Joe Ely has driven off from Taos, headed west, because of course he was. He was 78.
Pneumonia, Lewy body dementia, and Parkinson’s did for him, according to The New York Times. It took all three to finally drag the old troubadour off the road.
He was always going places: riding a motorcycle through the halls of his high school; hitching and riding the rails around Texas and the Southwest; covering the earth like a spilt can of Sherwin-Williams. In the photo on his website he’s behind the wheel of a convertible. In London, he joined a touring Shakespearean troupe.
As Mother Times noted:
He might open for Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden one night, and then take the stage in a tiny music hall in the Jersey suburbs the next. He loved it all, especially the hours spent driving from gig to gig on the open road, and above all the vast empty stretches of highway out West. “There’s something about that vast emptiness that makes your imagination come alive,” Mr. Ely told The Los Angeles Times in 1992.
Now and again Ely would hook up with two of his old high-school pals from Lubbock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, performing as The Flatlanders. That on-and-off gig lasted from 1972 until the mid-2000s. He opened for the Clash, becoming friends with Joe Strummer, and wrangled llamas for the Ringling Bros. circus.
Jaysis H., what a life. Other people got famous. Joe Ely lived. Somebody give this boy a ride to heaven.
So happy together — Flo & Eddie and The Mothers of Invention.
Mark Volman, a.k.a. The Phlorescent Leech, or “Flo” for short, has gone west. He was 78.
You may remember Volman from The Turtles. Or p’raps from Flo & Eddie, his two-man band with fellow ex-Turtle Howard Kaylan, a change of identity required in 1970 when they got sideways with their label and were contractually forbidden to perform as either The Turtles or even under their own names.
As a teenage weirdo in the magical Seventies I recall a mentor at the Colorado Springs Sun, Bill McBean, turning me on to Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention — specifically, their “Fillmore East — June 1971” album, which includes, as the wrapup to an insane musical tale of Seattle’s Edgewater Inn, a mud shark, and the Vanilla Fudge, a stellar performance of The Turtles’ No. 1 hit from 1967, “Happy Together.”
“Wow,” sez I, or something very much like that (it was the Seventies, after all). “That’s an excellent take on that old Turtles tune.”
“No shit,” replies Bill. “That’s Flo & Eddie you’re hearing.”
Further explanation was required — thank Dog for mentors — but I eventually came to understand that former Turtles Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan were now Flo & Eddie and rockin’ with The Mothers.
Talk about happy together. It still rocks, a half-century down the road.
Killing time between breakfast and burial last Saturday I drove out State Avenue to River Road and parked at a little pullout across from the Cattails Golf Course, where a couple sat chatting as a kid fished.
Alamosa didn’t seem much changed from 1971, when I was a freshman at Adams State College, the only school in the state that would have me.
The school is called Adams State University now, but that seems a little grandiose. It’s still a small college in a small town, and the dorms — from the outside, anyway — seemed untouched, save by the ravages of time and undergraduates.
Coronado Hall, undated; shoplifted from the Adams State website.
Coronado Hall still has that generic Fifties-to-Seventies vibe. Could be anything from a budget apartment building in a Seventies sitcom to a residential treatment facility to a nursing home.
But the McCurry-Savage-Moffat-Houtchens L-block apartments would embarrass an East German, even before the Berlin Wall came down.
I took no pix of this academic detour down memory lane, not eager to be dubbed an elderly perv’, or worse, a narc.
“Do you have any children here, sir?”
“Uh, no, officer, not that I know of. If I did, they’d be in their 50s, and I could see their pictures any old time down at the post office.”
I don’t recall which of these hovels was my last known residence at Adams State — but Savage would seem appropriate, so I’ll take it. My roommates and I broke all the written rules and some of the unwritten ones, too, until I dropped out after two years and discovered the wonderful world of work. This sent me shrieking back to school in a year. Not to Alamosa, though. To Greeley, where I met all these Martinezes.
A half-century later, as I hauled bike and baggage into my motel, a man and a couple of women were discussing in low tones some loved one bound for a stretch in the federal pen. Could’ve been me in ’73. Stay in school, kids. And don’t deal drugs from your dorm room.
