“American classical music audiences are half asleep,” the unusual prodigy said in a recent interview, adding that it is the performer’s obligation to wake them up.

From the time Hahn-bin dramatically threw off the black silk veil which concealed his face as he advanced toward the stage, there were no naps to be had.

Half geisha, half mime, half Mick Jagger, half Vladimir Horowitz, tiny Hahn-bin’s enormous stage persona consumed the room.

That adds up to four halves, which is about right.

The test of a classical musician, to me, is his or her ability to suppress the hacks and wheezes of audience members in the late stages of tuberculosis who drag themselves to the concert hoping to be healed.

Hahn-bin waved his bow like a wand over the January crowd and healed the sick. As he stretched thin the most quiet, yearning phrases, not a creature stirred, not even the uncomprehending infants brought by doting parents to absorb Hahn-bin’s genius by osmosis.

Classical concerts in this country are stiff, high-church affairs. People forget that 200 years ago, classical music was the rock music and audiences came to have a good time.

A common source of discomfort for all present is the constant anxiety over when it is appropriate to applaud.

No matter how stirring a movement, according to etiquette you aren’t supposed to clap until the third movement has concluded.

But at many concerts, some hick from the sticks who somehow made it through the screening process feels moved by the first movement and innocently starts to clap.

Other rubes follow, and soon a smattering of applause threatens to shatter the dignity of the occasion.

The snoots, who are too busy being snoots to actually hear the music, glare at the the rubes and stare them into silence. Snoots live for such delicious moments of superiority.

It is class warfare, and it has divided our country for decades.

Well, Hahn-bin had an announcement made before the event: The right time to applaud is when you feel like it.

You could sense the relief in the room, at least amongst we rubes.

But the stress level soon rose again as Hahn-bin’s pianist approached the stage dressed head-to-toe in black leather and sporting a theatrical feather mask.

It got higher as the be-veiled Hahn-bin himself swooped in with an exaggerated sense of drama.

Good grief, I thought. He’s going to have to be pretty good to pull this off.

But pull it off he did.

First, Hahn-bin pulled off his veil, revealing stunning theatrical make-up that made the audience gasp.

Then he pulled it off with energetic and inspired playing that turbo-charged the difficult but familiar classical pieces on the program.

My suspicion that Hahn-bin took inspiration from Mick Jagger was confirmed when his second costume change featured a shirt printed with dozens of Rolling Stones logos.

Sometimes Hahn-bin laid on the floor. Other times he stomped on the floor to accent a phrase. Sometimes he sat in a cushy chair. And one time he ended up standing atop the piano.

I checked the piano afterwards. Hahn-bin’s big boots made tiny scratches in the finish. You don’t stand on a piano without making scratches, I discovered once in my own home after some dinner guests left.

But Hahn-bin probably will be allowed to leave scratches wherever he wishes. Maybe they’ll have him autograph the scratches with permanent marker.

Classical music concerts can be trying. Usually, given the difficulty hearing unamplified instruments from a distance, it is best just to stay home and listen to a recording.

But at the old wooden museum, Hahn-bin’s rich tone flowed over the small but capacity crowd like melted butter.

Hahn-bin is only starting his career. He recently debuted at Carnegie Hall and showed up on the Today Show.

The chance to hear his talents in a small venue will soon vanish.

Hahn-bin’s next trip through Grand Forks will probably bring him to the big auditorium with cushy, sound-absorbent chairs where I once strained to hear his great teacher, Itzhak Perlman play.

More seats, more money, less reward.

Those of us in the crowd last Sunday were lucky indeed. We saw a rising star up, close and more personal than we would have at Carnegie Hall.

The only writing I’ve done regarding Fela Kuti was the following book review, about the still-definitive biography and critical study by Micheal Veal published five years after his death. It might provide some good context for those interested in the play and in Fela’s music. Fela’s sons Femi and Seun continue in his tradition, updating it with their own bands and recordings, which are also highly recommended — they’ve both appeared in Northern California more than once and will likely be back.

The Life & Times of a Musical Icon

I remember where I was when I heard that Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had died. It was August 3, 1997, and the veteran Nigerian singer Sonny Okosuns was onstage at the Reggae on the River festival in Northern California; his expected energetic live set seemed subdued. At one point he apparently could no longer keep his feelings hidden, stepped to the microphone, and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to have to say this, but just today we have learned that Fela Kuti has died. I do not want to believe this is true but I feel I have to tell you now.” There were tears on his cheeks as he turned from the microphone.

I also remember the days I learned that Bob Marley, John Lennon, and Jimi Hendrix died. And I mention those names only to reinforce just how important a musical figure Fela Kuti was. Perhaps only the Congolese guitarist and singer Franco obtained similar stature as a true Pan-African icon, but nobody — anywhere in the world — has ever matched Fela in terms of presenting a singular, controversial, uncompromising body of work — with a life story to match.

Fela’s life story and music have been the subject of a couple of books published while he was still living, but those works were not only hard to find, but generally judged to be not up to the weighty task of presenting all that their topic warranted. Now the definitive book on Fela has arrived.

Michael Veal is uniquely qualified to tell Fela’s story. A Yale ethnomusicologist, he not only has the intellectual and research skills to present a comprehensive biography, anchored throughout in the chaotic sociopolitical context of West Africa in recent decades, but — get this — actually played saxophone with Fela’s band when they toured the United States. He also visited Fela in Lagos to see him working and playing in his home element. Veal knows his subject as well as anyone could, with a proper mix of objectivity and passion for the music that makes his book both analytically challenging, even dense at times (it originated as a Master’s thesis), and compelling reading.

In 260 packed and large pages, Veal tells Fela’s unique and already legendary life story, drawing on over 500 publications, many interviews, and a deep and wide familiarity with Fela’s work as reflected in his own musical experience and an exhaustive discography. Given Fela’s continual involvement with the political and musical forces of his times, the book also becomes a de facto history of modern Nigeria and African music, centered around an enigmatic and powerful — and ultimately tragic — figure.

Even for readers already familiar with Fela’s work and life, Veal’s exploration is full of surprises and ironies. Veal begins this retelling (following a vivid opening recollection of a night at Fela’s legendary Lagos club The Shrine) before Fela’s birth in 1938 to second-generation Christian parents. His father, an Anglican pastor, was also a union activist. His mother was a well-known women’s rights activist when that was still very rare. This respected upper middle-class extended family produced prominent doctors and other professionals (including Fela’s cousin, Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka). Fela’s childhood friends, Veal notes, recall him as a “well-mannered, respectful young man with a mischievous, playful streak.” That streak, combined with his family’s stern and strict standards, earned him “systematic ass-kickings.” Nobody could know then that such mischief and beatings would be dominant factors throughout Fela’s life.

Exposed to a heady intellectual upbringing, Veal notes that Fela’s ideological foundations were (Ghana’s first president Kwame) “Nkrumah’s…Marxist rhetoric and the proto-pan-Africanism of Jamaican Marcus Garvey.” Musically, Fela began developing as a young man in the 1950′s “Golden Age” of Nigerian highlife sounds and left for London in 1958 to study music at elite Trinity College. There he became steeped in Afro-American jazz and formed his first band, leading the “Koola Lobitos” (roughly, “young wolves”) as a trumpet player, recording some singles and citing Louis Armstrong as a formative influence. Returning to Lagos in 1963, he began a musical career in earnest as both a bandleader and radio producer, but lost his job due to his focus on his own band’s efforts to present “highlife, jazz, the Twist, the Madison, and what-have-you.”

A trip to the United States in the late 1960s proved revelatory. The band’s planned tour was an organizational nightmare but Fela discovered both funk music and radical politics. He read Malcolm X, listened to James Brown, met African-American activists, and recorded his first unmistakably Fela-esque music in Los Angeles in 1969 — a prototype of the “afrobeat” he invented and would forever epitomize. “Fela returned to Nigeria a changed man,” Veal notes.

That changed man was the Fela who became notorious worldwide even before he ever ventured out of Africa again. Starting with a small group (whose fan club was at one point sponsored by a skin-lightening cream company!), during the 1970s Fela’s band, ego, image, following, recording catalog, worldview, and conflicts expanded exponentially. “The man turned Nigeria completely upside down” then, as Veal quotes a fan. “He had the whole country in his hand…Fela at that time was a law unto himself and did whatever he pleased in Nigeria, until he met an equally lawless group- the army.”

“Whatever he pleased” included Fela’s renowned penchant for women, including many wives, and for openly smoking illegal herbs (even though early on he strictly prohibited his band members from doing so), and for baiting his enemies in both the music industry and the government verbally, musically, and in writing in his “Chief Priest” column which ran for years in a major newspaper. The consequences included numerous raids on his homes and clubs, beatings and even death among his family and followers, and much jail time. To his credit, Veal covers all of this extensively but nonsensationally. Charges of Fela’s sexism, exploitation of women and musicians (his greatest drummer, Tony Allen, called Fela a “slave driver”), and inconsistent pronouncements are fully explored.

At each step of Fela’s development, Veal presents just enough of the political context to give a real picture of what Fela was up against — and how much of his problems might have been avoided or escaped had Fela been willing to compromise even on seemingly inconsequential points. But lack of any willingness or even ability to do so brought Fela fame and some fortune at first, and then increased arrests and beatings, criticism even among former followers, something close to poverty, and even, it may be argued, death from AIDS. Veal walks a fine line in presenting various perspectives on this decline and fall, without unduly judging a man who is obviously a musical idol.

On Fela’s music, Veal is analytical and admiring without being blinded. “In musical terms, the afrobeat Fela developed between 1969 and 1972 was his major achievement,” Veal argues. “It clearly drew upon highlife, jazz, and rhythm-and-blues, but Africanized the foreign jazz and soul elements while it deconstructed dance-band highlife, and grafted them all onto a traditional West African rhythmic template.” While I will probably never quite grasp what “deconstruction” is supposed to connote, this is as good a basic description of afrobeat as you’ll find, as is Veal’s view of Fela on stage: “Fela combines the autocratic bandleading style and dancing agility of James Brown, the mystical inclinations of Sun Ra, the polemicism of Malcolm X, and the harsh, insightful satire of Richard Pryor.”

Through the 1970′s and 1980′s, this larger-than-life figure recorded almost seventy albums of extended songs (fully listed chronologically here, with lyrical excerpts and descriptive critical commentary for many), and was arrested, beaten, harassed and jailed too many times to count (although Veal tries, estimating that Fela was arrested around 200 times). His provocations led some to feel he had a death wish, or at least felt himself immune to mortality. He made ventures overseas and was received with anything from ecstasy to derision, and plenty of confusion: “Those who expected a performance of traditional music experienced an electric, Western-influenced popular style. Those who expected virtuosic African jazz experienced instead a social, communal dance music in which virtuosity in the Western sense was not a prime consideration. Those who expected a progressive, leftist ideologue experienced instead an authoritarian, nontraditional polygamist presenting a stage show almost bordering on the burlesque.” And so on; Fela confounded everyone at some point.

Thus even the temporary overseas fame found by a few African musicians such as his compatriot Sunny Ade and South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela eluded Fela, and even though he said that did not matter, some of the quotes and information Veal includes indicate that Fela was in fact disappointed. “When I went to America in 1969 I knew Africa had the music to go around the world but I thought it was going to be quicker,” he said in 1983. “I have been waiting for this a long time.” He was to be kept waiting.

By the 1990s Fela’s behavior, never sedate, was increasingly bizarre and unpredictable, alienating even many of his followers. Formerly unmatched as a prolific composer and recorder, he released little music even by other bands’ standards. He had a controversial personal “guru” named Professor Hindu who performed supposed live executions and revitalizations (exposed as fraudulent here), and made ever-more scabrous and sometimes absurd pronouncements about many topics, including the disease which claimed his life at age 58. He likely exposed many others to HIV, a consequence never fully documented. Reading his life story, it’s actually surprising he lived as long as he did. He had been jailed, in a “skeletal” state, one more time just a few months before he died.

However far Fela had fallen, though, his funeral drew not only “dignitaries, politicians, students and diplomats” but over a million Nigerians who saw him a virtual deity. For, Veal concludes, “Despite the strongly divided opinions of Fela, the public reaction to his death was virtually unanimous. While his lifestyle was universally condemned, Fela had never wavered from his self-appointed role of calling attention to the sufferings of the common people….At the heart of his chaotic, contentious, and contradictory lifestyle was an authentic search for an African cultural revitalization, a refusal to submit to mindless authority mindlessly, and one of the most irrepressible and profusely creative African spirits of the late twentieth century.” His music, much of it now reissued and enjoying a posthumous surge in popularity, remains as evidence of all Veal claims for it.

“Fela” fully presents Fela, warts, glories, struggles and all. Veal’s “more than ten years of critical and recreational listening, musical performance, academic research, traveling, and collecting” invested in this book have paid off in a landmark work. This is, and almost certainly will remain, the ultimate book on Fela Kuti. In this life story, truth is indeed stranger — and stronger — than fiction.

Fela: The Life And Times Of An African Musical Icon, By Michael E. Veal. Temple University Press, Philadelphia; 2003.

“Manson’s shadow is everywhere,” recalls Greil Marcus in his new book about The Doors’ rapid rise and fall. And that too was not usually a positive thing. In the summer of 1969, Manson (and the Altamont concert a few months later) came to stand for the darkest side of the 1960s and the end of any dreams thereof. But in fact few knew about crazed cult leader and mastermind of murder before then, and The Doors burst into the American pop mainstream in 1967 with their debut self-titled and best album with creepiness and threat already fully intact. The LP concluded with the extended opus “The End,” wherein the singer/narrator acted out an oedipal murder/sex fantasy that was about as far from the imagined flowery Summer of Love that year as the Manson murders proved to be two years later, in the same week as the fabled peace-and-love Woodstock festival.

But Marcus is writing there about “LA Woman,” the title song of The Doors fifth and last real album, and about Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice, set in Los Angeles in 1970 where and when that LP was recorded. It’s one of the few Doors songs Marcus seems to like (although he adores the original “Light My Fire”). But their music sure seems to have stuck with him, ever since he saw them perform multiple times. His new book is subtitled “A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years,” and his take on the Doors discography seems to be that their sophomore LP, Strange Days, still held some power; the second and third records “were terrible jokes, regardless of who the joke was on,” and the fourth and fifth had their moments and even more embarrassments. But then in 1971 Jim Morrison died in Paris under somewhat mysterious but mainly pathetic circumstances. He was a great blues singer at a minimum who had rapidly devolved from being the sexiest rocker since Elvis — “He’s hot, he’s sexy, and he’s dead,” as the famed Rolling Stone 1981 cover had it, or as Marcus puts it, “He had Elvis’s Greek God looks, his seductive vampire’s hooded eyes; like Elvis he communicated the disdain of the beautiful for the ordinary world — into a fat bearded self-parody with a “gross, slobbery voice.”

Around that time, my mom was driving me to the clothes store for some “back to school” duds, and “Light my Fire” came on the radio, as it did constantly back then. “I recognize this song,” she said, although her tastes ran more to opera. I did too. You couldn’t really avoid it. A junior high elementary music teacher, trying to be hip, played “Strange Days” for us, trying to break down the title song’s structure. I wondered what Mom might think about the lyrics to “The End,” or to the later hit “Riders on the Storm”: “There’s a killer on the road/his brain is squirming like a toad/ take a long holiday/ let the children play/ if you give this man a ride/ sweet family will die…” etc. It wasn’t exactly The Monkees.

It’s always struck me as strange that Mr. Manson seized upon the sunny music of the Beach Boys and Beatles for his psychotic projections. He seems to have never mentioned The Doors, who not only fit his persona, but were from LA to boot. “In 1968, dread was the currency,” recalls Marcus, mentioning the RFK and MLK assassinations, along with Vietnam, Camus, and much much more, including seemingly random associations, as is his wont. But by then Morrison and The Doors had already moved into trying to sell more records, with “hits” such as “Hello I Love You” or “Touch Me” — songs Marcus easily labels as garbage akin to Elvis’ reviled movie music. And by then the band was “a band at war with its audience” with “contempt on both sides.” Marcus references many bootleg concert recordings, some online, but most listeners won’t have the patience to watch and listen to those. The Doors’ “official” recordings offer plenty of evidence of the decline Marcus describes.

Morrison once reflected about “The End” that “I didn’t realize people took songs so seriously and it made me wonder whether I ought to consider the consequences….” So it seems he was lucky that Manson and his “family” did not seem to be big fans or the “consequences” might have been even worse than they were.

But Morrison did seem to take his own lyrics seriously, wanting very much to be a poet taken seriously by all comers. Marcus, writes that The Doors “saw themselves as much in the tradition of fine art… the stream of art maudit that carried Blake, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Jarry, Buneul, Artaud, and Celine to their doorsteps — as in the tradition of rock n’ roll itself…” That’s a lot of name-dropping, but rings true in that those are some of the same literary figures Patti Smith reveres in her very fine memoir Just Friends. As the five years rolled quickly on, The Doors attempted extended overblown “suites” such as “The Soft Parade,” Celebration of the Lizard,” and “Rock is Dead” — which all had their moments, and deserved high marks for ambition at a minimum.

Jim Morrison took the revering a bit too far and died from it, in the process giving the term “Dionysian” a higher profile but not a good one. One could argue they took themselves a bit too seriously. Marcus relates how, in one of those unintentionally hilarious grandiosities of pop and film stars, how at least some of The Doors envisioned themselves occupying the White House at some point. Drummer John Densmore wrote in his memoir that “He imagined himself [it’s hard to tell whether ‘he’ here is Jim Morrison or keyboardist Ray Manzarek] as Secretary of State. Sounded like fantasy time to me, but I think a part of Ray thought it would really happen. I thought Jim was too crazy to be as popular as he was already!”

Indeed. Like, say, Manson, Morrison seemed obsessed with some sort of apocalypse, personal or otherwise. “The future’s uncertain but the end is always near,” he advised in the great “Roadhouse Blues.” He would never have guessed that just last year he’d be issued a formal “pardon” from Miami officials for “indecent exposure, public obscenity, and inciting to riot” onstage there 40 years earlier. The surviving Doors rejected the pardon, stating that “Four decades after the fact, with Jim an icon for multiple generations — and those who railed against him now a laughingstock — Florida has seen fit to issue a pardon… We don’t feel Jim needs to be pardoned for anything… His performance in Miami that night was certainly provocative, and entirely in the insurrectionary spirit of The Doors’ music and message. The charges against him were largely an opportunity for grandstanding by ambitious politicians — not to mention an affront to free speech and a massive waste of time and taxpayer dollars.”

So there we have it — Dionysian visions devolving into tea party-like arguments about governmental waste. Whatever one might think about Morrison’s music and persona, the fact that legal arguments linger on, books are still written about him, and mostly, that his music plays on and on via all manner of media — but not used commercially, thanks to an agreement the band made before he died that any sellout had to be unanimous — means that even though he joined the “Forever 27 Club” and died young albeit already past his prime, he triumphed in at least some ways, living on in our ears. Which can be kind of scary.

The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, Greil Marcus Public Affairs Books; 210 pages; $21.99.

In terms of expense a ticket to see the Liverpool Football Club at home at Anfield last Saturday against hated rival Manchester United, just 30 miles to the East, is as dear as those for the exalted venues of the classical music world. There is a big difference in scale: Bayreuth has nearly 2,000 seats, La Scala has almost 3,000 seats, and Anfield more than 40,000, still only about half the size of the biggest English football stadium, Wembley.

LFC boasts perhaps the largest worldwide fan base of any professional sports franchise, estimates varying from between 50 and 80 million supporters. That international appeal and its massive marketing potential help explain why the franchise was bought a year ago by a group of American investors known as the Fenway group. Lesser stakeholders in this bunch include basketball star Lebron James, who flew in and out of Liverpool for the game, his expensive Italian suit topped to the north by a flaming red LFC scarf. The New York Times is number two in the mix, and it’s no surprise that the paper has accordingly ramped up its coverage of European soccer in general and of Liverpool FC in particular. Where once princes and potentates conquered duchies and erected opera houses, they now buy up sports franchises and build stadiums. Or better yet, have them built on their behalf.

That a ticket to Saturday’s match played on a fabulously clear Merseyside day would come into the hands of an American with only the faintest knowledge of European football — its history, its present personalities, and its tribal affiliations — had to do merely with knowing the right people. My college roommate had just completed a film entitled Will, an expertly crafted and compelling story that centers on a English schoolboy who is a fanatical LFC supporter and (spoiler alert!) escapes from his boarding school to make his way across Europe to the 2005 Champions League final played in Istanbul. There his team celebrates the most unlikely victory, coming from three goals to nil behind in the second half to beat powerhouse ACMilano. LFC won the match on penalty kicks in one of the greatest comebacks in football history (more on this film next week). The movie included a cast of supporting Liverpudlians, among them Paul McGrattan, a boyhood friend of the Liverpool captain, Steve Gerard (who makes an oracular cameo in the movie) and is himself a Scouse — a native of the city.

My position only two or three degrees removed from the mighty Gerrard yielded me a ticket at the face-value of £48, which I could have turned around and sold for five times that amount — as could Gerrard’s friend, McGrattan. But this excellent fellow, who brilliantly plays a scalper in front of Atatürk stadium in Istanbul in the movie — was kind enough to throw this pearl before the Yankee swine, and welcome me as one of the lads. To be sure, indulging in the profit motive was continually discouraged by loudspeaker announcements outside the stadium trying to dissuade anyone from buying a scalped ticket. On the walk to the ground down the narrow street through the 19th-century terraced estates of worker housing — many of them boarded up and apparently ready for demolition, perhaps for a parking lot, or some such nefarious American-style scheme — we encountered a ticket tout being lead away in handcuffs. I was later informed he was probably selling counterfeit tickets.

Needless to say I felt a tad guilty getting a ticket that should rightly have gone to someone far more deserving. Or perhaps it wasn’t guilt, but rather fear of being discovered by those around me in the packed benches as an interloper with little real appreciation for the world’s game. But I know enough about football to know that a chance to see Liverpool versus Manchester United at Anfield should not be turned down.

I also convinced myself that ethnomusicological interest was enough to outweigh the selfish snatching of a ticket from the hungry mouths of local babes. Among the countervailing arguments against this bit of self-rationalization was the fact that I am about as equipped to relate and analyze the waves of resounding affection, musical epithet and improvised crudity that careen around the stadium as a Vienna choirboy washed up in the South Pacific is to make sense of the musical rituals of the Trobriand Islands.

Undaunted, this fearless expatriate made his way through portals so small that one has to turn sideways to get through them and into the glorious din of the stadium.

I was one of the later ticketholders to enter. A football match is short by the standards of American sport, beholden as it is to advertising breaks. European football gives you two 40-minute halves with a 20-minute pause in between. The whole affair clocks in at under two hours. The supporters get to the ground early and begin their rites long in advance of kick-off: stretching banners as big as a basketball court over large sections of the stands and passing these vast sheets hand to hand so they travel above the heads of the fans in a seemingly magical motion generated by the delivery of a held edge from one person’s grasp to the next.

As colorful as all this might be, the first that strikes you is the singing.

As I made my way up to my seat crammed in among the bellowing fans, I could hear that beyond the nearby sources of song, the deeper origins of an anthem apparently hymning the heroics of some former LFC player curled around towards my section from the stand to my right running behind the nearest goal. This area is known as the Kop, apparently in reference to a similarly slanted hillside in the South Africa Veld known as Spion Kop where British soldiers fought, and, one assumes sang in full-voice — if not into the teeth of Boer bullets, than on the march there and back.

Indeed, real musicological research might reveal that the poor of the British infantry were working class men who had unwavering allegiances to Victorian football clubs in the then-new English league. Singing would have been not only a form of cementing esprit de corps, but also of finding humor and resolve before and after the battle was joined, as one LFC song puts it in inevitable reference to the German menace and the nationalistic succor of soccer:

In a battle that started next morning

/ Under a Libyan sun

/ I remember that poor Scouser Tommy

/ Who was shot by an old Nazi gun

As he lay on the battle field dying

/ With the blood gushing out of his head

/As he lay on the battle field dying

/ These were the last words he said…

Oh… I am a Liverpudlian

/ I come from the Spion Kop

/ I like to sing, I like to shout

/ I get thrown out quite a lot.

The Kop in particular, and the other three stands that enclose the pitch, are overwhelmingly white and male. But some diversity comes with the international reach of the LFC brand. Many Scandinavians sat in my section, and singing along with them at full voice just behind me was a Sikh in his orange dastar and bright red LFC jersey letting fly in a rousing baritone. Also to be heard at close range were some Japanese men who were likewise giving it their all. Circumstances didn’t allow me to find out if these international brigades learned this repertoire by attending matches, by means of instructional CDs, through the pedagogical offerings of YouTube, from the numerous LFC song websites, or from some combination of all of these.

