Category: Absent friends

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.

Notes from the road

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
Water? In the Rio? ¡Que milagro!

In Alamosa, the Rio Grande is actually a rio.

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.”