November

Being self-employed on any level – whether it’s a creative pursuit or not – is often a “feast or famine” proposition…there are long periods of idle anxiety punctuated by frantic scrambles to accommodate everything that comes at you.  I’ve had a friend for years who alternates between worrying whether he has enough work in the pipeline to pay his bills and not being able to answer the phone out of fear of distraction because there’s so much work to do.

I’ve almost always had a “day gig” of some sort to relieve those extremes in my own life, although it’s largely been an exercise in self-delusion…just because one has a regular job, it can often create a false sense of security.  These days, though, it’s been a blessing – working for the company I work for has given me a lot of freedom to say no to things that I’d otherwise have to do in order to pay the bills.  

But then there are months like this November, when it’s just plain hard to say no to the things that came my way.

I had agreed some time back to a show in St. Louis with the Poco next-of-kin, but in pretty short order I found myself with a Boneyard Hounds show the week after that in Philadelphia and was asked to fill a chair up front for one of the “Songwriters and Storytellers” series that I’ve participated in as a sideman in years past…so this year, I’d be participating in the rounds as well as doing my usual “utility” work when the others were playing.  A lot of heavy lifting, but – I mean, I couldn’t say no to that…any more than I could say no to a Dan May show in Sandusky at the Maritime Museum on the 6th, before the real roadwork kicked in.

All of this meant a weekend trip to the Great Lakes region of Ohio, coming back to Nashville to work for part of a week before heading north for that run of four shows, then back to Nashville in time to leave for the St. Louis show with the band, then coming home in time to leave for Philadelphia again – but mileage has never been a deterrent for me.  If you’ve been reading these missives for a while, you already know this.

Just the mileage associated with these runs would add up to a combined total of around 5200 miles.

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Sandusky, Ohio is home to me in ways that I can’t really associate with places where I’ve actually lived.

And that’s all Dan May’s fault.

We came to the realization – during this particular show, in fact – that Dan and I have been collaborating for fifteen years.  “Musical Years” are much like “Dog Years” in the sense that one of them counts for more than a typical 365 day unit of time in a lot of ways, and Dan has been one of a handful of folks that have made my life richer for having been a part of that particular collaboration…but with Dan, it goes a little deeper.  Dan has adopted me and his family has taken me in as one of them, and – well, Dan has a large, extended family in both the accepted biological sense and the broader definition of the word.

I’m an honorary citizen of Sandusky, Ohio – as declared by Dan and – from what I can tell – the majority of the population of the city.  And every time we go there, the relationship deepens somewhat…I could pack my car and drive to Sandusky tonight and there’d be a dozen places I could go, where I could knock on the door and be welcomed in.

I don’t think that’s true of my own hometown, really.

So these shows, when they present themselves, are pretty much a given for me.  Playing with Dan is just a layer of the cake…getting to spend time with his extended circle is a fringe benefit that’s become truly special to me over the years.

I left home right out of high school and the disdain I had for the place accompanied me everywhere I went for many, many years.  It never felt like home to me then, and even now it really just serves as a figurative storefront for a place that doesn’t really exist anymore – family has splintered and scattered to the four winds, and that’s probably the main reason I can go back now without a sense of uneasiness…the pins on the map I have in my memory have mostly fallen away after all these years, to the point where it’s largely just another town.

Sandusky doesn’t have the burden of carrying all my mental baggage from my formative years, though, and the town has been a blank slate for me to write my own stories – along with the help of this swath of humanity that’s adopted me.  

Going back there is “a gig”, to be certain – but the “hang” is the attraction for me.  And this show was no exception…a highlight, even.

Dan’s band of supporting musicians has taken on a new member over the past couple of years (and yeah, that sounds like a long time, until you consider the COVID sabbatical) – she came to us as a student of Anthony’s who’d graduated to an instructor role at the School of Rock.  The first time Claudia and I played together was at Sellersville Theater back in 2019, and the connection was pretty much instantaneous – we started playing The Glory Years during soundcheck and she was playing my part as if it were me playing it, and a circuit developed within just a few seconds of that first song.  I thought the first show was just a fluke, maybe – based on some of the other things in the air that particular night – but every time we’ve played together since, it’s been there…and I gotta admit, I struggle to describe it.

As a musician, most of us recognize these connections when they present themselves – it’s not a tangible thing that fits into a social construct (friend, family member, co-worker, spouse, et cetera) that most people recognize.  I mean, anyone who can play three chords can pick up a guitar and play those three chords with anybody else who has the base ability to operate the instrument – but the thing that separates those two random “three chord” folks from the musicians that stand out to us are the people who transcend the mechanics of the process and connect on the next level.  It’s playful and intimate and telepathic and satisfying on a level that’s – again, hard to describe.  But Claude and I landed in that place almost instantly, and it’s been there every single time we’ve played together since, and I treasure that.

with Dan May and Claudia Terry at the Sandusky Maritime Museum

This show was just the three of us – Dan, Claudia and I – and the show was pretty great for three people who’d only played together twice, but the part that I’ll remember long after I’ve forgotten the details of the show was…well, everything that happened after the show.

We went back to Jerry’s house afterward, the guitars came out and we played until…shit, I don’t know what time it was, honestly.  Pizza was ordered, nachos were served, and we passed guitars around and played and sang until literally everyone else had gone upstairs to bed except Claud, Kevin (Claud’s dad) and I.  Kevin plays as well, and towards the end of the night someone had mentioned that a riff I played sounded like Leader Of The Band, so I played it and that opened the portal into the Dan Fogelberg Wormhole – and Kevin started playing the opening chords to The Last Nail and that sealed the deal.  It was All Fogelberg, All The Time until everyone just ran out of gas.

After it was over, I got a text from Claud with a video attached of her dad and I playing The Last Nail from the night before, captioned:  “my dads”.

I packed it in after everyone retired for the night and drove over to the Opfers’ house (I’ve been Team Eddie for some years now, and that’s my home base whenever we’re there) and – predictably – they were long asleep, but I got a nice long breakfast hang with them when I woke up the next morning.  They’d been at Jerry’s the night before for the jam session, along with all the usual suspects, but the hang at the breakfast bar with Eddie and Julie – the quiet time to connect – is really priceless to me.

After a stop along the interstate to take photos of Kentucky Speedway to text back to Danny, it was back to Nashville for a minute before taking off for the Northeast.

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I was looking forward to the drive, having gotten a taste of the beginnings of the descent of autumn along the interstate driving south from Ohio.

I realized, though – after only a few miles on the trip north that this musical pilgrimage had fallen at a nearly perfect point in the trajectory of autumn for this year – the Sandusky run was a warmup, but the mountain ranges in southwest Virginia were particularly colorful on the trip northward, and I left early enough in the morning to burn off most of the pre-dawn hours traversing The Nothing (the stretch of I-40 between Nashville and Knoxville that Jayda nicknamed for the void that swallows up everything in “The Never Ending Story”) and I watched the sun come up through the windshield just as I was leaning into the northward stretch of I-81 towards Bristol.  I couldn’t have timed it more perfectly if I’d actually made an effort to line it all up.

Serendipity.

The first show was in Bridgeville, Delaware and my phone took me across 66 and through Washington DC, across to the stretch of route 50 that crosses from Annapolis into Delaware just as the sun was dipping towards the horizon – seriously, I couldn’t have planned the timing of this trip more perfectly if I’d tried.  I got to the venue and hauled my gear in for the first show and crossed my fingers.

I’ve done a bunch of these shows by just plugging the mandolin (or whatever other acoustic instruments I might have along for a particular show) into the same signal path I use for electric stuff – for quieter shows, I’ve managed to get away with it for a long time.  But after that disaster of a show in Wisconsin a while back, I made up my mind to start taking that signal path more seriously – so I bit the bullet and started putting together a pedalboard for the acoustic instruments (banjo, dobro, mandolin, and such) and got a separate amplifier to run those instruments through.  Since I’d be playing acoustic guitar during my turns in the round, that’d be a factor as well, so – I brought ALL OF IT for this trip.  It made for a long load-in and load-out, but the truth is – it made everything easier during the show.  I had discrete signal paths for each instrument, all run off a true-bypass loop pedal – a ToneBone PZ-Pre for acoustic guitar and mandolin, a FIshman Jerry Douglas Aura for the dobro, with delay and tremolo thrown in for good measure.  I’d bought a Boss EQ that I was going to add for banjo, but it was so noisy that I bailed on it.  It made my whole rig sound like it was next door to the airport – I’d assumed that Boss gear was solid enough not to have to worry about that sort of thing, but…well, lesson learned.  I wasn’t really using banjo for this run, so it wouldn’t be an insurmountable issue for these shows.

