you are reading this in the comfort and security of your home or office and if you are a self-respecting male, you may be scoffing at me right now as my heart pounds in the forest. Perhaps you are thinking that you’d have put a quick end to such nonsense if it happened to you. But consider this: the clown must have known something I did not. How else could he be so confident? And obviously, his intentions were not good, nor was he of a right mind. What did he know that I didn’t? Maybe that he had a gun, or a knife, or some other weapon. Maybe that he had done this before. Maybe that he was someone who could cover his deed by one means or another. Add it all up and I knew that trouble was on my trail like Robert Johnson’s Hellhound.

I turned and walked faster away from the clown. This time I could hear him behind me. He no longer needed stealth. I stopped and the sound stopped. I began to jog and bushes tore at my pants. I wondered if he were running. I wondered how close he was now. Again I stopped and turned. There he was, stopping when I stopped. Should I talk to him? But to do so may force him to an action. Maybe I could just outrun him. But then I realized I did not know this forest and he undoubtedly did.

“What do you want?” I asked. I tried to say it boldly and with no fear in my voice, but I detected a slight quavering and I’m sure he picked it up. He said nothing. He stood firmly planted in my path with no hint that he would retreat if threatened. I wanted very badly for him to speak. I could begin to form some judgments based on his voice and what he said. “What do you want?” I repeated, my voice sounding lonely under the tall trees.

It is easy, I imagine, to think of yourself as being brave and decisive as you read this story. However, standing alone in those woods with an evil clown, darkness falling all about me, I began to think of death. The clown hadn’t followed me as a lark, of that I was certain. I thought of being shot and incapacitated or paralyzed and then being buried alive. I thought of various tortures. I wondered if I would be sodomized or humiliated before I died. The clown was bold and confident and that meant he knew he could defeat me.

I fought panic. All of this was happening rapidly. Only seconds were passing while thoughts raced through my head. At such a time a man’s mind begins to prioritize the components of his life. Values come under a giant mental microscope. What he loves and whom he loves becomes starkly clear. So much else that seemed important becomes trivialized. A vision of values is presented and seared into ones soul. Courage often follows resolution.

All of a sudden I had become alert and aware of myself as a fighter and a strategist. I would make my move and take the offensive. Boldly I strode forward and marched straight at the clown with the imagined feel of his neck in my hands, savagery in my muscles, and intent to do unkind things to his evil face. I figured that he would either run or make a stand. He did neither. Casually he sidestepped off the path and walked slowly into the darkest part of the forest. When I reached the spot where he had stood, he was twenty yards or more into the deep and I could no longer define his outline. He seemed to glow yellow and blue faintly in the stygian dark of the thickets. Then for the first time he smiled a sardonic smirk and motioned with his head in a sidelong movement that meant: “come this way.”

I was mad now and ready for combat. He had not shot me or knifed me or clubbed me. Perhaps I should follow him and beat him bad and drag him out of the forest and turn him in to the police. Yet still I trembled with fear and he stood waiting. Once again he motioned, almost imperceptibly.

The game had taken a new twist. He was no longer standing between the road and me. He had given me an out. Now he was tempting me.

If he wanted me to follow him into the density of that forest he had evil intentions, then again he had running shoes. Would he run? I analyzed my future. There is more to such an episode than merely escape and survival. There is also who you have become in the process. Could I live with myself as a coward or as prey to the hunter? Would I have to live my life wondering what I was made of? Or worse yet, knowing I lacked faith in myself and in what I believed? I decided this was a test of who I was on this earth.

I stared into the black barely making out that painted face. The eyes of the clown somehow gleamed in the dark. They hadn’t gleamed before. I figured that maybe he had them open wider now to see without light-or maybe he was eager. I have always been competitive, an athlete, a combatant. As a boy I’d been Galahad in search of the Grail, Lancelot who feared no man, and Arthur himself who lived in an enchanted world of wizards and mystery and evil. Every manly instinct I possessed was urging me to overcome my fear and win this game. My pulse pounded like a bass drum in the quiet of this ghastly dusk.

I started toward him and he nodded. I stopped. I began to think about my children, my friends and loved ones, my unfulfilled life, my need to contribute something meaningful on this earth. Would I throw it all away on the gamble that this clown couldn’t back up his bravado?

I thought of the poem by Robert Frost. I loved the words and memorized them from the first and only time I ever read them back in High School: “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep…”

“Promises to keep…”

“Promises to keep…”

“Promises to keep…”

There is a phrase we use: he or she “has so much promise.” Each of us is born with a certain amount of promise. Much of this promise is tacit and never written down or spoken, yet expected nonetheless. Our parents see promise in us as we play out our childhood dreams. Our spouses have great expectations when they lovingly say, “I do.” Our children believe us when we tell them we love them and will always be there for them. They look to our successes as pathways for their own. Our teachers hope that their efforts to instill in us the tools of tomorrow are not in vain. Our society turns its hard-earned money back into the system to seed the future with promise. However one defines his creator, it cannot be lost on that person the tremendous opportunity that is life, and the tragedy of squandering this most rare and precious gift. But most of all, we have promised ourselves, all our lives, that we would do that or become this or somehow live up to our perceived and believed potential.

The balance began to tip. On one hand I could defeat this clown or perhaps die alone in these woods having failed, or on the other hand, I could shake myself free from the guilt, lethargy, and self-incrimination that had brought me here this day, and walk back out to fulfill my promises. I had wasted a decade of life in doldrums and I had a lot of promise. I whispered to the clown, “I have miles to go before I sleep.”

I left the stare of the clown fading into the woods behind me. We played in Hot Springs, Arkansas that night in an upstairs room that roaring twenties gangsters once frequented called “The New Ohio Club.” I was very animated, because I knew what it meant to be alive and I savored every moment of it. The incident had shifted my focus from tortured retrospect to carpe diem and wondrous future view.

I wish life were like the denouement of a movie, that my illumination would have spawned rapturous change. That bells would ring and birds sing and beautiful ladies would make choreographed dives into fountains and Pegasus would fly above grazing unicorns. That Spring would burst out in a kaleidoscope of flowers. But alas, life demands that we travel the miles before we sleep. Change comes at the habit level. Attitudes are sunk deep into the recesses of the mind. Days come and go and they say nothing.

But what I had was a new direction. I had promises to keep. I had music to create. Stories to tell. Books to write. Philosophy to discover and hone. Poetry to ponder. People to love. A future wife to marry. Grandchildren to dote upon. And many more sunsets for which to give thanks. The courage and discipline to fulfill my promise would be profound in comparison to a blind burst of fury in the woods.

Yet still I wonder. What would have happened if I had followed his beckoning? Had I rationalized my leaving? My vanity sometimes wishes I had dragged that clown out of the woods and onto the front page of the newspaper. What would you have done? Before you answer, remember that conditions were not as you have them at your computer. That night the woods-were dark, and deep.

Carl

Epilogue

The question is of course, what was that clown doing in those woods? I have since concluded that this was a serious player of a grim and morbid game called “ghosting.” Or as some call it “ghousting”, rhyming with house. In some forms it is practiced by stealthily entering a home at night and walking around in the dark. The thrill or high comes from knowing there are people in the house who would be horrified if they detected your presence. It is a silent, but intense exhilaration. To some this benign thrill is no longer sufficient. They need a higher risk. They need your awareness of them. I think this is the status of my clown. I believe that because I was big and strong increased his risk and thus his exhilaration. He dressed as an evil clown because he knew it would terrify his victims.

I never heard anything of such a clown thereafter. The guys in the band tease me unmercifully and laugh whenever a clown appears on TV or in the movies. My nephew painted the Arkansas Clown on the side of our bus and I must say it looks very much like what I remember. If you own our CD, “More Trouble Than Worth,” you will find the story of the Arkansas Clown put to music.

Posted by Carl

Monday August 20th, 2001 @ 8:52 PM

I sensed the vision before I saw it. I turned and looked down the long sidewalk and beheld what looked like three glorious angels shimmering white in beatific splendor. Statuesque they were, and poised like figurines on a transparent ledge. After a short gasp, I yelled at a nearby photographer, and pointed at the vision. He responded by falling over his camera bag, gathering himself in an ungainly fashion, combing his mop of red hair, racing to a table where he kept his film, cramming the film into one of his cameras, then running down the sidewalk to get a closeup–which is exactly the opposite of what he should have done. The beauty was in the distant image down the lane, under the trees, which in turn were under the summer sky. Only far away would the figures appear so angelic and isolated and singular. It didn’t matter anyway, by the time he took an actual photograph the scene had vanished.

Three sisters began to move down the sidewalk to their destination before the preacher, who waited in a giant tent before five hundred people, and the three young men who would marry them. How often does one witness a wedding of three sisters at one time? Tall and elegant ones whose only rivals for beauty were each other? The flowing gowns gave the illusion of gliding as they slowly descended the steps above and behind the tent. Jason “12 fingers” Coomes played classical music on his guitar and one thousand eyes turned to behold the grand and glorious entry of the three lovely sisters.

Not strange eyes, but the familiar eyes of mothers, fathers, brothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, cousins, aunts and uncles, friends and co-workers, and dear acquaintances of every variety. Almost every eye held a tear, every throat a lump, every heart a tremor. Men and women bit their lips and smiled alternately as the mood changed with every step. Many had known these sisters from infancy and memories flowed through people’s minds in kaleidoscopic delight.

Blinddog Smokin’, as a rule, will not play weddings. But the opportunity to play at such a rare and special event broke our rule. Because of the strange and varied attendees, a band can’t seem to please anyone. The old people want quiet waltzes, and the young people want punk and grunge and hip-hop. The rednecks want country and the white-collars want elevator music. The ten year olds want rap with lyrics like, “I’m gonna take an ax and kill the bitch, that’ll teach her…” I’m not kidding. Add to all this, the favorite uncles and family friends who think they can barge onstage in the middle of any song to make a drunken toast, or sing their version of “Good night Irene…” and you have the musician’s nightmare.

I would not have contracted to play this wedding, despite the singularity, except for my special affinity with the father of the three brides. Being the observer I am, sometimes I seem to rise above a scene and view it from the vantage point of a drifting bird on the quiet draft of rising air. I seem to hang there in overview. This is my special gift and always has been, to remove myself in mind’s eye, to intensely observe and learn. So it was this day as I seemed to be watching the father from on high.

He stood tall like a Marine in dress blues, his tuxedo, starch-stiff like his backbone. I could feel the love in his heart as he watched his son bring each sister down the steps outside the tent to his position at the entry.

Love is such a trite and misappropriated and ill-defined word anymore. I hear junior high kids dating for the second time saying “I love you,” to one another. The love this father felt for his daughters was so beautifully honed, so intensely focused, so layered and textured through the years, and acutely tied to his great role in life. These lovely creatures, he had held in his arms as helpless babes, who looked up at him in awe and wonder. He had felt the fierce duty to protect them forever with his life and strength. He had known that to neglect them was a sin beyond reclamation. He had gazed at their tiny perfect bodies in praise to God, watching their miniature fingers bend and grasp for the first time.

He had known a time when the sisters had believed in him with all their hearts. If he said it was going to rain, then it was going to rain. If he didn’t like someone, they didn’t either. He was their hero and their protector and their provider and their source of knowledge. No one on earth could stand in his place. He was their daddy.

He had carried them on his back and umpired their softball games and sat by the pool at their swimming lessons. He had to deal with teaching them about the facts of life and coached them through the trauma of growing breasts. One of them had become lost at two years old in a clothing store. He had been convinced she was kidnapped. Frantically he ran through the parking lot, his heart pounding, visions of finding the perpetrator and beating him into the pavement fought for room in his mad thoughts with the ecstasy of hugging his daughter once again. When she showed up playing house inside a ring of dresses, he almost fell to the ground in relief and love.

As he walked each one down the long aisle of grass, his heart burst in mixed emotions. He was so proud, yet feeling so guilty for all the things he didn’t do and the times he was gone, and the sorrow he had caused by his own problems, and the breakup with their mother. He longed in remorse that he could have been perfect for them. He hated himself, yet his heart poured love into the atmosphere like warm rain on a summer eve. The mind works unbelievably fast at such times–precision and rapidity of thought is amazing. The thoughts are tempered and stirred by erupting emotion, while the face carries out its lifetime of training to remain placid and cool.

Then it finally hits the father straight in the teeth when he looks up at his new son-in-law, or in this case–sons. They stand eager to relieve him of his duty as protector. Their eyes are filled with a different kind of love. The meaning and symbolism of the whole ceremony suddenly comes to fruition in the father’s mind. “I am relieved of my duty. This other man is the new protector. She will leave me and live with this man and be his mate and go where he goes. If he is weak, she will suffer. Oh God that he be strong…” The emotion becomes one of fear for his daughter, then hope fights for a position, then joy enters in. It is enough combined force to fell a tree. For perhaps the first time the father truly examines the young man before him and wonders, almost with a sense of panic: “How can this sapling do my job? How truly deep is his commitment and dedication? What is to become of my daughter?”

Then suddenly the preacher is preaching and the daughters who held so tightly to his arm coming down the aisle are now gazing intently into the eyes of their men. And it is over. People cheer. The celebration begins. Hands are being shook. Laughter is erupting. The dancing will commence. The father, however, is feeling a draining of some part of his being. It is the stripping of a duty that he has had his entire adult life. The role is over. The curtain has fallen. It is as though the heart of his vitality and purpose has been torn out of his chest.

While the party rages and builds, the father must reconstruct himself. Who is he now? He wonders about the hundred ways he could have done better. He fights the remorse and the need to feel sorry for himself. Regret and self-chastisement only hurt and breed more hurt. He must lift his head and find his new role. He must think of the positives. He must sublimate his turmoil of emotions into new energy and direction. He must share the joy with his daughters and feel their hope and exhilaration.

A child grown and mature is a mirror. In it a parent can clearly see who he was during the child’s lifetime. If there is distance, there is a reason for it. If there is a bond, there is a reason for that as well. The child-rearing seeds have born their fruit. You cannot undo what was sown. Every hour well spent with them is somehow a piece of fruit in their modern lives. Every tragic mistake is a mark somewhere in their personality or personal relationship with the parent. It is cause and effect. Or so say I from my perch in the sky as I watch this curious event of three married sisters.

I travel about this world more than 99.999 percent of all human beings. I see life from so many angles, some wondrous, some banal, some ugly. I store my knowledge and strive to turn it into wisdom. When you compare so many lives and places and times like I am able, one forms a private mythology and draws from its lessons to survive, grow, and contribute.

The vision of those three angels shimmering in the shadows of fluttering leaves and sunshine dropping through the branches to bless them in radiance, has taken its place in my mythology. The vision will become more glorious as time passes–ethereal and mystical. It represents a gift that a man gave to the world. A gift of his daughters who he loved and labored to shape as a sculpture beholds his clay and strives to bring out the beauty and art and ecstasy.

He gives them to the world to make their mark, that the world be a better place in their passing. He then watches from afar as these little girls who were once his primary reason for being, discover life for themselves and go on to nurture their own children and follow their muses as they write their stories in the ink of tears and laughter.

But unbeknown to them at this time, he, the father, is still their greatest champion. For if the world turns against them, and even the one to whom he gave them in matrimony, turns as well, and would hurt them or hate them, he will be there waiting. His love is a great tempered sword of steel and cannot be broken or bent–it is Excaliber and as pure as the quest for the Grail. He will come, he will always come. Only death can stay his rescue, but it cannot remove his will.