In other news, the Safeway has moved across the street. The Campus Cafe, Bank Shot, and Purple Pig are still around, but the Ace Inn is not. The Rialto, where I saw The Firesign Theatre’s “Martian Space Party” — double-billed with “Zachariah,” written by the Firesigns — is no longer a theater.
Tell me my man Jim isn’t gonna set this big ol’ cigar to smoking. …
And everyone still does their serious shopping in Pueblo or Santa Fe. In Alamosa, a Martinez cousin groused, “There’s nothing.”
Well, that’s not entirely true. There was a big gay-pride rally just down the alley from William’s house on Saturday. The youngsters dashed over to buy a rainbow flag and T-shirt to prank their elders.
Speaking of pranks, there’s a largish artillery piece not far from where Jim and Lucy were laid to rest. I can see Jim having some fun with that on Halloween, New Year’s Eve, maybe Super Bowl Sunday if the Broncos ever get there again.
I can hear Lucy telling him to knock it off, too. “Cállate, mijo, people are trying to sleep here.”
This past weekend it struck me that I’ve probably spent more of my life with Martinezes than O’Gradys.
More waking hours, anyway. Not necessarily conscious, but in motion, for good or ill.
Lawrence Martinez, ex-cop, telling jokes to an ex-dope dealer he’d just met while taking five from his backyard grill in Alamosa, Colo. His wife, Lucy, making breakfast for the same ne’er-do-well and her eldest son, Jim, after their feeble attempt to follow in the oversized footprints of Hunter S. Thompson in Las Vegas.
The family came together again on Saturday as Lucy and Jim joined Lawrence at the Alamosa municipal cemetery.
Whenever I hear of a friend’s passing I always hope it’s a case of mistaken identity, or someone’s idea of a joke, and that we’ll see each other again.
But when I’m standing in front of a big stone with the name chiseled in … well, that’s one hell of a fact-check.
At graveside Larry Martinez spoke briefly of his father, mother, and brother. Sister BettyJo and her husband, Tom, were there, as were Larry’s wife, Sherry; their sons, Will and Stefan; daughter-in-law Kaitlyn and baby Delilah May; Jim’s son, Kelly; the resident wildman William, a.k.a. Guillermo; the fabulous Leonard R. Dogg; and a moderately sized coterie of other family members, friends, and hangers-on, among them Your Humble Narrator.
During a Friday-night barbecue at William’s and a late lunch Saturday at Nino’s Del Sol, old feats of dubious valor were revisited and new tales added to the family mythology. Some made me wish I was still a youngster sucker-punching his liver; others, not so much. Ditched in a small-town bar, stuck for a ride? The woman with four kids who says her place is a lot closer than yours? It makes for a good story later over margaritas, as long as the kids aren’t calling you daddy when the ex shows up unexpectedly.
I settled for writing a note to Jim that went into the earth with him, and placed a flower at graveside. And I bowed thrice to Lawrence, Lucy, and Jim, thankful to the universe for giving me two families — the one I was born into, and the other I stumbled into.
• • •
After lunch, pursued by an electrical storm, I drove to Colorado Springs to pay my respects to another friend, from another life.
I’m on a first-name basis with a lot of the ghosts in that haunted house of a town, enough of them to launch a chain of Overlook hotels.
There’s my dad, Col. Harold J. O’Grady, USAF (ret). And mom, Mary Jane (Dickey) O’Grady. My first dog, Jonathan, a.k.a. Jojo (William in Alamosa still remembers Jojo). Marguerite “Rusty” Mitchell, food editor at the Gazette, who dubbed the burg “a cemetery with lights.” My Zen bro Steve Milligan. My bike bros John “Usuk” O’Neill and Bill Baughman. “Doc” Lori Cohen, who put me back together every time I disassembled myself. Ike, a.k.a. Chairman Meow, the mini-kitty who fought off a coyote only to be felled by an enlarged heart.