For the shows, I had a volume pedal in front of me for each pedalboard – those being the only things I really needed real-time access to…I’ve never really been a tap-dancer, I usually set the signal path before the song and run with it…both volume pedals fed their respective pedalboards and amps, pedalboards off to the side and amps well behind the stage.  I’d select the proper path for whatever instrument I was using and roll with it, and it was as close to painless as could really be possible for this array of stuff.  AND – the acoustic instruments sounded pretty great.  No feedback issues, the tremolo actually sounded great on both the dobro and the acoustic guitar when I saw fit to use it, and changing out was as simple as unplugging, replugging, and stepping on a button or two.  The only way it could’ve been easier would have been to have brought a tech along…it’s about as manageable as it gets for one guy.

As material went, I did the usual thing and didn’t really bother to rehearse or re-learn anything…I had a few songs that I knew I’d want to do, but I wanted to just react to what was happening on the stage with the other performers and I didn’t want to lock myself into anything where material was concerned – I did listen to a couple of my older songs on the drive up, just to refresh my memory and brush up on lyrics, but that was pretty much the extent of my preparation.  I knew I wouldn’t need a ton of material to begin with – the most I’d have to do would likely be six songs if we did two rounds of three songs each, and I could play six songs in my sleep.  I knew I’d end up doing two Poco-centric songs for sure, both “Crazy Love” and “Where Did The Time Go” would be in the bag – but I gave myself plenty of rope outside those two.

I did a couple of songs from “Our Mutual Angels” over the course of the run – Brand New Distance and Is That Enough – just because they popped into my head at specific times.  But I also did Craig Bickhardt’s Giant Steps and Craig Fuller’s Sure Do Miss You Now from the Friends and Heroes collection…I did Tom Petty’s Southern Accents one night, as well.  Nik Everett surprised me by showing up for the second night of the run, so I pulled out Uncle Tom’s Cafe for that show, and I did Bitter And The Sweet for another – but those were the only new-ish songs I bothered to do…since none of that stuff was available at the merch table yet.

Seeing Nik was a welcome sight – we both tried a hand at doing the math, and neither of us could remember having seen one another since before I moved to Nashville in 2014…and that it might have actually been at one of the Bob Dylan Birthday Bash shows at Rembrandt’s back in the day…which would easily be ten years.  Nik was the last person I saw before I drove away from the Smyrna Opera House that night on my way back to Sol Knopf’s house, where I stayed the first two nights (as did Jesse Terry and his family).

I’ve known Sol for years, but in all that time I’d never had an opportunity to spend any real time with him, other than at shows – but we got a chance to connect during this trip that we hadn’t really had before.  A couple of great post-show hangs with long conversations, including the story of the night he met his wife and how her father factored into it…I won’t tell it here because I likely won’t do it justice, but…it’s a great story.

Sol connected me with a writer for an interview not long before I made the trip, and he used nearly everything from our conversation – which was surprising, because usually it’s a matter of bits and pieces – but we’d talked specifically about Sol during our conversation, and I made some unsolicited observations about him that I thought were just part of the banter, but that he ended up using in the article.  I told him that one of the things I always admired about Sol was how evident his love for his home state was in his work, how it was clearly part of his identity, and the only other songwriter I could really think of who’d managed to pull off having that same sense of place in their work was Springsteen – that to me, Sol was just as synonymous with Delaware as the Boss was to New Jersey.  Not in a heavy-handed, Jimmy Buffett fashion…but with a modicum of actual grace.

And honestly, after spending some actual daylight driving around the state a bit that weekend…I get it.

If you’ve spent any time there, you get it as well…you don’t need me to tell you. 

Three of the four shows were in Delaware, save for a show in suburban Philadelphia that had JD Malone subbing for Sol (he had a previous show on the schedule) – Claudia came to the show and she and I went out for dinner with JD and Tommy after the show before I headed over the bridge to spend the night at Casa Del Tearson before the last show of the run the next night.  Cindy Pierson (widow of legendary soundman George) and Carolyn Miller came over the next morning with breakfast for a nice hang before I left for the final show.

After we wrapped up the final show of the run, I went back to Sol’s in Smyrna and we stayed up with the family and had pizza before bed.

I got up the next morning at a much earlier hour than I’d normally get up and set out on a slightly different route home.  I decided that, since I was already so far south, I’d deviate from the typical Interstate path home…I was going to follow route 13 all the way south through Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia – across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and into Norfolk and across Virginia to connect with I-81 around Wytheville and home from there.  It was several hours longer than the typical drive home, but I had hoped it’d be worth it…and it was, largely – although I found myself wishing I’d done it during the summer when the days were longer and I had the extra daylight.

I got home in time to dump my gear from the northeast run and re-tool for the acoustic Poco gig in St. Louis and leave some 36 hours later – Jack, Rick and I had decided to rent a minivan for the run and drive up and back together.

The first thing I noticed when I got to Rick’s house to load up was that our rental van had Colorado plates.

I see you, boss.  I see you.

This set was essentially a reprise of the set we’d played at Wildwood a month earlier – a short set of Poco songs for a lifelong fan who was retiring from his position as director of the St. Louis Zoo.  He turned out to be a wonderful guy.  It was also convenient, in that there was a seller just outside St. Louis who’d listed a Source Audio programmable EQ pedal that I’d been looking for – to use on my acoustic pedalboard and he was nice enough to drop it off at the hotel for me.  I got in a nice walk through Clayton in suburban St. Louis (I could see the arch from my hotel window) and Mary (Rusty’s wife) and I closed the bar the night before we left to return home to Nashville.

Another down day at home before reloading the car to head back to Philadelphia for a show with Michael Braunfeld and the Boneyard Hounds – our first post-COVID show as a band.  It was a loud affair, to be certain, and there was a pretty stubborn layer of rust to shake off, but that’s a journey that begins with a single step, and we definitely took it that night.  There was a great crew of friends who came out to the show to support the band, and we did our best to make it worth their while.

Another night at Casa Del Tearson after a nighttime drive through Philadelphia to reacquaint myself with the skyline…and left the next day to cross the river and do a little shopping for the family before returning to Nashville.  I picked up some V&S fries, some Hippies’ ring bologna, some Chicken Pot Pie and some block swiss cheese (which appears to have gone extinct here in Nashville for some reason) to bring back to the kids to jog their memory.  I felt my stomach sink when I drove by the now-empty building where Queen City operated for over a quarter century…I knew to expect it when I turned the corner, but the knowing didn’t do much to quell the impact of the sight of it.  But I stocked up and made it back to Nashville in the dead of the night, leaving a bag of groceries on Jayda’s doorknob in the dead of the night…it was cold enough that I knew it’d keep ok.

Thanksgiving came not long afterward, and I made a point of assembling myself a Pennsylvania Dutch charcuterie plate full of what I’d have expected to find on the long table at Maplewood avenue back in the day – ring bologna, cheese, and kettle chips.  I’d put thousands of miles on the odometer over the previous couple of weeks, but it had been fulfilling on multiple levels…personally and musically…and I was thankful for new memories to add to the archive.  

So why not celebrate with a plate full of processed meat and cheese, huh?

“I’m just an open stage singer…”

I’m all but certain that Ray Naylor was younger than I am now when we first met, over a quarter century ago.

That’s an important thing for me to realize today, because it helps me put my respect for him into a perspective that I couldn’t fully understand back then, when Ray would come to the Monday night hangs at the Grape Street Pub – I mean, I had met Ray some years before when I was hopping from one open mike to the other, trying to figure out how this whole thing was supposed to work, but “The Grape” was a different animal for a number of reasons.

Grape Street Pub on a Monday night in the mid-nineties was probably the closest I’ll ever come to the Troubadour Experience of the late sixties and early seventies, when a horde of artists I’d come to love and look up to were all hustling, getting their thing together and figuring out who they were.

Monday nights were the one night of the week that most of us weren’t gigging somewhere else, and the Grape became a hot spot – songwriters came there for the hang first, and for the opportunity to play second…or maybe third or fourth, depending on who you might ask. It was an exciting time to be an artist in Philadelphia, and all the stars aligned for our little ragamuffin community.

Of course, whenever something becomes hot or trendy, all the tasteless and talentless wannabes line up to crash the party, hoping that some of the mojo will rub off on them, and there was plenty of that as well – but cliques tend to drive out folks with any degree of self-awareness that can sense when they’re not wanted, and you had to put in the work to become part of that family…and that’s exactly the way we wanted it.

Ray Naylor was easily older than most of us were at the time, and I remember thinking that there was something innately awesome about this guy who’d come in and get up and play Phil Ochs songs, peppered by his own compositions that were proudly and unashamedly carved from the Macdougal Street/Village tradition…because, Goddamnit, Ray was who he was, and he was defiantly uninterested in pretending to be something other than the sum of his own parts.

At the time, it was just a modicum of general respect on my part – but now that I’m likely older than he was then, I’m able to appreciate it in ways I never could’ve at the time.

I moved to Nashville almost ten years ago and realized – far too late to change course – that for me, there comes a time in ones’ life when it really is too late to start over. I couldn’t see myself going to the Five Spot or the Wash and becoming the East Nashville Version of the Steve Buscemi meme (“what’s up, fellow kids?”) and pressing new flesh and trying to navigate an entirely new musical community – aside from the fact that every possible manner of crazy shit befell us during that first couple of years, I just felt any motivation to try to do that, to be that guy – it just ran down the drain.