Querying the man next to me, a youth soccer coach in the city, I learned that alongside classics of Liverpool song such as the above-cited “Poor Tommy Scouse,” the repertoire continuously incorporates new additions, mostly contrafacta — new words fitted to preexistent tunes, from the theme to the Addams Family to “Those were the Days.” This unwritten hymnal also includes local masterworks of the greatest Scouse songsters, the Beetles, as in an ode to Steve Gerrard based on “Let It Be.”

The singing emanates from the Kop where the crowd remains standing for the duration of the match, in spite of an early announcement that the spectators should remain seated on account of children who might not otherwise be able to see the action. Standing up in the Kop expresses intense interest in the game, but also promotes earsplitting vocalization, still robust by the time the songs reach around the corner of the stand and down the stadium.

The building has low angled roofs that run to the very edge of the field, shielding the spectators from northern English rains. Such protection was unnecessary on such a fair Saturday. From high up in the stands some ten rows from the closed roof above, one looked longingly at the square patch of brilliant sunlight as it slowly tracked across the northern end of the field over the course of the match.

This low roof not only blocks out both the sun and the rain, but also creates a giant sounding chamber for the communal voices of the fans. It’s like putting a several thousand-voice male chorus inside the body of a giant guitar.

These Liverpool hymns, pitched low and manly and raising up in swells of gravelly rapture, are interspersed with pithier chants of a sometimes less imaginative contour: “Shit! Shit! Shit!” expressed several times the Kop’s ardent displeasure with the officiating.

When Steve Gerrard scored the first goal of the match in front of the Kop — not only against hated archrival Manchester United, but also in his first game since coming back from an injury that has sidelined him since last Spring — they erupted and soon broke into “Steve Gerard, Gerard” sung to the tune of “Que sera, sera” It was not a version Doris Day would have recognized — and certainly not one she would have much appreciated.

The club’s central hymn and motto is “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodger and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical Carousel. It’s the kind of song that Barbara Streisand can — and has — squeezed every breathy bit of quavering sentiment out of. With its yearning harmonies, it’s a tearjerker of a ballad that at Anfield froths and foams in the caldron of the Kop, and then, as the melody reaches for ill-advised heights, shoots geyser-like out through the opening in the band box towards the Merseyside heavens. The circling seagulls, and the ghosts of the mythical Liver birds, flee through the air. Even the Goodyear blimp above seems to register the shock waves of song with a perceptible shudder.

Anfield boasts of its status as the last 19th-century football venue — classic, pre-corporate, and uncompromising. The place remains for the time being a militantly unimproved stadium, though the capacity was wisely reduced in the 1990s when the benches were converted to seats. There are no modern luxury boxes, no big screen replays (or indeed replays of any kind) or the hammering interference of pre-recorded advertisements and cheers, tiresome rock anthems, and all the other acoustic torture that makes going to many a sports event in the US virtually unbearable. In terms of total decibels per hour, Anfield might possibly exceed the output of even the most overpowered American sports palaces. But the difference in the ethical effect of Anfield is obvious, even to the uninitiated: the authenticity, imagination, and restorative powers of spontaneous singing shame the corporate manipulations of American audio oppression. Long may Anfield remain a citadel of elemental song!

DAVID YEARSLEY teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint. His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London,” has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu

A couple years ago I created a catchy blues tune entitled Whoopsie Doopsie, and after I performed the song to the apparent delight of my wife Marcia, I thought I might make a recording of the tune and see how the world liked it. I wrote a note to myself—Whoopsie Doopsie Project—and put the note in the center of my just-cleaned desk, thereby establishing a new bottom layer for the accumulation of papers and books and drawings and letters and bills that would inevitably grow into a high plateau of dysfunction until, in a fit of frustration, I abstained from eating and drinking for several hours until the mess was properly expelled.

Thus time and again over these many months, I worked my way down to a little yellow square of paper on which was writ Whoopsie Doopsie Project, a trio of words that sent me to the piano to bang out the latest rendition, after which I would say to myself, “Yes, I really should record that and see what the world thinks of it.” Then the tides of time and paper would rush in again and submerge the note, and the project would largely vanish from my consciousness, except on rainy mornings when I was practicing the piano, at which times I might essay a version or two of the pleasing apparition.

Feeling especially sad one such rainy morning, I played a very slow Whoopsie Doopsie, and the sweet little love song became dark and plaintive; and I appreciated the song in my bones rather than with my sense of humor. And that very night we went to a dinner party at which the hostess asked me to play, and Marcia suggested I premiere Whoopsie Doopsie for the public, as it were. So I performed a rather timid version of the tune, the piano unfamiliar to me, and everyone in the audience said I must bring out a recording of the song—everyone being four people.

Here are the lyrics, in their entirety, of Whoopsie Doopsie.

Whoopsie doopsie, doopsie do

Whoopsie daisy, I’m in love with you

Whoopsie doopsie, doopsie do

Tell me how you like it,

Tell me what to do

Wanna make you happy

When we’re making whoopsie do

The last line is a not-so-subtle tribute to Ray Charles. As you can see, we’re not talking about great art here. However, we are talking about the artistic process, which I find fascinating and difficult to write about. The difficulty in writing about creative processes, for me, lies in the non-verbal nature of those processes through which original art and original concepts emerge and evolve and are ultimately captured so others may experience those creations. Since there are no words for that which is wordless, the best one can hope for in describing such wordless processes are faint approximations. And the other large challenge for me in writing about making art is to ignore the nagging feeling that I am describing a process that almost always results in mediocrity or crap, otherwise known as failure.

“There are only two dangers for a writer: success and failure, and you have to be able to survive both.” — Edward Albee

On the other hand, many great teachers, Buckminster Fuller among them, espouse the idea that there are no failures in the inventive process, that everything we do is a valuable part of the continuum of experience. Failure, these wise ones suggest, might more usefully be understood as a necessary step along the way to discovery and fruition. Two of my favorite quotes about this idea, referring specifically to musical improvisation and composition, are from Miles Davis and Bill Evans. Miles said, “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note, it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” And Bill said, “There are no wrong notes, only wrong resolutions. I think of all harmony as an expansion and return to the tonic.”

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein

My favorite composer of classical music is Felix Mendelssohn. Why? Hard to say, for love is as ineffable as creativity. Maybe his use of complex harmonies resonates especially well with my chakras. Maybe the brilliant confluences of his polyrhythms synch perfectly with my inner groove. I don’t know. In any case, I dig the cat. So a few years ago our very own Symphony of the Redwoods performed Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, and after hearing Marcia practice the cello parts for several weeks, and then being enthralled by the marvelous local rendition, I got out my Mendelssohn books to read about the Italian Symphony.

In Conrad Wilson’s Notes on Mendelssohn, to my great interest, I found that though the Italian Symphony was an instant and enormous success (the composer conducted the world premiere in London in 1833 at the ripe old age of twenty-three), Mendelssohn was dissatisfied with the composition and immediately after its premiere set about “changing the coloring of the andante, adding fresh touches of poetry to the third movement, and considerably extending the finale.” Yet despite Mendelssohn’s great fame, “his revision remained unperformed for a century and a half, and has only recently been issued in a performing version upon which most conductors are turning deaf ears.” I rushed to get one of the few extant recordings of the revised symphony (not readily available in the United States, but gettable from England) and to my ears the revised version is vastly superior to the original.

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” — Oscar Wilde

With the help of Peter Temple, I have made two solo piano CDs in these last year two years: Ceremonies and 43 short Piano Improvisations. While working on those albums I was forever being seduced by a particularly alluring chord pattern I would improvise on for hours at a time; yet only one diminutive piece born of that pattern was strong enough to include on 43 short Piano Improvisations. However, I continued to be enamored of that pattern and felt that one day I might succeed in recording a few longer takes of what I call Mystery Inventions.

Meanwhile, the Whoopsie Doopsie Project was bubbling away on a back burner; and verily it came to pass (driving to town one day, singing nonsense songs to the clickety-clack of our old truck on a country road) that a new and very different version of Whoopsie Doopsie escaped my lips and catalyzed an epiphany: why not make an album composed of several different interpretations of Whoopsie Doopsie, and throw in a Mystery Invention or two, too?

“One must bear in mind one thing. It isn’t necessary to know what that thing is.” — John Ashberry

As of this writing (early October 2011) the Whoopsie Doopsie recording project has been seriously (or at least continuously) underway for a month, and save for a slightly menacing a cappella version of Whoopsie Doopsie that came to me in the absence of a piano, nothing is turning out as I imagined anything would. Indeed, I would say the Whoopsie Doopsie Project is currently in creative free fall, and I am not surprised. The song that inspired this undertaking becomes less and less significant with every new Mystery Invention we capture, and new tunes audition daily as I chop wood and plant garlic and pick apples and make spaghetti sauce. Old tunes, too, long neglected, saunter out of the woods, tap me on the shoulder, and sing, “Hey, what about a revised version of me?”

The floodgates have opened. Mazel tov! So long as I don’t panic and attempt to control the flow too soon or too restrictively, there’s no telling what might come pouring out of that mystery reservoir I am convinced was once a river free of dams.

Todd’s writing and music may be accessed through his web site UnderTheTableBooks.com.

Billionaire financier/banjoist (not sure what he’d list first these days) Warren Hellman is what I’ve jokingly called a musical socialist who brings an absolutely incredible free lineup to Golden Gate Park each year, and at a time of year when the climate is best — this year timed to just beat out the rain. He may be smarter that way than those who put on the big summer festivals like Outside Lands — although they are likely playing to a younger crowd for whom summer vacation is a bigger factor. HSB draws an all-ages crowed with more of a preponderance of the aged than pretty much any other such festival.

Hellman has said, half-seriously, that he puts it on in order to get a gig for his own group, the Wronglers. How much the whole thing costs is private but it has to be many millions. Noblesse oblige, I guess. Crowds have been estimated at over half a million for the whole three-day weekend — bigger than Woodstock, in fact. It can get oppressively packed out among the six stages and on the trails in-between, but the foot traffic is well-managed and the crowd well-behaved with very few “incidents.” Some, perhaps many, former attendees have stopped coming due to the crowds, but clearly the event is as popular as ever, with folks coming from all over the country and maybe beyond.

From a more “strictly” twangy event, the musical menu has broadened to include just about everything short of opera or heavy metal. Very much is written about it; here’s some more, a personal “ten best” from a long, beautiful, musical weekend.

1. Robert Plant and his Band of Joy. He looks like Gandalf the Great Grey Wizard now, and still retains his magical mystical powers. The band is superb, including the striking Patty Griffin and omnipresent guitarist Buddy Miller, and when they kick into Led Zeppelin tunes it’s just nivana-ish (and I was never even that much of a Zep fan; but when he sang of Mordor and Gollum on a fantastic version of “Ramble On,” it was wizardly). The guy has nothing to prove and seems to be having a great time up there.

2. John Prine. This guy was saddled with a ‘new Dylan’ tag when he first surfaced in the 1970s; what a curse. He outdid it tho, and is considered one of the greatest of songwriters. This time with a great band in black suits, he looked a bit like Homer Simpson but rocked and rolled and enthralled all present.

3. M. Ward and Bright Eyes (Conor Oberst). I put these two together as they were a one-two headlining punch of the best of the newer breed of singer/songwriters. I’d expected some fairly folky sounds but they both seemed intent on rocking hard, and they did. I did bust Mr. Ward skipping out on Mr. Oberst’s set to catch Plant; who could blame him and one has to choose and, if lucky, catch half of each of many favorites.

4. Irma Thomas. The Queen of N’Awlin’s soul. What a voice, what a presence, what a big funky horned band. This kind of sound just jumps out and grabs everybody in the area in the midst of the mellower vibe.

5. The Blind Boys of Alabama. Here too, the power of the voices and rhythms are just irresistible. As much boogalo in the crowd as any other act I saw all weekend, and for a Sunday gospel sermon no less. Triumph over adversity indeed; triumph over everything.

6. Steve Earle and the Dukes and Duchesses. A perennial favorite, and a true entertainer who pulls no punches — proof that there is room for all political persuasions under this festival’s sunny skies. And his cover of Eric Burden’s goofy “San Francisco Nights” was no pandering, but a wondrous singalong.

7. Gillian Welch. Another every-year must-see; she and her partner David Rawlings set some sort of new standard for downbeat songs and singing and playing. And she too recognized the homecrowd with a crystal clear rendition of the Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic chestnut “White Rabbit” that, as my niece nicely put it, “just killed.”

8. Ollabelle. This lesser-known group came highly recommended, and with reason. Two ringing female singers and great players; and one more ringer for the home crowd, a slowed-down beauteous rendition of the Dead’s “Ripple.”

9. Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain, & Edgar Meyer. Wow; a banjo wielded mightily by Fleck as a sitar in the only example of raga-grass I’ve heard. The audience was spellbound and homeboy Hussain, who plays tablas with the greatest of masters, seemed to be having as much a good time as I’ve seen him show onstage, his hands a blur of mastery and a big smile on his face.

10. The crowd, staff, volunteers… 250,000? 500k? 700k? All sorts of estimates out there, and who knows how many, really. But you’ll not find better vibes in a city that size anwhere on the planet or beyond. More smiles per square acre than anyplace on the planet.

That’s it, I guess (the legendary Ralph Stanley’s Sunday bluegrass church session could replace one of these). I missed much, it’s just unavoidable now with six stages going all day and too many people to wade through to get to everything one might want to see (sorry for me, Flatlanders, Queen Emmylou, Kris Kristofferson, and especially — Merle Haggard!). I wish it were less crowded but what to do? I also wish there was a chance there to donate to good local worthy causes — I’d even volunteer at a booth for, say, the San Francisco Food Bank, Planned Parenthood, the SPCA, the park itself, etc., as I expect this crowd would pony up generously in gratitude for the beautiful festival and the place it takes place within.

But it’s Mr. Hellman’s party, his banjo pickin’ gets better every year (and he put out a very nice Wronglers CD with guru Jimmie Dale Gilmore this year), he’s provided for it to continue in his will; and really all one can say is: Thanks, sir. Yet again.

Then they casually informed me, just as I was about to print the covers and labels, that they’d decided to change their name to Green Day. I blew a gasket. It was too late; there was no time to change all the artwork. Besides, I insisted, it was ridiculous to expect me to sell a record by a band no one had ever heard of. “Green Day?” I sneered. “What’s it even supposed to mean?”

But as was often the case with my best bands, they had decided what they wanted and that was that. Thanks to my copy shop connection, we were able to throw together a new cover, and the record came out on time. It didn’t sell much at first, but I’d expected that; Sweet Children/Green Day were a slight departure from the usual Lookout Records fare: poppier, more melodic, almost, dare I say it, a little mainstream.

Although I loved the record, it was far from the only thing on my mind. The long-awaited, much-delayed album by our most popular band, Operation Ivy, was finally ready. Closer to home, I was putting the final touches on a new album by the Lookouts.

Four years earlier, with people threatening to burn down my house for bringing too much publicity to the area, calling our record Spy Rock Road would have seemed near-suicidal. In 1989, it never crossed my mind to call it anything else. It wasn’t just the name: the cover art, by the Anderson Valley Advertiser’s cartoonist, the mysterious “M,” simultaneously lampooned and paid tribute to our little corner of the world, replete with rampaging lumberjacks, CAMP cowboys dangling from a low-flying helicopter, a punk rock band plugged into a pine tree, and a bullet whizzing through the Spy Rock sign.

If my neighbors had opinions about the Spy Rock cover, they kept them to themselves. Times had changed. They really had; who could have imagined, back when the reaction to our fledgling band had run the gamut from indifference to hostility to outright threats of violence, that not so far in the future our songs would be echoing across the hills of the Emerald Triangle over the airwaves of a powerful homegrown radio station?

KMUD, which in 1985 had yet to advance beyond the crazy dream stage, was now consuming as much of my time and energy as the band, record label, or magazine. In addition to my Saturday afternoon slot with Chris, I was sitting in for other DJs, hosting public affairs and call-in programs, attending staff meetings, and becoming an avid fundraiser.

Chris and I were no longer KMUD outliers, it seemed — we were actually named “Programmers Of The Year” for 1989 — so I thought it was time I showed that punk rockers could help support the station, too — not just culturally, but financially. I organized a benefit concert, and when KMUD management questioned its viability, volunteered to finance the entire event myself.

The lineup I had put together would, I was sure, easily draw a crowd big enough to cover expenses and produce a substantial profit for the station. The main reason I was so confident was that Operation Ivy had agreed to headline. Their popularity had spread beyond the punk scene; even Humboldt kids who’d never been to a punk show in their lives had heard of them.

I rented the Vets’ Hall in downtown Garberville; we’d packed the place in February when the Lookouts had played there with MDC, my old San Francisco flatmate’s Pope-terrorizing band. Despite it being an unusually snowy night, the show had been a roaring success, even if Tre did dislocate his knee showing off for some girls and wound up in the hospital (he was considerate enough to wait until after we’d already played). That night had convinced me that the blue-eyed rastas and terminal Deadheads might finally be losing their stranglehold on the local music scene.

My optimism was unfounded. Two weeks before the benefit, Operation Ivy broke up. I begged them to put aside their differences long enough to play the show, but they’d decided to say their goodbyes where it had all begun, at Gilman Street, and suddenly my star attraction had vanished.

Two years later, either of my opening bands — Screeching Weasel and Green Day — could have filled any Vets’ Hall in the land, but on June 10, 1989, this was not yet the case. Especially in Garberville. I had replaced Operation Ivy with the Mr. T Experience, who had a decent following in the Bay Area but were largely unknown up our way.

Still, I was cautiously confident. Musical events aimed at young people were infrequent enough that you could count on a crowd for anything that didn’t involve Scottish clog dancing or an all-day klezmer fest. Sadly, my confidence was misplaced; maybe 100 or 150 people showed up, a turnout big enough not to be embarrassing, but nowhere near enough to make any money for KMUD. Instead, the event actually cost me a few hundred bucks.

The author of my misfortune was Jerry Garcia, who, unbeknownst to us, was performing a few miles down the road. Our audience had deserted us in droves in favor of the Grateful Dead frontman. That was Humboldt for you: kids were happy to check out something new, like a punk show, but Jerry remained first in their hearts. Apparently the rastas and Deadheads still ruled the roost after all.

For those who, unlike me, didn’t have to worry about money and logistics, it was a pretty good show, despite a few hiccups. Mike Dirnt, Green Day’s 17-year-old bassist, had been drinking heavily (I got the impression it was something he wasn’t used to doing), and when it came time to play, he was outside puking in the bushes.

We had to half-lead, half-carry him to the stage, and once there, help him find his bass (he’d failed to notice that it was already strapped across his shoulders). Assuming his being blind drunk would prevent Green Day from playing their normal set, I was ready to cut it short, but the minute the music started, it was as though he’d been transported to another world, a world where it was impossible for him to play anything other than note-perfect renditions of every song he knew. As long as he didn’t fall over, that is, which always seemed like a possibility.

Screeching Weasel didn’t fare as well. Ben Weasel, their acerbic frontman, had a regular schtick of trying to provoke and insult his audience, but the hippie-tinged punks of Garberville weren’t buying it. Or even getting it, for that matter.

Ben’s material consisted mostly of in-jokes that would only make sense to MRR-reading devotees of “the scene.” The sunny-faced Humboldt kids stared blankly back in the face of his vitriol, as if to ask, “Dude, why is that guy having such a bummer?”

Ben’s bummer did not diminish when he and his band had to follow me up to Spy Rock to spend the night. They were city people, driving a city car, and the concept of miles of precipitous unpaved roads, devoid of streetlights or Burger Kings, did not compute. His next MRR column began, “What kind of asshole lives nine miles up the side of a goddam mountain?”

Green Day made the trip up Spy Rock, too, without complaints or comments, except for the next morning when Billie and Mike complained that my “ferocious” dogs had kept them prisoner in their van all night. “Ruf Ruf and Kong?” I marveled. “The worst they could have done was lick you to death.”

We drove down to Berkeley the next morning, after, at my insistence, a stop in downtown Laytonville. I wanted the visiting bands to see a little of my world, a world they’d heard me talk so much about, but I also had a not quite so honorable motive: I knew it would drive Ben Weasel right up the wall.

It was the weekend of the annual Laytonville Rodeo, and our normally quiet little crossroads was abuzz with life, the kind of life, I was sure, that Ben was not going to have encountered back in Chicago. We found ourselves sandwiched in between half a dozen cowboys and a flatbed truck hauling a similar number of hill muffins in dazzling day-glo and tie-dye. In front of us was a crowd of jugglers and clowns from Camp Winnarainbow.

The camp, whose founder Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney is best known as the disembodied voice advising Woodstock attendees against the brown acid, was situated on land just north of Laytonville owned by the Hog Farm, a long-running hippie commune dating back to the 60s. The idea had sounded highly questionable when first broached — who was going to entrust their children to a bunch of legendarily stoned-out acidheads? — but Camp Winnarainbow had proved to be a resounding success.

My niece and nephew had spent time there, and so, to the everlasting shame of the Lookouts, had our drummer, Tre Cool. We hated to admit it, but he was still summering there well into his teens, which meant that when we had a show we often had to stop and retrieve him from whatever drum circle or mime class he might be engaged in. “Aren’t you getting a little old for camp?” I’d ask, to which he’d retort, “Never too old for having fun!”

Ben, as I’d anticipated, was not enthusiastic about hanging around Laytonville to take in the sights and sounds of the Rodeo. He was the kind of guy who had very fixed, sometimes quite arbitrary ideas about how the world should be ordered, and within this scheme of things, there was little room for clowns, hippies and cowboys, especially not jumbled together in a single place. I could see him fuming, could tell he assumed that the town of Laytonville, with myself as co-conspirator, had deliberately cooked up this concoction of clashing cultures for the sole purpose of tormenting him.

Though punk rock was still at the center of my personal and professional life, my explorations of the North Coast’s backwoods and byways were bringing me to into contact with music and musicians I previously would have ignored. It’s not that I’d become completely open-minded — there was never a danger of that — but my enthusiasm for local culture led me to at least give a listen to sounds and rhythms I once would have instantly dismissed.

There was Indiana Slim, of course, who’d gone out of his way to befriend me at a time when I most needed it. I’d never cared much for blues or blues-based rock, especially when played by white guys, but Slim imbued his work — and his life — with such infectious enthusiasm that it was hard not to be a fan.

He and his wife — she fronted their band, Baby Lee and the Red Hots — cruised around in a wildly impractical but undeniably elegant gold Cadillac with giant tailfins evoking an earlier, more profligate era. Slim was a walking, talking monument to the age of hepcats and crazy jive, and Baby Lee, well, if anything, I was even more in awe of her. She exuded a star quality that would have been at home anywhere from a honky-tonk roadhouse to the Radio City Music Hall, making it all the more incongruous to encounter in the parking lot of the Laytonville Post Office.

I never learned where or how they lived, though I wondered if Slim ever had to swap his ebony winklepickers and lamé sportcoat for rubber boots and a rain jacket when it came time to dig out a blocked culvert or chainsaw a downed tree. Mostly I assumed that mundane rural realities never intruded into what looked like their magical, charmed existence.

Through Slim I met Michael Ferretta, a singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar and an in-your-face attitude that might have been called folk-punk if that term had existed at the time. He’d become something of a mountain troubadour, especially for the growers and their families. One of his signature songs, “Locked Gates And A Loaded .45,” bemoaning the paranoia and violence that had invaded the once-peaceful pot trade, had becomes something of a local anthem.

He lived with his wife Holly, their three children, and Michael’s dad, in an expanded, updated version of the log cabin his grandfather had built early in the century. They were homeschoolers, and their kids seemed years ahead of their contemporaries, academically as well as socially. I’d met other homeschoolers, most notably the Colfaxes of Anderson Valley, who’d gained national attention when three of their sons were admitted to Harvard, but the Ferrettas were the first I was able to observe in action.

They were dead serious about it, establishing study hours and assignments more rigorous than anything the kids would have encountered in the Laytonville schools. As the kids grew older, the adult Ferrettas were constantly having to brush up on their own studies in order to keep up with them.

A perennial question about homeschooled kids was whether they missed out on the “socialization” process that a conventional school supposedly offers. Based on my own not especially happy experiences, I had my doubts. To its proponents, socialization meant learning how to work, play and interact with one’s peers; for me it had meant bullying, ostracism, and singling out for attack anyone who deviated from the norm.

