Category: Absent friends

Remembering Jethro

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Foreground, from left: Jim Martinez, who advised a mayor; Chris Coursey, who became a mayor; and Your Humble Narrator, in his final incarnation as a newspaperman, who would go on to blog about whatever to a small, deeply disturbed audience. Background, from left: Rudi Banuelos and Michael Brangoccio.

Chris James Martinez, a.k.a. Jethro, Santiago, Jim, et al., gave us the slip one year ago today.

You left us way too soon, homes. Some of us never got the chance to say “Adios” until you were dust in the wind.

Well, dust in a Chock full o’ Nuts coffee can, anyway.

After you hit the door running for the final time Larry, Kelly, and William got the old band back together and then some, first at the Bull & Bush in Glendale, and again in Alamosa, trying to sing you back home.

Sorry if it sounded more like the howling at the moon that was No. 1 on our El Rancho Delux hit parade Back in the Day™. Weren’t none of us exactly Jimmy Ibbotson, even then. More like Jimmy Beam, and near the bottom of the bottle, too. Talk about your long, hard roads.

Anyway, our serenades kept going to voice mail, or maybe to that answering machine I bought you way back when. It’s probably under those Glendale mondo-condos next to the Bull, with the rest of El Rancho. There’s an artillery piece at the Alamosa boneyard in case you want to call us back.

Thinking of you today, my brother. And of Lucy and Lawrence, too. Give them un abrazo for me.

R.I.P., Bob Weir

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Bob Weir fronting the Grateful Dead in Switzerland back in 1972.

“Lately it occurs to me / what a long strange trip it’s been.” — Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh

Bob Weir is off truckin’ for real now. The Grateful Dead mainstay was last seen headed west at 78. Years, not miles per hour.

I was never a huge Grateful Dead fan, though for years I looked more or less like their target market.

But who in their right minds, or even the wrong ones, didn’t love “Truckin’?” I mean, other than Robert Crumb, who came to hate his iconic “Keep On Truckin'” cartoon after it took off without him seeking someone else’s fortune, copyright law be damned.

I saw the Dead just once, on Sept. 3, 1972, at Folsom Field in Boulder. No idea how I got there — I may have had a driver’s license by then, but certainly no car. Could be I caught a ride with my old high-school bro’ and fellow music lover Bruce Gibson, if he wasn’t already in the Navy by then. I was in my first year at Adams State College in Alamosa, missing the dean’s list by light-years but probably making it onto a few less sought-after rosters.

We were way up in the cheap seats, and someone in the band — Jerry Garcia, maybe? — started throwing shiny objects to the crowd. Couldn’t quite make out what they were, thanks to our distance from the stage and the platoon of brain invaders setting up a perimeter in my cerebellum.

“Hell’s that?” I mumbled. “Cans of beer? Silver dollars?”

Nope. It was lids. Of weed. Oh, how I wanted me some of that San Francisco treat. But I seemed to have been lag-bolted to my seat in the nosebleed section and my mind soon wandered off by itself, muttering, “Forget this dude, he ain’t going nowhere.”

It came back, of course. Hence this blog.

It may be a while before we see Bob Weir again, Dog willing. But when we do, he’ll be jamming with Jerry, Phil Lesh, Pigpen, Robert Hunter and the rest of the old gang. Peace to him, his family, friends, and fans.

O’G and the Night Visitor

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The eastern sky on Christmas Eve morning.

I can’t say with a straight face that I’ve been a good boy this year.

So it must be that I was riding Herself’s coattails when Santa dropped off a holiday gift last night.

We both — yes, both of us — dreamed of our late cat Turkish.

The Turk at rest.

Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) left us far too early, on March 5, 2020. He and I reconnect now and again in dreams, but never have Herself and I met up with the old soldier at the same time.

In my dream, I was in bed, head propped on the pillows, but the bed was on the front porch of some vaguely familiar house from my past. I was just chillin’ there, watching the world pass by, when the Turk came aboard without so much as a bosun’s whistle and stretched out alongside me, as he did regularly when still he walked the earth.

Surprised to see my old comrade, I turned my head and said to Herself, who was nearby but out of sight, “Hey, check it out!” And then Someone hit the channel changer, the dream shifted gears, and I was lucky to have the warm memory of it when I awakened this morning.

Herself was scurrying around getting ready for work when I shambled into the kitchen and told her I’d dreamed of the big fella.

“I did too!” she said.

In her dream I wasn’t there, but her dad was, or might have been, though I don’t recall Bob Pigeon and the Turk being all that tight. He probably tried to explain how the Turk was going about the whole cat thing all wrong, and that would be as far as their relationship would ever go, because the field marshal was very much not interested in advice from junior officers.

Now, a cynic might write the whole visitation off as the upshot of eating spicy Mexican dishes for about a week straight, plus a few too many sugary seasonal treats.

But I know a gift when I see one. What a joy it was to have an old friend home for the holidays.

R.I.P., Joe Ely

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
I can’t remember the first time I heard this one.

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.

Flo turns turtle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
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.

Peace to Flo, his family, friends, and fans.