But at that same age, Ray was coming to the Grape and getting up in front of a room half-filled with Villanova Douchebags who couldn’t decide if they wanted to be Kurt Cobain or Dave Matthews and topped off with a bunch of self-absorbed folks staring up their own asses and complaining that they didn’t get to play because they were too cool to write their names on the damned sheet.

Everyone was trying to claw their way up the food chain, but Ray Naylor didn’t give a shit about any of that.

I don’t know that he ever aspired to anything more than what life ultimately revealed to him, but he never hung it up – he wrote songs, he made records (I got to contribute a few instrumental parts to one of them at Daoud Shaw’s studio years ago), and he ultimately found a home in radio, hosting his own folk show for some time.

The last Facebook post I saw from Ray was only a couple of weeks ago, when he announced that he was turning the reins of his show over to new hosts, and my first thought was – why?

I didn’t know anything about Ray’s health situation, as we haven’t really stayed in touch (Ray has that in common with a great many people, and it’s both a regret and a safety mechanism for me, it seems. I’m at a loss to explain it.) – but this afternoon I saw a post as I was leaving the office that he’d passed away during open heart surgery.

I feel like this little corner of the internet has become nothing more than a perpetual last stop for friends shuffling off the mortal coil, and I’m using the term “obituweary” a lot this past couple of years – it’s a thing.

Ray – thanks for showing all those roomfuls of kids what it means to be who you are without getting caught up in the trappings of nonsense.

It took a long time to rub off, but I think I understand it now.

Requiem For A Legend

A photo from the “Legend”-era lineup of Paul Cotton and Rusty Young displayed at Sunday’s memorial service

Like most people, I suppose there are a number of things that I tend to believe selectively…when it’s convenient, or when it suits my narrative.

Probably at the top of that list would be the old adage that “everything happens for a reason”.  Seems solid enough when it works to ones’ advantage, but I haven’t found much use for that one for a good long while…

…until this past weekend, maybe.

George Grantham (original Poco drummer, 1968-1977 and 2000-2004) had planned on making a “road trip” out of the sojourn to Wildwood Springs Lodge for Rusty Young’s memorial shows and service with his wife Debbie, so they’d have their own transportation available while they were there…Debbie isn’t big on depending on other folks to get them from place to place, and she felt up for the drive – but fate intervened in the form of a transmission issue that ended up quarantining their car at the garage well past when they’d have needed it back in order to make the trip.

Most of you know that George suffered a stroke onstage during a show in Springfield MA that effectively retired him from the road, although he’s made a number of appearances at special shows – he got up and played drums and sang “Pickin’ Up The Pieces” with the band at Wildwood in 2019, even.

If you stop by to read these missives on even a sporadic basis, you know that I’ve known George almost as long as I’ve known Rusty and Paul – nowadays, we live in the same city – so I wanted to do what I could to make sure the Granthams were able to be in Steelville for this last Wildwood Weekend if I could.

We hatched a plan to bring two cars, since Wendy and Danny were planning to come anyway – gear in one, luggage in the other – and Debbie rode along with Wendy while George rode shotgun with me.

I loaded a few decades’ worth of Poco and Buffalo Springfield MP3’s onto a flash drive and brought it along…and once we got everyone loaded up and said goodbye to Dusty (the Grantham’s fierce, man-eating attack dog), we started up Interstate 24 headed north to Missouri.

We started out making small talk here and there, but when the lulls between dialogue started to get longer, George started singing along to the Poco archive I’d been playing in the car since we left.

Half an hour or so up the road, Paul’s “Bad Weather” came on, and it froze both of us for a couple seconds or so, but then George went back to singing…and I took a harmony part right along with him.

Me being me, I immediately thought that “I’ve gotta get a snippet of this.  For me.  To remember the drive and the moment.”  I pulled out my phone and held it up to the drivers’ side window and recorded thirty seconds or so of the two of us singing along with Paulie – George was blissfully unaware of what I was doing.  But before I put my phone away, I held it up to my ear to listen to what I’d captured, and…

…I’ll be damned if George didn’t sound like…well, George Grantham!

I rationalized it in my head as I was doing it – “there are a ton of folks who want to be there this weekend that can’t be there, and they’d get a kick out of this.  Maybe it’ll make them feel like they’re along for the ride” – and I uploaded it to Instagram and cross-posted it to Facebook with the hashtag:

#countryrockcarpoolkaraoke

My phone started buzzing on a regular basis as folks commented on the post on both platforms, so I kept recording us, and we kept singing…and singing…for damn near the whole six-plus hour drive.

I almost got away with it for the entire trip – that is, until we stopped for a bathroom break less than an hour from our destination.  Debbie had no reason to think that I was doing it without George’s knowledge, so she mentioned it to him before we got back into the car to finish the trip and…well, I had to come clean.

George was all for it – and when we’d gotten checked into the hotel and went out for dinner, I showed him the dozens and dozens of comments people had left on the videos and he was clearly moved to see how many people were passing along well-wishes and love from various corners of the world.  He even got the chance to listen to a couple of them, in between torrential blankets of rain that threatened to drown out whatever conversation might’ve been taking place at the table.

GG reading social media comments on my iPhone

After dinner, I had planned on making good on my promise to screen a showing of “Count Me In” for George, but the WiFi was on the fritz, so we had to settle for a rerun of the Muscle Shoals documentary from my laptop’s hard drive instead…thus ended the first of three consecutive nights of post-midnight bedtimes.

Watching Muscle Shoals in the room at the Wagon Wheel Motel with Madison Thorn, Wendy, Debbie and Danny (sleeping)

Jack, Rick and I had spent some time discussing and curating the setlist for the Wildwood shows – trying to be sensitive to EVERY consideration possible, pacing the two sets and setting the theme for the first set as a tribute to Rusty – the reason the three of us were there in the first place, founder of the band and keeper of the fire for 53 years.

There were half a dozen videos that had been selected for the shows, plus a pair of videos that Richie Furay had sent in – one with some reminiscences about Rusty and Paul and another with a solo acoustic performance of “Bad Weather” and “Crazy Love”.  I spent several days writing a script, recording voiceover, soliciting recorded input from friends and band members, editing audio and video for a tribute film we showed at the very beginning of the first set – the video ended with Rusty playing the chorus of “Where Did The Time Go” and I was to be seated with my guitar in hand when he hit the final chord and would start the first verse of the full-length version of the song just as he finished…then Mary walked onto the stage and put Rusty’s trademark hat onto the headstock of his guitar as Jack started playing “Old Hat” (a song that he and Rusty had written together that – coincidentally, Rusty played as his solo acoustic offering at the very first Poco show I ever saw) – from there, we’d play “Us”, the first song Rusty ever sang on a Poco record…you get the picture.  We had some flexibility in the second set, but the first set was pretty solidly written in stone.

On Friday when we went to load in and soundcheck, I asked Jack and Rick how they felt about having George up for the first three songs of the second set – we had already planned on him doing his traditional appearance on “Pieces”, but he was in pretty great voice, and I knew that he was familiar enough with the three songs at the top of the second set that it’d be pretty low risk to have him up.  We conducted the world’s quickest unanimous “yes” vote and it was on.  

We ran through a few things to make sure everything was working – I had to improvise a pedal board on the spot, as I hadn’t had any time the previous week to get it together (I spent literally every non-working waking hour on finishing Rusty’s tribute video…the one I had done the year before to launch the Poco YouTube page was a solo effort with practically zero input, but this one was very much a communal effort, which quadrupled the time factor) – but I cobbled together a workable setup to get me through the weekend.

I felt that if I could just get through that first song both nights, I’d be OK.

night one of Wildwood Weekend – playing “Rose of Cimarron”

Thankfully, I actually DID get through the first song without a hitch both nights, but my brain was so scattered that I managed to forget lyrics to a song each night in mid-sentence…once per show, a different song for both shows.  I reversed verses for “One Tear at a Time” on Friday night, and my brains just ran down my nose during “Call it Love” on Saturday night.  

We got through the first set – the Rusty Set – and I went and got George and brought him up for the three songs that kicked off the second set:  “Child’s Claim to Fame”, “Kind Woman”, and “Pickin’ Up The Pieces”, and he sang his ass off.

GG doing his thing during the second set, night one

When every other memory of last weekend has faded, the one I’ll cling to will be George walking off to a round of applause after finishing those songs, and taking his seat in the front row…then noticing that people hadn’t stopped applauding yet, at which point he stood up and turned around to the sight of THE ENTIRE HOUSE ON ITS FEET.

Watching George from my vantage point a few feet away as he turned around and looked around the room, soaking in all that love…that, my friends, was a moment.