Growing up, and even once grown up, I harbored the fantasy that I would have been happier and better adjusted if I hadn’t been forced to attend school with dullards and thugs. In that light, homeschooling looked like a highly desirable option. What I didn’t realize, but eventually came to see, was that the Ferrettas put as much effort into their own kids’ “socialization” — by ensuring that they spent quality time with other kids, and adults as well — as they did into the formal educational process.

Sadly, not every parent claiming to be a homeschooler was motivated by the same principles and values as the Ferrettas or Colfaxes. There were some who kept their kids at home merely to save themselves the trouble and expense of getting them down the mountain in time to catch the school bus, while others were indifferent or actively hostile to the very concept of education, and saw it as a brainwashing tool of “the man.”

“Kids are smart, they can learn on their own,” they’d insist, then proceed to smoke, sniff or drink themselves into oblivion while their children effectively ran wild. I know of at least half a dozen functionally and socially illiterate young people who grew up without acquiring any of the skills they’d need should they ever want to leave the mountain and try their hand at civilization.

Witnessing the damage being done chipped away at my anti-authoritarian attitudes; for the first time I began giving serious thought and study to how education should work ideally. This led me to publish the first of several “theme” issues of the Lookout. The cover looked as irreverent and iconoclastic as ever; the headline shouted “HEY STUPID! WERE YOU BORN LIKE THAT OR DID YOU LEARN IT IN SCHOOL?” But inside was some of the most serious journalism I had ever attempted.

I interviewed Bruce Anderson, an outspoken critics of the educational establishment, and, speaking in defense of said establishment, Laytonville’s Superintendent of Schools, Brian Buckley. I devoted a couple pages to an anonymous homeschooling family — I suppose after all these years it’s all right to identify them as the Ferrettas — and rounded it off with my politically liberal, socially conservative 80-year-old uncle, who’d spent half his life as an educator of the strictly disciplinarian old school, whose idealism and devotion had remained remarkably undimmed.

The issue was surprisingly well received. I was reaching new, previously undreamed of levels of respectability. Local organizations and institutions sent me their press releases and announcements as though I were a bona fide media outlet, and I suppose, in a way, I had become one.

Records, books and magazines also came flooding in, and no longer just from punk rockers. I seldom had time to give them the attention they deserved, but one cassette, from a singer named Darryl Cherney, quite impressed me. I Had To Be Born This Century was a well-crafted collection of tunes, some pleasant, slightly hokey (I liked slightly hokey) stories about local places and people, others serving as rallying cries for the environmental movement and its new, ultra-militant manifestation, Earth First!

Most people thought of only one thing when they heard the name Earth First!: tree-spiking. In reality, the loose-knit organization — so loose-knit that it was almost more of a concept than an actual organization — advocated a whole range of tactics.

Only some involved ecotage or “monkeywrenching” — pouring sand into a bulldozer’s crankcase, for example — while at least as much emphasis was placed on traditional civil disobedience techniques like picket lines and sit-ins. But nothing struck fear into the hearts of forest workers — or evoked their anger — like the threat of driving spikes or nails into trees to make them unharvestable.

There were few instances of this actually happening — it had always been more a threat than a reality — until a Sonoma County mill worker was almost decapitated when his saw hit a nail that looked to have been deliberately placed in the log he was working on. Tensions ratcheted up between environmentalists and loggers, to the point where violence often felt imminent.

I drove up to Piercy, a barely inhabited hamlet at the north end of the county, to meet Darryl Cherney, who was living in a cabin a stone’s throw from the then-placid Eel River. It was as he’d described it in his song about the great flood of 1986:

I was living down in Piercy, a hundred yards from the river’s edge

But when I woke up on Sunday morning I found its waters on my doorsteps

It was my favorite song of his; I liked how the chorus namechecked the towns scattered along the course of the mighty Eel, turning ordinary place names into something like poetry:

And if you lived in Myers Flat or Benbow

Miranda or Phillipsville

Sprowel Creek or Weott

Scotia or Rio Dell

Redcrest or Redway

Or by the bridge down at Sylvandale

His folksy manner and easy-going drawl belied the fact that Darryl was not exactly a local boy. A master’s degree-sporting product of New York’s affluent Upper West Side, he’d come to California to re-invent himself, and done a pretty convincing job of it. He’d recently teamed up with another East Coast transplant, Judi Bari, who I also met that afternoon.

I liked Judi immediately; she was outspoken, almost a little strident at times, but her uproarious sense of humor softened the effect, and made her a lot of fun to be around. Among my favorite — and certainly most vivid — memories of her is the time she, Darryl and I were hanging out on the porch of the Boonville Brewery after some meeting or other we’d attended.

Admiring her t-shirt, which was an intense, pulsating green punctuated with a black fist and the Earth First! Logo, I asked if she knew where I could get one like it. “I’ll trade you,” she said, and before I had time to think about it, she was standing there topless, waiting for me to hand her my shirt in exchange.

I did love my Earth First! shirt, but was seldom brave enough to wear it during my comings and goings around the county. Having spent several years learning how to fit in, I wasn’t ready to start making a whole new set of enemies. Besides, I rationalized, I was a journalist now, and had to retain at least some semblance of objectivity in dealing with the diverse elements of our community. But mostly I didn’t want to get punched in the face.

Looking back now, I can see where I should have tried harder to understand where the loggers were coming from. Until the arrival of marijuana, logging had completely dominated the North Coast. The industry paid well — or at least better than anything else — and almost no one doubted that there was a never-ending supply of logs to be cut and milled.

But by the 1980s, the landscape had changed dramatically. The trees were still being cut — faster than ever — but instead of being sent to local sawmills for processing into lumber (which was where most of the jobs were), raw logs were shipped en masse to Asia and other parts of the world. Corporations like Louisiana Pacific and Georgia Pacific, run by outsiders and committed only to maximizing profits, had embarked on a race to liquidate what was left of their forest holdings.

The Pacific Lumber Company, Humboldt County’s largest employer, had not joined this cut-and-run orgy, but instead continued to log at a sustainable rate, as had been the case for decades. Its integrity became its downfall: by keeping its most valuable asset — its old-growth redwoods — in reserve, Palco made itself an attractive and vulnerable target for a hostile takeover.

Charles Hurwitz, a Texas corporate raider who’d enriched himself by buying healthy companies, selling off anything that wasn’t nailed down and looting their pension funds before driving them into bankruptcy, swooped in to give Palco the same treatment. The only way to pay back the junk bonds he used to finance the takeover was to immediately start clearcutting the last major stands of privately owned old growth redwoods.

It didn’t take a genius to realize that at this rate it wouldn’t be long — perhaps as little as ten or twenty years — before the cathedral-like forests would be reduced to spindly stands of what the loggers derisively called “pecker poles.” But in the short term, there was an upsurge of logging jobs, and the mistrust of hippies and environmentalists shared by most workers — and cynically nurtured by their employers — ensured that few heeded the warning posed by Darryl Cherney’s song, “Where Are We Gonna Work When The Trees Are Gone?”

In late 1989 press releases began to appear for something called “Mississippi Summer In The California Redwoods.” Based loosely on 1964’s “Freedom Summer,” when activists from across the land descended on Mississippi to challenge its Jim Crow laws and register African-Americans to vote, the idea was to invite thousands of protesters to spend the summer of 1990 defending the last of California’s great redwood forests.

The idea had potential, but I questioned its chances for success. The “Mississippi Summer” name felt awkward and unwieldy; it would be next to meaningless for many young activists who might not even have been born by 1964. I argued in favor of calling it “Redwood Summer:” it would be catchier, as well as more succinct and to the point.

Darryl and Judi, who’d assumed a leading role in planning the protests, agreed with me, but thought it would be too difficult to persuade other coalition members, many of whom framed every political action in the rhetoric and tactics of their beloved 1960s, to consent to a name change. Exasperated, I took matters into my own hands by referring to “Redwood Summer” at every opportunity, in print or on the radio. It still seemed like a losing battle until I collaborated with the AVA’s “M” on what would become a semi-official poster for the event.

While I can barely draw a rudimentary stick figure, I can occasionally come up with concepts that an actual artist — and “M” was an especially gifted one — can turn into reality. I don’t remember how much if any of the picture was my idea, but I did produce a tag line —“This Is Where The 90s Begin” — and, most crucially, persuaded “M” to scrap “Mississippi Summer In The California Redwoods” in favor of “Redwood Summer.”

I circulated thousands of copies of the poster by way of Lookout magazine and Lookout Records mail orders, at Bay Area punk rock shows, and in bookshops, food co-ops, and wherever else my travels took me. I can’t claim to have single-handedly turned the tide in applying a more sensible and user-friendly name to the summer’s action, but I’d like to think I played a part.

Did my publicity campaign bring in any additional bodies? I have no way of knowing, but Redwood Summer did attract a significant sprinkling of punk rockers who previously wouldn’t have come within miles of anything perceived as “hippie,” the heading that saving trees and embracing nature would have traditionally fallen under.

The ensuing cultural interaction may have helped produce a new hippie-punk hybrid, something I took note of when Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, introduced to Mendocino County by friend and collaborator Winston Smith, began touting the medicinal and economic values of “hemp,” aka marijuana. I too had been toeing the party line, recommending marijuana as a panacea for society’s ills.

Someone, somewhere, claimed that hemp oil would replace fossil fuels as our chief energy source? I unquestioningly repeated it as fact. Could it cure cancer, depression, AIDS, practically any other disease known to man, physical or mental? I didn’t see why not; after all, “everyone” knew the government was only trying to eradicate it to protect the profits of the giant pharmaceutical companies.

Personally, I had become less and less fond of the stuff. I hadn’t given up smoking it by any means, though I often thought I should. After a couple decades — I’d smoked my first joint in 1967 — of believing that it heightened my consciousness and made me a more spiritually and morally elevated being, I was beginning to suspect that most of the time the drug was doing me no favors.

Having seen far too much of my time and energy vanish into a dope-inflected haze, I tried harder and harder to curtail my usage. I’d be successful for a while; then, like a classic amnesiac, forget everything I’d learned and start reasoning that putting a little “edge” or “buzz” on the morning would make it more enjoyable and productive. Ten minutes later, often before the sun had cleared the trees and with the clock still lumbering its way toward 7 or 8 am, I’d be cursing my stupidity and accepting that another day had disappeared irrevocably down the drain.

Was the solitude finally getting to me, as I’d seen it do to so many others who lived alone on the mountain? What with the record label, the band, the magazine, the radio station and my new political work, I was meeting and interacting with more people than ever, but I always came back alone to my mountain redoubt, convinced that a hermit’s life must be what I had been fated for.

There might have been something in that, but looking back now, I think it was mostly the marijuana. Not only was it making me lazy and stupid; it also encouraged me to hang out in my own private universe, a fine place to be when you hanker to reign supreme and run roughshod over reality, but a very lonely place if you’re hoping to meet another human being who isn’t you.

At any rate, I was soon going to have to give up growing marijuana, which would in turn cut off my smoking supply. The record label was becoming too big, too much of a legitimate business. If, God forbid, I should ever get raided, the authorities would assume that its finances were intermingled with the proceeds from dope growing — in reality, they were not; the record label was now completely self-sustaining — and confiscate everything.

Until now I’d addressed this problem by having my partner, David Hayes, be the legal owner of the company, but he’d told me he was quitting at the end of the year. It had become “too much like a job,” as he put it. The upshot was that if the label were to keep going (I had my doubts), I was going to have to go “legit.”

These were the sorts of things running through my mind as the achingly beautiful autumn of 1989 slipped softly away. On one hand, I’d never been happier with Spy Rock and its way of life; on the other, I had a nagging suspicion that something was not quite right, that everything was coming undone. Such was my mental backdrop on that exquisite October day, as I cut firewood and listened to the World Series until it suddenly broke into a play-by-play of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

As was often the case when natural disasters struck down below, I felt as though I were floating safely above it all. Why, I often asked, would I ever want to leave this wonderful world? And, just as often, something told me that a time might come when I would have no choice.

Angst and feelings of unsettledness aside, there were also moments of sheer magic. One morning, ferrying a truckload of kids down Salmon Creek Road, I slipped the cassette of the new Lookouts album into the tape player and my favorite song came blasting forth.

I’d written it a couple years earlier while visiting the UK; it drew a parallel between Celtic tribes driven into the west country by invading Roman armies and our own “tribes” of hippies and back-to-the-landers striving to maintain their way of life on one of the last frontiers of America’s modern-day Rome:

And the rain still falls on the green hills of England

And the sun beats down on our California home

And the wind blows free across all your borders

Why must we be always on the run?

There are writers, gifted and visionary, no doubt, who can effortlessly turn out classic lyrics and soaring melodies whenever they set their minds to it, but most of us ordinary mortals have to content ourselves with an awesome line here or there, or maybe, if we’re really lucky, one perfect chorus. This was mine, or at least as close as I was likely to get.

In every direction, as far as I could see, the green hills of Humboldt were transfixed upon my eyes and transfigured in my soul. This was my home, my heart, my destiny. I could no more leave it than it could leave me. It was a moment, I knew, that would become a touchstone for all that mattered, for all the rest of my life.

The year glided to a gentle conclusion. On New Year’s Eve, the Lookouts spent the afternoon at KMUD, clowning around and playing soft, acoustic versions of our usually abrasive punk songs. They felt well suited to the day, which was mild and swathed in a not unpleasant cloud of melancholy and nostalgia.

Midway through “That Girl’s From Outer Space,” Kain’s upright bass “exploded,” as I put it. In reality the bridge had just broken loose and sent the strings flying every which way. Instead of cursing our luck or feeling our performance was ruined, we laughed almost hysterically while the bass was reassembled, then played some more, until we’d all but run out of songs. Chris, who’d been manning the control board, faded into an extended version of “Disco Inferno,” and we spilled out onto the parking lot to say our goodbyes.

It was only then that I remembered it wasn’t any old New Year we were celebrating, but the turn of a decade. At the beginning of the 1980s, I’d been fearful, almost despondent, about the direction I saw my life going; ten years down the line, I was almost brimming over with optimism and excitement.

1990. It really felt like the future now. Like science fiction, almost. Who would have dreamed I’d live this long and still have so much to live for? I knew before it began that it was going to be a banner year, and that proved to be true in almost every way. What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t or wouldn’t have wanted to know, was that it would also mark the beginning of the end of my time on Spy Rock Road.

To read previous essays in the series, click here.

I rented a chainsaw, forklift, flatbed truck, extracted my not so nice niece, and hauled her to the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey sideshow at the edge of town. There won’t be many paid lookers though, since people her size and much larger routinely waddle through America’s shopping malls like gelatinous herds of hippos squashing all in their paths. America is a 24/7 three ring circus with free admission. Tulsa’s retro circus is a pathetic attempt to revive the past.

I spent a sweltering month in Tulsa and vicinity visiting family and old friends, including my high school sweetheart, Muffy, who won the Miss Tulsa beauty pageant at age 18. It was great to hook up with Muffy again since she still looks great and is now a successful businesswoman with a chain of medicinal herb dispensaries throughout the Southwest — “Muffy’s Medicinals.” She graciously hired me to supply her with some interesting indigenous weeds from Mendopia.

The sixth annual Rockabilly in the Redwoods Festival at the miniature livestock Arena in Scotia, Humboldt County, was held during the weekend of July 15-17 deliberately coinciding with the Ka-Ka in the River Festival at Bongbow on the South Fork Eel, thus avoiding thank jah infiltrators who have a missionary mandate to sanitize and neutralize rockabilly and absorb it into the world pop music movement — the One True World Music for the One True God — Jah.

This year’s headliner was “Patty Donahue and his Rockabilly Plowboys” from Shannon, Arkansas, featuring lead singer, Snooky Lansom, and steel guitar virtuoso Twangin’ Tommy McAuliffe, the son of a steel guitar legend, Leon McAuliffe, of the famed “Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.”

Surprise performers were the novelty act Snow Bunny and the Seven Dwarfs” from Beaver Creek, Colorado, and interpretive dancer, Daisy Mae Yokum from Peel, Arkansas, on Lake Bull Schoals.

My route to Rockabilly was unique this year since I wanted to avoid Stunktown (Willits) and the Highway 101 gridlock of stoner caravans heading north to the annual Ka-Ka in the River Festival. Skunktown is now so depressing that I avoid it like the plague. It’s become a virtual Potemkin village money laundering pit for local pot growers with the local High Time pot grower supplier buying respectability by throwing blood money around town for “worthy causes.”

Having agreed to take my 800-pound stud-boar razorback, Sharpy, to provide security at the festival, I towed him in a plowhorse trailer behind my 1943 turbocharged Chech Tatra V-8 and drove north from Hopland to Redwood Valley, then north through spooky pot country via Tomki Road to Hearst-Willits Road, then northeast to Hearst on the Eel River near the confluence with Salt Creek — the home of Emandal Farm, a self-sustaining agricultural enterprise which provided me with some tasty vittles. “Hearst” no longer exists as such, but I hear that it was once a vacation compound for the Frisco Hearst Family.

Friends from Covelo had warned me to stay clear of the Mendopia National Forest because a “big” multiagency pot sweep was imminent — the infamous “Full Court Press” which confiscated over half a million pot plants, tons of crap, garbage, multiple weapons and vehicles, while arresting over 100 perps.

Unfortunately, the catch and release perps will reoccupy eradicated sites thanks to tractor-trailer loads of growing supplies cheerfully delivered by the High Time folks in Stunktown.

The arrested foreign nationals will be deported to Modesto where they will chill for a while then head north again to cache grow stuff in the forest for next season before winter sets in.

The arrested local yokels will have their charges reduced to misdemeanors and infractions in exchange for paying hefty fines. Full employment for cops, lawyers, growers, suppliers. Pot, the magic drug.

I had arranged to meet my old river rat body from Moab, Utah, Ken Hite, at Hearst where he provided a nifty river catamaran made with four Grand Canyon dories spanned by a large wooden platform which carried my vehicle, stock trailer — with Sharpie — and essential gear and supplies, including several jugs of Kickapoo Joy Juice.

The Eel River was still running nearly bankful so we embarked on the journey downriver to Dos Rios at the confluence with the Middle Fork Eel, then north through the Eel River Canyon to Alderpoint with pleasant stops along the way where we were able to catch some giant sturgeon for festival chow, view some ancient petroglyphs, and observe the rosy-bottomed skinnydipper in its native habitat.

With the exception of Island Mountain Falls and Kekawaka Falls, we had smooth floating all the way. It’s encouraging to see mother nature reclaiming her turf along the river canyon as the abandoned railroad bed is gradually obliterated by erosion and landslides. The choo-choo honchos who still assure the gullible public that the railroad will once again run through the Eel River canyon are perpetuating a cruel hoax and assuring themselves of permanent employment.

At Alderpoint, after offloading my rig and stowing the “ratamaran,” we climbed west over the hill and down to Ganjaville for the annual breakfast at Woodrose Cafe which was packed with self-described Thank Jah vegans pigging out on eggs, bacon, ham, sausage and pork chops. I had the Greek omelette since Sharpie has a vicious intolerance for pork-eaters. He was so pleased to gobble a tall stack of flapjacks that the pork-breath vegans wobbling out of the cafe avoided his wrath.

After a depressing run through the drug a gauntlet of Ganjaville, we motored north on Highway 101 through the Avenue of the Giants redwoods which always brightens my mood.

Approaching Scotia arena grounds, a retro rendezvous emerged — classic cars and vintage teardrop camping trailers with mellow folks charring meat and guzzling beer.

Front and center was a mint condition 1957 Chevy Bel Air convertible coupe like the one I had in high school until it wrapped itself around the only tree in northeast Oklahoma. The 1957 Chevy was the primo babe-magnet during the doo-wop era at the Nite Owl Drive-In.

One weird vehicle caught my eye. The owner had crossed a Humvee with a Volkswagen beetle and called it a “Humbug.”

The festival’s paper mache ticket booth this year had a medieval theme including a machicolated roofline — a term I learned in medieval history at the University taught by regal professor, Arthur King.

Master of ceremonies duties were once again handled by the massive “Buddha Bud,” the human beer keg on stilts who holds the all-time champion record at Hopland’s historic bar, the Keg.

Buddha Bud took Sharpie into custody for security detail where he immediately nailed an infiltrator — a World Pot Music commando who tried — and failed — to stuff his dreads into a 20-gallon cowboy hat. Get ‘em, Sharpie!

After chow and chugging, the opening festivities fired up at dusk as Snow Bunny and the Seven Dwarves performed a series of wacky, lurid skits best described as Homer and Jethro meet Alvin and the Chipmunks. It defies description. You had to be there.

Then Paddy Donahue and his Rockabilly Plowboys invaded the stage and opened with a set of rockabilly standards including “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” “Ooby Dooby,” and “Wild Wild Women,” followed by some roots-style Irish and Scottish folk tunes popularized in the film “Songcatcher.”

The final set was a rousing tribute to the King of Western swing, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, including “Osage Stomp,” “San Antonio Rose,” “Roly Poly,” “Ida Red,” “Boot Heel Drag,” “Ding Dong Daddy,” “Big Beaver,” “Bring it on Over to My House,” “Stay All Night,” and “Faded Love.” Then Twangin’ Tommy McAuliffe closed with a stunning rendition of his father’s signature tune, “Steel Guitar Rag.”

After a prolonged standing ovation the whole ensemble including Bunny and the Dwarves returned to belt out Bob Wills signature tune, “Take Be Back to Tulsa.”

Saturday morning a bleary-eyed crowd stumbled into the arena after breakfast for a well-deserved day of fun and games starting with strip tiddlywinks using poker chips, followed by the firehose mosh pit monokini tank top contest and leaf blower lawn hockey. The Slinky race was a bust because it was held on level ground.

The main event, held in early afternoon, was the dwarf tossing contest which was apparently won by Sister Boom Boom, a defrocked nun and former Sutro wrestler from Frisco. But her 50 foot toss was disallowed because the dwarf was pumped up with helium. Runner-up, Rooster Canard, a chicken rancher from Jackpot, Nevada, took the trophy with a legitimate toss of 28 feet.

Conspicuously absent this year was festival legend Big Mama Mia, the Flatten ‘Em Blonde who is now managing her family’s pig factory feedlot in Iowa. Big Mama Mia is now known as the “Fatten ‘em blonde.”

The evening feast was vintage rockabilly chow — beans, Bud, spuds, char-grilled Eel River sturgeon, and corn on the cob from Shively followed by hand-cranked ice cream made from ingredients donated by Ferndale milkmaids.

With bellies full and spirits high, the rockabilly mob gathered for the grand finale when a demure Daisy Mae Yoakam pranced on stage wearing a spandex emerald green sequined leisure suit, black spike heels, and a white cowboy hat. Backed by the Rockabilly Plowboys, she slowly began her ecdysiast interpretive dance revealing the Celtic Irish roots of rockabilly — shamrockabilly. Like Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils, Daisy Mae slowly, erotically, performed a dance of the seven leisure suits.

Her stunning, tasteful performance brought the house down — hoots, hollers, whistles, flying money, airborne clothes. After her hat was passed through the crowd, over $2000 was raised for Daisy May’s Dance School of the Ozarks.

Sunday, the day of recuperation, opened with a high noon sunrise service led by Reverend Billy, pastor of the Church of Stop Shopping, who admonished the congregation to just say no to consumerism — an easy thing to do in these downer days of the not so great depression when America’s lower echelon is flat broke and maxed out on credit.

The festival crowd was smaller this year even with a lower entry fee and most campers chose downsized teardrop trailers or pup tents over snazzy Airstream rigs. But the crowd was upbeat because no matter how sad you feel, rockabilly and western swing will cheer you up. Rockabilly is a better antidepressant than pot. That’s why the music will live forever. Rockabilly music is for dancing. World pop music is for trancing.

After an early afternoon loggers breakfast at Fortuna, I hitched up the rig and drove south on the Redwood Highway hoping to get ahead of the Kaka on the River traffic jam. Tulsa was calling me home and I needed to make time.

As we passed Bongbow, I wondered how the festival went this year since the promoters had pitched an Adriatic rather than Caribbean theme: Tuscan reggae by angel hair pastafarians with garlic breadlocks.