Blinddog Smokin’ has played some rare and special gigs, but that night will never be forgotten, for these, as you have probably already guessed, were my own beloved daughters, and the vision is mine forever.

Carl

Thursday April 12th, 2001 @ 8:50 PM

Prologue:

It is my habit in the summertime to ride my bicycle about my hometown of Laramie, Wyoming, in a casual fashion, letting the sights conjure up memories. I imagine the voices and laughter of old neighbors now long dead. Laramie originated with Trappers, miners, lumberjacks, cowboys, and railroaders, hardly the makings of a blues haven–which of course, it is not. But the blues planted a seed in Laramie, once upon a time.

I often ride along the railroad tracks on First Street, and as I come to a certain house there, as I did a few summers ago, I enter a time warp as though gravity has increased and all sound fades into utter stillness. This particular time I was awakened from my trance by a ruddy “granola type” lady asking me rudely what I wanted.

“Oh nothing,” I replied. “I was just reminiscing about your house.”

“Did you live here? She asked suspiciously.

“No, it was once a restaurant. Not like any other restaurant in Laramie. I had some meaningful experiences in there many years ago.”

She scoffed at me, “Nothing like that ever happened. I know the history of this house, and you are mistaken. It was never a restaurant. Check the records at the courthouse.”

“But you’re wrong,” I said. “It was before you were born, I would guess.”

“Please go away,” she said. “I don’t like you being around here. My husband will be home any minute. Believe me, you have the wrong house, nothing like you’re saying ever happened here.”
The Pic-a-Rib:

I looked at the clock above the teacher’s head: 1:15 P.M., the funeral would take place in forty-five minutes. I hadn’t wanted to confront the principal for an excuse. He wasn’t an understanding man where I was concerned. I had skipped a lot of high school that year and this would seem like just connivance. I decided instead to inform the teacher and slip out informally. But I hadn’t thought it through. To address the teacher at this point would mean stopping his lecture and having the focus of the class on my request. I decided to wait until the last minute, about 1:45, the cemetery being only blocks from the school.

I thought back to the first time that I’d seen her, so big and lovely and colorful, standing in her doorway, smiling through glossy red lipstick, and laughing. I was immediately attracted to her in the fashion of seeing a lioness or some other exotic creature. It was midnight and men were about her as they always were. I glanced down the long hallway behind her and could see silhouettes of people dancing in a large room with a jukebox.

Most of all I remember the smells. Her strong perfume mingling with the smell of barbecued ribs wafting out the front door into summer night air drenched in the aroma of blooming lilacs. The breath of the men added beer and whiskey and cigarettes to the eclectic bouquet, and through it all I could smell Wild Root Cream Oil in someone’s hair.

Her son Ricky had brought me to meet her. There was something about me she liked and she forgot the goings on about her and focused on me and smiled broadly. She took my hand after my introduction and pulled me down the hall. “Ricky,” she hollered at her son. “We got to fatten this poor boy up. Willie, get this skinny little thing some ribs.”

Willie was the cook and wore an apron over his white cotton tank. His beard was a series of disconnected cotton balls, and his head was cotton too. Eyes and Adam’s apple bulging, he spoke painfully slow in a deep voice: “Miss Peggy think everybody skinny.” He chuckled, which bobbed his Adam’s apple up and down.

Willie was a man of many past wives, two of which had shot him, one in the leg, one in the butt. A cigarette stuck to his lower lip and didn’t fall off when he spoke. I couldn’t imagine how his wives had hit him, as thin as he was. His apron was an abstract painting in barbecue sauce.

This was 1962, at the Pic-a-Rib Cafe. Miss Peggy opened the doors in the late afternoon, although few patrons would show up until respectable bars and restaurants closed down for the night. She actually had no license to operate or sell food and liquor, but this was First Street along the railroad tracks. Black people lived here, and the white establishment gave them autonomy. Not out of respect, but from indifference.

The blacks made a living off white hypocrisy. Here was a city block containing the Pic-a-Rib, and next door a private dance hall called “The Everybody’s Club,” and then Myrtle’s Chicken Inn where shady ladies were said to be found. In the dead of the night they would come; white businessmen, frat boys, doctors and lawyers. A man could bring a mistress here and it was as though it didn’t count. First Street activity never officially happened. When gray appeared in the Eastern sky it began to erase the events of the wee hours and when the sun rose over the Laramie Mountains on a Sunday morning, it unveiled men arm in arm with their wives going to church, followed by sweet children in suits and dresses.

Over cookies and coffee in the church basement, no one ever mentioned that they’d seen each other on First Street. If Miss Peggy happened on to one of her patrons in the grocery store, no greeting was passed. Whites didn’t associate with blacks in those days. In a few years discrimination would erupt into vicious conflagration, but as my story unfolds black people were still just freed slaves living off the crumbs under the white folk’s tables.

Miss Peggy loved color. She wore bright yellow and purple. She liked glossy wigs and exotic eye shadow and lipstick cherry red. Most of all she liked perfume. Passing by her bedroom was an olfactory adventure. Colorful dispensers lined her dresser and reflected in the great mirror that dominated her intimate domain. Like costumed eunuchs in a queen’s court, they stood about on every flat surface, their shaped glass glowing in the lamp light, their ornate squeeze bulbs and stems glistening like tawdry jewels.

The tables where couples sat whispering and eating barbecue were candlelit. The jukebox had a blue light that glowed into the dark, painting its color into the halos around the candles. The shadows flickered on the walls, creating distorted profiles of clandestine lovers. It was where I first heard the blues.

I felt them calling me, because like the atmosphere in which I stood, blues were sensuous and passionate. Unlike white people’s music, blues were raw, visceral, and brutally honest. Instead of squeaky clean sounds like Pat Boone’s “April Love,” or Lawrence Welk’s bubble machine music, I was hearing the apocalyptic haunt of Little Walter’s harmonica in “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Excitement rushed through my veins like a drug. I found myself in a nether world: exhilaration in slow motion–when nothing matters, and the past and future disappear, and every sense is focused on the moment, and the moment has nowhere to go.

Blues were my window to the black people’s spirit. Nothing was hidden, nothing taboo, nothing prevaricated. More than that, blues seemed to strip a human being of the prejudices and hypocrisies that contrived his conscience and soiled his soul.

That next Sunday in Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Church I studied not religion, but people. The building is a beautiful stone fortress towering over downtown Laramie with its majestic cross in the sky like a beacon declaring the righteousness of those within the stain glassed walls. No black people ever attended. I remember a poorly dressed hobo came one time and sat in the back pew and was immediately asked to leave. I guess the Episcopal god didn’t like a person without status.

I studied one man’s pious face and remembered it from the depth of a recent night when it was leering and profane. I pictured his arm around the black whore with whom he and his friends had been dancing. I began to see the church as a mighty rock decorating a manicured lawn, which when uprooted, reveals a colony of squirming white maggots.

But somehow, this duplicity was accepted and understood in those days. No one was trying to change it yet, black or white. The Pic-a-Rib Cafe was a birthplace for me, of my alter ego: the performer. I loved it there because I could be who I wanted to be without schoolteacher’s reprimands, parental restrictions, society’s expectations, and the narrow moral confinement of the church. I danced with Ricky and Miss Peggy: loose and cool and uninhibited. It was an era of many dance crazes: the twist, the swim, the mashed potatoes, pony, continental, fly, Popeye, yo-yo, U.T., bop, jerk, Watutsi, locomotion, monkey, hully gully, hand jive, and a few more I’ve forgotten.

It was exhilarating. Until then I’d only learned to waltz and polka at the VASA lodge where ancient Swedish ladies baked pies and did the Bunny Hop to accordion music with their drunken old husbands. Miss Peggy had heavy breasts that jiggled to the music of the jukebox. Ricky had big feet and wore long pointed Italian shoes, which made it easy to watch his steps and learn the dances. One time we traveled to Denver to see James Brown, who was thirty-two years old and in his prime, but still playing to all-black audiences. I was dumbfounded. That a human being could move like he did was incredulous. I spent hours trying to “camel walk” and copy his marvelous repertoire of moves.

Those were languorous days and I thought in my provincial naiveté that nothing would change forever. But we were nearing the end of an age. The fifties had seemed so carefree and immature and the doo-wop music reflected the puerile self-indulgence of a post-war nation at play. The turbulence of the mid-sixties was boiling just beyond the horizon of my innocence.

The bellwether of those changes in my life occurred in the form of Miss Peggy’s sudden and untimely death. Undiagnosed sugar diabetes struck her down one night in her sleep. I awakened the same night with horrible cramps in my calves, a co-incidence to be sure, but none-the-less, I have ever after associated cramps with her dying.

There is much I haven’t said about what went on at the Pic-a-Rib and much more to which I wasn’t privy, but it left it’s mark on my life, and yours too in a small and indirect way. I would not be a blues man this day–but for that day, and Blinddog Smokin’ would not exist.

In my classroom the big hand on the clock ticked onto the nine–a quarter ’til two. The teacher’s voice droned on and I knew I must raise my hand. The other kids, bored into zombie land, would welcome any break in the monotony. They would stare at me and all would be deathly quiet as I asked permission to leave. I knew the teacher would make me explain. Everyone knew Ricky’s mom had died, but Ricky was black, and white people didn’t go to black people’s funerals.

Having learned to dance at the Pic-a-Rib, I found that only the few black girls we had at the high school could dance like I could. After dancing with them a few times and raising some eyebrows, some white girls would no longer dance with me. I remember one sneering this reply to my invitation: “What’s the matter, aren’t there any niggers to dance with?”

I couldn’t raise my hand. The clock hand that had moved so slow up until now began to race to the top of the clock. I filled with anxiety. Emotion welled up like surging water. I loved this woman who had been so good to me and had released my inhibitions and my Caucasian cultural restraints. And then it was over. When the bell rung and I drudged down the hallway, crestfallen. I felt like Peter who denied Christ three times. I had forsaken my friend. Whatever grim tug I needed to complete this education in pathos, I received from the horror of my betrayal. Her life was left unrecognized and unhonored and I left myself unforgiven.

Weeks later I went to First Street and stared at the Pic-a-Rib. Already it was someone’s residence. Ricky had moved away to live with his aunt. It was as though it had never happened. Remember–that’s the way things were on First Street.

Epilogue:

From that day long ago until now, I have missed very few funerals of people I know. If it is at all possible for me to attend, I will go out of my way to do so. I even attend the funerals of my enemies. Anyone who has shaped me positively or negatively gets my salute. It hurts me when a life departs unrecognized. Of course in part every funeral is Miss Peggy’s where I should have been, but it never salves the betrayal. I hated the weakness in my character that allowed peer pressure and societal ignorance to dictate my judgment of a matter. I loathed the fear that I felt then and despise the fear I still feel in wondering how strong I really am.

All I can do is to let her live when I perform. For hers is my ability to feel rhythm, to let myself go, to ride the exhilaration like a winged horse, and most of all: to sing my blues, not to be cool, but because I was there–in 1962, at Miss Peggy’s after-hours Pic-a-Rib Cafe.

They asked my name again: “Guftason, Gusterson, Guftuffson…” They settled on Flufftason because I had my hair in a fluffy pompadour at the time. This soon shortened to “Fluff” and that was the only name I was known by from then on in that house. Miss Peggy drug me around introducing me to people eating in her establishment, which was known as the Pic-a-Rib, “Look at this little white boy my Ricky brought home!” She’d exclaim and then would hug me hard, smothering me in bosoms. So fascinated was I by this flamboyant woman that I could only stare dumbly with an idiot’s smile.

One year later, in the summer of 1962, I ran away from home, taking with me a toothbrush, a sleeping bag and a football. After a month in the home of a neighbor kid whose parents were gone, I was evicted by their return and had no place to go. I ended up at the Pic-a-Rib.

Carl

Posted by Carl

November 23, 2000  

The Ice was so thick on the Freeway that it formed its own potholes. The tires of the yellow suburban shuddered and slammed big chunks against the undercarriage. We'd feel a terrifying slide and the subsequent fishtailing of the trailer. The wiper blades, caked in ice, struggled against the wind and heavy snowfall, and I used the last of the Kleenexes to wipe the condensation from my side of the windshield. My shoulder muscles were bunched against my neck as I peered into the blizzard. They'd been that way for hours. We were in Western Kansas going twenty miles an hour and sometimes there is no end to Kansas. 

The great head of a Kenworth loomed in the pall ahead, grimacing in agony as its twisted body lay crossways over the highway and on down into the ditch. One headlight cast a macabre beam into the whirling snow above the wreckage, creating a dying Cyclops as we crept slowly by. Stopping in the dense whorl of the storm was to invite a rear end collision. The hulk and shadow of so many trucks littered the road that it had become an obstacle course not unlike the aftermath of a battlefield. 

Darkness was adding its depression to the bleak gauntlet and we saw a family of black people mired in a drift--the father bent into the wind, trudging through the snow seeking help, his head nesting deep inside his collar. We found a flat shoulder upon which we came to a stop. Chuck and Jason went to the aid of the family. We boarded the father and he left his loved ones huddled in the back seat of their car, which was disappearing under the heavy snow. 

The suburban was filled with band equipment, luggage, and us--still we welcomed the advent of another warm body against the frigid draft that swept the many holes and leaks in the tortured body of the old vehicle. We left him at a truck. So many diesels were bedded there that the collective purring created a blanket of sound heard even before seeing the orange park-lights in the heavy atmosphere. We plunged ahead, a deadline to keep. Another gig in the never-ending quest to survive the guerilla war that envelops the life of a touring bluesman. 

We arrived somewhere on the great plains of Kansas one half hour before showtime, having been boxed in and tensed up like troops in a landing craft since four o'clock in the morning. The muscles along my spine had become taut as re-bar in concrete. We pulled our heavy equipment inside as the wind kept slamming the door behind us. No one had any feeling in his toes and the concept of a hot shower to pull the cold from our bones was a luxury no one dared to even dream about.  

The owner's wife, a constipated bitch who hadn't smiled since fourth grade, brought her sour face over to the bandstand and presented it to us like a greeting from Medusa. "We didn't think you were coming so we told everyone the dance was off," she said with obvious chagrin that we had actually made it.  

We groaned as we looked around at the meager attendance of locals, most of whom had no other home anyway and whose life had come down to this miserable society of huddled drunks. We had agreed to play for a percentage of the bar. Suddenly I realized how hungry I was. We hadn't been able to stop to eat all day in order to make the gig on time.  

She spoke again, colder than before: "I can't let you guys have the KC steak like before, not with no more money than we're gonna make tonight, and I didn't make any salads." We settled for stale-bun hamburgers and fries, drenched in days-old, re-used grease--and she made us pay for those. Half way through our wretched ration she scolded us bitterly for showing up and then said, "If you don't start playing we'll lose even the people we do have." We started. Numb fingers on cold guitar strings; wet socks, hair not combed, and everyone sniffling and peering through bloodshot eyes.  

I can remember the audience--all twelve of them. Only four actually listened to us. One of them was a sot who always brought his harmonica and played at a table just to the right of the band through every song as loudly as he could. Since he was out of key on almost every song, the dissonance became unbearable. The drunker he became, the bolder he played. He eventually decided in his stupor, that he was most likely the greatest harp player since Little Walter and stumbled on stage about the same time a woman appeared next to Andy Miller and started playing a homemade washboard.  