Final bow, end of the Friday night show

Saturday morning, Michael Webb dragged himself out of bed after having played the Ryman with Amanda Shires the night before and drove all the way there to be a part of that night’s show, and to be there for Rusty’s memorial service the next day.  He gave me an impromptu tour of the “Poco Wing” of the lodge, where they’d come to take care of overdubs for “All Fired Up” and told me about moving the furniture around in the rooms to accommodate the band’s recording hijinks. 

in the “Poco Wing” of Wildwood Springs Resort with Michael Webb – who remembers where all the bodies are buried

 There was a lunch get-together that afternoon at an AirBnB rented by longtime friends Marc and Sharon…we got up and got ourselves ready to head out that way and very nearly got lost, pulling into the driveway of the host – who was apparently pretty accustomed to having to take folks by the hand and lead them to the property, which he happily did for us.  We stayed for a bit, but left earlier than I’d have liked, because we hadn’t gotten back to the hotel until almost 1AM the night before, and I wanted George to have a chance to rest up for the show that night, as it was almost certain that it would go at least as late as the night before had gone.

For that night’s show, we kept George up for the original three songs at the beginning of the second set PLUS “Keep On Tryin’”, and I made sure he knew the queue to come back up for “Good Feelin’ To Know” at the end of the night…a couple of people had needled me about playing “Wildwood” during the set, but the night seemed long enough as it were without getting too carried away with solo stuff.  And sure enough, it was again well after midnight when we left to return to the hotel on Saturday night as well.

Saturday night show, with Maestro Webb on accordion

Sunday morning, Debbie had a predictably tough time getting George out of bed and ready to go to the church for Rusty’s service, but he pulled through.  I’d talked to him on the way there about whether he wanted to say anything during the service or not, and he had somewhat mixed feelings about it…I told him that he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to, and that nobody expected him to if he wasn’t up for it, but – that if he did, I’d walk up with him if he wanted…and he said he’d decide once he got there.  I went back to where he was sitting after I’d gone up and spoken and he seemed a little intimidated by the notion of going up (Debbie told me later that she’d had to nudge him a couple times to keep him awake, and I felt bad that we’d kept him up so late the past few nights…but I can’t imagine he’d have had it any other way.)

Everyone from the band had great stories – Michael talked about playing a B3 part for a song on “All Fired Up” on the day Jon Lord from Deep Purple died, and about getting the call from Rick Alter, asking if he “knew anybody” that might fit what Rusty was looking for when he had to replace Paul Cotton in the band.  Jack talked about being taken out for all manners of food he’d never had before when Rusty brought him into the fold, and about hearing from Rusty when he’d decided to move to Missouri to be with Mary.  Rick Lonow talked about the difference between the “Poconuts” and the typical hangers-on that so many other bands attracted and how the ‘Nuts have eclipsed that stereotype to become a huge extended family, bound together by this music.

That, after all, is why we were all there.

Post Saturday night group Poconut photo, courtesy of Madison Thorn

This music drew us all in at some point in our lives, and upon being drawn into this family, the people within the family itself came to mean as much to us as the music did.  Yeah, I would’ve still loved the music if I’d never gotten to know the band and the extended family, but – maybe not quite enough to drive all night to a show on the other side of the state or up the coast…or make a trek to a mountainside in the Ozarks every third weekend of October for decades to be a part of “Wildwood Weekend”.

I talked to more than one person who’d driven fifteen hours – twenty hours – a day and a half – to be there this weekend.  Others who’d suffered through some odd flavor of airline torture…and one poor soul who stepped through the front door during the final song of the night on Friday night and missed the entire show.

There was a woman who sat in the front row and sobbed while we sang “Crazy Love” for the last time.

These are folks who’ve made this trip faithfully, year after year – and weren’t about to miss one last chance to come say goodbye to their favorite band with the rest of their family.

Sweet Tooth Potluck at the Super8 in Cuba has been a Wildwood tradition for some time…and George had to be there.

The music was the main course, but it was about so much more than that…and Rusty kept that fire burning for half a century.  We played Rusty’s songs, we played Paul Cotton songs (“Heart of the Night”, “Indian Summer”, among others) and we celebrated the music…because that will outlive them both.  But we celebrated more than just “the band” – we were taking stock of the fact that we’re all only here for a short time, and every goodbye may be The Last Goodbye.

They were there to mourn the losses of Rusty and Paul, but we were also mourning the loss of this unique thing that had grown up around the music, around the band and the personalities involved – as people have come and gone, as the band has changed, as we’ve collectively grown older and as we’ve lost some of our old-timers (Naomi, Zog, Claudia, and a host of others), the family has persevered.

None of us really know what any of this looks like moving forward, but The Last Wildwood Weekend felt like a good time to confront the fact that what we’d always known it to be was over…and we were saying goodbye to that, too.

George was pretty drained when we left the service, and Debbie had to work the next day – so we bowed out of an invitation to Mary’s afterward so we could get on the road.  But everyone was hungry, so we ended the weekend where it started: at Frisco’s in Cuba – home of Danny’s New Favorite Chicken Nuggets.

George and Debbie at Frisco’s on the way home – EVERYBODY had the nuggets during the last visit.

The place was very nearly empty, so we were thankfully in and out in pretty short order…but while we were sitting there, the faint strains of the piano intro from “Tiny Dancer” wafted in from somewhere, and (with the exception of Danny, who does NOT sing in public) the rest of us all started singing along on the chorus, right there at the table.

And yeah…no one needed to tell me….

“You ARE home.”

Some light news and some heavy history

So if you’ve been paying any attention at all to my social media lately, you’re likely aware that something is underfoot.

Yes, it’s true…I’m working on not one, but TWO new albums and three projects, all simultaneously.

One will be a 25 year anniversary re-release of Our Mutual Angels, due out next year that will include the original record plus a handful of restored rough mixes from the period the record was created, plus a handful of newly recorded versions of some of the songs.

The other will be the first actual full-length release of original material SINCE Our Mutual Angels, and work on that record is already in progress.

The third, and the one that will see the light of day first, is an album I’m calling Out To Pasture.

It’d be easy to call it a “tribute record”, but it’s a little more than that.

It’s an album, but it’s also a love letter…a sympathy card, a goodbye note, a bedtime story…it’s a collection of songs written by Rusty Young and Paul Cotton, but it also contains two original songs – one of them a moody rocker called Legends, one of them a song that I wrote during Poco‘s last Wildwood Springs Lodge shows in 2019, and one of them a posthumous co-write with Rusty Young – you’ll certainly hear more about this once the record is ready to see the light of day.

It’s the best way I could think of to say goodbye to a band that I’ve loved for as long as I can remember, and that’s essentially what it is…the sound of saying goodbye.

I have to say, though…jumping back into this process has been…well, it’s been a bunch of things.

Since I lack anything resembling the gift of brevity, pour yourself a drink and I’ll elaborate if you like.

There’s some part of me that’s varying combinations of voyeur and historian that has been and remains fascinated with other peoples’ creative process.  And yeah, I love the road stories and the nostalgia and the gear nerd stuff and all the trappings of the rock and roll part of it, sure…but watching those Classic Albums documentaries and “the making of…” – those land in a different spot for me.

It’s one thing to think about what the air in the room might’ve been like at a particular show or during a particular moment with certain people in the room – but I find myself much more drawn to thoughts of what it would’ve been like to have been at Joni Mitchells’ house the night Crosby, Stills and Nash sang together for the first time…to have been in that tiny dressing room the night David Lindley walked in with his fiddle and played Song For Adam with Jackson Browne on the night they met…to have been in the studio looking over Brian Wilson’s shoulder as he was leading the Wrecking Crew though the Pet Sounds sessions…to have been on the other side of the glass as a baby Dan Fogelberg was layering the wordless harmonies that precede the final verse of To The Morning for his first album.

Standing by the pool while Keith Moon throws a television into the water is happenstance.

Playing a great show is varying degrees of chemistry and mechanics, and it doesn’t happen if both aren’t present – you have to be able to play, and you have to be able to contribute an ingredient to a recipe that doesn’t come from anywhere else.  Yeah, it’s dexterity on a base level, but the thing that takes it from being a recital to being an event – that’s chemistry.

The creative process, though – there are ingredients, but it’s almost impossible to break it down, because the ingredients are different almost every time.

Janis Ian made her landmark record Between The Lines at a studio in Blauvelt, NY that was also used by The Ramones and Bruce Springsteen – so while the technical tools are a common thread in translating art to physical product, that’s really all the responsibility the recording medium bears for the end result.

Leland Sklar played bass on some of the most important records of my formative years, but he also played bass with Billy Cobham’s Spectrum, Lee Ritenour, Enrique Iglesias and Toto – great players are able to adopt to a host of musical styles and the ones favored for session work are often chameleons that adapt to their surroundings.  In fact, that’s often a factor in getting the gig in the first place.  So they’re an ingredient, to be certain – but you could use the same core players for a James Taylor record that you used for a Randy Newman record and the result would be significantly different – so you can’t guarantee an outcome by using the same studio with the same players, then.

