I returned from Oz....a bit changed, and without a girlfriend. But I returned, perhaps dragging my feet, perhaps feeling completely at home in Oz and not needing to return, but truly needing to get out on my own...for both of us needed SPACE. Oz was good to us but we were not good to each other and things went astray. But it's alright I guess, it seems that it was necessary. And I returned to the Eastern Sierra fresh with energy to play music and work towards saving for our land in Baja. It's still "our" land and we're still friends so the magic of Oz is still with us I guess.
What a LONG STRANGE TRIP it's been...wow...
starting almost immediately upon my return I got a backstage pass from my friends The Trespassers to be their "crew member" at Strawberry Music Festival and got to eat, drink, and watch awesome music up close and personal for free at the end of May, in the rainy pine forests of Evergreen Road...and it did rain boy, and we sloshed in the mud and played music out in it, and stayed up late jammin' and really ever since then things have been rather crazy.
A solid group of us pilgrimaged to Telluride, Colorado for the bluegrass festival at the end of June and lost our minds there...left them to be picked up in little pieces and reassembled later by some sort of haz-mat team from the future...it was glorious in all shades of glory, and kept us roaring for four days...(what wonderful things come from a tiny piece of paper sitting on your tongue, anyways....)...I'm not sure the people of Telluride will ever quite recover from the acoustic, without instruments rendition of Shady Grove that occurred on Main Street in front of the Hardware Store when a whole group of us "got inspired"....
After that it was pretty much ON...performing music with two different bands up to five nights a week, and jamming on the other nights, while working 8 hours a day five days a week landscaping, which means shovelling and hauling and lifting and grunting out in the dust and heat and brush sometimes...on other days it just meant dropping in some flowers but....QUITE a summer nonetheless...QUITE a summer....
I guess the highlights would be watching the sun rise on the July 4th weekend and rolling into it with bloody marys and music at Gull Lake along the June Lake Loop...the night at LuLu's when the Irish man and his family kept buying us rounds of beers and we played an hour later than we should've....the night at Side Door when the co-star to Kiefer Sutherland from the show "24" came in and made a fool of himself and I got it all on a recording...uhh let's see outdoors wise I did some fun climbs this summer with a friend, especially the Hair-raiser Buttress (5.9 R)....more highlights would include the old coyote moon show that we put on at the Auld Dubliner till two in the morning...the jam up at the Mono Lake Vista Point after the Blue Turtle Show on Saturday night back in September when a pile of musicians were there, basically three or four bands converging and combining to make a helluva a great jam that lasted till about four in the morning....followed the next week by our very own show at the Mobil Mart which was the best Calmer Than You Are show in history....
but this all reminds me of a few parties I've forgotten...namely the first BBQ at Marshall's house back in June or July or something, when we had roughly ten musicians, all friends, together on a porch at a 1930s cabin in the woods just jammin'...we had a couple other big jams like that...some fifty strings in a room at once...
It's been a great summer for music....we've all gotten better, gotten more inspired, taken it all more seriously and just plain progressed to being actual musicians.
There may not have been much backcountry time this summer, but the backcountry of my mind has certainly seen some time.
With summer gone, and fall in full swing, a large group of mammoth derelicts pilgrimaged to The City by the Bay for the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival...a wild weekend of music and walking and heavy heavy drinking, thousands of people filling the Golden Gate Park, having a front row position for Alison Krauss and Robert Plant only to turn around a realize thousands of people had filled in behind us making it nearly impossible to escape if one needed the bathroom...but what a show that was....definitely a highlight of the summer festival scene, Plant's still got it, and the two of them sound great together. Other great bands of the festival were Poor Man's Whiskey, The Bad Livers, Del McCoury, The Global Drum Project, and Iris DeMent's solo performance on piano.
Who knows folks. Who knows what will happen in this life. If you claim to know, you're full of shit or boredom one of the two, cause this life is magic and shifty and always on the move, lookout!----it's comin' after you!