Andy was a character in the second act of my little theatre of the absurd, in which I played a cycling journalist. A former technical director of the U.S. Cycling Federation who would later be dubbed “a problem promoter” by a top dog at that organization’s successor, USA Cycling, Andy was, simply put, a fool for bicycle racing.
He told me once: “Back, way back, in the late ’50’s through the mid-’70’s, I used my trusty Hallicrafters shortwave receiver to get Tour de France updates from the BBC in London on the hour. There was no other coverage anywhere here. I still have it within arm’s reach, though it’s long broken as tubes and parts are nearly impossible to find.”
Andy not only loved listening to bike racing, he loved watching it, on TV and in person, so much so that starting in 1991 he and his wife, Kathleen, began busting their butts promoting their Sand Creek Series of races in and around Colorado Springs, which despite the presence of USCF, USAC, and the rest of the Olympic “family” was woefully short of, y’know, like, actual bike racing, an’ shit.
The Bohlmann family — Andy, Kathy, and their sons, Matthew and Philip — picked up where that better-known, better-funded family left off.
Like another tireless Colorado race promoter, Boulder’s Chris Grealish, Andy could find a diamond of a course in the dung of unlikely places. The recurring nightmare “Hell on a Hillside,” for instance, which I remember as a vertical mountain-bike crit in Manitou Springs that was not at all tailored to my particular strengths, which were overshadowed by a multitude of weaknesses, primary among them a fear of death and/or dismemberment.
By turns goofy and grumpy this blue-collar bull in cycling’s china shop was forever tilting against the carbon-and-titanium windmills of the sport’s polo-shirt governance, and frequently found himself “in exile,” as he called it in a ceaseless torrent of emails to friends and foes. The Bohlmanns’ Sand Creek and Ascent Cycling races weren’t for the 1 percenters; they were for the rest of us.
Hell, they were there for you even if you didn’t know a chainring from a cassette. A 2013 race in Palmer Park sought donations to the Care and Share Food Bank for the firefighters battling the Black Forest blaze — at the time the state’s most destructive fire ever — and the residents affected by it.
As their sons grew and Kathleen fell ill in the mid-Nineties, Andy took on more responsibilities. There was college, and caregiving; he watched over his wife in their Colorado Springs home for nearly a quarter-century until she passed in 2013. He considered stepping away from cycling after that, but the boys encouraged him to carry on.
And so he did, until his own health took a wrong turn. I last caught his act at round four of the 2014 US Cup Pro Series in Pulpit Rock Park. In 2017, after we relocated to Albuquerque, he emailed to say he’d been out of the game for more than a year.
And then, on Aug. 1, son Matthew wrote to say his dad was gone altogether. A one-two punch — a stroke followed by the diagnosis of an inoperable cancer.
“He passed peacefully and comfortably at home with Philip and I with him,” he said. Good lads. They learned a lot from Kathleen and Andy, and not just about bicycle racing.
So there I was on Sunday, back at the old Bohlmann place on the east side of town, where my high-school pals and I used to act the fool in the boonies now buried under rooftops and retail.
Matthew and Philip had Jimmy Buffett on the stereo (“A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean”) and hoisted a pirate flag to a clangor of cowbells in a driving rain (Andy had taken a nautical turn at one point in his life, and it certainly felt as though we were at sea).
Stairway to heaven? The racers in the Mad Dog cyclocrosses at Monument Valley Park never called it that.
The mourners dined on Cuban sandwiches from a place he favored — call it a “Cuban Crime of Passion,” which of course I did — and shared memories face to face and over an Innertubes hookup for those who couldn’t attend in person. It was a fine sendoff for the old privateer.
Over the next couple of days, as sort of an homage, I visited a few of the courses Andy and I used for our respective events Back in the Day®: Palmer Park; Bear Creek Regional Park; Monument Valley Park
I brought a Steelman Eurocross and running shoes, but couldn’t get a whole lot of use out of either. The sky kept crying.
Not all of the fallen are found on the battlefield.
Some don’t turn up until later.
Less of both sorts, please.
Toward that end, what say we give our men and women in uniform better civilian leadership? It’s not much to ask of those of us here in the rear with the gear where there is no fear.
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