The producer?  Some producers (Phil Spector, Jeff Lynne, Daniel Lanois, Roy Thomas Baker and a few others come to mind) will walk into a project with specific gear or instruments or some other such stash of “secret weapons” that invariably ensure that whatever record they’re working on sounds just like every other record they’ve ever been associated with.  (For proof, listen to Roy Orbison’s You Got It next to any ELO track next to the Wilburys’ Handle With Care next to pretty much anything off Tom Petty’s Into The Great Wide Open and make your best argument that I’m wrong.  I’ll wait. This isn’t to say it’s the wrong approach – I mean, the guy has been phenomenally successful, and that’s probably in large part to the fact that he does put his fingerprint on his work. I’m not judging, just making a point.)  Others, like Rick Rubin or T-Bone Burnett will specialize in a genre of music that’s dear to them but can bring their chops to just about anything and make it better as a result of their presence.

Again, certainly an ingredient – but not the one that defines the recipe.

At the root of it all, there has to be a vision that drives the process – that informs the choice and the use of the gear, that informs the choice and assignments of the musicians, that informs the choice of songs and material, and that leads the musical contribution to the realization of the end product.  Sometimes it’s a singular vision, sometimes it’s a collective, but that process – that translation of a vague notion into an end result – that flavor of creativity has always fascinated me.

Whose idea was it to assemble the giant tape loop of cash registers that required two people to maintain tension with a pair of spindles on microphone stands that resulted in the intro to Money, from Dark Side of the Moon?

The huge, assembled mass of pianos playing a massive C chord in unison for the ending of A Day In The Life?

The backwards drums on Are You Experienced?

The Beatles literally inventing flanging by experimenting with multiple tape recorders?

And yet – while my imagination was fired by hearing these sounds I’d never heard before, the flip side of that coin – artists just sitting down in front of a microphone and plainly stating a lyric and a melody – was what really stirred my soul.

Jackson Browne singing Something Fine…Joni Mitchell on Marcie…Fogelberg singing Stars…BW Stevenson singing If I Pass This Way to close side two of his My Maria album…there was no technical wizardry, no trickery, no manipulation that somehow transformed a mechanical act of dexterity into art.  It was fully formed, and captured for posterity by technology.

That, to me, was more magical than flipping over a reel of tape and using it as a rhythm track.

By the time I was of an age to be able to write my own songs, home recording was just gaining a foothold and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on my first Tascam 244 – and I annoyed the shit out of my roommate in the barracks recording guitar parts and overdubbing vocal harmonies across the room…but there was no going back after that.

I dove headfirst into songwriting at that point, fascinated by the mystery that shrouded the songwriting process, and the sheer volume of possibilities made available by the recording process.  There appeared to be very few set rules for either – other than basic notions regarding song structure and technical no-no’s like “don’t let the meters go too far into the red” and things of that nature.  Both pursuits felt self-perpetuating…the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew and how much more there was to discover – and like any addiction, the more I got…the more I wanted.

My first songs were terrible, and my first recordings…if such a thing could be possible…were worse.  But there existed a hunger to do the necessary work to get better, to improve my craft, and to try to crystallize some form of creative vision and improve my ability to channel that vision into a finished song or a finished recording.

One of the first things I learned to make peace with, though – even at that early stage – was the notion that the finished product (for me, anyway) seldom matched what I’d initially heard in my head when I started down that days’ particular path.  I’d get close sometimes, really close other times – but the process itself would almost always make its own set of suggestions, and other doors would open that I hadn’t anticipated…and sometimes that can be exhilarating, but other times – when there’s a specific sonic goal that you’re reaching for and can’t quite grab – the resulting frustration comes in a multitude of flavors, from irritation to self-loathing to crippling doubt to waves of inferiority, jealousy and envy of others’ creative output, right up to the edge of defeat and resignation.

When things are going well, when juices are flowing and the results are satisfying and rewarding, there’s nothing else like it.

When that’s not the case…I’m not very good company.

Some who’ve witnessed those periods would say that’s an understatement.

I’ve sacrificed relationships (and one marriage) at this particular altar.  When I resign myself to the notion of making a record, it becomes a consuming pursuit, and – as mentioned – it’s a knee-jerk carnival ride from elation to despair and back again from start to finish.  The things that derail me are often things that have little to nothing to do with creativity – album art, publicity and promotion, duplication of the final physical product, things of that nature.

But when the thing that’s under the microscope is something of a creative nature, it becomes much, MUCH harder to traverse.  If there’s a problem with the artwork or the duplication, that’s usually reparable via a few emails or spending a little more money – but when there’s a speedbump in the actual creative process that you just can’t seem to smooth out…well, often there are no tangible methods to overcome that, other than continuing to chase the result you hear in your head.  Sometimes it’s attainable and sometimes it’s not, and when it’s not – scar tissue can build up beneath the effort you’ve thrown at it, and if you’ve missed the mark – it colors everything that comes afterward.

Sometimes it’s a technical limitation…hell, MOST of the time it’s a technical limitation, whether it’s related to gear, or a personal inability to execute the thing I hear in my head.  Often it’s the distance between the sound I’m trying to capture and the sound that’s actually being recorded – and the energy and effort put into trying to nail it down descends into one or more flavors of frustration, especially when nothing translates the way you want it to.  Or you’re trying to play a part a certain way and no matter how many times you run it, nothing that’s coming from beneath your fingers works or fits the framework of the song in the manner you’d imagined and you end up deciding that you’re just not up to the task on any level.

My first self-produced commercially available collection of songs was a self-titled cassette release I did over thirty years ago…I started the project in a studio that was based on ½” 8 track analog recording, but the producer folded up shop in the middle of the record, so I felt obligated to find another studio that used the same format, since I’d already bought tape for the project – the guy I ended up using was a pretty headstrong guy with a brain full of weird notions, and I ended up hating both that record AND the songs on it.  (I’ve since seen a pattern in a lot of artists who look at their first recorded efforts through similar lenses, but trust me – I’m right about this.)

It took me another six years to make a follow-up.  I started looking around at studios within a year or two of making the first record, but there was always something that nudged me away.  I can’t say for sure anymore whether it was the bad taste in my mouth from the first time around, but I knew that I’d missed the mark I set in my head by a mile, and I wasn’t gonna go through that process again without feeling a lot more comfortable with my choice next time around.  I laid a lot of blame on the room and the gear, but I also knew next to nothing about the process of making a record, and I needed to fill in a lot of blanks…which I set out to do.

Still, there were a couple of misfires and false starts before I tripped over my own feet and fell backwards into the arms of Steve Jay, who opened his studio to me and became not just a producer and engineer but a partner in making Our Mutual Angels.  Still, at the time, I had a very different record in my head than what ended up in my hands – because Steve was so passionate and so hands-on and knew so much more than I did about the process, I made a conscious decision to let go and hand him the reins.  And honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had a better experience making a record than I did with that one.  Sure, there were some things I might’ve changed in the moment, but I can still listen to that record all these years later and be fine with the end result, and I can’t say for sure that this would be the case if I’d forced some of those decisions in my own favor.

The net result of that experience, though – having that relationship with Steve and feeling like Longview (Steve’s studio) was my musical and creative home – was that when that door closed (literally, as Steve moved to the west coast not long after OMA was released), I didn’t even really look for another place to make records after that.  The chilly reception that the record received after all the work and love we put into it soured me on the entire collective experience of writing songs, making records, flinging myself out into the world as an “artist” – and almost everything associated with it.  Almost.

I found in pretty short order that I could scratch a lot of the same itches by playing in other peoples’ bands, and do so without the stress and risk associated with being The Name On The Marquee.

So for a long, long time – that’s what I did.

It would be almost a decade – 2006 – before I made another record, and it was easily the worst effort of my life so far…a self-produced, self-recorded set of demo recordings released as Noises From The Basement, made on ADAT recorders with a RAMSA console and cheap outboard gear and microphones.  Totally unlistenable to me now, really – and I haven’t even tried in a long, long time.

I made it on a lark as the social media era was just getting underway, on the premise that I could just make records at home, sell them over the internet, and play shows whenever I felt like it, but I ended up hating the record so much that it took another seven years before I worked up the nerve to do it again.

During my stint with Marshall Tucker Band, someone made an offhand remark that I could probably do an entire record of songs written by people I’d played with – by this time, I’d done a lot of session work and felt a lot more comfortable with the notion of possibly recording myself again.  Gear had changed quite a bit, and recording to the computer has become the industry standard – as such, I could get decent results with good converters, a few nice microphones and preamps…how hard could it be, right?

Well, the gear may change as years go by, but the second guessing and crippling self-doubt will follow you from room to room forever, once you let it in the house…and it’s been a constant companion of mine for as long as I’ve been able to push down the guitar strings hard enough to get a clean note from them.