A biker and his wife who had been there since breakfast tried to dance but she fell over on the floor. He just dragged her to a booth and they mutually decided to sleep instead. A midget lady took up the cause doing a form of Indian war dance to a blues shuffle. It was sad. She looked like a bird with a wounded wing flopping around in the yard.  

We didn't care anymore--about anything. We just stood there like war orphans in a mush line, going through the motions, staring bleakly at the far wall with eyes resembling bowls of tapioca pudding with cherries for pupils. We had to play for five hours to keep the till charging up our thirty percent of the take. At the end of the night we made seventy-four dollars. Not apiece! The whole band! It had cost fifty-eight dollars in gas to get there. The motel would be another sixty-five and our meals had come to twenty-one. The owner's wife bitched as though her hemorrhoids were bursting at having to pay us at all. "Why didn't you just stay home," she repeated over and over.  

We drug our equipment back out into the wicked cold and found a motel a little after three, and by four o'clock in the morning, twenty-four hours after leaving Laramie, we feel asleep in a room no bigger than a rich person's pantry--Jason and Andy in sleeping bags between the two tiny beds.  

At eight-thirty the maid was pounding on the door, "Are you staying? Or are you checking out?" She had the voice of a chicken. We hated her. "Check out time is Eleven," She announced. "You have to be out by Eleven," she said again. "Eleven, I say," she screamed having gotten absolutely no response from the guerilla squad that slept in the room. Two or three "Fuck you's" came out from under the blankets and there was silence again.  

At five after eleven we all sat in a family restaurant with screaming kids all about us throwing food from the giant buffet table. Not just a few kids, herds of little demons scurrying about like cock roaches after a manhole cover has been lifted off a city street. They screamed, cried, and made faces at us. We didn't know where else to go and were too tired to try. We had many hours to drive to another gig in the frigid aftermath of the blizzard.  

Thus goes the guerilla war. Maybe next time it is a tornado that follows us into town like what happened to us in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, where it knocked out all the electricity and we stood in the dark with our instruments until we gave up. It might be the heat of a Southern summer where bugs as big as Tweety birds fly slowly overhead like helicopters while chiggers and fleas decorate our sweating bodies with welts and bumps. With no money for an air-conditioned motel, we have spent nights stretched out in the suburban trying to sleep in the swelter, waging war against an infinite army of insects.  

Owners deciding not to pay us were common place while we learned the ropes of the touring business. To this day, an owner will unceremoniously cancel our gig at the last minute not caring that we make our living doing this and that we have no chance to re-book--sometimes not bothering to tell us until we have driven several hundred miles and arrive at his doorstep. 

We learn to survive. We learn every little trick. We learn to fight a guerilla war. Jason kind of went crazy several years ago. The kind of crazy a soldier gets when he fully realizes his predicament.  No mother is going to help you. No benefactor is going to appear on the scene. No mogul will discover you like in the movies. There you are. Alone and broke and desperate--and every road is an obstacle course. One day Jason just put on his camouflage paint and sneaked out into the music jungle and declared the world his enemy. We affectionately call him: "General Fucking Coomes."  

Jason came to delight in adversity. The worse it became the better he liked it. "Those other bands have to go through this too," he'd say, with a maniacal smirk. "They'll drop out and that we will rise up the ladder. I hope it gets worse," he'd laugh. "Only the strong survive." Jason has become tougher than whang leather. You could sharpen your kitchen knives on his attitude. He approaches every gig like a sniper sneaking up on a camp of cutthroats who just pillaged his hometown.  

We all assume that every soul we meet in this business is going to cheat us or renege on a deal or blame us for his woes of the evening. We long ago realized that we would get no medals or heroes welcome for braving the elements or for using resourcefulness to get on down the road. No fairy godmother would bless our carriage. No wizard or sage would lend his counsel and we can't wait by the phone. In a guerilla war you survive. We survive until the enemy has to acknowledge us as a worthy foe. When he attacks, we retreat. When he camps, we advance. When he sleeps, we attack.   

I don't know how smart we were to give up all we had to go on the road and fight this war. We spend over 2200 hours per year away from home in some strange city and in addition we drive over a thousand hours per year. On top of that, we play seven hundred hours of gigs that don't mean anything to the advancement of our career, but put bread on the table. We never see enough of our loved ones. We see way too much of drunks, who leer in our faces and harangue about Lynard Skynard or the time they saw Stevie Ray play afterhours--when he was stranded in their town, and taught them how to play a Stratocaster in the wee hours of a rare and beautiful night.  

I look at my approaching old age and shiver with fear of being broke and without security. All of us gird our loins time to time and step out on faith. Faith that we are really as good as we think we are. Every year we go on is a year we can't develop another skill or means of making a living. It is a year of survival. A year of physical deterioration. A year of clinging to hope in the face of discouragement. A year of very long and very lonely roads that lead to strange hamlets where we once again reach inside and pull out our talent and our passion and our very souls and hand them to the people in return for a little money and the hope we are appreciated. 

What saves our spirits are the festival and theatre gigs where we can radiate and scintillate and coruscate in the glory of the great stage and the masses of people who care. Here we can feel the rapture of rising above the mundane, to burst forth with power and incandescence and become a flame, a great pyre of energy and elegance. Once you bask in that ecstasy it is hard to release the dream of having it all the time, not just occasionally. It is truly the natural high that drug users seek through artificial means. The exhilaration becomes irrepressible.  

On this Thanksgiving Day, I look at my struggle of the last decade in Blinddog Smokin' and find it easy to get depressed. But there are things to be thankful for in the guerilla war and foremost are the people who recognize our fight and become our underground helpers. Without them we could not have survived. These are the people to whom our efforts and our music mean something. They have identified with us vicariously and perhaps live out in us some dream they had at one time.  

They put us up in their houses when we are stranded. They feed us. They encourage us. They send us away with homemade bread and cookies. They find us when we are broken down and patch us up and send us on our way. They form an eclectic underground and are not known to each other. They are in towns across this nation and no matter how bad things get, we know we can seek refuge in their bailiwick. Some of these people are unbelievably loyal and steadfast and longsuffering. They are the salt of the earth.  

They spread the word about us in their own little way. Subtlely and steadily, believing in us even when we don't believe in ourselves. When I see an old war movie where the citizens of the French underground risk their lives to bring an American soldier food and medicine and to hide him in a closet, I think of our similar faithful and their role in our quest.  

Sometimes I feel dejected that we can't win for these people. Year after year we struggle into their towns to play where we've always played to ask once again for shelter and refuge. But they don't give up on us and such is the nature of a guerilla war. American society has no venture or venue for its artists. They rise from the grass roots and when they blossom one day in the sunlight of civilization they stand on the shoulders of their underground army and if they have any character at all, they will never forget that. 

A wizened and feeble widow long into the winter of her years took my hand once upon a time and apologized to me for not being able to help the cause. I remember that she was poor and had to put tape around her worn out sneakers. "All I can do is pray for you," she whispered. "But I can pray like General Patton can fight."  

I think of that woman when we fight our way through someplace like the ever-wretched Shirley basin in Wyoming. When I see a deer just in time to swerve or brake, or when the ground blizzard is so blinding we must open the door and look down to find the road--I think of her praying and I thank God she is a soldier in our guerilla war.  

Happy Thanksgiving to the readers of TTW from Blinddog Smokin'. 

Carl 

Tuesday April 11th, 2000 @ 8:48 PM

A curious activity dancing is. What is it? Moving one’s body to music would be the obvious definition, but what is our motivation for this peculiar motion? Foreplay, perhaps? Ego gratification, maybe? Resolving something psychologically like crawling does for a baby?

It does seem to be an innate response to music or a rhythmic beat. I’ve seen a toddler standing on a street corner sucking his thumb, hear the startup of our band and immediately get big-eyed and begin to bounce up and down. This little bounce is the universal first dance. I’ve seen these wee humans do the same dance in Turkey and Spain and Fiji.

For some humans, that is as good as they ever get. At forty they are still doing that same little bounce, only it ceased being cute when they were six, and won’t resume being cute until they are seventy-six–the ages where self-awareness seems to be absent. In-between those ages people seem to need alcohol to dance. In ninety percent of the places we play, no one dances the first set. Whoever drinks the fastest will start off sometime in the second set and that gives a few more couples the courage to display their moves. By the third set the floor is usually full and by the end of the evening these same once timid and conservative humans are writhing around on the floor doing “the worm” and “high fiving” the band.

I’ve often wondered at this social phenomenon. Why do people need drink to dance? I think perhaps, it is tied to sexual attractiveness. Dancing is a sexual icebreaker among other things, and we often judge each other’s sex appeal by how we appear and move on the floor and by the confidence we display. The last thing we want to do is to look stupid when everyone is watching. And they do watch. I can be in the midst of the most inspiring harmonica solo I’ve ever played, and if the two most dorky looking hacks in the bar get up and start dancing, I immediately lose my entire audience. Every eye will settle on the uncoordinated bumbling and shuffling of the dancers.

Of course drinking doesn’t make anyone appear less stupid on the dance floor, but it causes a state of vision warp where the picture of themselves in their heads is dramatically different from what the audience is actually seeing. It is sometimes called the: I am a sex machine syndrome. Ironically, if the dancing partner is in the same vision warp, then indeed you are a sex machine, whether reality agrees or not.

However, this is often a one sided dance. Some poor bastard, who is divorced and lonely and horny as a satyr, has left a half an hour early from the machine shop to take a shower and wash the grime from his knuckles; then dons his only pressed shirt and puts on half a bottle of Brute aftershave. Now this guy hasn’t danced since he and his first wife were learning the shoddish from his Swedish grandmother at the VASA lodge when they were in sixth grade.

He spies a lady across the room who had to lay down on the bed to get her jeans buttoned, and is wearing enough makeup to spackle a Quonset hut. She is wiggling her torso to the music with a look on her face that announces: “To get anywhere with me boys, you have to ask me to dance.” He sees several other guys with freshly washed knuckles looking at her and reading the same message. He knows he has to act fast. He has left the security of his blue shirt that says “Ed” over the pocket and the comforting sounds of his drill press. His big feet don’t have their roomy steel-toed boots about them and are instead wedged into fake ostrich cowboy boots he bought at a truck stop for thirty-nine bucks.

He frantically runs through his memory for some encouragement and remembers a half-time speech by his high school football coach: “you’ll never be a real man if you can’t get the ball over the goal.” He puffs out his chest and it starts across the floor without his feet, which suddenly seem to have big wet suction cups attached to them. But he does it because he has been laid only once since his divorce. That was to his ex-wife during reconciliation, where, in the heat of passion she confessed to all the men she’d slept with in the last two months, including his poker buddy, Cletis, who wears a prosthesis from the Viet Nam war.

Immediately upon accepting his offer to dance, the woman, an exhibitionist who believes she is an “old soul” re-incarnated seven times starting with Cleopatra, bops unto the floor and begins to dance with herself while making faces of sexual ecstasy exaggerated in glossy lipstick.

The poor bastard awkwardly follows her around trying to place himself somewhere in her line of vision. He feels his neck burning and his face flushing and he decides he ought to start smoking again. He becomes aware of his big hands hanging there wondering what to do. They seem to grow larger and ungainly like Gooney bird wings. The suction cups are getting bigger and he feels worse than he did when his parents had him circumcised at age thirteen. He knows that the other guys with the washed knuckles are laughing at him. The song seems to go on forever as the world shifts into slow motion. He hates the band. “They’re doing this on purpose,” he accuses in the muddle that was once his mind. Meantime, Cleopatra is beaming and thrashing about like a porpoise doing a tail dance over the water at Sea World. The conglomerate gaze of eyes from the crowd caresses her fanny like a warm breeze and she glows with her moment in the sun.

He’ll get his revenge if eventually he wins the prize and weds the bonny lass, because she’ll never get to dance again once he has a ring on her finger. But for now, the poor bastard is in hell, and she is Satan, and the band is a gang of demons and the smirking audience members are the flames licking at his aching feet.

Some girls don’t wait around for the poor bastard to make his move, they just dance together. They like this because it allows them to look good and feel good without having to worry about the advances of the satyr. They don’t have to exchange astrological signs and listen to the male lie about his interest in whatever it is they like: “Re-incarnation? Really, I love re-incarnation! I had a dog once that I swear was my grandmother Gertrude, same look in its eye, same little fuzzy upper lip…”

The girls seldom get to keep their sorority untarnished from leg-hiking males for long, there is always the guy who upon seeing two or three girls dancing, decides to be their savior and come hopping to the rescue. He gets right in the middle and tries to copy whatever dance it is they are doing. He smiles and winks and shoots his thumb and index finger like a gun at his buddies. He’s the guy with the big sweat circles under the arms of his silk shirt and whose e-mail address is “hip_shakin_daddy.”

Hip Shakin’ Daddy is a wannabe leg humper. If one of the girls so much as looks at him he’ll run right over and hump their leg, and if she doesn’t hit him across the lips with a can of mace, he’ll move right around behind her for some prolonged and serious humping.

I’m amazed at how many people think humping is dancing. I like to think that humans dance and dogs hump. Humans are piss poor humpers compared to dogs. I had a Lab named Tigger who could hump both your legs in alternate strokes while holding one paw in the air like a dandy, or so it seemed. But accomplished or not, people love to hump. I’ve seen bars where an invitation to dance was an invitation to hump. Now think about it–isn’t that a bizarre Western World social oddity? Can you imagine doing this anywhere other than at a bar? Picture yourself at Safeway in the beans and tomatoes aisle, when an otherwise self-respecting and nicely dressed stranger comes over to you and says, “Hi there, would you like me to hump your leg for about five minutes?” Spectators would be aghast at your humping and the store manager would probably try to separate the happy couple with the hose he was using to wash the fresh veggies.

I’ve seen a lot of aberrant and humorous departures from our Judeo-Christian culture on the dance floor from my perch above on the stage. I saw a guy at the Grand Targhee ski area do “the lizard.” He squatted precariously on the edge of a chair, holding his arms tight in to his body making hooked three-finger reptile hands, while flicking his tongue and darting his head. Then he leaped high into the air, came down into a stretched out slide and wriggled rapidly all about the room like a giant iguana, dragging his feet, pulling himself forward with his hands. He never left his lizard persona as he scared woman up onto their chairs and slithered about the room faster than a centipede.

There isn’t a dance a human being can achieve anatomically that I haven’t witnessed in our miles around the globe, but the biggest irony came one time in Lander, Wyoming, in a tiny bar. I saw a voluptuous young female enter the room in wearing yellow flowered pedal pushers. That’s the name we used to call very tight pants that came down to mid calf. Her parts oscillated nicely as she moved in the jiggling flower garden and every eye sought the flowers like the flight paths of so many bees. The males begin to drool and the females looked at the flowers to see why their men had suddenly dropped out of what had been a cogent conversation.

This girl had come to dance and dance she did. She was a hoochie coochie style dancer like Charo of eighties Vegas fame. She had a female partner who was dressed in black and wasn’t quite as uninhibited. These two got the wave started and soon the floor was full of dancers, with the men trying to stare at the bopping butt in the yellow flowers, while their women kept trying to dance between the flower child and their mates.

Suddenly I was overcome with nausea and the urge to gag rose in my throat. A gaseous invasion of my sinuses had left me weak-kneed. It was so bad that I seemed to be viewing the audience through hallucinogenic waves like a mirage on the desert. I looked around at the band members to see if any of them was concealing a look of guilt. All were stoic. Obviously they were either good actors or the odor hadn’t reached them yet. But it did. Jason’s eyes came open like he’d been goosed by a python. Chuck drew his head back and flinched like a Catholic Nun had slapped his hands with a ruler. We looked at each other and begin to make the kind of wrinkled faces human beings can only make when something smells bad.