At Richardson Redwood Grove State Park a few miles south of Bongbow we were slowed to a crawl crawl by a big protest led by Mendopia’s Code Pink contingent, “Torpedoes Not Bombs” who were presenting their bona fides to make a political point — protesting Caltrans plans to widen and realign the highway through the grove to allow smooth passage for monster big rigs hauling megaloads of industrial pot to the big markets in Frisco and Los Angeles. The mom-and-pop growers are against the plan because they’ll be squeezed out by the big-time growers who can afford to export large shipments of pot. A classic dustup between Big Pot and little pot.

The Caltrans plan would remove several redwoods and damage the root system of many others. I offered myself and Sharpie to help man the barricades but the sisters screeched, “No male chauvinist pigs!”

I guess they’ll have to bring back Julia Butterball Hill for an encore, but since she’s significantly bulked out on rich Hollywood vegan chow, they’ll have to hoist her up a giant redwood on a structural steel platform suspended with case hardened anchor chain.

Passing through the torpedo gauntlet, we headed south to Laidbackville, home of Lumpy Gravy’s Camp Winnacashflow, and the famous Hog Farm. Traffic was light and we made good time through town but I was dreading the unavoidable trip through Stunktown ahead. To bypass the main drag, I took the scenic detour east along the edge of Little Lake Valley via Reynolds Highway and East Hill Road.

Little Lake Valley is still a bucolic treasure that will eventually be trashed by the Caltrans half-assed Skunktown Bypass which will destroy significant amounts of endangered wetlands. To “mitigate” this loss, Caltrans has purchased equivalent acres of lower quality wetlands from local ranchers who are now pissed because they thought their cattle would continue to graze the land. Now the ranchers will have to raise water buffalo which are wetland-friendly grazers.

The trip past Stunktown was distinctfully bittersweet. I miss my fun days there, particularly my massage sessions with Trixie Treats. But she’s gone big time now having purchased a fleet of stretch limos for her tactical move to Sacramento where the big bucks are.

Driving through Ukiah was another downer seeing the abandoned Masonite site and the old Thomas Pear Orchard now being converted to winegrape vineyards. I hope the new owners are planning to grow “organic” grapes, since the entire area is contaminated with lead arsenate which was used in the good old days before so-called “regulations.”

I popped in a cassette of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys to brighten my mood. At home on Duncan Peak, I off-loaded Sharpie to service his harem, arranged for a neighbor to watch the ranch, then started packing for my trip to Tulsa.

Is addiction a “disease?” Depends on who you ask, it seems, but if you ask those with the most experience and training — including doctors and scientists in the field — the answer is yes. With the recent, tragic death of singer Amy Winehouse, though, the commentary came fast and furious about how much she and others were responsible for her struggles and demise. The best popular piece I’ve seen, however, came from an actor, former addict Russell Brand, who wrote that he lived in fear and anticipation of “a phone call in the night” from his friend Winehouse — or somebody else, calling about her. As is too often the case, his expertise comes from similar experience, and it clearly has given him insight and compassion.

Winehouse was not my favorite singer, but after she died, I dug out her second and breakthrough CD, “Back to Black,” and gave it a spin. Hindsight may lend insight, but this time I was amazed that a then 22-year-old woman could write and sing with such pathos and force. Her words and voice were of a woman who had already lived much longer. She has now posthumously been compared to icons such as Billie Holiday, which I would agree to be premature, given that she only produced two albums in her lifetime. But what a presence — and, again in retrospect, what pathos and pain in such a young voice.

She’s joined the much-remarked “27 Club” — musicians who died at that age, or close to it — including Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain, Parsons, Buckley, Drake and too many others, including many of the best (and Holiday herself, though she outlived that list). Would-be musical philosophers have speculated about the quasi-mystical dangers of that age, but I’d wager the clustering of overdoses and deaths in that late-20s zone has more to do with the natural history of addiction.

Many, if not most addicts start using young, in their teens, and it commonly takes years, a decade or more, for addiction to truly take hold and take over. And musicians, especially if successful, lead lives without the more conventional constraints of jobs and so forth that give incentives to moderate use. Couple that with long-standing media imagery that it is cool to be high, and the risks are often too daunting to overcome. And thus, struggle and tragedy, often romanticized unto death. “I wanna live fast, love hard, die young and leave a beautiful memory,” Willie Nelson and Faron Young wrote and sang before any of the rockers above took the message a bit too literally — and left some less-than-beautiful memories.

As for the “responsibility” issue, it’s of course not all-or-nothing; anybody who’s struggled with the problem, especially if that person has encountered “12-step” programs, knows that willpower and commitment are essential and tested if one tries to overcome their addiction. Still, the stigma and judgmental factors are high in our culture, and over and again I have seen that most people do not really understand addiction until they see it firsthand in somebody they love — or in themselves. We tend not to guilt-trip people with other chronic, progressive, relapsing conditions such as, say, diabetes, when they fail to perfectly adhere to ideal treatment guidelines. But again, addiction comes with stigmas and often negatively impacts others more than most diseases.

Much of the “professionalization” of modern, medical treatment of addiction can be traced to here in the Bay Area. The Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinics were founded partly as a reaction to the stigmatization of addicts by “mainstream” medicine. Doctors at the Haight Clinics, besides treating the addicted, realized they had to advocate for better standards and research in this field and eventually professional medical associations focused on addiction were formed. The Haight Clinic even formed a “Rock Medicine” program to staff major concerts, which pioneered new approaches as well. I worked there for a time and learned much — as well as saw many strange and sometimes frightening things.

All that said and done, our national drug policy is in long-time dire need of improvement. There have been many authoritative calls for reform and improvement of our approaches to addiction, but thus far progress has been limited. Nevertheless, many good people soldier on with science and compassion as their inspiration and tools, and their dedication is a continual source of inspiration.

It has taken decades to attain true legitimacy within medicine and beyond for the “disease concept” of addiction and advances in treatment — but it has happened, and continues to. The American Medical Association has identified addiction as our biggest public health problem, when all the impacts and costs are factored in (although obesity may have overtaken addiction in the #1 slot by now). The “tobacco wars” continue, and alcohol abuse remains rampant. Abuse of prescription medications is still increasing, with often tragic consequences. Illegal drugs are often a scourge, and our longstanding “drug war” has not helped much, objectively viewed. There are still huge unmet needs for treatment, more science-based policies, health insurance coverage and more. We are only starting to take more aggressive approaches to limiting marketing of addictive legal drugs, especially to young people.

If there’s a “take home” message in this most recent celebrity death, it may be that we sometimes have to risk resistance and even ridicule by being assertive with those we care about when they might have a drug-related problem. Online Youtube videos of Winehouse’s final concert — harrowing viewing which I don’t recommend — bring this home. I understand why her colleagues might have been hesitant to do so — beyond their paychecks — even the late, sweet former First Lady Betty Ford, a pioneer in this arena, recalled that she called her family “monsters” when they tried to intervene in her addictions. But she later realized their concern set her on a path that saved her life. If only everybody, famous or not, were so lucky.

It’s true that the Sojourners and other progressive Christian groups have attacked the debt ceiling non-deal as devastating for the poor and antithetical to Christian morality. But the wrathful God of the Right Wing sees things differently. Red is the color of sin and of negative numbers on the balance sheet.

As conservative lawmakers uttered their obligatory Lord’s Prayers in recent days, they must have stumbled over its central words in the Evangelical version: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”?

Amid reports last week that John Boehner had shown a group of Republican Congressmen a scene from the Ben Affleck heist movie The Town in a vain attempt to rally support for his debt-ceiling plan, I thought that the better soundtrack for the entire debacle would have been Johann Sebastian Bach’s Debt Cantata, first performed nearly three hundred years ago, also in the final days of July. This alarming and wonderful piece, thick with financial metaphors brought to seething life by a ceiling-less musical imagination, should have blared from loudspeakers in the Capitol rotunda, or better yet, been performed live by an elite military early music ensemble — maybe the Baroque Bombardiers. Finally, one Pentagon appropriation I could get behind.

In 1725, the year Bach composed and performed the cantata within the span of a few days, the 9th Sunday after Trinity fell on July 29. The Gospel for that day in the church calendar was taken from the thirteenth chapter of Luke. This passage relates the Parable of the Unjust Steward, in which a manager is accused by his rich employer of squandering the goods entrusted to him. The manager then proceeds to cut deals with the rich man’s debtors on the theory that once fired, the manager will need a place to stay, and forgiving some of these debts (without telling the rich man) would do the trick. The parable has caused not a little confusion and consternation among interpreters, especially those who attempt the difficult task of explaining Jesus’ apparent endorsement of duplicitous financial dealings, while he simultaneously argues for a downward redistribution of wealth. Many wealthy Christians like to skip over the passage’s closing line: “No servant can serve two masters … Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Not so our Bach, who musically depicted this idea with unmatched ferocity.

The fiscal parable from Luke prompted Bach’s librettist, Salomo Franck to pursue the same literary vein with great vigor. Franck had been the court poet in Weimar when Bach had been employed there between 1708 and 1717. The two had begun to collaborate in earnest in 1714, when the organist Bach was elevated to the position of Konzertmeister and in this capacity was charged with producing one cantata every month (as opposed to one a week in Leipzig). Aside from being a man of letters, Franck was also director of the ducal mint in Weimar, which may explain his taste for monetary imagery in his poetry. Franck provided the for text another of Bach’s fiscally-oriented Weimar cantatas, Nur Jedem das Seine (BWV 163) , which treats the touchy subject of taxes, and includes a moving central aria in which the human heart is likened to a coin to be minted by God. Bach had left the Weimar court some eight years before writing his Debt Cantata in 1725 by which time he was Director of Music in Leipzig. Bach may have returned to Franck’s vivid text because the poet had died just two weeks before. The cantata, which treats the big themes of money and death, might be heard not simply as an expansive musico-poetic interpretation of Luke’s Gospel, but also as a tribute to Bach’s former collaborator and fellow numismatist.

The cantata begins with the upper and lower strings chasing each other breathlessly through the orchestral introduction before the bewildered bass voice delivers its opening, and oft-repeated demand that the listener “Thue Rechnung” — “Make an accounting,” or, more colloquially, “pay up.” In the opera house this music would have suggested a storm at sea; in the church it is a tornado that sweeps through the moral ledgers. The music becomes still more frantic as the voice frights at the “word of thunder” — at the demands for payment by the Almighty in a thunder that crumbles cliffs and freezes the blood, the latter image brilliantly evoked by Bach through a long-held note low in the bass’s register. The ultimate payment will come at death and to the Big Banker in the Sky, when he will demand “goods, body, and spirit.” The Day of Reckoning is itself a financial metaphor, and to be in debt to Him is to be terrified.

This bracing aria is followed by a grimly restrained tenor recitative conducted in a kind of bureaucratic language that tries to remain icily objective. Yet it can’t always contain the underlying angst barely covered by talk of “office and position.” Explicit reference is made to the Unjust Steward: when God takes an unstinting look at one’s own accounts and the “selfish squandering” of His gifts, He will be pretty angry. Perhaps suggesting the slow and earnest accounting to come, two oboes d’amore sustain their controlling sonority throughout the twists and turns of the harmonies.

The unstinting look at personal moral finances continues in the ensuing aria: “Kapital und Interessen” (Capital and Interest). In his Bach biography, the humanitarian, organist, and scholar Albert Schweitzer, clearly put off by Franck’s penchant for talking about money in a sacred context, dismissed the aria as unworthy of Bach. I hear it differently. The unison oboes d’amore offer up a courtly dance suggesting the easy, leisure-filled life of “capitalist,” defined in 18th-century Germany as someone who lives off his rents and investments. The music is smooth, untroubled but also insinuating, with the oboes sometimes elegant to a fault. But however rich one is, there is always the final accounting:

Capital and interest,

My debts large and small

/ Must one day be reckoned.

Everything that I owe is written in God’s book

as if with steel and diamonds.

The ledger of eternity is not calculated with computers and obscure financial instruments, but cut with heavy, screaming machinery, perilously high for the bass voice. The silk-cuffed capitalist will have an especially tough audit.

In strident tenor tones, the next recitative enjoins sinful debtors to come before the Great Creditor in the knowledge that He will cancel all debts through the “blood of the Lamb.” Luther’s reformist theology rejected good works as the path to heaven, claiming instead that faith alone guaranteed redemption. Nonetheless good works could be taken as a sign of underlying faith, and the closing sentence of the recitative urges earthly altruism:

However, since you know

/ That you are a steward,

/ Be careful and not forgetful,

/ To use money wisely,

/ To help the poor,

/ Then you shall, when time and life end,

/ Rest securely in the courts of heaven.

A soothing arioso evokes the calmed conscience of the good steward. The Leipzig rich had something to ponder (if they were listening) as they sat in the front of the church in their rented seats, while the poor milled around at the back of the church.

These noble words usher in the impassioned soprano/alto duet that is the climax of the cantata, one that urges a rejection of money-making for its own sake:

Heart, rend the chains of Mammon,

Hands, sow goodness!

The suave oboes are now silenced. A minor-mode descending bass-line, its contours long a symbol of death and despair, is given to the continuo group. This bass-line tries to escape the inexorable gravity of the chains of Mammon with upward ascending figures, that can almost be heard as shrieks. But the chains are too strong, too heavy. Above this remorseless descent, gulping for air from above, the two vocal parts battle. Their crying upward-fighting arpeggios dramatize the desire to “rend the chains” even as the close, enmeshed suspensions between the voices portray the unbreakable strength of Mammon’s shackles.

As always the moral injunction matters most in the final reckoning of death, and here the duet becomes somewhat sweeter, almost consoling, but for the stabs of the bass-line and occasional slashes of the vocal figures:

Make my deathbed soft,

/ Build me a solid house /

Which will last forever in heaven

/ When the goods of earth turn to dust.

There is no more-harrowing a two-minute aria in Bach’s oeuvre. The classic performance  of it is from Nicholas Harnoncourt and the Concentus Musicus of Vienna with two boys, Christian Immler and Helmut Wittek, as soloists. Theirs is a powerful rebuttal to the claim that such pieces exceed the abilities of boys, and it is worth listening to again in light of the now-favored view that only male falsettists sang the treble arias of Bach’s demanding sacred music. The pure, powerful, but slightly unstable voices of Immler and Wittek give the duet, even when it makes consoling overtures, an electric aura of terror.

Appropriately, in the cantata’s final, placid chorale, there is no talk of money and debt, but only of faith in God at the moment of death. Bach’s own financial house, it has to be admitted, was not in great shape when he calmly departed his cramped Leipzig quarters in the last days of July, 1750 for the spacious condo in the sky, vaulting his much younger widow and unmarried daughters into desperate straits.

Like the parable on which it is based, this cantata invites diverse interpretations. I hear it this way: with every note the Debt Cantata demands that you listen not to the financiers and their politicians, but to your conscience.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint.  His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London,” has just been released by Musica Omnia . He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu.

One of the drawbacks of dividing my time between Spy Rock and the city was the rigmarole I had to go through every time I left or returned.

It wasn’t a big deal in summer. I’d leave food for the dogs and cats, make sure the water tanks were full and the drip irrigation timers working, and I could take off, reasonably confident things would run smoothly for a week or so. I didn’t even bother locking the door, not that I could, anyway; the lock had broken a year or two ago and I’d never got around to fixing it.

In winter it was more complicated. The most important thing was to get every last drop of water drained from the pipes and water heater. If I slipped up — as I did a few times — I would come home to shattered pipes, a broken toilet, a no longer functioning shower or bathtub. Sometimes I could repair the damage — most of the pipes were easy enough to mend, and although the new toilet I installed wobbled like a ship at sea, at least it worked.

But the shower plumbing was embedded behind the artfully installed redwood paneling, and short of taking a crowbar to the walls, I couldn’t get at it. I was able to get the tub working again, but I had taken my last shower at Spy Rock.

Things would have been simpler if, like city people, I could leave the heat on while I was away, but you can’t really do that when you’re relying on a wood stove. Not just for the obvious reason that someone needs to be there to feed the fire, but also because it’s really not safe to leave a wood stove unattended for long.

An earthquake, for example, could tip it over or knock the stovepipe loose. The biggest quake we’d had so far hadn’t been that strong, but it had literally rolled me out of bed and left me momentarily wondering if the house was going to stay on its foundation or even in one piece. Another concern is the chimney fire: if you don’t keep your stovepipe sufficiently clean — something I’d been known to be guilty of — a residue called creosote builds up, and if it catches fire, it can get hot enough to melt the pipe and set your roof alight. If you’re there and catch it in time, you can close the vents and cut off the oxygen supply. If not, you can come home to a pile of ashes where your house used to be.

Another result of my not living there full time was that the house itself went into a slow but inexorable decline. Wooden awnings that shielded the windows from the sun, wind and rain collapsed under the weight of accumulated snow when I wasn’t around to clear it off. The siding on the east-facing wall began to buckle and come loose, a process that was greatly accelerated when I unthinkingly cut down a large oak that had been shading that end of the house.

I’d been looking for more light and a better view of the Eel River Valley; I hadn’t anticipated the havoc that would be wreaked on the house and deck by several additional hours of unfiltered sunshine in summer and unbroken winds in winter. The wood cracked and in some cases broke under nature’s relentless barrage; possessing next to zero skills as a carpenter, I was completely flummoxed about how to fix it.

The logical course would have been to hire someone to make the necessary repairs, but the marijuana trade had hopelessly skewed the local economy. You couldn’t pay skilled tradesmen enough to work up there. I did find one guy, but he disappeared after three days when a grower down the road offered him twice what I could afford to pay.

The deterioration doesn’t happen all at once, and mostly occurs in slow motion, so I didn’t notice it from day to day, especially with my mind on so many other things. Gilman Street, the Berkeley warehouse/club I’d been working on had opened its doors, and in early 1987 was doing shows every weekend. The Lookouts were getting invited to play more often, and I was finishing up work on our album, which we planned to have out by April.

Having acquired some rudimentary computer skills while doing the cover design, I bought my first computer, a powerhouse 512mb Apple. If I labored assiduously enough, it could produce a page of copy in no more than ten times as long as it would have taken me on the old-fashioned typewriter.

But the ability to manipulate fonts and type sizes made it possible to include more content in Lookout magazine, which continued to grow in both size and circulation. I’d found a copy shop in Berkeley that offered much cheaper prices than I’d been paying, and the deal was to get better yet, when the manager pulled me aside to say, “Yo, I been reading that stuff you’re printing; you got some funny-ass shit there.”

He offered me a super-discounted price — I’m not sure it covered his costs — and the Lookout’s print run shot up to a thousand copies and more. It felt like I was on a roll, leading me to redouble my efforts to cover everything of interest in the Bay Area as well as the Emerald Triangle. Best of all, it seemed I was finally gaining a grudging acceptance from some of my Mendocino County readers.

I still had my enemies, of course, and even those inclined to agree with me continued to question my tendency to resort to purplish invective at the slightest provocation. But at least they were engaging with me, and my letters pages proved it. If I’d wanted to, I could have filled an entire issue of the Lookout with nothing but readers’ letters and my long-winded responses.

While you could digest the town’s “official” newspaper, the Laytonville Ledger, in five or ten minutes, the Lookout kept people entertained and/or infuriated for hours. Even those who claimed they would never stoop to reading “that rag” had an opinion about it, and since they didn’t want their complaints (along with my snarky retorts) showing up in the Lookout, they began writing to the Ledger to complain about me.

The Ledger had pointedly ignored me for a couple years, but it was hard to do now that I was generating more discussion than they were. Things came to a head in March when the town was riven by a bitter controversy over Sheila Larson’s attempt to build an asphalt batch plant on her property at the center of what might generously be called “downtown” Laytonville.

Her property was also home to Boomer’s Bar, which for years had served as the town’s only saloon. Its clientele consisted mainly of good old boys (and girls) of the cowboy-booted variety; some hippie types ventured in, but others (probably, but not certainly without justification) feared they would be risking their lives to do so. Another bar, the Crossroads, had recently opened across the street to cater to “the new people;” if a sociologist had wanted to do a study of class and cultural conflicts in Northern Mendocino County circa 1987, the contrasting populations of these two watering holes would provide all the data he needed.

There were certain old-timers — the Geigers, who ran the general store, the Harwoods, who owned the lumber mill, Bill Bailey, whose logging supplies business was making him the richest man in town — who had grown used to having things done the way they wanted, usually without so much as a question or an eyebrow being raised. That’s not to say that they run roughshod over the town; on the contrary, they were left largely unchallenged not only because of their money and influence, but because they were generally perceived as having the community’s best interests at heart.

Sheila Larson had been around a while, but made the mistake of assuming she had achieved full-fledged old-timer status, and the greater mistake of assuming everyone — at least everyone who mattered — would agree with her view that what was good for Sheila’s business was good for Laytonville. She announced her batch plant as a fait accompli, touting the jobs and income it would allegedly produce.

The trouble was, as nitpickers like myself pointed out, that asphalt plants produced a great deal of noise and pollution, and she was proposing to locate this one right next door to Laytonville High School. It also meant that hundreds of heavy trucks would be converging on the two-lane highway that doubled as Laytonville’s “Main Street,” helping to transform the heart of Laytonville (there were wags less charitable than myself who questioned whether such an organ existed) into a smoky and smelly industrial facility.

Granted, Laytonville wasn’t much as it was, but it had, as an optimistic real estate agent might put it, potential. While Bruce Anderson had described it as “a rural slum without a single redeeming feature,” I tempered my own criticism. “Its dusty roads, gun-racked pickups, and wild-eyed dope growers make it an easy target for ridicule from the more sophisticated quarters of the county,” I wrote. “It’s not cute or quaint or glamorous or vital, but there are those who happily call it home, and even those who, inexplicable as it may seem, love the place.”

That was from a two-page special edition of the Lookout that I cranked out in response to the batch plant brouhaha. I described the public hearing where Laytonvillians descended en masse on the dreary county seat of Ukiah, likening it to something out of Frank Capra or Norman Rockwell, an outpouring of “country bumpkins, urban expatriates, leather-skinned pioneer women, brown rice and tofu hippies, sweet-faced grandmothers, and good old boys who self-consciously doffed their NRA caps as they entered the room.”

Journalistically I felt it was my finest hour, not just because I’d covered a breaking story and had it in the hands of the public before the Ledger had bothered to notice it was happening, but also because I had provided a focal point for the opposition, who, in a stunning reversal of the way things were usually done in Mendocino County, stopped the project dead in its tracks. Suddenly I was no longer persona non grata in town; as I made my way through my usual rounds of the post office, Geiger’s, the nursery, and the lumber yard, people were stopping me to shake my hand and thank for me what I’d said.

This view was not unanimous, however, as I was to learn when the Ledger belatedly bestirred itself to cover the controversy. For the first time anyone could remember, the town newspaper published an actual editorial. It was not, as I would have expected, about the asphalt plant, either for or against, it was about me, and the verdict was unmistakably, unmitigatedly against.

It wasn’t just the editorial; the bulk of that week’s Ledger was given over to correspondents writing in to denounce me. They weren’t necessarily on Sheila Larson’s side when it came to the asphalt plant; what they were up in arms about was my characterization of the town and its people.

And I had thought I was being flattering! Apparently I had much to learn about the art of flattery. I’d been inspired by this upwelling of protest from a town I’d previously thought of as a backwoods Podunk; I was genuinely surprised to find that the residents of Podunk didn’t necessarily see their town in that same light.

“If he doesn’t like it here, why doesn’t he leave?” and “Who appointed this Livermore guy to speak for me?” were typical sentiments. One vexed resident said she wouldn’t vote for me as septic tank inspector, “even though the job does suit him.” Another called me a “pompous, presumptuous, pretentious pedant” and a “jabbering jackal,” and titled his contribution, “Every Town Needs A Village Idiot.”

One reader fired back, “It is hard to believe that someone who wanted to locate a Hot Rocks plant in the middle of Laytonville, went around cussing like a trooper when opposed, and reputedly carried a .357 Magnum, is now portrayed as a good guy, while someone who wrote an unkind but largely factual account of the hearing is now the villain. Laytonville doesn’t need a village idiot, it is one.” For some reason, the Ledger didn’t print that one.

Just when I thought things had finally settled down, I showed up at the Mad Creek Inn to play the piano, something I’d been doing on a semi-regular basis for a couple years. It was a magical place, an old roadhouse dating back to the 1920s — Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were said to have stopped there on a weekend getaway — that its owner and hostess had transformed into a relaxed candlelit refuge from the workaday realities of mountain life.

Mad Mary, as she was affectionately known, made everyone welcome, loggers, hippies, tourists, anybody who happened to stroll into her little island of serenity 14 miles north of Laytonville on Highway 101. She’d befriended Anne and me from the start, and when times grew tough, invited me to play for my supper and any tips that might come my way.