Friends And Heroes was an ambitious concept – a double CD with one disc devoted to songs written by artists I’d actually collaborated with in either live or studio settings, and a second disc devoted to artists who’d been an inspiration for me to follow the path that I did.  Conceptually, it was very heavy on “warm and fuzzy” for me, and I was genuinely excited about making the record – and I have to acknowledge that part of the attraction for me was that it contained ZERO Tom Hampton songs, as I still hadn’t quite gotten back to a place where I felt like sharing anything I’d written with the world at large.  One of the reasons that Noises happened in the first place was because it was a split of cover songs with a few leftover originals on it that I’d written during the OMA period, and my will to write just dried up after that record was ignored to the extent that it was.  I took that personally, as an editorial commentary on the worth of my work…largely because I had let myself believe that it had more worth in the eyes of other people than it did to me personally.  And at the time, I might’ve been right.  But with this new project, I could hide behind other peoples’ songs and make a record with my name on it with what felt like a legitimate purpose for making it – to pay tribute to the folks who’d trusted me to add something to their records or live performances over the years.  I had an unreleased Dan May song, an unreleased Craig Bickhardt song, an unreleased JD Malone song…and a Robert Hazard song called Summerland that we’d only played twice before his passing…and would’ve been lost to the ages if Brian Light hadn’t recorded a performance of the song on a radio show Robert and I did as a duo.  I pulled some great songs from elsewhere in my orbit, including Kind Woman (which allowed me to duck the notion of choosing either a Rusty song OR a Paul song…I just went right back to the “in the beginning” moment).

Once I was deep into the weeds on this record, though, I found myself second-guessing decisions about arrangements, about drum sounds, about which instruments to layer into which songs – I beat myself to within an inch of my life during the mixing process.  NOTHING I did sounded good enough to my ears.  I’d burn reference disks and listen to them everywhere, convinced that there was something I was doing wrong that made them sound so radically different when going from one environment to another (and yeah, there was an element of that, but I was also harboring unrealistic expectations that the mixes would sound identical just about anywhere.  The music I listened to that WASN’T mine did, why couldn’t I get these mixes to be consistent?

I was obsessive – I was working a day job, touring with Marshall Tucker constantly, and spent whatever time I had left tweaking, remixing, tweaking some more, burning another reference CD and taking it out in the car to listen for the next thing that would run me off the rails.

If I hadn’t gone ahead and scheduled a release date with accompanying live performances, I might STILL be working on that record…but it had to be duplicated and ready to go in time to go to retail and to start fulfilling orders, and I eventually had to settle for a set of mixes that – ultimately – lacked any real punch because I was trying to get them to sound the same across platforms that they really weren’t supposed to sound the same in.

That was almost ten years ago, but it might as well have been thirty – while a lot has changed since then in various parts of my life, my approach to making records hasn’t moved around much.

Friends and Heroes might well have been the last record I ever made if I hadn’t joined Poco…and if the events of this past year hadn’t come to pass.

I’d written a few songs, but other than throwing down reference demos so I’d remember how they went, I didn’t give them much thought…but there’d been a notion of a new Poco record that had surfaced in a couple of conversations here and there during COVID and I had a couple that I was legitimately excited about sharing with Rusty and the band.  Now, in the aftermath of Rusty’s passing (and Paul Cotton’s death just a couple of months after Rusty), there’s a new band that’s forming around the remains of the old band, and…an outlet for songs, since we’ll be making a record this year.  

So…I started writing again.  In earnest.

I don’t know exactly what happened…if it was the collective trauma of losing a friend, hero and mentor in the midst of a life-altering pandemic and the emotional fallout from that, or if I just nicked an artery when I picked up a notebook and a guitar with something resembling actual intent for the first time in decades – but words just started gushing forth.

The first thing I did was to take the chorus of a song Rusty had sung to open a show they played for the television cameras back in 2004 (called Where Did The Time Go) and write verses and a bridge for it, since Rusty never actually finished the song…after that, the floodgates opened up.

So, now – I find myself in the late stages of two separate projects that I’m working on concurrently…my first album of original songs since Our Mutual Angels in 1997, and a record called Out To Pasture – a collection of Rusty and Paul songs, along with the aforementioned Where Did The Time Go, a song I wrote during the bands’ last shows at Wildwood two years ago, and a ten minute opus called Legends – all songs directly influenced by the band and by our stories, our mission statements, our lifes’ work.

And I’m falling into those same traps again, relistening to and remixing and rethinking and burning reference CD’s, and…

…and strangely, I’m finding that I’m not as obsessive as I once was.

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m more confident in my skills, if I’m happier with what’s coming out of the speakers, if I’ve just given up the ghost and it hasn’t become apparent to me yet…I can’t put my finger on it.  I mean, I’m not enraptured with every single note I’ve recorded…far from it.  Just three nights ago, I did 54 passes of a guitar solo until I got one that felt like it developed at the right pace and fell back into place when it was supposed to.  I probably could’ve gotten away with using any of the passes I recorded, but I wanted it to be right, and I knew I had the right one in me, so I waited until I got the right one before I stopped.

I’m still plagued by the inconsistencies I hear in drum sounds from song to song, in levels, in where the vocal sits across the spectrum of songs on the record, but…I feel like I have an out.  I’m not afraid to ask for input and for help, and I know it’s out there – so I’m trying to make the best record I can and to reimagine these songs a bit, and leave it all in the space of a musical monologue of sorts.  To say goodbye to this band, to bid farewell to a piece of myself, to say my piece and lay this dream to rest.

There’s plenty here to haunt me without lying awake at night over drum bleed.

I’m not sure how that became a feature and not a bug, but…well, here we are.

I don’t know how much more time I have left in me, with respect towards creating new music…and I think it’s a bit of a pipe dream to entertain the notion that there’s a joyful record buried somewhere inside me that’ll find its way out eventually.  I don’t think I was ever intended to make records that make people dance or smile or bob their heads while the wind blows through the windows of their car.  I make music that’s pretty emotionally dense, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Making records is no different than any other creative exercise in a lot of ways – and it means different things to different people. For me, it’s as close as I’ll ever experience to the actual physical pain of childbirth…the frustration, the self-doubt, the waves of inferiority, the very nature of how I carry myself when I’m immersed in the process…all that is peppered with moments like the 55th pass of that solo I tracked last week, when it rolled off my fingers in one pass exactly the way I needed it to evolve for that song…or hearing the harmonies line up in a way I hadn’t anticipated, but better than I could’ve hoped…or hearing an accidental clash of two separate passes of mandolin and dobro echo a pattern in succession in a completely unplanned way…

It’s auditory heroin, really. It’s a momentary buzz that – once you experience it for the first time – becomes something that you chase in some form or fashion for as long as you continue to punch that particular clock.

And not unlike childbirth, you’ll have some offspring that will need a little explaining and you’ll have some that’ll bring forth tears of joy – and sometimes they’re the same child, whether you even realize it or not. But they make you proud, in a collective sense – not just of who they are, but of who YOU are.

The cathartic element is more plain to me than it’s ever been, with this record – and I guess the only wish I’m really harboring for this album is that I might actually carry that cleansing notion through to fruition when it’s done and I’m holding it in my hands.

But for now…it’s time to put the cans on and sing.

Paul Cotton: 1943 – 2021

playing pedal steel guitar with Paul Cotton in NJ, 2010

The first time i saw him on a stage, I wasn’t sure it was him at first glance.

I’d never seen the band before, and I didn’t recognize the drummer or the bass player at all…I knew Rusty, of course, but there was this balding blonde dude playing guitar, sporting a white Stratocaster with a tortoiseshell pickguard and – while it could’ve been Paul, I wasn’t sitting close enough to make out his features well enough to tell…

…until he opened his mouth to sing.

They opened that show with Ghost Town, with Rusty singing the first verse – and the minute the blurry guy stepped to the microphone and sang the words silver moonlight falls…between grey walls…all doubts vanished.

that’s fucking Paul Cotton! THANK GOD.

They finished Ghost Town with a frenzied lap steel solo by Rusty and went right into Legend, the title track from their biggest record…I was holding the sleeve of that very record in my hands, trying to keep it dry while sitting in a misty rain in the audience with tears forming in my eyes, thanking the Gods that I was actually getting to see them play.

I wouldn’t have known about this show at all if my mother hadn’t flown into the wrong major city in Pennsylvania when she came to visit her granddaughter – she opted to fly into Pittsburgh when she should’ve flown into Philadelphia, and I drove out to retrieve her from the airport. As I always did in those days, I grabbed copies of whatever music-related free weeklies were available to scout the ads for potential places to play in the entertainment listings. There was an ad for the summer concert series at the waterfront, and SONOFABITCH – Poco was coming!

I didn’t know who was in the band anymore, and I didn’t really care – I had already done my first record, and it had a cover of Made of Stone on it, and I happily drove the five hours back to Pittsburgh for the show with a cassette copy of my record and my Legend album cover and sat there, fixated on the two guys who (to me) had always been the heart and soul of the band in the first place. Rusty and Paul were the principal songwriters and vocalists when I first became aware of the band, when I’d fallen in love with their music – so as long as they were there, I was happy.

with Rusty Young and Paul Cotton the night we met for the first time, 1991

They played Ghost Town, they played Legend…they went from there into Call it Love (their most recent hit) – later, they took turns doing solo acoustic songs with Paul playing his classic Bad Weather and Rusty playing a new song that hadn’t been recorded yet called Old Hat. I found out thirty years later that it was a co-write with Jack Sundrud…somehow I never knew that until after Rusty passed away back in April.