I begin to look around the dance floor for the culprit who I intended to shoot in the face with a seventeenth century Blunderbuss. I glanced about for the usual suspects, like some 300 lb. truck driver with a ship tattooed on his chest, sporting six inches of plumbers crack, an Elvis hairdo, wolfing down a jalapeño Chimichanga, preparing to blast the vinyl off his bar stool.

This was some bad gas folks. This could fumigate cockroaches hiding behind the quarter rounds. I could picture them there writhing on their backs kicking their greasy little legs. I pictured my socks curling down around my ankles. I refused to take my harmonica solo where air intake is voluminous.

I figured if he knew about it, Saddam Hussein would recruit this bad motherfucker to ride around on a camouflaged trailer like a scud missile. Somebody had turned a food processing tube into a bazooka. A scud missile often misses its target, but this poison gas would have the Kurds waving white flags all along the Iraqi border.

I asked Chuck, “Where is Dr. Kevorkian when you need him?” Some priest should have entered with an iron cross and a whip of rosary beads to force a confession. Not a sissy priest, but a crazed monk with a sour stomach and a tooth ache–a throwback to the inquisition who would administer a forty-five minute ass whipping for penance. I’m not sure God Almighty in all his mercy could forgive such an unmitigated and unconscionable olfactory assault. If this wasn’t sin, then the Pope is a Mormon penguin visiting door to door on the south pole.

Whoever it was would not give up the attack. Finally the dance floor began to clear and to my horror only the two girls were left. I called a break. They came to talk to me. Which one was it? Another wave boiled up to the surface from its cauldron and I had had it. I knew one of the girls was guilty and the other one thought it was me. Now I’m as gracious as the next guy, but I would be damned if I was going to be a martyr for this broad’s cause. I spoke up, and in one precious breath said, “You girls are going to have to step outside and one of you needs to confess to the other because if you cut loose one more time you’re going to kill me.”

There it was. The flowered pedal-pusher girl frantically called the other one outside in embarrassment. “Oh no, not the flower of humanity,” I thought. “Whatever happened to sugar and spice and everything nice?” I was dismayed and disillusioned. Why couldn’t it have been the Elvis trucker? The world was not running in its greased tracks, something was out of kilter. Whatever cook fed that poor girl needed to be put in the town stocks where every male who ever fantasized about the purity and loveliness and inviolable nature of lady hood could walk by each day for a week and slap this nasty dude’s face.

Oh, the dance floor! What extremes of human nature are displayed there! For myself, I like the symbolism of a smooth transfer from normal person to dancing person. It is symbolic of the changing faces of mankind in our many roles. To just jump out of character violates the chameleon in us–the multi-faceted wonder that is a human being. I both hate yet enjoy when a person stands pensively on the sidelines watching the band, then upon entering the dance floor, walks stiffly to the center and suddenly turns into a flopping Albatross from bizarro world. It never ceases to make me smile or break out into laughter.

I like approaches, cool approaches. So cool that imperceptibly the human transforms into dancer and back again to human so that we the onlooker can’t tell where one begins and the other leaves off. This is a practiced art. A subtle snapping of the fingers, a slight facial gesture, a bounce emerging in the step and then–there they are, dancing, and nobody knew how they got that way.

I once saw a couple who never left the dance floor. They seemed to have always been there. The man was an old gray cowboy wearing an even older grayer hat with a curled up brim. His pants were several inches too short and his worn socks had fallen. He had no expression on his face. Neither did she, an Indian lady near his age, who was probably half African-American. She had on a dress that went out of style with Dixie cups that had pictures on the lids. She sported a hat with a black net veil pulled up over her forehead. They gently held each others finger tips and swayed back and forth to the music. Next to them a lady lay on the floor wiggling, wriggling, and giggling, looking up at her partner who just stood there dumbfounded.

The old couple never changed their dance. If the beat sped up they moved in half-time. Between songs they just stood there holding finger tips. A strange ritual to be sure, but I leaned forward and studied them, and found meaning in their dance. Past experiences had scarred these two human beings and left them afraid and confused and lonely–very lonely. I thought about us all, riding this tiny planet in the gargantuan dark and quiet universe. We the people, so short-lived and fragile, so easily vain, yet so quickly desperate. Facing old age and regret, frailty and illness, and the mysteries after death, all by oneself, is enough to make you insane. And, indeed these two pitiable creatures were crazy.

The dance was in Evanston, Wyoming, at the State Mental Hospital–for the residents there. For these two forgotten people, life had slowly eliminated those who had loved them and touched them. Alone and bewildered in a foreign place they had never intended to be, they reached out to each other when they heard the music and begin to dance their tiny step. Somewhere in the strange confusion, or dormancy, or damaged cognizance of their minds, a comfort crept. A minute transference of love that said to the other, “I understand…”

I sat on a folding chair in the shadows of the old gymnasium and stared at this couple and pondered, lump in throat, about the strength that neither dancer had for himself, yet could somehow give the other. The lines etched into their faces spoke to me of tragedy, sorrow, defeat, and fear, but the countenance that glowed so delicately through, unveiled the joy that warmed their hearts and mine like so many fading embers in a hearth long abandoned. They were still dancing when I left. It was the sanest activity I’d seen on the dance floor in many months and left me heartened that perhaps there is hope for us yet.

Wednesday February 2nd, 2000 @ 8:45 PM

 (Many will find the following tale far-fetched. That’s O.K. with me, as long as you enjoy it and learn from it. However, the story is as true as I can remember it, given my long removal from the details. I have a couple of composite passages, and I’m not sure if some names are quite right, but the essence of what happened is certainly there and I tried not to add or subtract from events as I remember them. I know it is long, but I think you’ll find it worthwhile. Carl)

Mr. Shag had an elbow like the railroad couplings holding together the train that crossed the desert vastness of Australia that night. Framed in the window behind his beastly head was what remained of a red sun still boiling below the horizon. The elbow was planted heavy on the table and joined together the fore and upper parts of an arm wrenched and twisted from a lifetime of bending iron. It looked like a swamp log. His dark eyes limned into view over the great fist. A voice crawled out from somewhere within his dense beard, “If I win mate, you know what you got to do?”

I nodded and asked with a tremor, “If I win, will you keep your word?”

The English dwarf beat him to the answer, “A course he be keepin’ ‘is word, arsehole, he can give it freely. Nobody ever beat ‘im. And you ain’t to be the first and I’ll wager you or any man.”

No one took the wager. I placed my arm on the table, measured it against his, then took it back. I placed a Gideon Bible beneath my elbow and still I came up short, but it would have to do. As we gripped each others hands and leaned in I could smell the Yukon Jack and Tabasco juice that sloshed in his tremendous belly. He grinned with clean, fine, teeth belying his ogre-ish appearance. I felt panic shiver through me as my hand felt the crush of his bulging knuckles. My God Almighty how I wanted to win!

The train jostled back and forth as only a glow remained of the sun, and silhouettes of shrub trees passed quietly by the moving windows. The interior of the lounge car became suddenly quiet. The eyes of all the onlookers focused intensely on the knotted hands. I took several rapid breaths and tensed every muscle I could consciously command. I could see the tattoo of a Harley chopper behind the strings of hair that covered his forehead. It glistened in sweat.

The dwarf stood on a chair and held our hands. I was surprised to notice that he had long and well-shaped fingers attached to his diminutive arms. The wee referee puffed a thick cigar and the smoke hung in my face. Then suddenly my fear was replaced with focus and I had never felt more ready in my life. The dwarf lifted his hands and the car erupted in shouts.

I leaned into my vibrating arm with my entire 225 lbs. and the vessels of my right eye seemed to burst. I could actually hear the torque of the straining biceps tendons. Blood shot from my nose and unto our grip and down the arm of the giant. I could see the veins of his neck gorge with pressure and his mouth turned down at the corners and a husky gasp broke from his lungs. The din was earsplitting now, and for the first time money began to pass and I knew I had a chance. Despite the flood of adrenaline I could feel pain wrack my arm and shoot into my chest and lungs. Even my calves began to cramp. I heard a macabre moan come out of my body, but I could not control it. I could smell the breath of a dozen men screaming in close quarters and flecks of spit landed everywhere.

It is a tale that would end in tragedy. As I look back on it now after thirteen years, the faces of that last night on the Ghan, have faded in my memory. Except for Mr. Shag and the lady with whom he would fall in love for one memorable evening.

The Ghan runs from Adelaide on the south coast of Australia, approximately 1500 miles to Alice Springs, which is in the center of the continent, near the famous Ayers Rock, which serves the country as a hub of sorts. The Ghan was so named for the Afghans who brought their camels to the great interior desert and built the railroad when no one else could. It is a land of red dirt that sports a time zone on the half-hour contrary to the rest of the globe. That year Alice Springs was hosting a dwarf-tossing contest and Mr. Shag brought his own dwarf, Ebenezer Tittes, affectionately dubbed “Little Tits” by his fellows.

Little Tits was not a nice dwarf. He was mean as a badger and always cranky. He cursed in every sentence and was given to kicking people in the Achilles tendon. I didn’t like him then, and I’m sure I wouldn’t like him now. He was to be the best man at Mr. Shag’s wedding. The wedding was slated for Saturday, the dwarf-throwing contest for Sunday. After Mr. Shag won the contest he planned to bike up to Darwin with his bride and his winnings and his motorcycle gang, which accompanied him on the Ghan. He couldn’t have guessed that he would find a new love on the train. It was I who introduced them.

It begin when a two-year old girl toddled by me in the dining car and stopped to stare. Having raised three such darlings myself, I immediately became nostalgic and set the petite cutie on my lap. Of course all such angels have guardian mothers and this one snatched the babe from my grasp and gave me a look of astonishment. “How did you get here,” she exclaimed to the child. “Mama has been looking everywhere. You’re to scare me to death…”

The mom was an attractive girl of twenty-two or so, wearing no ring, and with eyelashes that could dust a doily. I invited her and the little one to my table. Recovering her composure, she asked if the child’s grandmother could join us as well. “Of course” I replied, not wanting an elder’s interference, but knowing there was only one answer to the question.

The Grandma was a handsome woman about my age and showed up in arm with her own mother. The great-grandma was protesting that she was worried about her mother being left alone in the Pullman. “Five generations” I marveled out loud as I pulled out their chairs. “No six.” Replied the first mother, my great, great, great, grandma is going to be one hundred on Tuesday, and she’s taking all of us and her bridge club to Alice Springs for her birthday.

“Why Alice Springs,” I asked.

“Because she wants to be buried there and she plans to die on Tuesday.”

“Why?”

“Because she set a goal as a young girl to live to be a hundred and she will be a hundred on Tuesday, and she’s made up her mind to die. She’s been riding the Ghan up to visit her husband’s grave site for years and this will be her last night on the Ghan. She intends for it to be a good one.”

I found the family to be delightful company, and afterwards was introduced to the queen grandmother. She and her daughter nestled in the Pullman compartment like kittens drawn by a Walt Disney cartoonist. To my astonishment, they still possessed marvelous hair, braided into pigtails, and tied with broad colorful ribbons.

They beamed up at me, delighted that a tall young man such as myself would come to visit. I was immediately charmed by the elder, named Millie, and determined to help make her last night on the Ghan a rewarding one.

“Ladies,” I announced with the boldness of a drill sergeant. “I want to invite you all to the piano bar where I just recently was singing all by myself, accompanied by as versatile a pianist as I have ever personally witnessed. He knows every song you can imagine and can improvise anything. I even had him playing the blues.”

Millie was ever so happy with this invitation and immediately rounded up her bridge club, which consisted of five old ladies in various states of decrepitude. None was as vibrant and vivacious as Millie. Feeling full of self-congratulatory exuberance, I marched off through the railroad cars leading my troop of ancient ladies and Millie’s descendants.

We passed through the lounge just before entering the car containing the piano bar and endured smirks and derision from the gang of bikers playing poker and drinking beer. The dwarf yelled at us, “Are you taking them to slaughter, mate?”

We ignored the gang and settled about the couches surrounding the piano. The car was clean, quiet, and empty when we entered. The pianist was appropriately named “Skinny” and he grinned broadly at his new audience. We sang: “You are my sunshine, Merry Oldsmobile, She’ll be comin’ around the Mountain, Darlin’ Clementine, and some Aussie songs I wasn’t familiar with about Wallabies and Billabongs and the like. We all pretended like we were having great fun, but the ladies weren’t singing very loud and one of them was asleep.

Finally, Millie cried out, “What we need is some booze and some men.” After the shock wore off and much discussion had taken place, it was decided by unanimous vote that I should go next door and invite the biker gang over for a party. By process of elimination, they were the only candidates available on the train.

My proposal to the gang was met with such laughter that more than one man began to gag from it. They all wiped tears and when it would almost subside, somebody would burst out anew and the whole gang would be back in a state of hysteria. I shuffled and rubbed my hands together and felt my face flush a number of times. The dwarf, Little Tits, didn’t laugh. “I vote we should kick his arse,” he announced, and the laughter died out.

I was crestfallen and embarrassed, but I made one more appeal, “The guy plays blues,” I pointed out, appealing to their rough masculinity. “You wouldn’t have to sing old ladies songs.” Little Tits threw his cigar butt at me and ordered me to leave and threatened again to, “…kick my arse…”

The folly of his threat started the whole outfit laughing again, but this time it was mean: sniggers and chortles and such. I raised my eyes and looked at Mr. Shag who was studying me intensely. “How bad you want us to sing with the old lassies, mate?”

“She’s gonna be a hundred on Tuesday,” I explained. “She’s going to Alice Springs to be buried by her husband. It wouldn’t be so bad…” my voice trailed off into a silent shrug of the shoulders and I awaited my fate.

“Tell you what, laddie,” said Mr. Shag, who hailed from Scotland and Ireland, before coming to Australia to blacksmith in the outback. “We’ll all come a singin’ if you can beat me at arm wrestling.” A collective complaint went up from the gang, then the dwarf waved his arms and hushed the complainers, “You fuckin’ idiots,” he said, “You know nobody can beat Mr. Shag, what the hell ya’ thinkin’?” Then he looked at Mr. Shag and asked, “If he loses, the penalty is to hold him for me while I kick ‘is arse.”

Mr. Shag looked at me for agreement to terms. He had befriended Little Tits somewhere in Europe long before coming to Australia and enjoyed the mischief the dwarf liked to stir up. I focused on Mr. Shag, who I figured to be about six five and in the realm of 350 pounds and covered with hair. Although his hair was raven black, his beard was red like a brick. I had no doubt that he was brutish in his strength.

I was an experienced arm wrestler and knew several tricks. I was in the prime of life and in great shape, sober as a judge, and getting angry. Still the thought of having my “arse” kicked by a dwarf in front of this band of jacklegs had me seriously worried. Mr. Shag also added that after my whipping, I had to stay and play cards with them all night so they could win my money as well. But waiting in the other room were the sweetest little old ladies in Australia and I could sense serendipity hanging in the atmosphere like the smell of fresh baked apple pie. I agreed to terms.

I tasted the blood from my nose and felt his grip tighten as his eyes sparkled in the thrill of battle. He took a deep breath and roared into the smoky air. I surged against his massive arm and dove deep into black concentration. I no longer knew where my arm was. His roar broke of a sudden and he yanked his arm loose grimacing in pain and holding his elbow.