My repertoire consisted of show tunes, 60s and 70s hits by the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, etc., and even some slowed down and prettied-up versions of the angry punk rock songs I’d been writing for the Lookouts. I also improvised, playing simple repetitive melodies in the style that had come to be known as “New Age.” I didn’t think I was especially good at it, but the customers didn’t seem to mind, and were soon dropping dollar bills (occasionally fives and tens) in my basket. I taped the first dollar to the wall above my piano at home in honor of it being the first money I’d ever earned playing music.

Few if any customers realized I was the notorious rabble-rousing Lawrence Livermore until I made a flippant reference in the Lookout to the time my arch-nemesis Bill Bailey left me a $20 bill. It was the single largest donation I’d ever received, and I wrote about it as much to let people know how touched I was by his generosity as to gloat about putting one over on the logging supplies baron.

Whatever my intentions, the normally blissful Mad Mary, wearing a face like a thundercloud, banished me forthwith. “How could you?” she asked repeatedly.

Angry and hurt as I was, I came to see her point. For the sake of her business and the tranquil atmosphere in which it flourished, she couldn’t be seen giving aid and comfort to someone who routinely had half the town up in arms against him. My lack of discretion meant the end of my first — and to this date, only — piano-playing gig, and also to the wonderful home-cooked meals Mary had served me after the last of the customers had gone home.

Still smarting from that rejection, I was offered what looked like a new opportunity to connect musically with the community. A young girl had tragically drowned while crossing the creek during a spring flood, and Indiana Slim’s band helped organize a benefit concert on her behalf. Slim invited the Lookouts to play, suggesting it would be an opportunity to mend some fences, to show that everyone, regardless of ideology or culture, was coming together to support the bereaved family.

I was thrilled at the prospect, but remembered my past experience with Piano Jimmy, who played a prominent role in Slim’s band. “Are you sure Jimmy will be all right with this?” I asked. Slim told me not to worry, just to bring my band and our equipment, and that he’d take care of Jimmy.

I don’t know how Slim was expecting to do this, but as it turned out, Jimmy was most definitely not all right with it. After Slim’s band played their set, Kain, Tre and I dragged our equipment up to the stage, thinking it was our turn to play. But instead of clearing their things out of the way, Jimmy and a couple other musicians re-took the stage and began idly riffing in the blues-based style they specialized in.

“We’re supposed to play now,” I said. “Slim invited us to.” Jimmy gave me a wordless smirk and kept plinking away at his piano. At that point I lost it. Bitterly disappointed, furious that Jimmy, who I perceived as a thug and a bully, was going to get away with denying us our opportunity to play, I ran my hands across his keyboard and busted up whatever melody he’d been putting out.

It was, stupid, I’ll admit. You don’t do that to a musician, even a genial, good-tempered one, and Jimmy was not one of those. He pounded one of his hamhock-sized fists straight into my eye. If you wanted to dignify the encounter as a “fight,” it was over before it began; Jimmy was roughly twice my size, at least by volume, and the only victory I could claim was managing to stay on my feet when I should have been flat on my back.

The more timid townspeople, especially those with children, got up to leave. After a few more minutes of kerfuffle while Indiana Slim tried to smooth things over, the band went on to play another hour or so. We finally got to do a few songs, after almost everyone had gone home. When I next found myself in front of a mirror, I discovered that Jimmy had given me the most spectacular black eye of my life (given my penchant for shooting my mouth off, there had, as you can imagine, been others).

No big deal under normal circumstances, but the following night was our record release show at Gilman Street. I knew I’d be in for both questions and ridicule when I turned up sporting that shiner, but before we took the stage, something quite remarkable happened: Kain and Tre used magic markers to draw their own black eyes in solidarity, many members of the audience followed suit, and any self-consciousness I might have had vanished.

I’d begun doing a column in Maximum Rocknroll magazine, the logo of which featured a picture of me that had originally run in Beth Bosk’s New Settler Interview. Before that month’s issue went to print, someone at MRR doctored the photo with another drawn-on black eye, creating what for a while would become my de facto public image.

The show was well received — perhaps our best outing yet — but the record, not so much. As I’ve noted, it wasn’t very good; our friends and fans dutifully bought up the first couple hundred copies, but 800 more would sit around my kitchen for the next year. I was disappointed, having genuinely believed (or at least dared to dream) that we were going to set the world on fire with our long-awaited (by ourselves and possibly half a dozen other people) first release. But too many other things were happening with the band and the magazine for me to sit around licking my wounds.

In Laytonville, another uproar was already unfolding. Smarting over the attacks the Ledger had unleashed against me, I used my newly learned computer skills to combine its logo with the Lookout’s, publishing my next issue as “The Laytonville Lookout and Ledger.” On the front page I claimed to have successfully sued the Ledger for libel, and as result, taken over ownership and merged it with the Lookout.

Far-fetched? You bet, but there were people who took it seriously. Others were outraged by my printing a picture of Jesus on the cross and titling it “Easter 1987: [Ledger editor] John Weed, Sheila Larson, and Piano Jimmy party at Lawrence Livermore’s crucifixion on Cahto Mountain.” Laytonville was not a deeply religious community, but it was religious enough to take offense at that.

Or, I should say, parts of Laytonville were; when I next ventured into town, the dirty looks were outnumbered by thumbs-ups and knowing smiles. After years of feeling like Public Enemy Number One, I was shocked to find that a fair sprinkling of locals had come to like, appreciate, or at least tolerate me. If I’d accepted every offer to buy me a drink in the Crossroads that afternoon, I’d have been far too drunk to drive home.

Black eye or not, I was starting to feel almost popular. Or if that’s overstating the case, at least I felt as though I finally belonged here. Not just in my private fiefdom atop Iron Peak, but in the community as a whole. It was a new experience. Not only had I never before lived somewhere where it was possible to know most of my neighbors, but I was also starting to let go of the sense of alienation that had always been my default setting. For the first time, I was able to genuinely commit to a place and its people, to unabashedly admit that, warts and all, this was my home, and I loved it.

My new sense of belongingness notwithstanding, I still felt very alone much of the time. More than two years after Anne had left, I hadn’t been involved in anything that would qualify as a date, let alone a relationship, unless you counted the time I wound up in a woman’s house on the outskirts of Laytonville, who, by way of making me welcome, laid out a line of cocaine.

I was out of there like a shot, having decided in the wake of Anne’s departure and other ensuing misfortunes that my problems had originated in what the hippies used to call cocaine karma. I’d resolved never again to look at, let alone touch the stuff. I’d stuck to this resolution, too, giving me a perhaps undeserved reputation as a goody-goody in certain circles.

That spring, though, I became obsessed with a girl I’d met in the Bay Area I first noticed her in a photo taken when the Lookouts had played at the band shell in Golden Gate Park (we’d played so loudly and/or badly that we were shut down, by the police, despite having been issued a permit by the city; they claimed they’d received complaints from three miles away in the Marina District). Soon afterward I discovered she was a fellow contributor to Maximum Rocknroll and a volunteer at Gilman Street.

She was about as uninterested in me as a girl could be without taking out a restraining order. I exaggerate; we spent some time together and had many long, involved conversations, only some of which involved her explaining in great detail just how clueless I was. When it came to romance, however, her interest in me remained completely nonexistent.

Undeterred, I invited her up to the mountain; for reasons I never understood, she accepted. She loved it, despite not being by inclination a country girl. Our weekend passed in complete chastity, but it was pleasant having someone around for a change, especially someone who seemed to appreciate the wonder of a Spy Rock spring as much as I did.

Part 7 continues next week.

The prison had an auditorium and, from time to time, brought in outside entertainment. One night we were presented with an all-black fashion review, “Originals in the Essence of Elegance.” Black inmates filled the first 20 rows in the auditorium. When the curtains parted, two pretty red-headed black ladies in skimpy whore’s negligee performed vulgar dance-step gyrations to the slap of a disco record while framed in a gaudy backdrop of tinsel and sequins. The brothers went wild, hooting and clapping. Prisons used to get Johnny Cash and the likes of our fashion show, a far cry, I think, from what they get today. A year before I arrived, the “Police,” featuring, of course, “Sting,” played a concert at T.I., leaving behind some of their equipment for the inmates. “Take-away” is the game prisons seem to excel at and it includes entertainment as well as personal comforts. I’m glad I wasn’t around when they decided cigarettes would no longer be allowed, an entire population of criminals on edge undergoing nicotine withdrawal.

Another evening featured comedy, a black front man named “Shoo-fly” told jokes and clever stories. At one point, Benny the Ferret started to heckle him, Shoo-fly responding, “…look, man, if I want any shit out of you, I’ll come down there and squeeze your head.” Benny didn’t say much after that. Another night featured San Francisco 49-er running back, Wendell Tyler, along with a musical review. A couple of songs were sung, and then it happened: the old Jesus sell. An ex-con came out to tell us about how tough he used to be and all the rat-holes he’d been in. Then he met Art Linkletter and Jesus. I was put off by the ruse and didn’t stick around very long.

When not otherwise in use, the auditorium could be reserved for inmate rehearsal of music or drama programs. I fell in with a couple of guys who invited me to join their band. David, a hyper but pleasant black fellow, was the leader and bass player. He was joined by a drummer we called, “Sticks,” and a rhythm guitar player/singer who had the implausible name, Cashmere LeBlanc. I came on board as the piano player and we soon added a diminutive, four-foot-ten Thai, on flute, who went by the name, “Choo-Choo.” Musically, we were a rag-tag bunch. Cashmere could actually sing a bit and David was a practiced funk-soul bass player. He was serious about music, and anything he lacked in actual talent was made up for by his tremendous confidence and the stars in his eyes. Cashmere actually looked like his name sounded: he was a slender, handsome black man of medium height, cool and confident, with slicked back hair and a Boston Blackie mustache, well spoken and polite with a warm voice and gleaming eyes, an exceptionally smooth operator. I wanted to use his name in the band’s name, and I christened us “Cashmere LeBlanc and the Champagne Brothers of Righteous Ecstasy,” or CLB&CBRE.

Cashmere could barely tune his guitar, and I had to help him most of the time. The raggedy old piano had 3 keys permanently taped down and was grossly out of tune. Sticks had two cymbals, a kick-drum and a snare, but he could count to four and keep time. Choo-Choo played his flute with all the enthusiasm of Pan, prancing around the stage, pixie-like, on the toes of a ballerina. His broken English was a kick in the ass: “…we jam down tonight, yes boys? I am too many strengths down for this work all time, is not in my body working to plus four hours of the day on this night.” When he blows a solo, he says, “…lats!” — a Thai rodent I suppose. David’s funky bass playing sounded something like the musical accompaniment to the Jerry Seinfeld show on TV. We played songs by Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and James Brown, but we never made anything really fly. Then Cashmere got rolled up and stuck in the hole, “under investigation,” for what I never learned, but I never saw him again. He was replaced by a transvestite whose name was Chantay. David came up with a new piano player and I moved to electric guitar, but this guy played like he was wearing a baseball glove on each hand. Then David found “Two-Step” who was a pretty good guitar player, and I moved back to piano, and all of a sudden we started to sound at least as good as a second rate bar band in a skid-row dive. I managed to teach the band, “Proud Mary,” and Choo-Choo took the vocal: “…lef’ a goo’ jah ina chitty…low’lin, low’lin, low’lin ona livah.”

We played mostly contemporary black music in a lot of strange keys and I had to figure out a lot of new chords, but David insisted that this is where the soul comes from. I asked him once if we could do something in plain old C-major, or G-major, keys where I could get in some of my better hot licks on the piano. “Naw, man. Them’s hillbilly keys. We gonna get down, brothuh!” Right you are, David.

* * *

“Carpet creeper, sizzly-juicy, calliope, asshole tear & atomic bomb.”— farts, as once classified by brother Robbin

Chris is working overtime at his job in prison industries and I’m laying back reading, passing not only the time, but some noxious gas as well. Whatever they served for dinner that evening was at war in my stomach. Old Lame Dave, the chaplain’s assistant, is wandering around with his broom, an accoutrement that sticks to him like his shadow. He’s a quiet, unassuming fellow, sort of strange looking with bad posture and a crooked mouth, but there’s something about him that sometimes makes me wonder if he’s really all there. I’ve heard it said that they keep him drugged with Thorazine, a powerful sedative. Across the canal from our side of the dormitory is a cannery where tuna and other fish products are processed. Sometimes if the wind is right, a rank and horrid smell snakes across the water and permeates the air at T.I. Pretty soon Dave saunters into my cubical to bum some coffee and walks smack into the invisible cloud of my most recent fart.

“Man, that smell from the fish factory really comes in on this side of the dorm,” says Dave.

“Yes it does, Dave,” I say, “It really does. Sometimes it can be downright awful.”

“Whew!” says Dave. “It’s really strong tonight!”

“Yes, Dave. It certainly is.” I mimic HAL the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“Jesus!” he says. “I didn’t know tuna-fish could smell that bad.”

“Well, it seems to be diminishing a bit now, Dave. Living on this side of the dorm, you know, one gets used to it.” Poor old Lame Dave. He thanks me for the coffee and with his broom, ambles off about his business.

* * *

Christmas comes to prison as only the government could bring it. The warmth and cheer of Nancy Reagan presenting cabbage patch dolls to Korean orphans under the perfect symmetry of the White House Christmas tree pervades the air. We are provided with a scrawny, wire-and-bristle fake Christmas tree and tinsel-strips, along with pretend wreaths, ornaments and suchlike. The inmates seem divided between Scrooge and delight. A couple of the more delighted inmates masquerade as elves and help me with the preparations. DeLafayette Washington and Leon Swackhammer assist me decorating the tree and the C-Unit lobby with cheery enthusiasm. DeLafayette is about six-foot-seven and has to bend over to put on the crowning ornament. “Tha’s…one…fine…uh…muthafucka!” he says in his heavy, slow motion drawl, his words reaching me with the velocity of a pearl dropped in heavy oil.

The dope addicts are generally ecstatic about Christmas because with Christmas, usually, comes dope, packed into tiny sleighs of plastic wrap and concealed in someone’s colon while visiting with a connection. Another crew of enthusiasts are trying to fix a string of flashing lights for the tree, but “Wasted” Anthony crosses some wires and plugs them in backward and blows out the power in all the wall circuits. We call maintenance and they send over their top-gun repair ace, “Arky Malarky,” who announces his arrival with his trademark, “Howzit goin’?” He is his own self-opening bundle of addled humor, pouring out the corniest jokes imaginable, most dealing with the purported enormity of his reproductive apparatus. Tools and rolls of electrical tape hang from his midsection. “Yew fellers got a little problem here?” Arky resets the breaker and all is well. Subjected to a pat-down coming out of the kitchen, Arky tells the cops, “…watch out when yew come to that 40 pounds of swingin’ meat, there boys. That’s how I got my hernia, yew know, liftin’ that thing all the time,” guffaw, chortle, snicker.

* * *

Personal physical conditioning worked its way into my weekly schedule, and I began to run on the South Yard track and started some weight training as well. I read a few books on the subject and began to understand the benefits of aerobic training, something I’d ignored while dealing dope. I lifted weights so that maybe I would start to look good naked. In the nine months I spent at Terminal Island, I lost the 30 pounds of unhappiness I brought in with me. By the time of my final release, I will have left over 50 pounds behind me and was in the best physical condition of my life, at least since high school. I later met a fellow at camp who was over 300 pounds on arrival and went out the gate at 160, leaving a whole person behind him.

It was on the running track that I began to take notice of Charlie Harris who was from C-Unit but lived on the opposite side of the dormitory from me. Quiet and retiring, he was mostly a loner. We hadn’t met one another yet, even though more than anyone else in C-Unit, Charlie and I shared similar intellect, humor, temperament and social background. We were the strangers in C-Unit, the ones who stood out against the norm. We would both be transferred to the prison camp at Lompoc within a month of each other. We began with just a smile and nod, acknowledging one another on the running track. Soon we were conversing and taking stock of one another.

Charlie once told me about “Shy,” a sleepy looking unkempt black man whose bunk was near Charlie’s in C-Unit. “He’d been down eight years,” said Charlie, unbelieving, “and was within a week of release. I think Horace talked him into it.” Horace was a tall, sharp looking black man who also lived in Charlie’s C-Unit neighborhood and ran on the track with us. Horace beamed intelligence and was an operator, maybe a one-time successful coke dealer. Apparently, there was someone on the yard who owed Shy five dollars and the debt was grossly overdue, the debtor stringing him along. Shy wanted his five dollars.

“Dat man disrespectin’ you, Shy,” said Horace, devil in Shy’s ear. “Makin’ you look a fool!”

Worked up by Horace, Shy went looking for the debtor with a two-by-four and let him have a good whack on the head, damn near killing him. Shy was rolled up and put in the hole pending assault charges. Any thoughts of parole were now likely another five years away. Charlie was incredulous that five dollars could inspire such unthinking, foolish behavior, no matter the circumstance. Charlie later shared a room with my brother and me at the Lompoc camp, establishing a bond and friendship that still goes on today.

* * *

Once weekly for 12 weeks, I attended the prison drug rehabilitation program, mandatory for every C-Unit inmate. The leader was Gurucharan (“Feet of Wisdom”) Singh, a very pleasant and well meaning Sikh who wore a turban, earning him the inmate designation, “Diaperhead.” I assume he had some sort of professional degree in psychology. I cannot imagine a more hapless, unappreciated task than trying to rehabilitate the C-Unit addicts. Cooperation from the inmates was nil to non-existent. The idea of participating in a meditation or yoga exercise was beyond them.

“…can’t get into it, man. S’not my trip.”

“…wasn’t me robbed that bank, man. Was cocaine robbed that bank! I don’t even belong here…”

One biker-type starts bragging about how tough his chapter of the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle club is, when a black inmate interrupts him with “…dey ain’t shit, man. My uncle whupped a buncha dere asses in Portland las’ year.” And they bristle and foam at one another, almost coming to blows before Gurucharan can settle them down. Then we start into another meditation exercise that attempts dialogue with that part of our inner self that feels drugs are necessary in order for life to function at a satisfactory level. More than half the class rejects the idea of closing their eyes and trying to relax. A discussion on the merits of injecting methamphetamine into a vein while participating in sexual intercourse ensues and poor Gurucharan’s control of the class is tenuous at best.

Back in C-Unit I engage in the paperwork required when new inmates arrive. In prison vernacular, inmates don’t arrive, they “drive-up.” I had driven up eight months ago. The duty officer usually assigns the bunks, but sometimes it falls to me. Today there are eight new arrivals, and Morales, the duty officer, assigns them their bunks. One white boy, “Gator Red,” tattooed with confederate flags, a swastika and “White Power” down the back of his arms, wants to make sure he doesn’t get bunked with a “nigra” person. Then I come across a new recruit who will go through life with no balls and one strike: Owen Juan. From the back of the unit, Clearthur Sims storms up to Morales, demanding, “…whuffo you put that big, nasty white boy in mah house, Morales?” It’s hard to keep everyone happy. Morales throws up his hands and tells me to make the rest of the assignments. I make Clearthur happy by moving “Moose” out of his cubicle and put him with Owen Juan in an empty spot. Next, a mousey little man with scraggly pageboy hair follows me as I set out to find an empty bunk for him. “Make sure it’s with a white man,” he says. I head for “Pig Iron” Biggs’ house, but he already has a bunkmate. Just across the aisle there’s an empty top bunk over a Mexican fellow. The mouse flinched at living with a Mexican, but I told him that was the space available. I don’t think the Mexican was thrilled at the prospect of living with the mouse, either. I have to bring a mattress from another bunk for the mouse. “Hasn’t been no niggers sleeping on it, has there?” whispered the mouse. I told him it was rumored that the last occupant had crabs. Pig Iron takes this in and laughs. He says, “…you know how to get rid ‘o them, doncha? You picks one ‘a da little devils of’n you an’ you paints him black, den you sticks him back on. All da others will move out in a worl’ a hurry!”

* * *

Starting with the unit manager, then up through the prison bureaucracy, I was recommended for transfer to a low security camp setting. The only thing that remains before I am transferred is my parole hearing. The paroling authority will examine my case and history and decide how much of the fifteen years of my sentence I will actually serve before being paroled. The minimum time possible under my sentence is 60 months. I asked a new acquaintance, Roger Reaves, what a parole hearing was like and what I might expect. Roger was a friend of my brother’s who earned a disciplinary transfer from the Lompoc camp for getting caught smuggling contraband. “Expect to be cross-examined by four or five eggheads in business suits who have the demeanor and attitude of prosecuting attorneys.” Four against one didn’t seem like a fair contest. I asked Doron to come down and represent me at the hearing.

The hearing itself was conducted in a dark and cheerless dungeon-like environment without windows or fresh air. Doron warned me, “They’ll correct you from the record if anything you say disagrees with what they have written in front of them.” We were ushered into the dim surroundings, looking very much like an interrogation room in some TV cop drama. There were only three of them across the table from us, looking exactly as Roger had described.

“You understand that we’ll hear from you later, Mr. Weinberg. We want to hear from Mr. Rohrer at this juncture.”

“Yes, of course,” said Doron.

“Now, Mr. Rohrer, would you care to expand on the causes of your, ah, spurious activities?”

“Yes, sir. Where would you like me to start?”

“Harrumph,” he snorted, “It says here that you imported and distributed two hundred-five pounds of cocaine. Would you care to elaborate on that?”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but I think you are confusing the crimes of Mr. Green, the informant, with what is alleged against me.”

“Harrumph,” again. “…Oh yes, I see it here.” This ‘harrumph’ lacked the righteous indignity of the first. He shifted his weight on his chair and rattled the papers in front of him. “Yes, here we are. Now, as I understand it, Mr. Green is currently serving a twenty-year sentence, is that correct?”

“No sir. Far from it. Mr. Green was released after serving 18 months, a reward for his cooperation and testimony against me and others.” The questioner retreated into his papers, the ‘harrumphs’ now weak and wimpy, his ears turning a noticeable crimson. The interrogator to his left took over. I reflected on how the feds considered ratting on others as “cooperation.”

“Can you tell us, Mr. Rohrer, how a man of your background ever got caught up in this sordid business?”

“Yes, sir. A weakness at the time, born of financial need, fear and, I guess, the ease of opportunity. I was out of work and desperately needed to support my family.” I looked him right in the eye, buoyed by the simple truth of the statement. “It was a very stupid thing to do,” I added for effect.

“Let’s go over this, shall we? I see that there are two other defendants in a related case, your brother, who it says here introduced you to this business, and a Mr. Sinclair. Do you know what their sentences are?”

“Yes. My brother was sentenced to six years, and Mr. Sinclair, who was Mr. Green’s best friend ever, was sentenced to one year and a day. With all due respect, (this was a term I picked up from Doron at my appeal hearing; he would use it whenever he wanted to tell the justices they were full of shit) and hoping it doesn’t seem presumptuous of me, I would like to suggest that Mr. Green soft-sold Sinclair’s role in all of this at my expense.”

This seemed to get their attention. “I am not denying my guilt, but I do take issue with the extent of my involvement as alleged by Mr. Green. Mr. Sinclair was sentenced as a minor league participant, even though the only “hard” evidence in the entire case was one hundred thousand dollars in cash, a confiscated payment from Mr. Sinclair to Mr. Green, which clearly suggests that Sinclair was something more than a minor league player. What I am alluding to here is that Green, in accounting for all of his claims, protected his old friend, Sinclair, by trivializing his participation while overloading the claims against me, a recent acquaintance. As you know, the evidence against me was solely the word of Mr. Green.”

“Judging from the outcome, I can sympathize with your feelings,” said the suit. Can you tell us the extent of your involvement?”

And on it went. Whenever the government referred to the weight of a particular transaction, it was stated in pounds. Whenever referred to by our side, it was stated in kilograms. Thus, an eleven pound accusation became a five kilogram defense, “street value” mentality and theatrics playing their roles. The hearing ended with Doron defending my character, pointing to mitigating circumstance and blaming it all on my brother.

“A fancy courier,” is how Doron put it, “who simply stepped into a going concern in which he had no hand in building. Nor, gentlemen, is it alleged that Mr. Rohrer ever had a hand in importation, as is admitted by other defendants who received far more lenient sentences. We agree that the amounts in this case seem large and that is because that was the level on which Mr. Rohrer was introduced to this business. Had Mr. Rohrer’s brother been a gram dealer rather than a kilogram dealer, Mr. Rohrer would stand before you today charged in grams rather than pounds.”