Yesterday, Jack sent me stems (digital audio files) of a recording of Old Hat done by the surviving members of the band back in June so I could add some pedal steel to it before it goes off to mix.

Life has been an avalanche of full circle moments lately that I’m purely incapable of enjoying – because most of them are (at best) bittersweet in Rusty’s absence…but the fact that I’m adding pedal steel (Rusty’s instrument) to a song written by Rusty and Jack..that I heard for the first time at my first Poco show…a song that was never released by the band – that definitely goes to the upper echelon of that list.

I had also started recording a couple of Poco songs in my home studio over the past month – with one of those being Paul’s Please Wait For Me (from the Blue and Grey album) – I posted a clip of myself singing it during the vocal tracking for that one on Instagram just a week or so ago, and I figured I’d go ahead and put steel on that song while I was set up to track Old Hat later that night.

A few hours after the files showed up in my email, word floated out that Paul Cotton had died peacefully at home – from a post on his Facebook page.

Onstage with Poco at the Colonial Theater, 2006

I have a ton of great Paul memories – of staying up with him in the hotel bar after a show I opened for them in 1995 and playing guitar until 4am (I still can’t believe my wife didn’t drag me out of there well before then), of sitting in with the band on a handful of occasions…of his smile and the perpetual twinkle in his eye, of gear talk and his stories from the old days.

The last time I saw Paulie was at Wildwood in 2019, and…it was a challenge to keep my game face on.

He looked a little lost, and his health was clearly in decline – but he hadn’t forgotten me, to my immense relief. I was there to act as interim roadie for the band, as there were a myriad of tuning changes and such, and I assured him and his wife Caroline that I would take good care of him once the lights went up.

He gave me a big hug and smiled…“I know you will, Tommy. I know you will.”

His last words to me at the end of the weekend were “Tommy…I sure do wish we lived closer.”

With Paul at Wildwood for the last time, 2019

Our collective mortality was hanging heavy in the air that night – we’d just lost Claudia Upton, a notorious Poconut and lifelong fan of the band, and there was a memorial for her during the show that weekend, but…looking around the room, at the faces in the audience and on the stage, it went further than that. I couldn’t shake the thought that this could easily be the last time I see this group of people on this stage again.

I had no idea that the notion was actually a premonition, but that weekend did, in fact, turn out to be the last time that Pauley and Rusty ever played together…the last time Rusty played at Wildwood…the last legitimate Poco show at Wildwood (there will be a show with the surviving members this October as a tribute and memorial, but it’s not Poco without Rusty).

I recorded a number of moments from that show, but I never posted any of them on social media because they felt like private property…like they belonged to the folks who were in the room. For people who know me, that has to sound like I probably copied and pasted those words into this missive, but – I just couldn’t do it.

Now that Paulie has left the building, I don’t see them ever coming to light.

I went back to my hotel room after the first show of the weekend, and this “end of an era” weight just wouldn’t leave my shoulders. I had Bad Weather stuck in my head and it occurred to me that it might be a fun songwriting exercise to see if I could fashion a new song from scrapbook cutouts of lyrics from other Poco songs…it was supposed to be something to occupy my brain until I managed to shake this sense of dread that was following me around, and it started out well enough:

In every day that passes us by
Indian summers, come and gone
I can still hear that nightbirds’ cry
singing straight on through until the dawn

Every one of those was from a Paul song…obviously, having seen him this weekend had left an impression. It became even more obvious as I kept writing:

Now none of us are young men anymore
And you can’t ignore the writing on the wall
I guess that’s what the stories and the songs are for
A chance to take our eyes off of the ball

It quickly evolved from musical scrapbooking to a love letter…

So many years have passed
But I still wanna hear that sound
I wanna make it last
Another time around
Sing a picture of the days gone by
With a gentle, aging hand
Because tonight my friends, all of us are living in the band

The rest of the song turned into a declaration of sorts for me:

In the beginning, not so long ago
For a thirteen year old kid from Tennessee
There was just a little magic in the music they were singin’
and I could hear it calling out to me
They left a trail of love and glory
As they crossed the southern sky
And my life would be a sadly different story
If that harmony had somehow passed me by

So plug in that steel guitar
I still wanna hear that sound
I wanna make it last
Another time around
Sing a picture of the days gone by
These crazy lovers understand
Tonight my friends, all of us – are living in the band
Yes, tonight my friends, what’s left of us….are living in the band

Most songs that are worth the trouble write themselves…this one jumped onto the page, largely a result of the overwhelming sense that I was saying goodbye that weekend – and it’s taken a couple of years to realize just how accurate that foreboding turned out to be.

Early 2000’s – sat in with the guys during a surprise birthday party in NJ

Rusty and Paul both cut deep, deep rings into the center of my tree, both musically and personally…from a distance, they appeared to be the perfect foils for one another – Rusty’s instrumental virtuosity and his gentle, lilting voice aside Paul’s soulful guitar playing and his full-throated unmistakable voice…it made for a lot of magical moments. They both became mentors and were incredibly supportive over the years, and I’ve never forgotten it – and likely never will.

The Legend album cover that the two of them signed for me still hangs in my living room to this day…

from Rusty: “it’s great to meet you! keep on pickin’!”

from Paul: “a pleasure! happy trails!”

Happy trails, Paul.

I wish we lived closer, too.

you are what you eat

so I’ve been on a bit of a tear lately, where songwriting is concerned – for a multitude of reasons. there are projects just around the bend for which i’ll be expected to contribute material, but also – i’m finding that i’m attracted to the exercise for the first time in recent memory.

i’ve written a couple of things over the past few years, for sure, but it hasn’t been anything remotely consistent for a long, long time. I had a short fit of creativity rekindled by the re-emergence of an old flame for a month or so, and there’ve been a handful of songs that have essentially written themselves while I was in the room (“wrong side of history” most notably among them), but I’ve churned out roughly a dozen songs over the past two months and it’s been an education.

the most obvious lesson that i’ve learned from all this is that while age isn’t always a bedfellow of wisdom, it has brought a certain – boldness, perhaps?

i’m finding that i’m no longer weighing my words as carefully as I once did, i’m not as afraid of the consequences of my words, of what friends or loved ones might say or feel in reaction to what I write.

it’s not so much that I don’t care what they think, it’s that…well, i don’t care what they think.

(it sounds bad when I put it that way, doesn’t it?)

what i think i’m trying to say is that i’m not as frightened of the end result of speaking my truth at this point in my life, because i don’t feel as though it’s classified information anymore. i’m not carrying around any secret longings, not feeling trapped in my own skin (at least not to the same degree I once did), not plotting some daring escape from my day to day circumstances – a lot of the things i once used as fuel for songs no longer constitute the lion’s share of the weight i carry around on a daily basis.

i find myself a lot more contemplative, a lot more reflective, more willing to say some pretty uncomfortable things out loud – generally, a little more brutally honest than i might have been at other times in my life.

and let me tell you…”liberating” doesn’t even begin to get the point across.

so – because i’m going to need to play these songs for other people, i spent a couple of weeks recording demos recently, and i uploaded a sampling of them to a folder on a Google drive and sent an email to a handful of folks whose opinions I respect and asked for some honest feedback. “let me have it,” I said in the email with the link. “rip ’em to shreds and send me back into the shadows to contemplate whether i should’ve even thought about doing this again.”

well, i didn’t get any feedback of that particular flavor, but i did get a lot of honest thoughts about the direction i’d embraced from a lyrical standpoint, about song length (almost to a song, all of them are in the six minute range with one in particular clocking in at over nine minutes, but it’s long for a reason – there are thirteen verses, and there will be noisy guitar solos…it’s probably not a candidate for a record, but who knows?) – i was grateful for all of it, for sure, but there was one bit of feedback that i saw fit to chew on for a while.

i won’t single him out, but a longtime collaborator pointed out that some of the instrumental parts that i’d played had made stronger melodic statements than the melody of the lyrics themselves, and that after hearing the songs more often, he found himself humming the instrumental parts moreso than the lyric…and that gave me reason to examine my process, and i had a couple of epiphanies around that.

i’ve always imagined that folks who write music and lyrics simultaneously are probably best equipped to come up with memorable melodies, because they’re creating the melody and the lyric at the same time. i used to write that way all the time, but now i find that i’m either ambushed by a lyric (one of the new songs, “fade away”, was recited practically verbatim into my cellphone while driving to pennsylvania for a show back in june), or i’ll come up with a chord progression or guitar part that feels like a song and i’ll record it into my phone while i just “Mellencamp” along with it (grunt nonsensical noises that bear no resemblance to words along with the musical part as something of a placeholder for what i’d likely sing over the chord changes).

it’s not that i prefer this method to the notion of sitting down with the guitar AND the legal pad at the same time and completely focusing on the task at hand, it’s just the way things tend to get done nowadays. even so, i find that when writing lyrics, i’m almost always more focused on the pentameter of the words than the melody itself. I don’t have a specific reason for this that i can point to, but in considering it over the past couple of days it occurred to me that a lot of my favorite lyricists (Dylan, Jackson Browne, John Moreland, Dar Williams, etc.) seem to write as slaves of the narrative, and i find myself more attracted to that than to the notion of finding the right notes and making the words fit into that framework. of course, then there’s Richard Edwards and Shawn Colvin and Jimmie Spheeris and a dozen others whose melodies are so compelling that i almost don’t care what they’re saying…and Joni Mitchell, who defies any effort to lean her in either direction.

considering this analysis of my work from outside my own bubble, though, it’s been a bit of a revelation to look at my work alongside my influences and see whose fingerprints loom largest as rings inside the tree. no surprises, but good information nonetheless.