Again, the room went completely quiet. Everyone stared at Mr. Shag and waited. “You lost,” I quietly pointed out. Everyone looked at me, then back at Mr. Shag. “Shuddup you cheatin’ prick,” ordered the dwarf. “Mr. Shag tore something in ‘is arm, the bet is off.”

“I won fair and square, injury or not,” I asserted. “Mr. Shag, are you a man of your word?”

His gang didn’t seem to be taking my point of view and I received some threatening looks–the way a cat looks at a bird that just shit in his food tray. Little Tits walked over and kicked me in the Achilles tendon. I can’t describe how badly that dwarf irritated me. I turned on him and the gang moved in and grabbed my shirt.

“Let ‘im go laddies,” said Mr. Shag. “He’s right ya’ know? We’ll be goin’ to sing with the old lassies. Buy up some beer and wine and whiskey and let’s be doin’ what we promised.” He rubbed his sore elbow and bit his lip. “A man ain’t for nothin’ if he goes back on ‘is word.”

Well, they didn’t like it, not one little bit, and Little Tits refused to go at all and marched off to the bar. Mr. Shag went over and snatched the dwarf with one great paw and hauled him off the way a man carries a bucket.

So there we sat: old ladies on one side of the piano and bikers on the other, with Little Tits pouting in the corner. It was quiet. Mr. Shag sat in the middle next to Millie and it was a sight to see. She stared up at him like he was a mountain. He peered down at her like a dog discovering a bug. The air was tense.

“So let’s get her going mates,” Skinny blurted out. “With a few rounds of Row, row, row your boat.”

“Fuck off, dork,” ordered one of the gang.

“What about Mannish Boy?” I asked. “It’s an old Muddy Waters blues. We can make up verses. I’ll go first,” I suggested.

“Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, dunt,” said the piano, and I started singing, “I once met a dwarf while riding a train, his head contained horseshit instead of a brain, ‘duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, dunt’, I met his mama and asked what ever did happen, he stuck his head up a horses arse when it was crappin’.

When the laughing stopped and Little Tits was calmed down, Mr. Shag enthusiastically joined in with a booming voice, not in key, but booming nonetheless: “When I was a young man, not yet twenty-one, I shoed wild horses for money and fun, I come to Australia to get a new start, I left behind Ireland, bullet in me heart”

“It’s true,” said Little Tits from his corner. “Mr. Shag has a bullet in his heart. The doctors won’t operate for fear of killin’ ‘im, I say. If the bullet didn’t get ‘im, nothin’ will.”

We talked about the bullet awhile, then, the song started back up, this time with Millie, who had been drinking from a bottle of White wine. “When I was a young girl, not yet twenty-one, I smiled at the boys but turned down my thumb, Now I’m an old gal, my breasts are all saggy, but I could go through these bikers and still do Mr. Shaggy”

That’s all it took. The night leapt into the twilight zone. Within a couple of hours everyone was drunk and singing arm in arm. Old ladies sat on the laps of hardass bikers and then the dancing began. Mr. Shag did the Shoddish with Millie and tenderly moved her about while waving off anyone who came near her. He was so aware of her fragile old bones. He took tiny steps to match hers and therein a 350-lb. man became cute as a child.

Somewhere in the early morning hours the grumpy dwarf mooned everyone from atop the piano, hoping to scare the old ladies and ruin the party. Instead, they were absolutely delighted at his tiny derrière and began to pat it and giggle, saying “Isn’t that just the cutest little butt you ever did see?”

Mr. Shag and Millie hit it off like the oddest version of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire that one could imagine. She repeatedly sat on his knee and fed him cookies that she had baked for her great, great, great, grandkids who lived in Alice Springs. He finally resorted to lifting her up when they danced and he waltzed around the room to the music. He wouldn’t let anyone else dance with her. He was afraid they’d accidentally hurt her. I heard him say, “Miss Millie, If you just wouldn’t die on Tuesday, I’d marry you instead of me betrothed.” She said, “If I’d known you was going to come a courting, I’d have waited eighty years to be born.”

When the sun shot a beam across the flat red earth and pierced the windows to the east, everything stopped inside the piano bar. It was an unspoken sign that the last night on the Ghan was at its denouement. The first mom and her little girl had long since retired. I looked around the room. Bottles and potato chips were strewn about the floor. An attendant, bright eyed from a fresh nights sleep, was picking things up. Most of the bridge club had fallen asleep, a couple of them in the laps of the biker gang members. Somewhere in the night, Mr. Shag had tossed Little Tits into a corner and he had passed out. He looked so tiny in the morning light.

Skinny had passed out around four A.M. and later recovered enough to go to his quarters. One of the bikers took over the piano and it was bad, but no one cared. Two of the gang joined in with harmonicas in two different keys. I had spent my time with the my-age mom who was a widow and quite fun. She promised to write.

Mr. Shag made Millie promise to come to his wedding. She made him promise to come to her funeral. They shook hands and kissed cheeks. He walked her to her bedroom and patted her head as he said good-bye. She put her head affectionately on his tummy and beamed up at him once again before waddling into her room. “You’re a good man, Mr. Shag,” she whispered. “I hope your wife will feed you the way I would if I was her.”

I stood at the next door with the my-age mother and watched Mr. Shag cry like a baby. Sure he was drunk, but he was a sentimental rascal as well. Everybody loved him that last night on the Ghan, but most of all Millie.

I was sitting at an outdoor restaurant in Alice Springs, writing in my journal the things you have just read, when Mr. Shag barged in with a grin, “Ah, there ya’ be, me laddie, I was meaning to find ya’ now.” We were alone but for one tourist and the waiter.

“I’ll miss you, Mr. Shag,” I said. “Why do they call you Mr. Shag, anyway?”

“Back when I just went by me nickname of Shaggy, (due to me haircut and beard) I was introduced to a nose-in-the-air gentlemen who was announced to me as “Doctor Wellburton.” I looked about at those in attendance and stood up tall, lifted my nose, and said, “How do you do Doctor Wellburton, I’m Mister Shag” I got a good laugh and the name stuck.

We made some small talk and then he smiled at me and said, “Carl, me boy, I got me pride. We got something to settle.” Nervously, I began to shake my head. He pointed at my arm and said, “There’s no bet this time, it’s just between us.” I groaned at the thought. “Hell, Mr. Shag, I’ll just forfeit. The concept of tangling with that big arm of yours makes me want to throw up.”

There it was again: that swamp log of an arm, standing at attention on my table ready to rumble. I reached deep inside and mustered my competitive juices. He had pulled something before, maybe it would re-injure and I could get away without too much stress and pain. We spent a couple of minutes securing the grip we wanted and then with a nod we attacked with mutual fury. I could hear the awful sound of torqued tendons again, but to my amazement my arm was slammed to the table like it had broken off at the shoulder. The contest hadn’t lasted two seconds. Mr. Shag held my arm down for effect and stared into my eyes. “You’re a good man, Carl, you did a fine thing last night.”

Puzzled still, I looked down at my arm in dismay, then back up at Mr. Shag.
As I stared at this crazy character I could feel the immense power in his body until he released my hand. I knew that there was never a chance that I could have beaten him. He knew what I was thinking. A slight smile formed on his mouth, and he winked at me, “I wanted to sing with the old lassies, but I had to find a way to save face with me laddies.” He patted my limp arm and said, “But like I said, I got me pride.”

Weeks later, back in the United States, I received a letter from the my-age mom. The letter, along with some other journal entries, was stolen from our Blinddog Van in 1995 in Oklahoma City. I will paraphrase its contents for you and I’m sure my memory won’t be too far off the mark.

Dear Carl,

My great, great grandmother Millie did attend the wedding of Mr. Shag that Saturday. It was at a small lake and he took his bride and preacher out in a rowboat near sunset. The gang, Millie, and others stood on the shore and watched. It was very romantic as the sun glistened across the still water.

Mr. Shag was drunk as was his bride. They stood up in the boat to take their vows and lost their balance. Mr. Shags great weight capsized the boat. His bride could not swim. Neither could the preacher, but he managed to dog-paddle back to shore. The wedding couple was wearing their riding leathers and Mr. Shag had a Harley chain around his waist as well. He struggled mightily in the water to save his bride. He did, but the effort on his bullet bearing heart was too much and it quit beating right there in the water. We could all see that something had gone very wrong. He collapsed and when they pulled him to shore he was dead.

Everyone was gathered about trying to revive him. Millie knew she could not get to him and she just turned and walked over to me and put her head on my breast and sobbed quietly. She didn’t die on that Tuesday; instead she attended the funeral of Mr. Shag who was buried on a ranch sitting on his motorcycle. I know it sounds fantastic, but it is true. The grave was enormous and was plowed out with a dozer. Everyone in attendance threw mementos and sentiments in the great hole. Millie wrote him a poem and threw in a bag of cookies. We humans can do silly things at funerals, but somehow it made a weird sort of sense, I guess.

Millie flew back to Adelaide. She is so very healthy. Who knows how long she will live. She vowed, however, never to take the railroad again. That was her last night on the Gahn.

I felt as though a great light had gone out or a grand tree had been uprooted–such a life force was Mr. Shag. I learned that it doesn’t matter how old you are, or how healthy, you never know which ride will be your last night on the Ghan. We always think there are many days to live and to love and to fulfill our dreams, yet you just never know. It behooves us to make our days count and to give what we have to give to this world.

The matrix that allowed the whole episode to take place was music. Music drew the diverse souls with its call. It provided a common ground for the strangest of gatherings, and does every single day of our lives. It makes people share feelings and emotions and fantastic thoughts together. It crosses all boundaries and races and ages. There is quite simply nothing like it to quickly bond disparate mankind.

I think of the last night on the Ghan often in my life, especially when Blinddog Smokin’ comes to perform. Whether for a new audience of strangers, or old friends and fans, whom we have come to love. “Play with your might,” I think to myself. “Give the people your energy, your talent, your affection. Take them somewhere above and beyond the mundane. Let them exhilarate. Let them feel it together. Make a memory. Do it tonight, because for someone in the band or the audience, it may be the final show.”

I think of Mr. Shag in his huge grave, a grinning skeleton riding his Harley, the mighty arm bones that pinned me to the table, still grasping the bike handles. I have always felt that I owed him something for what he did to help me and the old ones with that clever sacrificial move of his. So here is what I did. I went back to my journal and resurrected his story, and now tonight, for 372 subscribers from all states and many countries, I allowed him to live out in your minds, his last night on the Ghan.

Posted by Carl

Wednesday December 1st, 1999 @ 8:43 PM

We had the pleasure of a visit from Maddog Miller at one of our recent gigs. He attended one set with his mother and sister who assisted him. He was on crutches and looked thin and anemic, but seeing him actually out and about was quite a surprise and certainly good news. He still cannot bear weight on his hips and won’t be road-worthy for a couple of months, but his progress is much better than we anticipated.

He told us stories of being turned in the hospital bed by unskilled and unsympathetic nurses who would do things like turn him for his rehab, then five minutes later come in and say they forgot to change the sheets, and turn him again. The pain was excruciating as you might imagine. Doctors peeked in and asked how he was, and before he could answer, they’d be gone, leaving behind a $90 billing for having said hello. He did have some good guys around, like the physical therapists who he admired for their skill, patience, and understanding.

Andy now faces boredom and slow mending of his many broken bones. He will, however, fully recover, we are almost certain. The margins between life and death became evident as facts came in concerning the accident. Had it been a couple of degrees colder, he would have frozen or died of hypothermia, lying exposed as long as he did. Had it been any warmer, the bleeding in his head would have caused swelling inside his skull and the damage would have been severe, even to the point of death. Had he worn his seatbelt, which I’ve seen him do many times, he’d be dead. Had he lit just a hair over this way or that his back would have been damaged far worse, etc.

When you put all the factors together, he is very lucky to be alive. What he does have to live with is no vehicle, no job, and thirty-thousand dollars of hospital debt. They never found the hit and run driver who abandoned the U-haul after running Andy down and leaving him for dead alongside the road, and of course, U-haul is balking at coming through with any money. I believe they will have to eventually, but the sweet gal who rents you the truck, and the smiling insurance man who sells people their policies are not present on this end of the deal.

Instead you have lawyers, knucklebreakers, and callused investigators, who make their living by making sure their company doesn’t have to pay. It’s loophole city.

In the meantime Blinddog has employed two bass players who take turns touring with us as their schedules allow. We haven’t been able to play many of our originals or arranged pieces, but going over some of the oldies but goodies has been fun and good for a change of pace. We can’t be as tight and polished as normal, but we are learning how to fake it really well.

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Our bus is still down. We are hating life without it as the Ford Van is falling apart and sounds like a WWII tank with damaged treads. The Van has poor shocks and pounds us over the miles like a Wagnerian Opera Soprano turned masseuse.

The bus seems to have rare requirements in its differential. We have inquired all over the country and finally found someone in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of all places, who has a collection of gears for our type of ride. You can bet we’ll be paying that guy a visit next time we are in Tulsa. He’ll be our new best friend.

Part of the reason we bought the bus was for our image. It is just so cool to cruise into your town in a colorful tour bus. People stand by and watch to see who gets out. We can make dramatic exits and stand around looking important afterward. But arriving in a fading bronze van with a plastic camping bubble on top, sounding like we were starting a civil war cannon battle, and bouncing to a halt with our muffler hanging down like a well wrung chicken’s head, is just not cool. If that weren’t bad enough, the inside gets filled with carbon monoxide and we step out cross-eyed like we’d been sucking campfire smoke from a police marijuana burning.

We hate to spend the money on the van when the bus bill is forthcoming, but–such is life on the road with a blues band.

*************************************************************

Good news for those who feel obligated to read the harptalk, but who don’t like essays, I’ll finish off today’s message with a top ten, blues world, pet peeve list. It is longer than you like, but it ought to be fun.

Peeve # 10: Drunken, male, water pump style, hand shaker’s. Why won’t these guys let go? I think they are trying to demonstrate appreciation, enthusiasm, and male bonding all in one great flapping, zig-zagging, gyrating, out of synch, stupid looking, gooney bird flop, that rips the ball and socket joints apart and makes me want to amputate the dumb bastard at the shoulder. I think my solution is going to be working out with a hand grip so I can squeeze this grinning and drooling dolt until he either stops pumping or pees his pants.

Peeve #9: Drunken female hand clasper’s in yo’ face. This is the ladies counterpart to #10 and they get equal rights in my vilification. I know they are trying to express sincerity as they gaze at me with whirligig eyeballs that they are fighting to keep from tilting in opposite directions. Why won’t these ladies blink? The worst part is being able to smell fermenting alcohol on their stomachs as they talk to me close up in sentences that seem to use only the letter H: “Hello, Honey…I’m Heather, from Houston, Hail to you Handsome Hunk from Hhhhhhhhheaven…

Peeve #8: Dancing idiots who direct the band. These are the folks who think the band is there to make them look good on the floor for their imagined legions of fans who have come to watch them dance. If the band comes down in volume to build anticipation for the next crescendo, these people get impatient and start gesticulating like Zubin Meta before a Philharmonic orchestra. They raise their eyebrows in dismay at our ineptitude. Why can’t we realize their reputations as cute and bouncy party people are on the line? They shake their heads and sometimes stop dancing to put their hands on their hips and stare at us in wonderment, angst forming in the corners of their mouths as they get exasperated. They really think they are going to make us change our approach and style just for them. What they don’t realize is that all four of us are thinking the same thing as we look back at them dispassionately: “Fuck you dipshit!”*

*To my religious readers, please stay on my mailing list, just translate this into Baptist.