After a brief conference of only two or three minutes, they gave us their decision: 60 months, the minimum allowed. They seemed apologetic that it couldn’t be less. “The judge saw to that,” they said. Their decision would have to be confirmed by the regional parole commission, which it was. Doron and I would now set our sights on Judge Schnacke, who we would ask to modify my sentence to an appropriate level given the circumstances, a process that would take another two or three years.

* * *

I gathered up my belongings and said my goodbyes to those I cared about. Chris was working and I left him a note with a mailing address. I crossed the yard and started to climb the steps to R & D, when Chris came running up behind me. “Amigo! Amigo! I will miss you my fren’. You are the smartest and best dude I ever bunk with.”

“I’ll miss you, too, amigo. I left a mailing address at your house. Let’s stay in touch.” And off I went, Terminal Island at my back, the Federal Prison Camp at Lompoc out in front. I was given ten hours of freedom, a furlough, and it was up to me to arrive at Lompoc on my own. I got laid on the way, an unsatisfying roll in the hay from a relationship that was mostly dead before I checked in, a final performance and dying obligation; an exchange, I suppose, for helping herself to my records and moving her boyfriends into my home.

Click here for part 14.

***

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The months following my discharge from John’s employ were hard ones, on me and those around me. I was living with an engaging and bright woman in San Francisco, estranged from my wife and family, and I was floundering. What would I do next? I had no idea. There wasn’t another CCR or John Fogerty around who needed my services. Competence wasn’t enough for a job like that; first you had to be a pal. I talked briefly with Bill Graham who had no openings for me, and I even answered an ad by Alpha Romeo who was looking for a western sales representative. My resume pointed to my career and experience in the auto business as well as in music. Nothing that appealed came my way and I was fast running out of confidence as well as money. My biggest financial need was to take care of my family. I collected unemployment and worked on the side for my brother and Sheldon, who together had purchased a unique Berkeley property they called the “Castle,” a crumbling, art-deco-like remnant of an earlier era that looked like a 16th century Norman castle, only smaller. I moved out of San Francisco and, for a while, into the Castle.

While I was running around the world with Creedence and later working for John, my brother had become successful in various business ventures, mostly on Maui, and equally successful at selling marijuana and, more recently, cocaine. Sheldon and some friends had established a successful real estate investment company, buying, renting and selling residential properties in Berkeley. So here was my brother and my best friend, two of the people closest to me in the world, doing well and tossing me $75 a week to be the caretaker at the Castle, for which I was grateful. The property straddled a major earthquake fault and was in need of a lot of care from decades of shaking. Between the unemployment and the caretaker income, I could see to the current needs of my family. My estranged wife, Jeanne, had started to work as well. At one point, my son and I went to Maui and spent several weeks working on the construction crew for a home my brother was building in Olinda, high on the slopes of Haleakala, a close and healing experience for both of us. Between working on the home and visiting with mom, we spent a lot of time at the beach and playing basketball.

I needed something to do with the rest of my life and unemployment benefits weren’t going to last very long. Mom thought I should come to Maui and get into real estate. She had recently sold a 40-acre property to Mick Fleetwood and even touted my availability to Mick’s attorney, but I just laughed. I wasn’t one of Mick’s pals. If I possessed an ability and experience that could be called a trade, it was that I could manage an automotive parts business. I had done just that for my father from the time I was 13 until the time of his death. An old friend several years my senior, who had started in the auto business working for my dad, became the Toyota dealer in Berkeley and he was looking for a parts man. I talked with him and looked over his operation. I didn’t like the idea one bit, but it would be solid employment though lacking the glamor of the positions I previously held.

My brother, bless him, was incredulous. “You don’t want to do that,” he said. “Stick around. Opportunity will show up…by the way, do you have five grand?” I had five grand, but just. “Give it to me,” he said. “You’ll get back fifteen, quick.” That didn’t sound too bad. What the hell. I gave him my last five grand, knowing only that he respected my interests and wouldn’t be careless with it.

The scam worked like this: one of the partners had a connection in Peru. A cruise ship traveled a route on the west coast of the Americas that called in Lima. Pure cocaine was purchased there for twelve thousand dollars a kilo and stashed behind a secure bulkhead in a suite on the cruise ship. The same suite was reserved in another name for the following cruise. When the ship returned to San Francisco, the cocaine remained in the bulkhead. The ship was refurbished and made ready for the next cruise, prior to which there was by tradition a gala send-off party. Revelers by the hundreds came on board to

see the passengers off, a few of them leaving the ship with the cocaine in back packs, free from the threat of customs, inspections and so forth. Voila! What was worth twelve thousand dollars a kilo in Peru was worth about sixty-five thousand dollars a kilo, wholesale, in the U.S. One hundred thousand dollars was put up by partners and investors to purchase eight kilos of cocaine and cover expenses. I turned out to be an investor. Once the cocaine was sold in the U.S., it would return five hundred-twenty thousand dollars. Investors, which also included the partners who pledged their own cash at various levels, were paid three times their investment, three or four general partners splitting the rest. Turn around time was about a month. It was understood that if something went wrong, you would lose it all.

Nothing went wrong and in no time I had some breathing room, fifteen thousand dollars, plus a bonus of twenty-five hundred dollars for sitting on the load. The partners figured there could be no place under less scrutiny than my home in Orinda. Though I had moved back with my family, it was an uneasy but quiet peace between Jeanne and me.

I continued as the caretaker for the Castle, which was almost a full time job. Everything there needed patching or fixing. Arriving to work one day, there was a Hispanic man waiting in the front yard who I learned was from Colombia. He spoke no English and had a wicked scar running ear to chin on one side of his face. He was seeking one of Robbin’s partners who, like Robbin, would be out of town for another 10 days or so. My junior high Spanish class was about to pay big dividends. In clumsy conversation I was able to learn that he had ten kilos of pure cocaine for sale at fifty thousand dollars per kilo. It was already here; there were no other parties to consider. I did some rough math in my head and convinced him: “…bring the cocaine to me!” And he did, starting with two kilos.

During the prior investment load, I was introduced by my brother to one of his key distributors, a trusted associate who we called the “Professor” because he used modern laboratory testing equipment to determine the purity of the cocaine. No one at our level of the game ever adulterated or “cut” the product; that was all done further down the line. Nonetheless, the cocaine was always tested for its purity—who knew where it had been? I took the two kilos to the Professor, who spooned a miniscule amount of the cocaine into a miniature test tube, which he placed into a heating device that registered the temperature to which the sample was heated. When it reached the prime temperature at which pure cocaine would melt, the sample in the test tube instantly dissolved into a clear liquid, leaving no discernible residue. The Professor’s eyes widened, a smile crossing his face. “Let’s do it,” he said.

This was the first time I was actually involved in the sale of something illegal. I didn’t think of cocaine as a dangerous drug. It had been prevalent and socially acceptable throughout the music world and was often given to me as an introductory gift by various people I would meet. I used it on occasion but never thought much of it. If there was a single drug I thought powerful and to be respected, it was LSD. None of us had any experience at all with heroin, a drug we thought of as evil. I remember my disappointment the first time I used cocaine. Some friends and I went to see the film “Easy Rider” and we sat there and fidgeted. Fifty bucks for that? What a gyp, I thought.

Even though a rank rookie, I was entering the business on a major league level, but I understood the financial mechanics of the game. We were American drug dealers. We sold product in pounds and ounces, rarely in kilos. We never sold quantities in grams although we used a scale that measured in grams. A metric pound was 453 grams, a metric ounce 28.6 grams. Our ounce was 28 grams, our pound 448 grams. So, rather than 2 kilos, I left the Professor with four pounds, each weighing 448 grams and priced at $29,500 for each pound. At $29,500 per pound we were getting $65.85 per gram and there was over 200 grams left, about seven and a half ounces. The seven ounces would fetch another $13,000 and the half ounce would become personal stash, split among the partners.

Bottom line on the two kilos was a profit of $31,000 after I paid the Colombian his $100,000. The same would have been true if I had sold the cocaine at $65,850 per kilo, but I guess $29,500 per pound had a better ring to it. Marketing wasn’t limited to TV.

This was 1977 and cocaine was breaking into the American psyche, becoming a socially popular drug. The cover of Time Magazine showed a martini glass filled with cocaine in its story about the drug’s proliferation. It was expensive and hadn’t yet made its way into the ghettos, and free-base cocaine, the smokable variant, was yet unknown to us. Pure cocaine was in short supply and greedily scooped up by the rapidly expanding market. Those plying the trade, at least the ones I would meet in that first year or so, were honorable outlaws who operated on trust and a “do unto others” approach. Most had been, and still were, involved in the marijuana trade as well. No one carried or used weapons of any kind, and it was understood: you didn’t lie, cheat or steal, or especially, if you somehow got caught, you didn’t rat on your brothers. When I went to collect the first payment from the Professor, he gestured to an adjoining room where there were several full-size brown paper shopping bags on the floor, filled with cash. “…take what I owe you,” he said. I counted out approximately $130,000 in $5,000 bundles with rubber bands securing each end of the bundle. I laid it all out on the floor, but he hardly even looked at it. There was an accepted trust that I would do what was right. I welcomed such open honesty and personal trust. The thought of becoming a Toyota parts man vanished from my mind.

Over the next week I would see the Professor and the Colombian almost daily, completing the entire transaction, all ten kilos. When my brother got back into town, I handed him and his partner over $50,000 each in cash, sticking a like amount into my own pocket. They were of course elated and I had arrived. I was still the caretaker at the Castle but no longer required the $75 per week.

A new partner, Mexican Henry, arrived on the scene, the introduction by way of Sheldon who had met him in a real estate transaction. Sheldon could spot an outlaw at a hundred paces. Henry had connections and ways to move cocaine through Mexico. We had the connections and ways to turn it into cash in this country. We raised the required $100,000 or so with investors, most of it coming from ourselves. Sure enough, the load arrived and was transferred to my brother and me in an unnecessarily clandestine hand-off in Tilden Park. Again, a hungry market readily gobbled it up in no time at all. I was now a full partner, and on completion of the load, we each stuck $76,000 into our pockets. We called this load the “Spirit of ’76.”

* * *

Monkey Pic

Elated, Henry celebrated by buying Sheldon, a monkey, a token of his appreciation for the introduction to my brother and me. Giving someone a monkey is appreciated the same way as if they’d given you syphilis. This wasn’t a cute little squirrel monkey, rather, a sometimes ferocious South American Wooly, “Charlie,” who probably weighed in at about 25 pounds. It fell to me to build him a cage at the Castle. I think I was the only one to establish a companionable relationship with Charlie. He seemed to know I was the boss, and he’d follow me around the Castle, playing with the tools in my toolbox as I worked on various projects; we had a respectful relationship. When it was time for me to go, I would have to put him back in his cage and he sometimes objected with a show of his formidable fangs. I seemed to know that if I let him back me down I’d lose control, so on those occasions I would steel myself and talk firmly to him, pick him up and put him in his cage. He never once bit me. But he did bite others if opportunity presented itself, especially females, no doubt a by-product of his own sexual frustrations. We came to learn that a menstruating female would set him off into a frenzy.

The first time my brother met Charlie, he had his girlfriend with him, and when he let Charlie out of his cage, ostensibly to play with him, the monkey took over. Charlie didn’t bite anyone that night, but I think he was probably over-amped by a female presence. He ran around the Castle swinging from overhead light fixtures and generally raising hell, having his way and intimidating my brother with his fierce teeth whenever he’d try to get him back into the cage. The frantic phone call came to my home in Orinda, “Jake, get over here quick and do something with this fucking monkey!”

Charlie escaped one day and bit a little girl in neighborhood who saw him and wanted to play, though it wasn’t a serious wound. The Animal Control people gathered him up, and we found him later at the shelter. It was becoming clear that Charlie was more a handful than anyone wanted to step up for. Ricardo, one of our friends from Maui, wanted him and took Charlie home with him. We all thought Charlie would be better off in Maui’s tropical climate, but he one day administered a savage bite to his new owner’s bare foot and, as I hear it, ended up in the Honolulu zoo.

Just prior to Charlie’s relocation to Maui, we were one day meeting with Mexican Henry at the Castle. The meeting concerned a second load we had financed and was overdue to arrive. Henry’s line of bullshit about the load bothered us, and we developed a distrust of him. We somehow got our money back, but I always felt that Henry had cut us out, teaming up with some other distribution partner. But destiny’s fate always seems to extract its due. This time, a little monkey karma. During the meeting, Charlie was out and occupying himself with some of his toys behind the sofa. Henry got up up and crossed the room to get a beer from the kitchen. Like a rocket, Charlie bolted from behind the sofa, grabbed Henry by the leg and sank his fangs into his ankle, a nasty bite. I later read about Henry’s problems with the feds, multiple arrests and charges that made my own coming problems almost pale by comparison. I just considered it Henry’s drug karma.

Even though I was now financially secure, I started to work for the real estate partnership belonging to Sheldon and his friends, running the office and handling real estate transactions. It was a good experience for me, and I liked the people I was working with. But cocaine was always around, showing up in my life. We had established a network of outlaws that provided a reliable outlet and, generally speaking, easy money. At least it seemed that way at the time. If we didn’t have our own load happening, someone else usually did, Stephen Green among them. It became a part of my life. I was always meeting new people and hustling more cocaine. And starting to use more of it than I had in the past.

* * *

Celebrations and party life soon skewered any possibility of reestablishing a life with Jeanne. We remained cordial and civil with one another, our proud and loving relationships with our children remaining our link. I realized with no small amount of guilt what yet another separation meant to our children. It was especially hard on my son, Dan, but the love and bond we had established over the preceding fifteen years would hold strong. Robbin decided that we needed to celebrate our wealth and success with what he called a “love boat” cruise on the Mexican Riviera. We brought Max with us and invited our mutual pal, ex-CCR bassist, Stu Cook, to join the party. We brought along enough cocaine to fuel an entire field of race horses. Max claimed that each time he snorted a line of coke he would become a few years younger. “Man, I’m feeling down to about fifty now! Wonder how it feels to be forty-five again?” The times were festive and we were free and easy. I hooked up with the estranged wife of a San Diego Police Department drug agent, whose company I enjoyed, but I took care to not divulge to her my other life. Sitting in our shipboard suite one night, just having a drink, Robbin rushed in, laid out and snorted a huge line of coke from the glass table top, and rushed back out to the party. “What was that?” she wanted to know. “Just my brother, dear. Pay him no mind.”

Pulling into port at Mazatlan, Stu noticed that shipboard activities that evening included a talent contest, and he was determined we would enter. Stu and I went into town and bought a couple of $60 guitars at the market place and Max always had a harmonica with him. Robbin wasn’t musically inclined, but we got him a tambourine to bang against his ass, counting in time, one-two-three-four. At rehearsal we met a delightful woman seeking to join up with someone as a singer or dancer. Perfect. We hired her on the spot as our dancing lady. We would perform as “The Famous Flying Tomato Brothers & Sister Rose,” the name inspired by the Flying Burrito Brothers, The Maddox Brothers & Sister Rose, and the color of my guitar, a gaudy reddish-orange. I told corny jokes and introduced the band members (“…when Max was born the doctor slapped his mother!”). The crowd loved us and we were the hit of the show.

We had such joyous times that we tried to duplicate them later with a Caribbean cruise. Although a lot of fun, it lacked the magic of the Tomato Brothers cruise. Max was uncertain about again setting foot in Florida, harboring unpleasant memories from his first visit. Robbin convinced Uncle Eddie to come along with his wife. Ed hated being cooped up on a ship for days on end. The only table there for him was in the casino. He got drunk enough to spill a drink all over the roulette table and belligerent enough to have security escort him to his cabin. Then we had to put up with an older man who was coming apart at his mental seams and had somehow gravitated to us. “Crazy George” we called him. He was taken off the ship mid-cruise, strapped on a gurney to a waiting ambulance. Ed taught us a new trick that turned out to be a fun concept for us. Stu and I climbed around the partition between our suites and “short-sheeted” Robbin’s bed, folding the top sheet back inside the covers and remaking the bed. Anyone trying to climb into a short-sheeted bed bottoms out halfway in, especially aggravating when you’re loaded, which we always were. Our steward was “Winston,” a charming and playful Jamaican who got loaded with us most nights. We ran out of cocaine two nights before the cruise ended, putting a no-more-coke damper on festivities. Winston particularly missed our nightly escapades.

* * *

I was soon to learn that cocaine is not without its own brand of karma and it rubs off on those around it. The huge financial rewards attracted the kind of people who were as willing to cut your throat as look at you. What I had once looked on as a business that ran on honor and respect became a murky world, filled with paranoia and unseen dangers. And use of the drug itself was a tricky road, especially in the long term when it became an every day habit. “Poverty will keep you from going snow-blind,” says one song, but that didn’t apply to us. Money wasn’t the problem. We had our own supply trains with enough “free” residual leftovers to keep us supplied all the time. Then many who had been regular users began to free-base, a powerfully addicting form and process. The Professor fell into its clutches and could no longer function in the real world. Richard Pryor burned himself up. Free-basing seemed to hide people away in their closets, coming out only to obtain more cocaine, the pipe becoming their best and only friend. Where I had once seen cocaine as generally harmless and benign, I was beginning to see that it dismantled people’s lives. It is an insidious substance, sometimes seeming an empowering wonder drug, then dragging you into its downward spiral.

The world of the “honorable outlaw” I had once embraced was crumbling all around me. It started with an armed robbery at the Castle, gangsters in search of a big score, out to steal a “load.” Drug dealers and outlaws, people who live outside the law, can’t call on the law when they need it. They become easy targets for these vampires. A woman at the Castle innocently opened the door one night and let them in. With a revolver to her head, then mine, they blindfolded me, tied me up, roughed me up, but didn’t really hurt me. There was no load there and they got only my wallet and an ounce of “Bing Wong,” a reconstituted cocaine washed under laboratory conditions that removed any trace of impurities and left it a sparkling, flaky snow white. It was named for a Berkeley dry cleaning business. It was sobering to have a loaded revolver at my head. At their insistence that I “…give it up,” I could only tell them, “…if there was a load here, you’d own it.” On reflection, I knew beyond any doubt who was responsible. I had only one black client, the “Ghetto King,” who never required a “front,” always showing up with a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash. The intruders were black, his henchmen, although the first character at the door was white and looked like a drugged out loser. The black guys were in charge of the operation, but didn’t show up until the loser had things under control. I had mentioned the possibility of a new “load” to the Ghetto King only a week before and he had once visited the Castle. Don’t insult my ability to reason, Satch, you motherfucker, don’t tell me that it wasn’t you. But thanks for not shooting me.

A few who were once reliable clients fell into free-basing, using up great amounts of the drug rather than paying for it. One client was set up and set upon by gangsters who beat him and stole his entire supply. Once a close friend, he would a few years later fall into his own deep hole and commit suicide, but I think it unlikely that cocaine was the major player in that life ending drama. The trusted “Mr. Big,” Stephen Green, went down in flames, only to turn major rat, even against his own family members. As stressful and nerve-racking as it was going to trial, the nearly two years I spent free pending appeal were the worst of my life. I was in an unsatisfying relationship fed by a stream of constant cocaine use, treading water while waiting for the hammer to drop, as I knew beyond a doubt that it would. I gained 30 pounds of unhappiness.

Another trusted associate, one of the smugglers from the early days who we called “T”, contacted me with a plan to buy 10 pounds of cocaine in Los Angeles from the uncle of another trusted associate, someone he had met a few years earlier. I told him it sounded too good to be true and he could be getting set up. But he thought otherwise and then proceeded to get set up with my thirty grand, a down payment on the load. We had agreed that the money would remain hidden until he could inspect the cocaine and confirm that everything was on the up and up. But he was sweet-talked into bringing out the cash beforehand, which in turn brought out the .357. “Uncle George” was as unprincipled and vicious as they come. Following the rip-off of my thirty grand, he somehow found out where T lived, a rural home in Sonoma County, and a month or two later showed up with two gunmen seeking further hoard from someone who couldn’t call the police. In this instance, though, he was wrong. T’s property was enclosed by a high redwood fence with a gate. He was fortunate to be upstairs that morning when he saw Uncle George’s Cadillac pull through his gate, two men with guns and wearing gloves getting out and closing the gate. T grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and pumped in a round, letting the Cadillac have it broadside. The men with the guns returned the fire while managing to reopen the gate, making a hasty get away. Fuck it, T called the police and reported the attempted home invasion, describing the Cadillac and the gun fire. The Highway Patrol stopped the Cadillac, arresting the occupants. Uncle George, incredible weasel that he was, faked a heart attack and went to the hospital rather than jail.

None of us ever signed up for this shit, but coke’s karma can be a vicious fate. Uncle George never knew of me or that I was the financier for his original rip-off, fortunate for me. He just assumed T was the financier and would be an easy target for more. When T told me what had gone down, I hired one of the better private investigators in San Francisco to find out as much as we could about these guys. Surprise, surprise, the two gunmen were off-duty Los Angeles police officers. Cops and robbers. LAPD Internal Affairs got involved, and the case against the cops was transferred to LA and effectively hushed up. Sonoma County law enforcement knew this was a drug hit, but even though T had no drugs or record, he was considered an uncooperative witness. I think they were happy to transfer the case against the cops to LA. The case against Uncle George was drawn out until he really did have a heart attack that killed him. No tears or sorrow from us to see this vicious bastard meet his maker.

In some ways I was anxious to go to prison, to end this chapter of my life, wipe the slate clean. I wanted out of a loveless relationship and out of this lifestyle. My brother had already pleaded to charges and had been sent to the Federal Prison Camp at Lompoc. He warned me not to use any cocaine for at least ten days before surrender because they might do a piss test on arrival and if it turned up dirty, they would throw me in the hole. I did my last line of cocaine ten days before surrender and noted that after two years of constant abuse, there were no withdrawal symptoms other than re-training my bowels. I also noted that it took a threat to compel me to quit. But I was happy to get away from it. I sensed I would be okay. I knew I had a guardian angel and I always would. I would deal with my shame and guilt and pay the debt I owed ‘em, thankful for the love and forgiveness of my family and friends.

Click here for part 12.

***

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— Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

Following the breakup of CCR, John kept me employed for another four years or so. We moved out of the “Factory” and set up shop in a temporary office on San Pablo Avenue in Albany. We hadn’t yet developed a game plan, but we would take things one step at a time. John, I knew, was fed up with Saul Zaentz and Fantasy Records, who in his mind had fucked up the follow-up releases to his “Blue Ridge Rangers” album, among myriad other unpleasant feelings toward Saul and the label. I found a residential property just off Solano Avenue that was also zoned for commercial use, a fluke. John bought it outright, and it became our new office and his studio. Before we moved in, I got a call from Max, setting things into motion that would, for a while anyway, have significant impact on the life of John Fogerty and create no small changes in my own.

Max explained to me that a local packer (a commercial hunting guide) named Roger Wilson was going to take a string of mules 15 or 20 miles up into the canyons of the national forest that borders Troy. Max was going with him on horseback. Their purpose was to see how Roger’s hunting camps had come through the winter and do a little clean up. The area contained one of the largest elk herds in North America. “It’s wild back country,” said Max. “The trail follows the Wenaha River all the way, one of the prettiest and cleanest rivers you’ll ever see. We might see bear, deer, elk, big horn sheep, maybe even mountain lion. We’ll catch some trout, too. Why don’t you and John fly up here and come with us?”

As his song implies, John was no fortunate son, and I think that was true in more ways than those suggested in the song. We didn’t talk a lot about it, but it became clear that much of his childhood suffered from a broken marriage and a father who had problems with alcohol. The idea of getting on a horse and going into country like this very much appealed to John. It would be a brand new experience for him. I, of course, was the fortunate one who had grown up experiencing a lot of the great outdoors with my father. John was enthusiastic about going and I looked forward to seeing this country and spending time with Max.

The closest commercial airport to Troy is Lewiston, Idaho. Max met us in his angular Toyota pickup that looked a little like a military vehicle. We drove the hour and a half to Troy, making our way through high country wheat fields, then down through steep and majestic mountainsides on a winding road called the Rattlesnake Grade that bottomed out at the Grand Ronde River. We followed the river’s course through Washington, then into Oregon and Troy, about 20 miles on a gravel road, towering canyon walls studded with rim-rock rising all around us.

