Saltwater 2005

I should have written this last night when I got home from the festival with my head still just thrumming to the music. Maybe someday I'll be able to piece this all together in some kind of order, but now it's still just snatches...

Rory Block is stuck in my head as some kind of Delta Blues Banshee -- a real mystical, scary force of nature. A woman not to be trifled with.

Same for Mindy Smith, only different. Impossibly slight with her shoe-polish black hair and cigarettes, rolling up the windows in the front of her black SUV while her guitar and mandolin backup squatted in the gravel behind the open hatchback, scratching sharpie setlists. And when did mandolin players start looking like that? Like... I don't know. Punk rock stars? (Is there such a thing?)

Chris Smither - the Irish wolfhound of the bunch - towering, rangy - his hand totally engulfs yours in a handshake. Be careful not to knock off his fingerpicks... Sitting back-to a picnic table, tuning his guitar dressed in Johnny Cash black.

Then I'm sitting cross-legged at the top of the stairs, back of the stage, looking right under the hi-hat at the drummers of the day: Inner Visions Reggae, Braddigan's funk-acoustic-rock, The Samples with their own brand of it - "Feel us shaking" they sing, and you can - the whole stage is shaking and I'm overwhelmed with the power and precision of it all - even when the Samples drummer has knocked his gong cymbal right over and the sound crew has to rush to get it back up and in play.

And Nashville! Nashville incarnate in the form of Johnny Hiland and his manager - that old-school kind of manager excitement that money just can't buy holding on to this new-school, blind kid from Maine goes down to Nashville and sets the town on fire with his guitar playing kind of fairytale story and Johnny's on stage and he's got the two halves of the crowd clapping against each other and his manager gives me a wink and a pat on the shoulder and then I've got to track down Winifred Horan from Solas so I can tell her what a big fan I am and that we listen to their albums all the time at home and when she's done playing and I've handed her a copy of my CD to listen to on the bus she gives me a hug and a kiss on the cheek and says to say hi to my family...

And it was 8:45 before anyone even mentioned bug dope (except for Mick McAuley who insisted that the buggers were sweet on him and that his allergies would provide a robust reaction should he be neglectful) and the tide came in and the sun did shine and the clouds provided the only little bit of shade we needed...

Maybe there was more to it than that, I don't remember right now, but I sure did have a hard time sleeping last night.

Great Big End-of-the-World Moon

So last night was one of those optical illusion moonrises -- where the moon sits all fat and gaping on the horizon for so much longer and seems to dwarf the trees and streetlights. One of the two things I remember from studying physics is that nobody can explain why the moon looks so much bigger when it's on the horizon -- it doesn't have to do with any physical properties of light, the atmosphere -- and it really does look bigger. I don't remember what the second thing I remember is...

I just finished Bill Bryson's latest book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything." The book is basically split into two parts: part one is how we got here, part two is how we're going to be utterly annihilated at any moment. It's funny because Bryson is at Dartmouth, where I went to college so many years ago -- and one of the pithy little end-of-the-world statements comes from the same professor, John Thorstensen (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~physics/faculty/thorstensen.html), who shared that observation about the moon. We called him "Thor." He was full of gleeful doomsday remarks. I think it comes with the territory of being an astro-physicist. I also remember him making the observation that "if you weren't alive in the sixties, you have no idea how little your government actually cares about you."

Overheard snippet of conversation at the Exxon station: "...section eight. It's guaranteed money. What's your problem?" This from the two boys in the silver mob-car, sweaty necks and arms in their wife-beater t-shirts, cigarette smoke drifting around the open car doors.

Trip to Tupelo

Great trip to Tupelo hall in Londonderry, NH last Thursday – Pat, aka “Paddy” Mills and I rolled down from Maine in the pleasure-mobile (totally killer Ford Escort Wagon, 1997, all tricked out with AC and that fancy dashboard light feature that prevents you from seeing your speedometer after dark…). Traffic got Paddy hung up on his way to Brunswick, so we were tense as we watched the clock tick off the minutes to 6:45 before we got there – five more minutes and we would have earned 4+ hours in the car for the honor of watching 4+ hours of open mike without playing…

As it was, we squeaked in under the wire and got great performance slots – 5^th and 8^th. Tuning was the most adventurous part of the night – I staged my very first retuning on the fly during “Up Through The Snow” – yanking an offending string into shape and hardly missing a beat, proving there’s a first time for everything. Paddy totally showed me up, though – the Gods of Discord whacked his guitar as he made his way to the stage. His soundcheck/introduction was marred with one of those baffling “everything seems wrong” kind of open-G chord strums that led to some fruitless twiddling at the peghead and the totally understated observation from Paddy: “That’s unfortunate.” I was sure he was doomed as he started up his song without ever getting the strings to sound anything like harmonious, but I was amazed when the song went off without a hitch. Everybody loved it, of course. Then he retuned between songs – same deal: the guitar sounded like a roomful of kindergarteners had spent their lunch break with it. And he launched into his second song nonetheless, and again, it sounded fine. We talked about it on the way home: apparently he simply avoided playing the strings that he knew were really out of tune. Which utterly boggles my mind.

So the good news is that both Paddy and I have come away from the night with some shows at Tupelo Hall -- Paddy is going to be the feature spot at the open mic in a little less than two weeks, and I'll be opening for a long-time folk hero of mine, David Wilcox, in October.