Peeve #7: People who think we are their personal request band.”Could you play something by Metallica?” They ask. “Who’s that?” I answer with my best puzzled facial expression. “You don’t know Metallica?” They ask in shock, amazement, and feigned pity. You can substitute names like Lynard Skynard, KC and the Sunshine Band, Garth Brooks, Boxcar Willie, etc., it doesn’t matter as I have the same puzzled look for any of them.

“Is Metallica that girl who wears the armored tits on the old Laugh In show?” I inquire.

“Come on dude, you can do it, I now yer good enough, just try, OK?”

“Really–that good?”

These thimblebrains think we rehearse millions of songs by hundreds of thousands of artists and we can switch voices and styles and special instrumentation at the snap of their fingers. To make matters worse, they come up and ask while you are singing another song or playing a solo, as though you’re just going to stop the whole band and bend down to them, and then in your immediate enlightenment and orders from headquarters, break out into death metal at a blues club.

These people need a brain transplant–doesn’t even have to be a human brain, a tulip bulb would do just fine and keep them from an early death.

Peeve # 6: People who tell you about their uncle. It starts with a compliment about our guitar player, then degenerates into a twenty minute harangue on how good their uncle is. “He played slide with Boots Randolph, man, at the Cow Pie Pavilion in Wichita Falls, 1961–with a lap steel he made out of a push lawn mower…”

Yeah, well, we don’t care about your uncle or your cousin, or even your blessed mother, you goofball. We have twenty people standing in line this break trying to buy our merchandise, we’re signing autographs, we’re trying to get the lazy-ass bar maid to get us the drink of water we asked for an hour ago, we’re trying to restring guitars and fix a broken monitor and we have to pee like the kid in the dunce corner at school, and here you are blithering about your broken-down uncle who’s probably in a nursing home playing slide on his pecker and doesn’t even remember who you are.

Peeve #5: Woman who pull us out on the dance floor. In this day and age of sexual harassment, a man can’t be too careful. That’s why I’d rather deal with an asshole man than an asshole woman any day. See, you can just bop the man on his head or have the bouncer’s throw him fifty feet into a fire hydrant. But an unstable woman is like nitro glycerin. The last thing we want is to see one of these volatile creatures go off on us in public. If a man behaved like that and remembered it the next morning, he’d do the decent thing and shoot himself. But these emotional black hole women call a lawyer and have you arrested. This is after having copped a few uninvited feels and suddenly latched both arms on your protesting body and started backing out on the dance floor like a dog with a rag in its mouth.

Nothing scares me more than this. I’d rather fight a biker with a tattoo of Attila the Hun on his forehead. One time in Greeley, Colorado, one of these unhappy wenches threw an apple at me while I was singing and hit me right in the mmh, mmh, mmh. The apple hit so hard in split in two and hit Andy as well. It took three big men to get her out of the bar while she screamed and kicked, and promised to sue them for touching her parts.

Peeve #4: Guys who run off the women. We have a rule of thumb in our band that one good looking woman in a bar attracts ten guys. A dozen of the gentler sex all wrapped tight in Levi’s and hair spray will fill your bar. That is why they have ladies night, and ladies drink free nights, and no cover charge on ladies night, etc. Now this will make some of you angry, but it’s true nonetheless, I know of bars where the doorman is instructed to evaluate how attractive a woman is and let her in free accordingly. Ugly women have to pay.

Anyway, there is this particular breed of man, closely related to mongrel humping dogs, not hunting dogs, who can single handedly run off all the good-looking women in ten minutes. He needs no help at all and unfortunately there is at least one in every bar. This poor dumb clod deserves to be locked in the town stocks and slapped by every woman who walks by for a year.

He has lines like this: “How come you don’t wanna dance, are you a lesbian?”

If you do dance with him he’ll try to hump you on the dance floor. These disgusting slimeballs who infest our nations dance halls with their greasy gazes must be eradicated. Why do bar owners let them stay inside to soil the atmosphere with their malodorous presence? They can’t possibly ever have a date. Even the women in my previous peeve wouldn’t stand for their obnoxious behavior. Notice that these guys all disappear after about age forty-eight. I think it’s because they masturbate to death.

Peeve # 3: People who come up on stage during a performance. Who are these people? Do they have jobs and function normally during the week? Or do they dwell in their mother’s basement in candle-lit shrines to George Carlin? They just climb up and start talking through the microphone or telling the band what to do. When you kick them off the stage they get mad or act totally shocked that you should treat them this way.

Sometimes they start emceeing the evening, sometimes they sing, sometimes they start telling people to applaud the band and scream out accolades and proclamations. They dance, they try to shake hands, they pick up the spare guitar, they help themselves to the tambourine or a harmonica, and they truly have an image of themselves as being the life of the party, the toast of the town. Women do it too. They are much harder to remove than the guys because you dare not touch any of their parts. The band is at the mercy of the club in a situation like this and most clubs wouldn’t know if Andre the Giant were onstage humping the bass drum. If the band throws these people off and a ruckus arises, then the owners usually blame the band for being troublemakers.

In Twin Falls Idaho, one of these stage crashers got us thrown not only out of the bar, but out of town. We can’t play anywhere in Twin Falls anymore. Now it’s true I did ease the guys pain for awhile, but he was smashing all of our CDs because we wouldn’t let him pull himself up on stage by using Jason’s leg. He then turned around and tried to sue the club and us for harassing him. Believe it or not ladies and gentlemen, this happens frequently. Who are these people?

Peeve #2: Drunken Club Owners. Talk about the blind leading the blind…

We set up for an evening in somebody else’s domain. The club owner is boss of this little realm and unfortunately some of them think it means God. Bacchus, perhaps, but little else smacks of godliness. I truly admire the bar owner who does his drinking in moderation or at home.

We’ve had to deal with owners being the jerk who walks onstage during a performance–then what do you do? We had one guy threaten to not pay us if we didn’t play an extra hour. He demanded free CDs for himself, his wife, and his friends. He ordered us about like deck hands and even told us what songs to play. Another one pulled the plug on us in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and ordered us out of his bar without pay. We had to march into his office and demand payment or else. He wrote a check, wadded it, and threw it at us. We went to his bank at opening the next Monday so he couldn’t cancel it.

We’ve had bar owners change the deal at the end of the night many times, and we’ve been unceremoniously canceled at the last minute as many times. I’d like to be able to remember how many clubs we’ve been kicked out of over the years by drunken club owners who just have to show the world who’s boss. Fortunately, we’ve reached a status where we can pick and choose the clubs we play. We also started a “Fuck You”* fund as well so we don’t have to lose our dignity because we are desperate.

Another problem with the drunken bar owner is the lady owner who thinks she gets the right to your privates because she is paying you for the night. I had one big German lady actually chase me around the room. She looked remarkably similar to Jaws, the giant actor in James Bond who had the steel teeth. She was announcing to the bar what naughty things she was going to do to me. Had she caught me, I’m not sure I could have won the fight. She was picked up for drunken driving later that night. I still have nightmares about that one.

*How would this be rendered in Baptist? The Screw you fund? No, still too rough, how about using the King James and saying “Screweth”? Thine screweth thee fund?” Just having some fun here. Don’t send me a nasty e-mail.

And at last, the number one pet peeve: Bad Blues Society Newsletter authors. I am convinced that there is a school for these people, or at least a class called “Cheese 101 or How to write with inside jokes and parenthetical statements.” If no such class exists, how can diverse newsletters from all over the United States have authors with exactly the same horseshit style of writing?

A reader recently asked me to advise her on writing for her Blues Society newsletter. I sent her what I thought was the perfect example, sure to be published immediately and with great proclaim. I made it up from a collection of actual statements I’ve read, names changed to keep me from being stoned when I come to your town.

“Well howdy blues lovers, buckaroos and buckerettes (har har), and all you out there in blues land who read Uncle Bluzer’s column every couple of blue moons or so (get it? “Blue” moon? Heh, heh). If your like me (and God knows that would be too bad, right Frank?) you ate too much at the old annual blues pig roast again this year (burp), but hell, didn’t we all? Like to thank our blues Aunt, Mable Bluezinski for bringing her bloodhound again this year to clean up the pile of bones Harold was making over by the beer keg (remember Herb, you were there all day (hey, relax, I won’t tell your pretty wife, Hazel))–sorry Harold about Bertram (the Bloodhound) hiking his leg on you, but then it was just recycled beer anyway (har).

Hey folks, did ya get to the Blinddog Smokin’ show out at the Booze ‘n Bluz Club Thursday night? Well, (If I must say so myself) you missed a humdinger. The moon was full and the ladies were out and the music was hot and you should have seen old Uncle Bluzer out there shakin’ a leg (don’t worry honey, I only danced with your sister, (oh hell, I confess, I did put a pair of Blinddog panties on my head and danced with Al Bains, but you know how it goes–he was a perfect gentleman, (harty har)). Hey I’m gone, outta here, sianara, hasta manana, and happy blues trails to all you bluz gurus out there in readerland. By the way, pick up copy of Kenny Wayne’s new CD, that boy ain’t black, but he sure is blue (gotcha!!!!!!!!) Hey the next meeting is down at Herb’s Wiener Bar, bring a deck of cards and an Albert Collins CD (Nothing’ like an Ice cold beer with the iceman, he?). Oops, wife’s calling. I’m history. Uncle Bluzer”

Posted by Carl

Monday November 8th, 1999 @ 8:38 PM

Is there an apparition stranger than a man within a man, one the creation of the other, one seen and one not seen? This I wondered as I saw his eyes. Bright eyes, black and eerie in the smoky pall. Rings adorned his every finger and thumb. The stance was proud, the visage was stone, the smile–slow and chilling.

The eyes again, turning toward me under a flat-brimmed hat, focused from their corners now, piercing the haze to meet mine. Did he know me? Uneasy, I leaned forward to study the dark figure slow-stepping in the interior dusk. Something familiar limned into my memory, then vanished. The gray cloth of his suit hung elegantly from the lank frame. An aura was distinctly about him as he moved like an old panther, sure of its lair. I knew him, yet I did not. “Who is he?” I thought. “What is he?”

Suddenly I knew. I was beholding a doppelganger. Were doppelgangers like vampires, I wondered, with peculiar rules to govern their slaying? I knew that people sometimes feared these doublegoers and often tried to kill them. Society, as a whole, tries to kill them at birth, yet paradoxically celebrates them if they survive to maturity. But fear them, or glorify them, they remain a fascinating study.

I had met D.C. Minner in the day lit interior of his home from birth, also known as the Down Home Blues Club in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, a tiny black community, hidden from the main roads. A gaunt figure with a nappy gray head and stringy goatee, he mumbled through toothless gums trying to wake himself into sociability. He appeared many years older than his official sixty-two. It was hard to detect where the worn upholstery of his chair melded into his disheveled clothes, so homogenous were the artifacts of his life throughout this old jukejoint he called home.

D.C. is a storyteller, one of the two best raconteurs alive in my empirical knowing. It was he that introduced me to the doppelganger: “I put a hat on him and a fine suit,” he announced in third person narrative. “I put in his teeth–the ladies don’t want no gummy man singin’ to ‘em, and I git his rings ‘n shit, shiny shoes, an’ a red shirt. He a struttin’ man when I bring him out…”

What the hell was he talking about? Bring who out? I hadn’t fully understood until that night of the doppelganger when I hadn’t recognized the transformation of D.C. Minner himself. So concerted had been the metamorphosis that I had to percolate my vision in order to change my preconception. Was it really the tired and dusty old man staring in defiance and triumph as he galvanized the night air with his electric guitar and marched about in a soul-strut born and raised on a thousand stages like this one? “I’ll be damned,” I had muttered.

I knew that the doppelganger I saw that night was a survivor, not of wooden stakes and silver bullets, but of other torments, specific to these rare and beautiful doublewalkers: jealousy, conformity, fear, and envy.

Originating in Germanic literature, the doppelganger is said to be a spirit double, inherent in all people, but developed more in some. They can live apart or parallel to each of us. For my purposes it is the glorified self, honed and polished by fierce ambition, relentless drive, and torturing self-sacrifice. It takes years to create the mature doppelganger of my definition: years of rejection and adjustment, rejection and adjustment, rejection and adjustment–over and over again, throwing out what doesn’t work, keeping what does, but always innovating in a mind-frame of undaunted faith.

Once unleashed in their refined and burnished luster, they are hard to kill and march forward in an accolade reserved only for their kind. When their creator dies they often live on, and in so doing they shed all vestiges of human vulnerability. Look at Stevie Ray Vaughn, forever cast as the Texas gunslinger: spangled hat and serape straight out of a spaghetti Western–the mighty Stratocaster poised like a Winchester Rifle on his hip, all in confluence to a face drawn to dignified rapture through the mastery of his art and the conquering of his demons.

People fall in love with doppelgangers, not knowing that they only live when performing, and then as D.C. explains, “….I put him back away until it’s time to bring him out again.” Oh, the doppelganger loves to live and at times fiercely resists being “put away”. The more he lives, the more he loves to live, because the doublegoer lives in a rhapsody. We forgive the great doppelgangers almost any deed because they have vaulted above reproach, above the commonplace, and have secured a seat in Valhalla, and we live through them vicariously. As the high priest is said to be a Vicar of Christ, these doppelgangers are the vicar’s of human exhilaration, and we love them for it.

To what is base and displeasing about human living, the doppelganger is no longer subject. We don’t see our image of Cher straining at an arduous call of nature. We don’t picture “Old Blue Eyes” humping the hostess like a mangy dog before he regurgitates his alcohol and passes out snoring. No, we forget the creator and immortalize the creation on stamps and paintings like the sequined Elvis. The doppelganger is an exclusionary vision, conceived as a dream, whetted by a million strops of scorn, and ultimately presented in an empyrean descent–and only the strong survive.

The Blues world is replete with doppelgangers in varying echelons of incandescence. At a festival one can observe all levels, from doublegoers freshly conceived in the minds of their creators, to vaunted stars, immutable and supremely confident. There are also the wannabes, who lust deeply for the glory, but are as yet unwilling to pay the price to unleash and sculpt their greater nature. They perform with a cool hat or a dangling cigarette and dump their shallow exhibition on us while lost in a daydreamed lie, in no way the great dynamic of the doppelganger.

As wonderfully mesmerizing as a fully developed doublewalker can be, we squelch that development all along the way. Think back to your childhood when you first tried to sing a song or dance in your classroom, or recite a poem or act in a play. Children laugh and scoff at each other–sometimes to the point of humiliation. Most teachers encourage conformity. It is rewarded, while individualism is punished, except by rare and courageous teachers. Parents want their children to be like all the other children, except for rare and courageous parents.

The slaying of a doppelganger can begin the day a child voices a dream, seeing himself or herself, as a glorious adult, in a state of being far beyond the parent who is listening. “Let’s be realistic, says the parent, we’ll put money aside for your college education so you can become an accountant. You can work your way through school at McDonalds, don’t you see?” Or the less sensitive parent who bellows: “Just git a fuckin’ job…”

Many parents fear the horrible disappointments that accompany the creation of a doppelganger. They wish to protect their precious child and nurture it. They don’t want to see their child rejected and crestfallen. They remember the scorn and ridicule they encountered before they gave up their quest to create the supreme configuration of themselves. Doppelgangers always walk uphill through a gauntlet of disbeliever’s who castigate them with clubs of doubt.