Troy sits at the confluence of the Grand Ronde and Wenaha rivers, nestled between the canyons cut by the rivers over countless eons. The only business in town was the Troy Resort, run by Roger and his family. It was old and quaint, a 2-story clapboard structure with a steeply pitched roof, western-style shutters and a hitching post out in front. The people who lived around Troy and who frequented the resort were visiting sportsmen and local country folk, cowboys, farmers, field hands, loggers and people who worked with their hands. Tough, capable and strong, they were a population who mostly by choice avoided big cities and heavily inhabited areas. Max fit right in. He was born in Anatone, Washington, at the top of the Rattlesnake Grade, and he spent his early family life farming, blacksmithing, driving trucks, operating bulldozer, tractor and other farm rigs, able to fix or repair the equipment he worked with.

Roger was a country boy, hayseed and easy going, nonetheless alert and savvy. Not what you’d call an academic, he was a muleskinner, someone who knew mules inside and out. Like a horse trader, he was a shrewd buyer and seller of mules and he knew how to train them and use them as a pack animal. True to their reputation, they were stubborn animals but possessed a sure-footed ability beyond horses, making them a valued trail animal. Roger was personable and charming, and I liked him right away. I also gathered he might be a bit allergic to hard work. Not that he wouldn’t be a packer and a muleskinner, but I think he preferred tending bar and being an innkeeper.

On our first night in Troy, Max got drunk, something I’d never seen before or since. Why he saved it for John’s arrival was beyond my reckoning. Even so, we had a fun evening, strumming guitars, Max playing his harmonica, John and I drinking within reason while Max got sloppy and staggering, even managing to fall over a dinning room table, sprawling out on the floor. Maybe John’s celebrity overcame him; Troy had never seen the likes of someone as famous as John. Max loved John’s music and music in general. He once told me he had heard a new song that had captured him right away and wanted to bring it to my attention; it had a line in it about “…standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” corners that he himself had stood on. “I think the group that did it was called, the ‘Hawks,’ or something like that,” said Max. Maybe they were “Eagles,” huh Max?

We got a late start on the trail, Max nursing a head-splitting hangover, getting underway without enough coffee or beer to sustain us through the trip. We were probably short on food rations as well, but coffee and beer were important items. This may have been John’s first time on horseback and he struggled a little with his mount. Roger gave him his personal riding mule, John remarking that suddenly it was as though he were now driving a luxury sedan after wrestling with a jalopy. Bringing up the rear with his hangover, Max called out, “…first one sees an elk gets an extra beer!” Then, typical of his subtle humor and desperately wanting a beer to soothe his pounding head, almost under his breath and directed to no one in particular, “…think I just seen one.”

John and I were dazzled by the natural beauty and ruggedness of the terrain. The trail took us high over the river along rocky bluffs, an eagle soaring beneath us. Then we would descend to the river, crossing a waist deep tributary on horseback, wending our way farther upstream through wooded flats that gave way to rising trail before again falling to the next flat. We didn’t encounter another soul the entire journey. Around a blazing campfire we traded stories far into the night, the bitter cold closing in on us the moment we ventured from the fire. The scream of a mountain lion sent a chill and shattered the darkness around us. Then we shivered the whole night through in lousy sleeping bags.

Arriving back in Troy, the Grand Ronde Social Club, headed by local rancher Lester Kiesecker, a lifetime resident who farmed some acreage on the Grand Ronde a few miles out of Troy, called for an evening of food, music and dance at his ample backyard patio. Word had spread up and down the rivers and through the valleys, John Fogerty was in Troy! These country people were fond of their music and most knew America’s traditional roots music; many played acoustic instruments. John, of course, knew and enjoyed the same kind of music and true to CCR’s demographic, most knew John’s music, too. If John had been from, say, Jefferson Airplane, few would have known who he was. Lester himself was a live wire, playing fiddle, musical saw, spoons, guitar and probably other instruments as well. His sons also played various instruments and his wife played piano.

Over a hundred people attended that night, country folk, men with pints of bourbon in brown paper bags, women in gingham dresses piling the tables with food. Respectful of John’s celebrity, people would come up to me and ask, “…is that really who they say it is? Doggone!” John got up and sang a few songs with Lester’s son’s band, and I chunked along with Max’s 12-string guitar. People danced and laughed and had a hell of a good time in this festive country setting, a wild river running between high canyon walls, echoing a time and place long gone in the America John and I had come from. As we were dazzled by the terrain, we were charmed and welcomed by the people, their social life and the role music played in it, a natural existence that relied on the seasons and each other. We’d seen this life before only in movies.

Roger was a charmer nonpareil and instantly likable. He was also a rodeo cowboy, capable of rough and tough western crafts that took skills and daring beyond what either John or I possessed. He was in his late twenties at the time and had never seen a large city. He wasn’t an aggressive person. Rather you were struck by the warmth of his smile and outright friendliness, but he could use his fists, too. One night I saw him leap over the bar at the resort, moving so fast I missed the fact there was a problem. He grabbed the troublemaker and knocked him through the front door and out into the street with a right cross. Real wildwest stuff. Nonetheless, he was shrewd in his own country ways and, like Max, he could probably sell ice to Eskimos.

Troy was in Wallowa County, the far northeast corner of Oregon where elk season was a paramount event. As many as fifty thousand hunters would descend upon Wallowa County for elk season, chasing a herd of elk estimated at about fourteen thousand head, maybe three or four thousand of those legal-to-hunt bulls. Of economic importance to the state and the county, the hunters would each buy a hunting license and an elk permit, and they would inhabit local motels and eat at the diners, buy groceries and gasoline and sporting equipment, and so forth. In Troy, they would retain Roger as a guide and a packer, using his tents, mules and horses, and they would eat and drink at the Troy Resort. In this period of a few short weeks, Roger would bring in the vast majority of his annual income.

As it turned out, there was another business in Troy, not as visible as Roger and the Troy Resort. There was a rival packer whose operation consisted of a barn and some modest cabins and a few lots at the backside of town. Roger worked his magic on John, who at the time was wide-eyed and intoxicated by all that we had seen and done in Troy. Without consulting me or Max, John announced that he had entered into a partnership with Roger. For some fifty thousand dollars he would buy out Roger’s competition, expanding the packing business that John would now share in, and have some property on which to build his own cabin. Except for Roger’s benefit, it probably wasn’t a great idea.

* * *

“Where the river flows, where the water goes, I’ll be over there, waiting over there, Where the river flows…”

— John Fogerty, “Where the River Flows”

Troy would become for a while a part of our lives. The partnership never worked quite the way Roger had described it to John, and John eventually extricated himself from the business and the real estate. In the meantime, David Geffen had come to town, courting John for his own label, Asylum Records, and put a deal together buying up John’s remaining obligations to Fantasy Records. John busied himself producing his first solo album for Asylum which never quite measured up to anyone’s expectations, except maybe my own. I still hear in it the heart and soul of John Fogerty, even though some of it may not have been up to earlier efforts. John seemed every bit as interested in establishing himself in Troy and becoming a hunter as he was in his musical career.

We returned to Troy for elk season, bringing along John’s younger brother, Bob, and Harvey Graham, a carpenter and builder of exceptional skills, equally adept as a hunter and backwoodsman.

Harvey had originally done some remodeling work for Doug Clifford and was eventually passed around to the other CCR members. Personally appealing as he was skilled, Harvey was a man of great honesty and individual character, and he would find in Troy his personal Shangri-La, a place that offered the all things he most valued in life. My family, too, came to hold Troy in high regard, especially my daughter, Tracy, who, like Harvey, found there her own very special place while growing up that she would return to, again and again, over a lifetime, sometimes with her dad.

I was not too keen on taking up hunting again, my father having died while hunting from an accidental rifle discharge that tore through his upper leg, losing too much blood to recover by the time he got to a hospital. But I would enjoy the camaraderie of bivouacking in the back country with all the guys,

passing a bottle around a campfire and bullshitting while the sky filled with stars unblemished by light pollution and night surrounded us in a primal darkness. Max and Harvey would make it especially worthwhile. With any luck I wouldn’t encounter anything to shoot at and maybe it wouldn’t snow on us, both wishes coming true.

Back in Troy, informal music sessions were a part of many evenings at the Resort, playing traditional and country music. John of course was the leader, but sometimes there would be other skilled musicians who would join in and the music would soar. The cafe would fill beyond capacity and Roger would sell a lot of beer. John found a 400-acre parcel just across the river, and plans were made to build a house fronting the Grand Ronde river, a country retreat for John and his family.

John was a great one for experiencing life, reaching for things that had been only dreams in his youth, learning things on his own. He once learned how to fly an airplane, getting his pilot’s license and doing a solo flight, then, to my knowledge, never flying again. His musical skills were exceptional, and throughout the Creedence years and beyond he would teach himself to play whatever instrument might be needed to make the record he had in mind. For better or worse, he was for years adamant about making records by himself, playing all the instruments. He was a hard worker, capable and bright, and he would undertake whatever was necessary to make his visions a reality. In Troy he would learn to hunt and fish. And now, he would learn how to build a house. Not quite on his own, but with Harvey in the lead and the guys who worked for him, me, brother Bob, equipment handler Bruce Koutz and John himself, we would build from scratch his country retreat on the Grand Ronde. A water witch (“dowser”) came with a willow branch to locate the well. It was a great eye-opener and learning process for me as well.

Max was also on the team and had started his own business in Troy with Charlie Allen, a local hired hand and roustabout. They had a tractor and an old dump truck and called their enterprise “Ho-Hum Construction.” Max, always on the money with a slogan, came up with “Don’t Call Us—We’ll Call You.” Whenever I’d run into Charlie in later years and ask what he was up to, the answer was always the same, “…you know, man, just ho-hummin’ it.” Charlie also joined us in elk camp. During one cold spell at camp, Max and I moved into the cook tent where we could light a fire and warm things up. But come three or four in the morning, we were freezing again: “…pssst, Halsey. Hey Max… Why don’t you get up and build us a fire?” “Why don’t you, brother?” It was too cold for either of us to get out of our sleeping bags.

Now we would travel from our Bay Area headquarters on a regular basis, coming to Troy for weeks at a time to work on John’s house. Harvey would stay for extended periods, getting things done on his own. It wasn’t an easy journey. Troy is some 900 miles from the Bay Area, no matter the route, and there are several. I know each by heart. That, of course, was a big part of Troy’s appeal; it was so remote and hard to get to that it remained mostly in its natural state.

As John’s presence in Troy became part of the scenery, word would spread to the outlying communities of Lewiston, Idaho, Clarkston, Washington, and into Enterprise, Oregon: John Fogerty was playing at a street party in Troy. The once informal cafe sessions turned into rock and roll barn dances held in the old tack room, an outbuilding and part of the Troy Resort. Two hundred people could squeeze in there, and the ancient, wooden structure would creak, bounce and sway in time with the music and gyrating bodies of the weekend party folk. There would be a pick-up drummer and a pick-up bass player, me on acoustic rhythm guitar, sometimes the CCR recording engineer, Russ Gary, was there on guitar, and John, of course, kicking major ass, looser and having more fun than I’d ever seen him have on the professional stage. I have a hand-held cassette recording of us doing “Mule Skinner Blues” in the old tack room. What it lacks in sonic detail is made up for by the energy and vibe, recalling the best of old time rock & roll. Roger prospered, John’s celebrity swelling the population of Troy beyond capacity and bringing him more customers than he’d ever seen.

* * *

Roger was no dummy and every time a party was imminent, he would get the word out to the outlying communities. The parties in Troy became legendary, sometimes even scary as people would overdo the party spirit, alcohol and testosterone overcoming common sense. The village bad boy, Slim, a rangy logger whose fame was limited to his ability to savagely beat an opponent into a pulpy mass, would lead a charge into any arena, looking for a fight. Sometimes he carried a gun, but as far as I know the only time he ever used it was to kill his pet dog whose corpse he drunkenly threw out of a cabin door and into the street. I wondered where Darwin would have Slim stand while charting the “descent of man.”

Back at headquarters in Albany, John, by himself, went to work on a second album, “Hoodoo,” an ill-fated venture into synthesizers and disco rhythms. An admiring and humble Rick Nelson came to see John about producing an album for him. I guess John felt he had too much on his plate at the time and declined but was honored by the thought. I was hoping John would undertake the project—I knew he could do a good job of it. John and I both admired the music of Rick’s teen idol days. Someone had the good sense to put together a hot band for Rick, led by the superb guitarist James Burton, elevating Rick’s music well beyond the likes of the Frankies and Fabians. But it wasn’t to be, and Rick was lost to everyone in a plane crash a few years later.

Soon we’d be back in Troy. Asylum Records had arranged for a story about John to appear in Rolling Stone magazine. The interviewer/writer, the “Almost Famous” Cameron Crowe, would come to Troy together with a photographer to do the piece on John. It fell to me to see that they had somewhere to stay when they arrived. I called Roger from our office and reserved two of the little cabins. “We’ll need them for a couple of nights. Some guys from Rolling Stone are coming to Troy to see John,” was roughly how I put it to Roger. I didn’t consider that Roger wouldn’t know that Rolling Stone was (and is) the preeminent journal of rock and popular music. Here’s what Roger heard: “…the Rolling Stones are coming to Troy to see John!” and word went out on the Roger wireless.

I was driving to Troy in my Peugeot 404, choosing the central Oregon route. Forty miles out of Bend, I noticed the temperature gauge starting to climb and pulled over to have a look. Shit. A stream of coolant was coming out of the water pump, a seal had ruptured. I spent my teen years working in the service department of my father’s auto business and I knew exactly what this meant: call a tow truck to get the car into Bend, overnight in a motel, find a garage capable of replacing the water pump (which I knew would have to come from California), and rent a car to get me to Troy. All was accomplished and I pulled into Troy in the early evening of the following day.

Max told me at one time, early in the century, Troy was known as “Outlaw’s Roost,” a natural and secluded hideout for an outlaw on the run. There were two main roads in, but also two lesser-known roads made four roads out. When the outlaw got word that arrival of the sheriff was eminent, he could choose among the several exits, getting away clean. Troy was still known for its outlaws, but the thought of the drug-addled international bad boys, the Rolling Stones, was too much for local law enforcement, who had obviously picked up on Roger’s announcement. I was coming into Troy from Enterprise on the Flora Grade, about 10 miles of steep gravel road with multiple switchbacks, driving a rented Ford sedan. When I reached bottom, coming into town on level road, I saw flashing lights up ahead and found that the road was barricaded. There were several patrol cars and when I pulled up about a dozen cops surrounded my car with flashlights, searching everywhere their beams would penetrate. I presented myself matter of fact as a part time resident, owning a cabin of my own in Troy, and answered all their questions, noting that they seemed disappointed in both my sobriety and legitimacy. A similar roadblock was set up on the road in from Washington and Idaho. The cops were waiting for the Rolling Stones.

John wouldn’t even arrive until the following week. Nonetheless, there were a couple of dozen early arrivals who made it through the roadblocks and had come to party. For a band they got me, Charlie Allen on mandolin and a bass player whose name was Rex. Not quite John, let alone the Rolling Stones, but at least Rex could sing. As it dawned on me what had happened, I could only laugh and explain the reality of what was going on to Roger who, I assume, corrected the accuracy of his press release. I later took Cameron and the photographer up on “Fogerty Mountain,” a part of John’s 400 acres, and with Max’s .22-magnum Ruger Single-Six, we laid waste to empty pop bottles.

* * *

As we came close to completing the house in Troy, a call came in from John’s lawyer who had been in touch with Joe Smith, the head of Asylum Records. John got in touch with Smith who told him he didn’t think they should release the “Hoodoo” album because they thought it wasn’t up to what John could do, no better than the prior album which had not done well by CCR standards. At the time, I thought it was a crushing blow, but John, after dealing with the initial shock, remembers thinking they had made the right decision. Nonetheless, I am sure he had some expectations when he turned it in. In any event, John would begin in earnest to wrestle with his inner demons, none of which included alcohol or substance abuse. Adding to the stress and problems, John and the other the CCR members had discovered that the offshore trust that held their millions, Castle Bank & Trust, was a scam, some said a CIA front. When their attorney, Barrie Engel, arrived in Nassau for meetings with bank officials, he found an empty building with chains across the door, only scattered furniture and shredders remained. Even 60 Minutes did segments on Castle Bank & Trust.

In the months that followed, I could sense the tension and strain building in John. I had nothing to do but audit royalty statements and push papers around. I knew it was coming. In May of 1977 John came into the office and didn’t say good morning. “Jake, there’s no easy way to do this. You’re fired. Write yourself a check for $5,000 and good luck.” Thus ended a relationship that had lasted nearly eight years and contained within it a lot of trust, mutual support and marvelous times, marked by life experience beyond anything I could have imagined.

I still visit Troy, the town still sleepy but changed from the old Troy we first discovered. The old Troy Resort was lost to a fire, and Roger and his family moved on. The backcountry remains pristine and I relive our experiences each time I hike into it, knowing exactly where the best pools are hiding the biggest trout. John sold all of his property there, the end of a chapter. I will always be grateful to John as a generous employer and a trusted friend. My gratefulness extends to Stu and Doug, Tom, too…all of them, for their friendship and the opportunity to come along as they conquered the world.

Click here for part 11.

***

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“I don’t have a credit card or bank account or any shit like that. I never will,” said the guy who hitchhiked into Boonville on Thursday, June 26th, the day before the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival began. He was at the Ander-son Valley Brewery tasting room bar standing next to two guys from Virginia. The brewery was renting pieces of their beautiful grounds to the festival attendees for camping. The guy was trying to rent a tiny slice but they had sold out.

“I’m just one guy with a tent. I go out of my way to camp here at the brewery every year,” he said loudly, arousing the attention of people around him.

The hostess gracefully offered the young man on foot a deal for the whole weekend; he didn’t refuse.

I left the brewery and walked north through town. Many people were just showing up with their oversized packs and their two feet, setting up traveling piles in the patches of grass in front of the Mendocino County Fairgrounds on Highway 128. The usual festival transients — VW buses, campers, vans, and rental RVs with pictures of happy vacationing families printed on the sides — trickled into town the day before the festival was to begin.

By the next afternoon, Friday the 27th, a change in downtown Boonville was taking place that could not be ignored. I got a wristband in the administration office from a sweet young woman with blue feather earrings named Megan Sheehan. Passing through the gate I expected harsh security, but it consisted of nothing more than a young girl sitting on a bale of hay. She felt my backpack to determine if I was sneaking in any beer cans or bottles and that was that.

Inside the festival there was a U shape of vendors’ easy-ups and tents lining the field. A happy reggae band ran through a sound check on the main stage, or “Valley Stage” as they called it. A burlap sack with a pot leaf printed on it hung from the keyboard player’s rig, flapping in the warm breeze. The Valley Stage was built at the opening of the U of vendors. Attendees had no escape from the form-revealing hippy dresses, the hemp clothing, the glass pipes and beads, and of course all things red, green, gold, and black.

There are two confusing elements in the name “Sierra Nevada World Music Festival.” It is not held in the Sierra Nevadas anymore, and it is virtually a roots-reggae, Jamaican, Rastafarian-influenced music festival, a capitalist celebration of Rastafarian socialist culture. I walked around the U of vendors and looked inside. Tent after tent — at least 15 tents I saw throughout the whole weekend — had nothing but t-shirts and flags of Bob Marley; Bob Marley with a joint, in a soccer uniform, blowing a smoke cloud, in denim with fist to his heart and dreads coming down onto his exposed chest. Many of the other vendors sold Rastafarian or Jamaican-inspired clothing and accessories. A bottom half of a female mannequin wore a pair of sexy red, green, gold and black hot pants that had “ONE LOVE” printed on rear ass in white. A white college aged girl pranced across the field wearing a Jamaican Flag bikini bottom. Before the music even officially started, this made me consider the foundation of all this Rastafarian and Jamaican inspired gear.

When powerful European nations began making strides in naval technologies that enabled them to navigate tricky tidal currents, regular trading routes began to take form connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Christopher Columbus “discovered” Jamaica in 1494, and “claimed” the island for Spain. At first the Spanish used the native Arawaks as slaves, but they were very brutal and thousands of them died. The Indians didn’t obey the Spanish much, so a popular belief formed among the Spanish settlers that they should start getting their slaves from Africa instead, by way of British and Portuguese vessels. This slave trade continued through 1665 when Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables drove the Spanish out and claimed Jamaica for the British Empire. Before the Spanish slave owners fled the island they freed their slaves. The Maroons, as they were to be called, ran to the hills of central Jamaica, built communities, and strongly resisted the British power. During the first 200 years of Britain’s rule Jamaica was one of the world’s largest exporters of sugar, which required a massive labor force. The British rapidly increased their population of African slaves until they became the majority in the 1670s. In 1807 the British abolished slavery, but Africans continued to be smuggled into the colonies. During the 19th century the white Jamaican planters saw a reduction of their wealth, caused by European wars that disrupted trade across the Atlantic. In 1838 slaves received full freedom and “Free Villages” and peasant farming began to flourish.

Their lot in the societal structure was still much lower than that of the white planters they now outnumbered. Tensions continued throughout the century, resulting in the Morant Bay Rebellion, which sparked much needed changes for the newly freed black Jamaicans. During the beginning of the 20th century, and during World War I, black Jamaicans began to travel off the small island and gain a global perspective. Though still mostly poor, this movement of people and ideas became part of the ingredients for a fertile era of realization and ideological growth for the black Jamaicans.

At this time nearly all of the African continent was still controlled by European colonist powers. As a result of the 1884 General Act of the Berlin Conference or “Scramble for Africa”, colonialist European countries divided the continent up amongst themselves. Liberia (founded for returning slaves with the help of the United States) and Ethiopia were left as the only independent African countries.

On June 15th of 1914 Jamaican journalist, publisher, and entrepreneur, Marcus Mosiah Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. Garvey’s goal was to unite all of Africa and the African diaspora into “one great body to establish a country and absolute government of their own.” Garvey wanted the European colonial powers gone from Africa, and for them to be replaced by economically empowered, educated Africans.

Garvey’s Pan-African ideas greatly influenced the poor, rural black Jamaicans. Many early Rastas started out as “Garveyites”.

On November 2nd of 1930 the coronation of Haile Selassie I as Emperor of Ethiopia took place. He was the only black Emperor in Africa accepted by the European rulers. He is believed by Ethiopians and Rastas to be the 225th in an unbroken line from the Solomonic Dynasty, believed to have started with Menelik I, son of King Solomon and Queen of Sheba.

At his coronation he was titled “Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” “King of Kings” and “Elect of God.” News of Sellasie’s coronation ceremony reached Jamaica via two Time Magazine articles, one before and after the event. He was seen as the messiah and Jesus incarnate by many of the impoverished blacks in Jamaica.

Before he was emperor, Selassie’s title was “Ras,” meaning “Head,” a position equivalent to a Duke in Great Britain. His birth name was Tafari Makonnen. When Selassie visited Jamaica on April 21st of 1966, approximately 100,000 Rastafari greeted him at the airport. Per-ceived prophesies in the Bible lead to cannabis being con-sidered a sacrament for the Rastafarian Movement. “A haze of ganja smoke” arose above the crowd awaiting the man they believed to be their new messiah at Palisadoes Airport in Kingston. This became known as “Groundation Day” to the Rastas.

The Rastas wore their hair in dread locks, a reference to the Lion of Juhad, a symbol of the Israelite Tribe of Judah whom members of were believed to have returned to Ethiopia as servants with the Queen of Sheba from her visit with King Solomon in Jerusalem. The Lion appeared on the Ethiopian flag when Haile Sellasie I became Emperor. Sallasie was believed by most Rastas to actually be the Lion of Judah mentioned in Revelations 5:5 of the Bible.

The use of red, gold, green and often black by the Rasta-farian movement originated from a combination of the colors used by the Marcus Garvey movement and the colors of the Jamaican and Ethiopian flags.

As I scanned the vendors’ inventories on that first day of the the festival (and each following day), I saw only one Haile Selassie I flag hanging in a tent among rows of Bob Marley merch. A t-shirt on the other side of the same tent had a picture of half of Bob Marley’s face morphed into half of a lion’s face, forming one.

The dreaded singer of a band now performing on the Valley Stage asked the audience “Where ya ganja smokas at!” and clouds of smoke wafted from crowd.

I walked on the road in the fairgrounds that connected the mainstage to the rest of the festival. A desperate looking man in a #36 jersey with a mohawk made a quick move as I passed him to put himself right behind me. He followed me, I looked back over my shoulder and let him know I knew he was there. He soon slowed down and turned around and walked back in his original direction. I saw Bruce Hering in full Uncle Sam regalia holding an American flag with peace sign made of stars in the blue square. Four women in red flowered dresses danced to natural African drums, being played in front of a tent with a sign that said “Drum Temple.” The Drum Temple was provided by long time sponsor Sageman, whose display of drums for sale sat under a tent nearby. The next day I passed the drum temple again and 20 to 25 mostly young girls danced to African drumming. An experienced, sexy young woman tried teaching a nerdy red head hippy girl how to do the African dance they were all doing together. The awkward hippy girl could not quickly grasp it and returned to her spot on the grass.