Maybe this is as it should be. I am not judging right or wrong here, only telling you what is and why. My friends of yesteryear, who knew me as I struggled to raise a family of four children, wish to slay the doppelganger. They see me as poor and bohemian, gathering no moss, and living an illusion. One wrote me a letter asking when I was going to quit hiding behind my stage persona and become the real me. He said I had come to a crossroads in my life and had chosen the wrong road, and implied that the world of blues was a false world, and veiled, a haven of self-deception, where I was slipping into darkness, and wherein dwell the doppelgangers. The implication was spiritual or religious: the creation of the doppelganger is vain and self-serving, ungodly and dark.

Have you ever lay awake at night and wondered if there was a better you trying to get out? As you look back on your life does it seem that at some indefinable point, circumstances took over, and the person you dreamed of becoming just vanished? Have you wondered whether the vanishing was the coming of reality or that perhaps the preferred someone lies dormant in your labyrinthine id?

When you hear yourself described by your occupation, do you ever ask yourself, “so that’s who I am? That’s what I’ve become?”–then feel a twinge of angst because you know that it doesn’t represent the pure and true definition of who you really should be? Then do you wake up in the morning and accept your role in life and for the next few months forget that you even questioned it? I have, and I know I’m not alone.

This mortal and mysterious life we have all happened upon has something a life governed openly and daily by a revealed God would not have: risk. Obvious risks like death, dismemberment, blindness, disease, poverty, war, rape, and subjugation. And subtler but equally vital risks, like humiliation, defeat, embarrassment, ridicule, and the despair from lost hope. Risk is what causes fear and therefore produces the need for courage, and the by-product is exhilaration. If you knew the roller-coaster could not wreck and that even if it did, you were immortal and couldn’t be hurt in any way, it wouldn’t take any courage at all to ride it, and it follows that the exhilaration would be greatly diminished.

The doppelganger, as I describe him, is a person who has laid himself bare to the judgement of others, has taken chances with his character and personality. One who has weathered the storms of criticism and ridicule and repeatedly pushed on, improvising, adapting, growing. A person who has demonstrated courage and faced his fears, and crafted a finer version of himself than he who is left to his own appetites, and the decisions of others, security, and the pulls of mundane materialism. The doublegoer can only exist where there is risk. He who constantly protects himself from his fears cannot go where the doppelganger goes or share the glory.

I submit that mankind needs the doppelganger. Mankind needs a vicarious vision of what is possible in human dimensions of emotion. We need the example of courage and self-sacrifice. We need the creative phenomenon. We need to be able to crawl inside the soul of our fellow man and experience ultimate exhilaration. That is why thirty thousand people will sardine themselves onto a levee every year at the King Biscuit Blues Festival and behold the doppelgangers everyday from noon ’til midnight, rain or shine.

One of the brightest doublegoers I ever personally witnessed was the late Luther Allison. I stood before him at the aforementioned blues festival in 1996 and was impaled by the puissant force of his shining spirit. His eyes shimmered with intensity. I don’t recall seeing such focused energy in a human being before. Wave after wave of adrenaline surged in my veins as he tore into the night air with vicious guitar attacks and vocal tone born in his deepest essence. A normal man could not do this. A normal man could not have guessed this kind of output was even possible. It was the unique quality of a doppelganger lost in song. It was song defined as the human plight, a crying out to the universe for understanding. Those humans who deny themselves access to this kind of passion are missing a trenchant dimension in their development.

I have never been the same since. I reached inside myself for renewed vitality. I saw a new path that lay open a vision of human vivacity that I’d never seen. I went away more alive than I knew was possible before that night, but Luther went away to die. Even as the doppelganger burned like a dazzling shooting star on the stage before us, his creator was dying of brain cancer and the end would come suddenly.

I have a tape from long ago, before his self-imposed exile in France, of Luther Allison playing drunk in a bar. I was amazed at the lackluster performance, characterless voice, and lifeless guitar work. The doppelganger had not yet formed. His subsequent rejection in America, and his years overseas, and his multitude of life experiences where he refused to give in, refused to conform, refused to stop believing and growing, had forged the fabulous product I saw decades after the tape had been made.

The doppelganger, though, needs us. Luther fed off the power and adulation of the audience. That is what a doppelganger eats–not food, but human animation and devotion. The more he receives the stronger he gets. Without us he cannot live, cannot exist in the first place. We have the ability to destroy him or empower him. Without the doppelgangers we cannot know what is possible nor feel the exhilaration of it all. We can ride them to places high and beatific, and we can follow in the steps laid down by the greatest of the doublewalkers. They are the trailblazers of the soul.

Now, of course, there are no doppelgangers per se, only we humans wanting to rise above our earthy nature. Some of us do despite the obstacles. A preacher I once heard, a doppelganger if ever there was one, said we all find ourselves on this earth and begin running the race, the human race I guess, and we go along comfortably until we trip on an obstacle and fall flat on our faces. At that point we realize it is an obstacle race. We get back up and run again trying to spot the obstacles, and once again we fall flat on our faces. It is then that we learn the obstacles are the other people in the race.

As a performer, I ignore those who tell me what I can’t do and shouldn’t do and didn’t do and will never do. Some people vitiate and invalidate, while others empower and elevate. I choose to revel in personal growth–my own, and that of my fellow man.

Last August Blinddog Smokin’ arose at the crack of dawn for the first time all year, and drove to the hay fields outside of Salmon, Idaho, where we met a sweet couple in their mid fifties, who decided to start life over together. They’d both come out of unhappy marriages with negative mates who made it their mission to devalue the other’s life, and squelch their dreams.

They had found each other and decided to become balloonists, par excellance: a far-fetched dream for a 300-pound man and his new wife afraid of heights. But they believed, and they committed, and they got married in a balloon. They took us soaring high above the dew-laden fields with only the occasional sound of flame breaching the pure quiet of a blue morning sky. We were a brilliant zephyr, resplendent in bright colors, musing above the muck and muddle of stressed-out humanity.

Our captain was in his glory, he torched the balloon to great heights, while he beamed in ecstasy, and roared on occasion with cheerful tales and adventures. We figuratively rode the back of this doppelganger like four monkeys on a stallion, and value the memory like gold.

I couldn’t help but wonder after my marvelous morning, what the world would be like if the doppelganger in all of us were allowed to live. What wondrous adventures we could share. But the call to material conformity is strong, fear of failure is deeply embedded, and indebtedness keeps a stranglehold on most of us. Perhaps worst of all, there are many among us, some in whom the doublegoer was once strong, then languished, who are envious, jealous, and scared, eager to slay the doppelganger.

*Footnote: I use the term Doppelganger within a framework of my own interpretation. If there be German literary scholars among my readership who would take exception to this or that inaccuracy, I urge them to lighten up and enjoy the read.

Posted by Carl

Monday September 27th, 1999 @ 8:36 PM

It was the best of gigs, it was the worst of gigs. The great stage glowed
blue and red in the humid blackness of a summer night. Several thousand eyes stared from the dark revealing the reflected floodlights, their desultory blinking giving the scene a firefly effect.

Preparing to mount the steps was a guitar stud I’ll name Big Bad Blues Bully. Standing legs apart in his worn-at-the-heel snakeskin boots, he tucked in his flowing shirt and put on his game face while venting a stream of macho-babble at his young, disinterested girlfriend.

BBBB was regionally famous. It was no pilgrim who strutted into the spotlight and stung the masses with a piercing note from a Hendrix cover tune. This was my kind of show: big amps, mercurial licks, power chords, throbbing rhythm and a player with balls. Testosteronic, high torque, bombast. Anticipatory shivers swept my skin leaving goose bumps in their wake. The base guitar slammed through my ribcage with reverberation. I dug the power.

When the husky voice honed by years of drugs, booze, and
hard nights filled the summer air, the ladies showed the hint of a collective writhe, let their eyes cross just a little under half lids, blew an
imperceptible moan through pursed lips, and role-played medieval wench in their minds eye. This guy had the goods. I envied him.

Guitar licks blistered our ears for the next hour. Hot, fast, and nasty. But
they were licks we’d heard before: Hendrix licks, Stevie Ray licks, Buddy Guy licks–trite and shopworn. Licks that sounded alike. Licks all at the same volume. Licks we loved from their creators, but that didn’t ring true from the imitator. BBBB or Fourbee, said little if anything to the audience, preferring to let his music speak for him, only it was delivering a boring sermon.

The human mind is entertained by surprises. Predictability creates boredom no
matter how high the energy, the intensity, or the technical skill. We have a
remarkable ability to adapt to any environment once it becomes predictable,
but in the delight of novelty, there is no end. Great entertainers continue
to surprise you with their talent and personality, even if the surprises are
subtle. Fourbee ran out of surprises before he finished his first song.

The two sidemen drooped forlornly behind their wannabe guitar hero going
through the motions, probably wondering what their cut of the festival check
was going to be. I have always thought that the further removed from death an
entertainer is, the more fascinating he becomes. These guys looked like God’s
practice attempts at resurrection, almost alive but definitely cadaverous.

People begin to make bathroom treks. They stood in line at the barbecue tents, the chatter level rose to challenge the music level. When human beings get bored they begin to itch for some reason. I saw much scratching and digging going on. They had come to be fed musically and they were hungry and restless. Had you asked any of them if Fourbee was a good player, they’d have agreed that indeed he was. They would blame their inattention on themselves, pointing out that it was a hot night, or their wife had been galvanized with a PMS attack, or their baby messed his pants and they forgot the diaper bag.

When Fourbee and the Cadavers mercifully put an end to the long string of Hendrix/Stevie covers, the former came up with this great original
salutation: “We love you people. With all our hearts!” That exclamation is always enough to make me want to throw up. What the hell are they talking about? Love is a pretty serious word in my book. This guy loves his guitar and his snakeskin boots, but he couldn’t care less about a mass of faces of whom he really knows very few. There were people in that audience who would disgust a syphilitic mendicant. He didn’t love them and most of all he didn’t love himself.

When he left the stage waving a triumphant hand in the air, he began to curse the people to whom he had just professed his wholehearted love. He cursed the festival promoters and he cursed people I didn’t know. He issued as vile and effusive a barrage of gutter profanity as I have ever heard, and I was three years in the United States Marine Corps. He condemned everything and everyone, mixing religious and sexual profanity with a tone so venomous it would shame any self-respecting viper. Fourbee’s girlfriend nodded in agreement and suggested they leave this ungrateful conglomeration of shit-eating mankind. And he did, forthwith, and in a violent huff.

This technically talented man had obviously put countless years of practice into his instrument, but had neglected his soul. His self-loathing was destroying his music and his happiness. A great body of notes thrown out to our ears without the context of a profound and textured soul, is nothing more than noise in the night. I pitied the man.

I pitied the slender girl singing in the coffeehouse two weeks later. She had no snakeskin boots, just stood barefoot on the floor strumming a twelve string guitar singing through an anemic P.A. to twelve people. Blinddog Smokin’ was the headline attraction at the large nightclub downstairs. We had a couple of hours to burn and nowhere to go, so Jason and I made our entrance into the cozy room that smelled of coffee and fresh baked pastries.

I love making entrances. I used to study John Wayne coming through the saloon doors, then stopping to survey his audience. The door of the coffeehouse faced the audience slightly to one side. I sauntered in with a combined J.W. body posture and facial expression that said: “Ain’t I bad?”

No one looked.

I hate that when it happens. Why would these twelve people be more interested in who I sized up as a granola eating-hairy armpit sporting-super maudlin-save the whales-hemp is heaven-gunnysack dress wearing-body odor is beautiful-all mankind is a sisterhood-please don’t judge me while I judge you-self righteous-Joan Baez is God-let’s spray paint fur coats-pansexual-acid tripping-cappuccino is health food-my mother is a lesbian-let’s all hold hands and save the world–dorky, dirty, dingy, daffy, dipshit like this pathetic and pusillanimous, patron of puerility? Stereotypical folksingers tend to rile me a bit.

I mentioned to Jason that we could still catch the two-dollar movie one block down the street and even though we’d already seen it twice, it would be more to my liking than this slip of a girl and her I-brush-with-a-garlicroot grin. We almost left, then he said, “She’s doing some cool stuff on her guitar, let’s stay a minute?”

I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had pulled down his pants and mooned the twelve people. Jason judges guitar playing the way a school marm with a bun judges fourth grade penmanship. So for the first time I really focused on this woman. She was actually a cute little thing, and sanitary. I even begin to suspect that she shaved her armpits and brushed with normal toothpaste. Oh, it was the dreaded folk music alright, but something was shining through.

Jason and I stood cavalierly at the counter remaining aloof. I still pitied this lilting Lilliputian with her wee audience, but I decided to stay and find out what was drawing us to her. A song went by, then two, then more: original songs; philosophical songs–some humorous, some sad, some enlightening, but passionate every one. She was a sprite of sorts–a person who glows, whose aura can be seen even by the pragmatists among us. I will call her the Songbird. With a mutual glance, Jason and I knew to go sit with the twelve and become an official part of her audience.

I sat upright, chin high, and somber. I still had a reputation to uphold. I was too full of machismo to yield my admiration to a nymph folksinger. Jason though, was studying this woman, chin in hands. He openly admired her clever guitar tactics and percussion tricks. I followed his lead, and looking casually over my shoulders in the event somebody cool was watching, I let my body descend into the famous sculpted thinker’s posture.

This lady was a storyteller–creative, ardent, and picturesque. I gave her the supreme salute: I paid attention. I had stayed at first because as the Greeks were fond of saying: she was good to look upon. Then I noticed her vocal style and how she uniquely handled each word, each syllable, crafting her trade with meticulous detail. Along with this was her ability to make her guitar an unobtrusive and integral part of her persona and her stories. One tended not to notice the guitar work, only accept it as part of the whole.

My growing admiration of this effervescent raconteur moved to a higher echelon as I found her to be wise and sophisticated. Her words forced me to examine life, and myself. I sensed her mind behind the music and it was convincing and resolute. I begin to like her. I found myself impaled. I yielded my defenses and let her move me. Her songs had the conviction and passion of someone that has felt and felt deeply, and her experiences were not borrowed.

The greatest connection a poet can have with his audience is on a spiritual plane. Courtship from the bard is a pavanne that slowly brings two minds into harmony and the busy, chaotic, nonsense of a whirring individual brain is courted into the beautiful waltz of a shared epiphany. The thoughts are isolated and frozen for examination and the souls of both giver and receiver are lifted and nurtured. This then is performance with purpose. One walks away gratified and delighted.

A vignette portrayed by this songbird will illustrate the concept: She sat in a restaurant in Boston one afternoon and stared through a great picture window at the tranquil winterscape covering a frozen lake across the way. Steam from her coffee shimmered the scene as she beheld the utter peace and unspoken loveliness framed by the window. Slowly her eyes allowed a reflection on the glass to limn into her consciousness. The image was that, of her own face, superimposed upon the scene of fantastic tranquility beyond. It was a disturbed visage that looked back at her in counterpoint to the pacific loveliness that served as its backdrop.

Startled, she realized of a sudden that she was out of sync with nature. Her face did not fit in. The worries and troubles of self-centered materialism and a frenetic society had twisted her spirit and the evidence was in the window.