Along with the Rastafarian themes put forth by many of the musical acts, an undeniable theme of sexuality ran through the festival weekend. It was distracting, in the way fireflies distract someone sitting on a porch on a warm summer night.

There were two or three times more people in town and inside the festival on Saturday. In the early afternoon I made an effort to see The Cables who formed in the late 60s in Jamaica. There were four of them, all singing. A band called The Expanders who performed their own set just before The Cables came on stage played as their backup band. The man who sang lead on most songs announced to the audience “This is our first time in Nevada!” No one corrected him until he thanked Nevada again and I heard one man in the front yell, “This is California!”

The four old men’s vocal harmonies were top notch, but the songs were noticeably under-rehearsed by the Expanders. I think they may have “overexpanded” themselves.

The last song they played was a reggae rendition of “Salt of the Earth” which was played by the Rolling Stones at the end of Beggar’s Banquet. They dedicated it to the soldiers fighting overseas;

“We are here having fun dancing being happing while everyone over there is getting their asses kicked and blown up.”

When The Cables finished I walked out onto Highway 128, some traveling festival kids tried to sell “treats” inside tiny plastic containers. An older couple with necklaces on display in their trunk asked me in a carny voice, “Do you want to buy a Rasta necklace?” Another crew of kids sold coffee from a push top dispenser on a square foldout table beside their station wagon.

I returned again on Sunday morning, sat and drank coffee with my friend in the Boonville Camp’s Burning Man gypsy wagon art car. We listened to a band performing on the smaller “Village Stage” in a wooded area near a gazebo where the art car was parked.
Soon a band from Fort Collins, Colorado, called Dub-skin began playing on the Village Stage; good minor key dub style reggae with lots of delay. Many people gathered in front of the stage, dancing as Dubskin performed their first song. But something happened — they stopped playing mid-song. The festival crew on and off stage yelled for a medic, then yelled for the medic to run. The crowd shifted to their right, all together like a flock of birds changing direction in the air. Something was happening behind the PA speakers that sat in my line of vision of the incident. I heard the guitar player say, “It’s happened before man, it’s happened before,” as he walked down the stage stairs. The festival medics brought a lifeguard style stretcher. Radios were buzzing all around.

When they held up a large plaid blanket and put him on the stretcher, the crowd mostly dispersed. A man walked around the plaid blanket shield holding the downed musi-cian’s bass guitar. The man sat the bass guitar down and picked up a mic. Apparently he had a seizure on stage during the first song.

“When you go about the rest of your day having fun, think about this gentleman and what he tried to do for us.” Then he said, “He is okay, it’s going to be okay, have a great.”

He left the stage and immediately a happy reggae song started playing through the PA. The singer was saying, “Hey Rastafari” with flutes in the background.

I walked over to the Valley Stage and saw my favorite act of the festival, who wasn’t reggae at all. His name was Vusi Mahlasela. He is an African folk singer with just a guitar. A big man with a beautiful voice, hitting high notes that make Mariah Carrey sound like Barry White. He sang a song about bushmen in Botswana. Under the Queensland Protection Act, a fancy name for apartheid, the government tried to remove the bushmen and women from their birth-place and home where they also got all of their medicine and food. Someone intervened however and they were able to stay on their land for now. Some of his singing wasn’t even words, just sounds and noises that gave the impression of being narrative. His last song was the title song of his new album produced by Taj Mahal called “Say Africa.” The way he sang and played his acoustic guitar compelled some watching to squeal in delight.

“I may be walking on the streets of a city called London. But the dust on my boots and the rhythm in my feet and my heartbeat say Africa — Say Africa!”

Good thing I don’t believe in omens, as this one would have been wrong — the rest of the weekend, at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, went off without a single negative deed nor word witnessed by anybody I talked with. Even the climate was ideal — just beating this week’s heat wave.

The music is the main draw, of course, and one can’t catch it all between the two stages and dance hall barn and lawn, so herewith are a few highlights seen and heard.

South African singer Vusi Mahlasela, aka “the voice,” spellbinding a too-small crowd on the smaller stage Saturday evening with just his singing and guitar — so beautiful that a rough and tough Texan I was listening with was moved to tears. Zimbabwean Thomas Mapfumo, exiled former ally of the despotic Mugabe, looking rather frail but chanting hypnotically over a spellbinding band.

Toots Hibbert channeling Otis Redding, 45 years after he coined a term with a song titled “Do the Reggay.” But The Cables, four singers reunited onstage here for the first time ever, predated even Toots and sang sweet ‘rock-steady’ — a brief but sweet form of 1960s Jamaican song that bridged the 1950s jazz-based ska and reggae itself — backed by the very fine Expanders, a Los-Angeles-based retro band of reggae faithful. But a yet even older group, The Jolly Boys, played mento, a musical form that predated even ska and features a banjo, likely a first at SNWMF. “These guys have been together since 1956 and they are not tired yet!” said the MC, but they updated their signature sound with cover versions of Steely Dan, Sade, even the talented train wreck that is Amy Winehouse (“Rehab”!). Even the guys from The Cables were dancing and singing along out front.

There was more fine roots reggae from 1970s stars Horace Andy, Brigadier Jerry, and Pablo Moses, a hypnotic set from relative newcomer Taj Weekes, a tough roots offering from and a superb show by pioneering chanting star Dennis Alcapone, accompanied by the sweet singing of British star Winston Reedy and a very fine band. As festival founder and honcho Warren Smith noted in these pages a couple weeks back, it gets tougher to find and bring the old guys back, and beyond that worthy effort he strove to bring in some acts that appeal to a younger demographic, which seemed to work. They did sell more tickets than ever, and the crowd seemed even more youthful overall — although it certainly is an all-ages event, and the perspective could just be through my aging eyes.

There was stirring African drumming and dancing, and the annual parade of Brazilian percussionists and dancers on stilts. And much more, including lots of Latin-flavored music on Sunday afternoon but by then I was toast and had to go back to the swimming holes at Hendy Woods, even though the river and banks were overcrowded with families and noisy partiers — the water still felt very fine and even the non-swimming dog dipped.

If there is any fault to find with the people who come to SNWMF, it might be that some of them still leave litter. But early Sunday morning, there was Gretchen Smith again, be-gloved and picking up trash along 128 in town. This seems akin to a CEO doing the company composting. I heard of only a few altercations and arrests — in fact, maybe fewer than on a usual non-festival summer weekend — it would be ironic if bringing a few thousand music lovers into town cut the crime rate? In any event, a couple of uniformed law enforcement authorities sat sipping coffee outside the Mosswood where we started each day, drinking fine coffee, reading the news of the melting-down world that seemed so far away, and watching the groggy human parade. And it can be a fetching one — one attendee was heard to remark that somebody could make money selling a “Girls of SNWMF” calendar. We searched out the fine food at Mis Potrancos for a third time, eating in the next-door saloon with the local brew on tap — a sweet arrangement that even the dog appreciated on a hot early evening. And late one night, even though not really hungry, we had to seek out the fresh and tasty tacos outside the Redwood Drive-In — at $2/per, a superbly sabroso deal.

A more smiling and polite gathering you will not find, anywhere. A posting on the SNWMF.com open ‘phorum,’ commenting on my AVA interview with Warren Smith re-posted there, said the festival “brings out the best in humanity.” Another, a first-timer, said, “It really goes a long way towards restoring my faith in humanity.” Is this asking a lot from a music festival? Maybe. Anyway, the wristband they gave me to allow access to the show read simply “Peace. Love. Music.”

Can’t argue with that.

What is “world music,” anyway? And how did you get into it?

Dear Keef:

Hi. Long time, I know, man. So long you likely don’t remember me. Can’t blame ya, considering some of the things I’ve just read in your autobiography.

But of course I remember you, and, well, I have of late been involved in something called a “twelve-step recovery program” and have been thinking of you, for some reason. Now, you may have never heard of such a program, but it is for people who want to be you, but are not quite you. I’m not you, and thus, this program and this letter. One of the “steps” we are supposed to do is to apologize to anybody we may have f___d over while we were, well, trying to be like you. So here I am, offering a few apologies. Here goes:

Osama + Miley = Party In The USA

Here in the Homeland there is jubilation. The YouTube site of teen idol, Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” hosted the virtual party to celebrate  the unarmed bin Laden’s killing. As of this morning the video had been visited more than 215,000,000 times, and viewers posted thousands of celebratory sentiments — along with racist slurs and sexually prurient outpourings. America had voted with its virtual feet and made “Party in the USA” bin Laden’s funeral song, the lighter-than-air digital body of pop culture dancing joyously on the arch-terrorist’s watery grave.

An adolescent geopolitical moment apparently required an exuberantly adolescent song for this epoch-making anti-funeral. In contrast to the burkas of mourning Muslim women, the Cyrus video gives the world down-home American young womanhood on full display: miles of leggy real estate between the frayed southerly edge of the singer’s Daisy Duke shorts and the tops of her cowboy boots. Her flowing auburn hair does more to cover up her womanly wares than the black bra and tank top. This vision was simply too much for some of her onanistic admirers, many of whom seem to have a gift for typing with one hand. If the Nashville-born Cyrus still wears her “purity ring” it is lost among her bangles.

Cyrus’s reputation for teen chastity has been sullied by the usual parade of supposedly inappropriate photos exhumed from her computer by a hacker, who was probably paid by the singer’s own publicists. Not since Clinton claimed not to have inhaled, has an encounter with marijuana been denied with such breathtaking absurdity. The bong the 18-year-old can be seen getting friendly with all across the internet is filled, her allies claim, not with the smoke of the devil weed, but that of fragrant salvia (though one strain of the vast salvia family is said to have psychedelic potential).

The video marking bin Laden’s demise is a vacuous mix of nostalgia and sexual desire, one that projects the American Dream through Hollywood’s vaseline-smeared lens. The setting is a mythical drive-in theatre mired not in suburban sprawl but spread out in the tall brown grass and among the live oaks of the seemingly unspoiled California hills. The dress of the singer and her cohort is Dukes of Hazard chic: the teen-set from the Bible Belt is out for a good time in the bright light of day. The heavy-petting of the drive-in outings in the 50s required darkness to descend before things heated up. Not so in Cyrus’s video, as couples cuddle on the hoods of vintage America muscle cars, and the singer grapples with a retro chrome microphone as her scantily clad gal pals dance — “Moving my hips like yeah” as the song’s lyric put it — in the back of a classic Ford pick-up and parked alongside a Mustang. It’s pure male fantasy stuff: babes and cars.

The narrative set out by “Party in the USA” is the autobiography of a star being born: girl comes to Los Angeles, goes directly from LAX, past the Hollywood sign, to a dance club in her taxi. The jaded partiers scrutinize her entrance: “Everybody’s lookin’ at me now / Like who’s that chick, that’s rockin’ kicks? / She gotta be from out of town.”

Miley is nervous — though she doesn’t look it. “It’s definitely not a Nashville party,” she observes, and this gets her to “feelin’ kinda homesick.” But then the DJ drops “her favorite Britney tune,” and all her nervousness is immediately dispelled.

As Cyrus intones a three-fold “And a Britney song was on,” the video gazes up as a giant American flag unfurls down the face of the drive-in screen, not the typical white surface, but one that is golden and burnished. Even if the streets are no longer paved with gold in America, at least a rural drive-in screen can be.

Suddenly, Cyrus is in front of the screen doing that thing with her hips she’s so proud of while fondling her microphone. Cyrus’s voice has been put through scans, probes, and processes more dehumanizing than a TSA search. Or perhaps it’s simply that she’s inhaled a balloon full of digital helium. What is left is a computerized phantom that sounds dangerously close to the croonings of a Smurf. It is the body that sells, not the voice.

The message of “Party in the USA” seems to be that the American Dream is not to be realized through hard work, but by being discovered on the dance floor. Sexual availability, or at least the advertisement of it, is the quickest road to success, preferably in a Camaro with big fat racing stripes.

Cyrus’s video probably vaulted to the top of the charts for the bin Laden Death Festivities because of the vastness of its flag and the skimpiness of the singer’s outfit. Its motives and music may make many feel good to be an American because you simply don’t have to think to believe it. But it is not just the patriotic symbols of flag and free-range automotive beef grazing the California grassland that stir the national pride of the teeny-bopper set, and make it the anti-bin Laden hit the song was never intended to be. The more powerful message it sends to the terrorists is that even at a funeral a nearly naked American woman could sing her heart out too — if she had one. ¥¥

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. He is the author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint.  His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London,” has just been released by Musica Omnia . He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu .

The mad tax scramble of my birthday has become an intrinsic part of the rhythms of my existence. When such rituals are disturbed it feels like an imposition, un upturning of the proper order of things. This year’s weekend-long reprieve to April 18th rewrites an immutable line of life’s script. The granting of this extra time only serves to highlight the arbitrary power of the tax authority: that dark priesthood alone can tinker with the absolute, blithely realigning the sacred calendar of financial tribute.

Tossed amidst the sea of receipts seething on my study floor, I assuaged my tax-sickness last year with Bach’s Cantata, Nur Jedem das Seine . The whitecaps are spitting foam again this year, but this season the soundtrack for the misery of a birth connected umbilically to taxes is more recent—George Harrison’s “Taxman,” a song that combines an appealing, if impotent, discontent with New Age visions of a tax-free Utopia.

Lukas Nelson, left, and bassist Corey McCormick

Last week, over 100 people attended the Ukiah screening of “May I Be Frank,” the true story of brash, Brooklyn-born, 54-year-old poly-substance abuser Frank Ferrante, who allows three young men, all in their twenties to act as his “transformational cheerleaders” at one of the most critical junctures of his life. The men- all employees of San Francisco’s raw/vegan restaurant Cafe Gratitude, challenged Frank to suspend his life’s routine for 42 days and be part of a reverse “Super Size Me” experiment. The profound results set the stage for astonishing, long-lasting changes. Following the film, the audience and Ferrante marvel at the innate spiritual and secular wisdom displayed by his youthful coaches.

A few days earlier, 22-year old Lukas Nelson and his band, Promise of the Real, played yet another searing two and a half-hour set at the Mateel Community Center to an overflowing down-home audience. And again, one could not help but be astonished at the profound sensibilities displayed by this up-and-coming young buck.

It isn’t that Nelson can effortlessly emulate and eclipse sonically complex, Hendrix-worthy guitar riffs. It isn’t that he has politely rebuffed requests to play with Bob Dylan’s band because he is committed to penning and performing his own music, and it isn’t that his abilities as a songwriter belie his two scant decades of life. Like those three young men from Cafe Gratitude, Nelson demonstrates an inner composure and healthy self-assuredness that many Seekers of Truth would be wise to emulate.

Nelson and his band Promise of the Real more than live up to their name. They are as real as rock ‘n’ roll gets. Drummer Anthony LoGerfo, percussionist Tato Melgar and bassist Corey McCormick along with Nelson, primary songwriter and lead guitarist are poised to become the Next Big Thing. Recently anointed by both Letterman and Leno, with a new CD and a place on the three-week Country Throwdown tour, gigastardom may be only a matter of time. The band has never accepted financial support from, nor do they ride on the coattails of Lukas‘ father Willie (yes, that Nelson). In fact, when music major Lukas dropped out of Loyola Marymount College, the family drew a line in the sand and cut the purse strings, which was just fine with Lukas, who lived for a time in his car and perfected his chops doing street music in LA.

The band is paying their dues and hitting the road hard, generally performing in small venues all across the country. “POTR” as the are referred to, have opened for their share of major headliners including BB King, the Dave Matthews Band and of course the Senior Nelson.

It is both very easy and very difficult to separate father from son. When Lukas sings, one can’t help noticing the vocal similarity between the two. But there the comparisons end. The most significant attributes they share are their boundless passion for music and a natural talent for heartfelt songwriting.

“I guess we’ve played Mendo and Humboldt about five or six times now. “We like to be relaxed,” says Nelson, who is great at eye contact and perfectly comfortable saying, “Yes, ma’am.”

And in comparison to those network debuts where he sported noticeably coiffed hair, neatly trimmed beard and impeccable cowboy chic, Nelson certainly does look, well, more “relaxed” at the Mateel — a venue far away from the suffocating clutches of fandom, traffic and industry remoras.

Nelson had an interest in and exposure to music from the time he was very young, taking the road with the Waylon/Kristofferson/Cash/Nelson supergroup the Highwaymen, writing his first songs at the age of 12 and starting his first band a few years later. He rubbed elbows with music illuminati from an early age, but what rubbed off went straight to his ears and not his head. He’d be the last one to say it, but Nelson has absorbed and will surpass many of his musical mentors — Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, the Allman Brothers and countless blues and American roots masters. The band is as comfortable with standards as they are with Nelson’s original material. They do a scorching, sexy “Hoochie Coochie Man” and bring an entirely new take to Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain.”

Perhaps it is their rendition of Neil Young’s “L.A.” that demonstrates their musical maturity and appreciation for one of the most fertile times in rock ‘n’ roll history. In Humboldt, the entire crowd joins Nelson in Young’s sarcastic refrain, “Don’t you wish that you could be here too.” Actually, not so much. That’s why they’re at the Mateel, living in the EmTri- as far away from Hollywood as you can get.

Nelson regularly cites Neil Young as one of his primary influences. When he speaks   about meeting Young for the first time his sense of awe and deep respect are palpable. We spoke about how certain songs become place markers for significant times in one’s life.  “I could listen to Neil all the time. All of his songs affect me like that.” Nelson listens to Pandora, keeping his selection dialed into Tulsa musicians, Neil, Dylan, Delaney and Bonnie, Odetta. On the contemporary front, he’s impressed with Arcade Fire (“I heard them do a number with David Bowie which stayed with me for a while”), Mumford and Sons, Neko Case, Jack Whyte and Modest Mouse.

Duke Ellington said, “Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.” Nelson says much the same. On his Facebook page, he says “Music is my religion.”

And it is that merging of music and mystery which Nelson is considering a few short hours before pounding out some of the best rock’n roll, blues and country music anyone could ask for.

“I don’t believe in organized religion,” he notes, gently turning a small, roughly triangular-shaped rock on the picnic table as we chat. “I like spirituality. I don’t like religion. I feel like it teaches people that they’re not worthy.”

“I was raised to have an open mind- to accept whatever truth comes into my heart. I’m not saying religion is all bad. Mostly there is corruption, some kind of agenda. I think it is good to sift through ideals,” says Nelson. “Religion can be helpful for people who don’t wish to think for themselves.”

He objects to the juxtaposition of faith, sin and spiritual proselytization. “It’s not coming from a place in the heart when you’re told you have to believe in certain things or you’ll go to hell. People shouldn’t meddle in other peoples’ business. I never really enjoyed that kind of organized conversion of people.”

Nelson’s songs are filled with references to spiritual struggle, some exuding a gospel-like hopefulness.

When I wake up, the eagle will forever fly my name.

When I wake up, your tears will shed the potion of my pain.

My soul will shine like northern lights- like the way my life’s supposed to go

My mind will play a melody that weaves us through the web our hearts have sown.

* * *

“Everyone wakes up — wakes up and goes back to sleep. I’ve sailed so far away from the concept of good and bad- they really don’t exist. There’s so much good happening in the world. If you’re looking to lump something into ‘good and bad’ you’re going to be sorely mistaken.”

Here is a young man who bends strings like Mike Bloomfield and plays as well with his teeth as most play with their fingers. But at his foundation are life’s biggest questions. “Death. People get so freaked out. You keep going no matter what. It’s nothing bad. Death as sacred as life and birth. When something tragic happens you hear people saying all the time, why would God let this happen? People die. People have different times to go.”

There’s a peaceful solution

Called a peace revolution

Let’s take back America

There’s a war and we’re in it

But I know we can win it

— Willie Nelson

“Peaceful Solution” is almost always a part of a POTR show. “Violence is becoming a dying art,” says Lukas. “We’re not accomplishing anything from it. You act according to your spiritual development. People who understand simplicity, who understand less is more, benefit- on many levels of emotional health.”

Nelson is planning an upcoming trip to Japan- not to perform, but to serve. “A dear friend was in Tokyo during the tsunami. I’m planning to go over to help out in any way- working however I can. I’ll probably stay at least a couple hundred miles away from the reactors. I’m thinking I’ll end up working at one of the shelters.”

At a recent concert, attendees were in tears- was it was the unbridled abandon of the band, the shredding guitar and primal yowl that almost evoked the specter of a sober Kurt Cobain, or the shared joke in the Dylanesque lines of an audience favorite:

My Independence calls me

from a pay phone far away

He says, listen, man I’m worried,

you ain’t never been this way

And I get antsy

Real commitment seems absurd

Out here in the country

Forever is a four-letter word

Whatever the case, the audience belonged to the band. People left the hall in shock. “Not only was that the best concert I’ve ever been to, that was the best fuckin’ rock ’n’ roll I’ve ever heard,” proclaimed one 60-something gentleman, to whoops and high-fives from everyone surrounding him. When Nelson heard this anecdote, he seemed startled. It was literally as if this was the first time the band had received a complement. “Well, that’s what it’s about- letting people relax, having a party. I don’t like people to just sit down and clap. It’s all about releasing pent up energy,” he notes.

And why would they sit down — at 26, super-drummer Anthony LoGerfo — whose infectious smile can be seen from the back of the hall has toured with Gwen Stefani, Jackson Browne, Ozomatli and friend and mentor John Avila, bassist from legendary Oingo Boingo and original bassist for POTR.

Bassist Corey McCormick has a diverse musical background with appreciation of everyone from Stravinsky to Black Sabbath, but it was getting a gig with Soundgarden’s legendary vocalist Chris Cornell which took him all over the globe and ultimately to POTR, where he can hold down a dark, growly, funky bottom or provide subtle support on a poignant country chorus.

Tato Melgar, gifted percussionist from Uruguay and Argentina, has been a childhood friend of Lukas who together formed two other bands before enlisting LoGerfo and McCormick. Melgar breathes fire into the band whether he’s on congas or timbales. Each band member always solos, and it is immediately evident that Nelson is only one of four bright lights illuminating the band’s musical landscape. The band is comprised of master musicians who easily stand alone, but together their synergy is infectious, down and dirty and utterly inspiring.

And then there’s the hair-whipping. Another celebrity child- Willow Smith, precocious 10-year-old daughter of Will and Jada, has 47 million YouTube hits for her pop debut, “I Whip My Hair.” Obviously, young Willow has been studying the moves of Lukas, who is by far the best hair-whipper to date. Head-bangers everywhere, be proud. Lukas has perfected this move- direct from the classic rock ‘n’ roll playbook.

Nelson has an acceptance of and optimism about the future. “People are going to fret, argue debate and kill each other. Hopefully as time goes by, people will start learning. It’s already getting better in the world. There is always going to be negative and positive- that’s just science. What you have to do is personally liberate yourself from that wheel — that cycle. Truth has never been easy to see. Your personal level of truth will tell you that things happens for a reason. There always has to be a journey in your life. Where focus goes, energy flows.”

Don’t lose your mind

Don’t let your thoughts control you

I tell myself this all the time

‘Cause you’re not real

Work hard for life

Don’t act like you deserve it

Though you know it to be true

The world you know can end on you

Spoken like a true Buddhist. Which is why Nelson is the perfect candidate for the next Dalai Lama, now that His Holiness is proposing democratic elections for the Tibetan people. Why not? Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay. The Dharma isn’t going anywhere. Born in the Year of the Dragon, a student of compassion and wisdom, embodier of skillful means- Lukas has a great spiritual resume. The spirit of loving-kindness pervades his very essence, he’s got great advisors and most importantly, like the Dalai Lama, Lukas Nelson ROCKS.

Perhaps the Dalai Lama’s celibacy vow would have to wait a few years, but Tibetans have always had the gift of flexibility. However, since many of his fans are veteran rockers from the sixties and seventies, it seemed fitting to ask Nelson if he liked older women. The blush and the long pause before answering were both apparent. “Well, I honestly don’t really know how to answer that one,” he smiled.

Lukas Nelson’s totem animal, the Red-Tailed Hawk, screeches a long, keening “kreee” the following morning- the Emerald Triangle’s salute to an impeccable group of artists who will no doubt “keep it real” for many years to come.

I’m riding my own wave

I’m breath in the sunset

And I feel- Lord I feel so free

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