The Songbird decided right then to change some of her values and ways. As I listened to the story told so well, I had to wonder what my own face would look like against such a window. I felt the torque on my own soul and my heart felt heavy with stress, angst, anxiety, and rage. These qualities should not be in my life. But unless they are exposed, I carry them as my hidden and heavy cross.

The little audience had grown to twenty-five, but I hadn’t seen them come in. I rose to leave as our own gig was to begin shortly. I looked at the Songbird and shook my head in revelation and admiration. I thought of the Big Bad Blues Bully and realized how this diminutive dryad had just kicked his ass and stole his wallet. How very much he could learn from her. How very much had I. As a performer she was bigger than he was in every way except shoe size. She had kept me guessing, delighted me, surprised me, taught me, inspired me, and entertained me profoundly. I caught her eye as I left and nodded my respect. I didn’t really care about my image much at that moment. I was busy digesting food for thought. As I went to perform for my own fans, many times the number of hers, I envied her.

The Big Bad Blues Bully will undoubtedly go on bludgeoning his audiences with mammoth sound, and overwhelm them with volatile licks and a million notes. His angry soul will dictate a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes him feel his glory is being robbed by we, foolish and ignorant people who can’t appreciate his great technical skill. We, pedestrian slugs who just get in his way. We are ingrates who he unfortunately needs to measure his success. But we won’t give it to him because deep inside we know he is empty and self-loathing.

Perhaps he should sit in a restaurant and look out a great window at a peaceful scene and see his own angry face in polarity– angrier still if he knew that he had his butt kicked by a one-hundred pound girl with a P.A. system smaller than a breadbox. We blues men are supposed to be the left ventricle of pathos. We are supposed to herald it like stentorian trumpeters standing on the great cliffs–and the echo should ring pure and true. Ironically, sometimes we discover the brass for our testicles in a foundry small and feminine.

Posted by Carl

Monday August 2nd, 1999 @ 8:34 PM

The famed Western writer Louis Lamour coined a phrase called “Yondering” which I interpreted to mean: seeking the far horizons. It differed from wandering in that it was not aimless, but rather focused on what adventure or intrigue lay over yonder.

The lifestyle afforded me in Blinddog Smokin’ allows for much yondering as we travel about the world often on back roads and by-ways, winter and summer, forest and plains, city and village. I learned my own way of yondering more from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle than anyone else. My father read his tales of Sherlock Holmes to me while I was still in grade school. Holmes, with the precision of the English, always differentiated between seeing and observing. Everybody sees things, but few observe what secrets lie within the vision, thus his knack for concluding the perpetrator of crimes and their methods.

I have always noted whether or not a man shaves unevenly and can therefore deduce the light patterns of his bathroom. I look at the direction of his belt to see which handed he is. The hands are always full of details about the person’s lifestyle: condition of fingernails and what is under them; calluses or lack thereof; missing digits, scars, writer’s warts, crooked fingers, size, atrophy, powder burns, liver spots, sun spots, ink spots, all contribute to tales told about the person I’m subtlety examining.

Holmes’ head was replete with ways to observe. I take this practice into reading a town and its people. I carry my bicycle on the bus and whenever we hit town I hit the pavement pedaling. I go yondering. I try to cover the town in a reticulated pattern so as not to miss anything. I note the architecture and see how it changes historically. I find the early town and try to decipher how it grew and spread and why. I talk to old people and characters. I especially like to cruise alleys and see how the people live in their back yards as opposed to the “front” they put on for the passersby. I am fond of parks and baseball fields.

I treasure the individual creativity of someone’s special home built over the years with love and craftsmanship. I pity the “straight lined commonplace” that reveals people in banal existence without pride and without hope and without work ethic. I wish that mankind, rich or poor, could at least plant a single flower or sign their signature upon their life in some distinct way. If they do, I will observe it.

Recently we played in Butte, Montana over a weekend. My yondering took me up and down the steep inclines of this mountainscaped mining community that was once the richest city in the West. The Victorian mansions sit amidst shanties. The synagogue adjoins the Catholic church and the Korean Shriner’s Temple. Such an eclectic hodge podge of historical evolution makes for delightful dalliances in Doyle detectivism. The old town simply haunts the observer with ghosts and specters from its heyday a century ago. Every other building lies vacant with sad windows and crippled doors not unlike the old miners who shuffle along the streets mumbling of tales from the reckless and dynamic past when whores and gamblers beckoned them from the same buildings that now only echo the sounds of another era.

A 24-hour diner sits among the brick architectural giants, built when gold, silver, and copper were as common as beer bottles and avaricious men vied to outdo each other in their vain building of monuments to themselves. A salty redhead minds the counter and seems to always be there no matter when you happen in. She takes no guff off the crusty blue collar workers, winos, and punks who drift in off the main street. “You don’t like the special?” she scolds. “Then get the hell out and leave a seat for the next guy.”

The men sheepishly obey. It is a conditioning they accept and a newcomer such as myself realizes immediately the futility in bucking a woman who has “hard life and sorrow” written all over her features.

The cook stands behind her with sleeves rolled up and a curious smirk on his face. He hears each of us order as plain as if we were Jimminy Cricket standing on his shoulder, but the woman screams the order into air for his hearing anyway. He too is continuously there. And like her, he always looks the same, his clothes having absorbed the grease and smoke of the grill until he somehow becomes as much a part of the diner as the linoleum countertop.

One afternoon during a thunderstorm, I took refuge in this gathering place for eclectic personalities, and sat down by an author whose balding forehead bespoke his intelligence while his laundered clothes suggested success. On my right was a huge man whose clothes smelled of earth and horses. A few seats away a quiet woman mothered her small daughter, both wore dresses with frayed edges and sipped the soup of the day, chicken rice.

On the main floor which contains no tables, just serves as a walkway to a back room of poor man’s slots and poker tables, wavered a forlorn octogenarian miner. His once powerful body could be seen only in his bent fingers that hung idly from sunburned wrists, his buttoned sleeves being several inches too short. That he had mighty stories to tell I had no doubt, but his ability to tell them had faded as his mind had become the dim flicker of a miner’s lantern. He was a lonely man it was plain to see. Like a decayed, oak, drilling rig he stood bent and lopsided examining the floor. Back and forth he combed the dirty tile squares and said nothing.

The cook with the smirk, pulled out a penny. The smirk twitched a little as he looked toward the old man. When the man turned away he tossed the penny out on the floor. The cook turned back to the grill and chuckled silently. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. What good was a penny going to do for this miserable but once proud man? Obviously he was looking for lost change so he could by a bottle of cheap wine, that was what he had been reduced to. The cook was mocking him.

After several minutes he found the penny. He bent low to retrieve it and had to put one great hand on his protruding kneecap. Slowly the dangling fingers of the other hand dropped to the penny. They hovered over it taking a trembling aim. He could not pick it up. His fingers were stiff with arthritis and the knuckles were enlarged. They had never been fingers made to pick up pennies anyway. These were hands that had set timbres in shafts and had swung a single jack into solid rock, probably for decades.

I watched with mixed feelings. I wanted to help him but I had already judged him for a proud man. The cook looked again and the smirk grew and he chuckled out loud this time. I bit my tongue. He still hadn’t served me my eggs yet and ugly things can be done to eggs by irritated cooks.

Finally the old one gathered the penny up and placed it in his giant weather-beaten palm. A hundred and fifty more labors like that and he’d have enough for a bottle of 20/20 I thought. He began to shuffle again. His soles flapped against the tile. He made his tortoise way to the little girl eating the chicken soup.

He hesitated for a moment at her side hoping not to scare her, then nudged his trembling hand in toward her face. He held out the penny. For a moment her large brown eyes, glistening with the sparkle of youth, stared at his recessed and wrinkled ones which held no return glow, yet somehow conveyed his wishes.

Suddenly her heretofore-listless little face beamed with gratitude. What that smile did to that poor old man’s face simply melted my heart. It was as if a lifetime of woes and cares were momentarily lifted and the beauty of his fine human spirit shown through for anyone to observe if only for a moment. He hadn’t the energy even to smile, but a thousand subtle changes shimmered through his withered body and he was truly happy in the presence of that precious little girl. My desire to just hug them both to pieces was overwhelming, yet I remained frozen as to not spoil the moment.

I glanced back at the cook. He was biting the lip that always held the smirk. The tears in his eyes spilled over unto his unshaven cheeks and he wiped them with his soiled sleeve and quickly turned to hide his emotion and all of a sudden I just loved that man. I had happened upon a little daily ritual known only to the cook. Everything fell into place and I realized how he had found a secret way to give the old man some joy. And the very finest kind of joy it was. Pure, beautiful, precious, and in so doing he had given himself joy as well.

Now I’m a strong man who prides myself on how tough I can be, but I confess that I had to go out into the pouring rain and let the raindrops bury my tears to save my macho image.

In our quest for glory and fame and fortune as we tour the world, every now and then I go a yondering and find out that perhaps the treasure is right there in the streets of your town. There is a beauty in the human spirit that when it shines supersedes any status and makes fortune seem irrelevant, after all look at the value I found in a penny?

I have many friends from the places I lived in the past: business, religion, the military, college, and various careers, who can’t understand how I can find purpose in singing the blues. Perhaps it is because they’ve forgotten the real beauty of life and don’t realize that the pure and honest blues man observes that beauty and gives it a forum with proper emotion and tells it in a story. A story told well enough to exorcise our demons and bring out our nobler qualities and make us like ourselves again.

If a bluesman is nothing else he is a storyteller. He first observes life in all its pain and suffering and ugliness and then puts it in perspective so we can understand it and find our own healing, our own beauty, our own soul. That is why the blues connoisseurs treasure the old black guys, because of the lack of pretense, the sincerity, and their ability to tell a story the way it is supposed to be told.

Whether it is in the timbre of the voice, the haunting call of the blue note on guitar or harmonica, the deep groove of the rhythm section, or the look in the eye that lets the heart jump right into your lap; the blues man seeks to remind us that life is not credit cards, VCRs, business deals, and partying until you puke. It is much more than that, and needs to be felt and felt deeply. If he cannot convey that, then he is not a real bluesman, but a pretender.

A society without its storytellers is sterile and cold in my opinion. Those of us in Blinddog Smokin’ don’t have much status in society because status is measured by wealth, power, and accumulation of material goods. But we can go a yondering and bring back much wealth for those who don’t just see, but actually observe. I think that’s a pennysworth at least.

Posted by Carl

Wednesday June 9th, 1999 @ 8:31 PM

 “Let’s form a committee and look into it…” A long time ago I decided to start a huge basketball tournament for church kids who couldn’t make their high school team. I made a proposal to the church board and they formed a committee, mostly to give me reasons why it shouldn’t be done and couldn’t be done.

“The kids would fornicate in the Hotel…” they asseverated. “They’d vandalize the gym…” they decided.

“There would be nothing but confusion and chaos with that many kids,” one man pointed out.

The negative assault continued on my poor little idea baby. After much “harrumphing” and throat clearing, and with pious frowns belying their sophistry, they voted me down.

I later went about my tournament independently and it became so large and successful that it made the book of world records for most tournament teams under one roof. Some kids fornicated I’m sure, and there was some confusion, and a little of every problem that was forecast came up, but, I became a hero to the kids and their parents and started something that couldn’t be stopped. So the church board formalized my tournament and gave it an official organization name and put a “qualified” executive in charge of it, and they proceeded to fire me and steal my tournament.

I’ve always thought that if you put a committee to work on a painting of scenery, that the result would be a thin straight line.

“The mountains are too high”, someone would cry out in fully justified effrontery.

“The valley’s are too low,” would sound in righteous indignation.
“The river’s are too fast,” a fearful voice would quaver.
“The sun is too bright,” someone would pontificate.

And so eventually when the committee finally agreed on everything that didn’t offend somebody else, the painting would consist of a thin straight line with no color or ingenuity or spirit. However, the committee would declare it a work of genius, abstract and original, not too liberal, not too conservative, not too offensive, not too anything.

When Blinddog Smokin’ first hit the blues scene, and by that I mean the established clubs, festivals, magazines, and blues societies, we had rabbit ears. We listened to every comment and criticism and worried about who didn’t like us and why.
“They are too young,” they said of Jason, Andy, and Chuck.
“He’s too old, ” some said about me.
“Too much rock influence.”
“Carl talks too much to the audience.”
“They’re too white.”
“Chuck’s too black.”
“Not enough Delta influence.”
“They spend too much time down in the Delta.”
“Real blues can’t come out of Wyoming.”
“Andy’s hair is too long for a blues man.”
And nowadays: “Andy’s hair is too short for a blues man.”
I could write a small book on all the stuff we were too much of or not enough of.

The first time we were invited to a major festival, The King Biscuit in Helena Arkansas, 1996, we had been a band for three years and were still adjusting our style to meet this bar owner’s tastes and that blues society’s preference etc. At the King Biscuit, Jerry Pillow, the music director, had seen in us the potential that many now understand clearly. He gave us our first big break.

We responded by looking out at the audience and seeing writers, booking agents, radio announcers, label executives, festival organizers, blues society presidents, and worst of all: heavyweight established blues stars–we just compromised our style that was already chameleon, and gave the audience a thin straight line of music.

It was Bruce Iglauer of Alligator records who unwittingly turned us around. Bruce hates our music. That is his word, not mine. He once said, upon reviewing our CDs, that he wanted to help us gain distribution so that “other people could hate us too”. He called us a “schizophrenic” band. He said that until we learned to get a recognizable style we could never be on his label. He likes old guys, old conservative blues, old tried and true formulas. This is fine, but it is not our style.

We took his advice to heart in a way he didn’t intend. We decided to start writing our music the way we liked it. We decided to start performing in the style we felt comfortable with. We decided to give Bruce Iglauer the finger and anybody else who didn’t happen to approve of our band personality. In short, we finally became artists.

Since then we have learned to believe in our songs, our personas, our moves on stage, our solos, our stage rapport, our taste in music, and have presented that image with confidence and panache. No more thin straight line. The result is a burgeoning and a blossoming that has gotten us invitations to tour overseas (this late Fall), invitations to many more festivals and top echelon clubs, and overwhelming positive response at our shows. We have several thousand people on our mailing list and have sold over ten thousand CDs off the stage and we keep the money, not some conniving label executive. We have a big tour bus and our own recording studio where we are currently putting out our fourth and fifth CDs due for release this November.

Some of you saw us recently at the Newton, Kansas Blues Festival. I consider that a breakthrough performance. Over the last few years we have learned how to perform with confidence, but in Newton, we just dominated the stage and overwhelmed the audience. We had arrived at the place where we know exactly how our stuff is going to go over and we played it to the hilt. We had standing ovations and an outrageous demand at the end for encores. We signed autographs for the next two hours and sold a thousand dollars worth of CDs and T-shirts.

The lesson herein for all of us is that we humans are unique individuals. No two fingerprints alike, no two personalities. However, the world pushes conformity. We are told who is supposed to be popular, what tv shows to watch, what movies to see, what clothes to wear and what cars to drive. The government and the workplace are replete with policies. We are told what is politically correct to say.

The inbred blues world has a barb wire fence around its stars and a list of “you can’t do’s” that would make a Marine Corps Drill instructor happy. Well, Blinddog Smokin’ has cut the barb wire and we go where we want to, and whistle while we work. Our blues rooted music is being “digged and dunged” and allowed to grow, and our personalities are free and strong. I truly believe I could look any other performer of any stature right in the eye while I was on stage and just do my thing without caring at all whether he liked it or not.

Farewell to the thin straight line.

Posted by Carl