(this is not to say that if you listen to “Late For The Sky” over and over again that you’ll eventually write something that brilliant…if that were possible, i’d have done it by now. i’ve put the time in, for damn sure.)

the most gratifying thing i’ve taken away from this introspection into my own process, though, is that i didn’t walk away from it feeling as though my work was inferior as a result of examining it in this light, but rather that i’d learned something about my own process that i hadn’t really considered prior to now…and that it might be worth challenging myself to step outside my own routine and get uncomfortable and try some new things to see what other tools might fit into my toolchest.

the music i listen to in the car comes courtesy of a 32GB flash drive with several thousand MP3’s on it, and i discovered some time back that the best form of “shuffle” for this scenario is good old Alphabetical Order. that’s right – there’s nothing more jarring than letting everything play in order by song title where you go from “Superman” by REM into “Super Trouper” by ABBA…and that’s just one bizarre alphabetical seque. there’s hundreds more.

but this morning, as if to underscore this topic, i heard my favorite Bob Dylan song (“Sweetheart Like You”) followed by “Sylvia Hotel” by Cheryl Wheeler – and it underlined this entire thing with a bold black sharpie.

“Sweetheart” is more spoken than sung, really – and the lyrics are sprinkled with moments of genius, punctuated with the same closing line to every verse, and it’s brilliant. Musically, there’s an atmosphere that perfectly fits the lyric, and it forces me to grab the volume knob every time it comes on. But today, “Sylvia” came on right afterwards as if to underscore the notion that you can have a poignant, haunting, transformative lyric without sacrificing anything melodically or giving up options in your narrative.

life never stops teaching if you’re willing to remain open to learning new things.

a month…a week…a day or a year….

It’s been a month today.

It still doesn’t seem real…it doesn’t seem real because, in some ways, my life hasn’t changed a lot with regard to my day to day routine. I get up, I either get in the car and go to work or sit down at the kitchen table and start replying to emails, dialing into meetings…the usual mundane stuff that a workday brings. I sleep a lot, probably a lot more than usual…I sit in front of the TV and watch stuff that I’ve seen before, so I don’t have to commit a lot of actual attention to it.

It’s almost as if it never happened, and yet…it’s never out of sight. It never goes away.

I got a phone call from a buddy today after I got home from work, and he asked me how I’m doing – I immediately thought of the first verse of Jackson Browne’s song The Late Show that closes side one of Late For The Sky:

“Everyone I’ve ever known has wished me well
Anyway that’s how it seems – it’s hard to tell
Maybe people only ask you how you’re doing
Because it’s easier
Than lettin’ on how little they could care…”

So, I figured – fuck it, let me give him an honest answer and see what he says…

“…well, buddy – aside from the fleeting reprieves offered by work or sleep or the occasional phone call, my life is basically an endless wellspring of sadness…not rock-bottom despair, just a deep, profound, perpetual chain around my neck that never completely goes away – and can go from a few extra pounds to bone-crushing and back again at the drop of a hat. That about sums it up.“

He was quiet for a couple of seconds, and then he said…

“…well, I actually expected it to be a lot worse.”

Some days it feels like this month has been a year long, others it feels like the phone just rang this morning.

The morning after Rusty died – after Jack’s phone call, I ran away to the office to try to hide from the news – I threw myself into every menial task I could, and I got through most of the day without showing my hand to the folks I worked with. Around 4pm, a friend of mine in HR came by my desk and she knew, somehow, that something wasn’t quite right…and she tried to talk to me about it, and nearly broke me in the process.

It was time to get out of the office.

I drove home and went to the fridge…I already had a plan for the afternoon that I’d concocted in my head as I plodded through the day like a zombie, and it was time to put it into action.

Back in April of 2020, shortly after news got out to the world of my having become the newest member of Poco, my longtime buddy (and bandmate in Idlewheel to Jack and myself) Tommy Geddes sent me a bottle of champagne to welcome me to the band. Tommy knew what a fanboy I was, and he understood the significance of my membership in the band as well as anyone. And while I appreciated the gesture, I didn’t open the bottle.

I opened the package and read the card with a smile…but I set the bottle aside.

I thought to myself that – as much as I appreciated the gesture, I couldn’t bring myself to open it yet.

I felt as though I needed to hold onto it until such time as I’d actually played a show with the band, until I’d made my actual public debut with the band as a legitimate member…I’m not really sure why that was important to me, but with the advent of COVID and our involuntary respite from the road…opening that bottle of champagne and celebrating my membership in a band I’d loved since before I was old enough to drink or vote or get a drivers’ license just felt…premature. I’m not particularly superstitious, but…it just didn’t seem right.

It’d mean more if I popped the cork after my first show with the band, so…I waited.

…and waited. And waited.

And that bottle of champagne sat in my refrigerator for weeks…then months…then almost exactly a year.

The day of The Phone Call, though, I came home and went to the fridge, retrieved the bottle, and went down the hill in the back yard to the dock beside the lake and popped the cork and watched it fly out over the water and float for a moment before it sank to the bottom. I poured the first drink into the water beneath my feet (for Rusty, of course)…and I sat on the dock and proceeded to drink the rest of the bottle as the sun went down on the shittiest day I could remember.

I had put my phone on vibrate earlier in the day, as I knew I wouldn’t be able to form sentences around the news of the day…so it felt pointless to field calls or try to talk about any of this. My voicemail filled up. Texts were coming in, but – I just couldn’t.

I was still in some strange mix of denial, disbelief and rage.

And – truth be told – I think that I’ve learned a lot about grief in the time between then and now. But that’s a longer conversation for later.

I set up my laptop on the kitchen table and worked from that spot for a couple of days, going through the motions and considering the repercussions of what had happened. I hadn’t just lost a bandmate – I’d lost a childhood hero, a friend, a mentor, a teacher, a bandmate, and (by virture of all those things combined) a big part of who I was.

There are a number of things that makes this loss difficult to convey or describe to other people – no, we weren’t related…and no, I can’t really describe my relationship with Rusty in a way that I can tie up in terms that other non-musical people can comprehend.

If you get it, you get it, and…if you don’t, I can’t really help you.

The days after Rusty’s passing are something of a blur – Jack, Rick and I had a vocal rehearsal scheduled for that Friday, as we were prepping for the possibility of a video shoot on the west coast…the three of us got together that afternoon at Jacks’ house anyway, in the spirit of commiserating and remembering our Founder. We sat around Jack’s kitchen table and talked about how certain we’d been that Rusty had another twenty years in him, about how Mary had been posting pictures of Rusty in his rubber boots working in the yards all winter and how he seemed invincible…and yeah, about how completely fucking unfair it was that he was the first of the Poco alumni to go.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever get over that last point…the fact that the ONE MAN who spent over fifty years of his life keeping this music alive and keeping this band on the road – HE would be the first to go.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair…it’s…not…

It’s just fucking wrong.

It’s wrong – not just for me, but for Jack…who’d been the constant in the band for thirty years. For Rick, who’d been an outspoken advocate for bringing me into the band from the days of my first rehearsals as a sub, and – yeah, of course, for me – who’d spent over a year on the sidelines waiting for the COVID cloud to pass overhead so we could unveil this version of the band to the world. All of us, to a man (including Rusty) were really excited about taking this version of the band on the road and showing people what we could do with this lineup of singers and players…but we’d been deprived of that opportunity now. We had a brief glimpse at the possibility of this lineup a year ago, and we’d have to settle for what might’ve been.

Needless to say, all Poco dates that were scheduled from June through the foreseeable future were taken off the calendar. There’s no Poco without Rusty – he was the constant in the lineup of every version of Poco for well over half a century, and it seems blasphemous to even think about going out under that banner without having Rusty on stage. So we set those dates aside, with the exception of the annual Wildwood Springs Lodge booking…which we set aside as Rusty’s memorial weekend. We discussed it, and Mary felt like it’d be the best available point in time to gather to remember him…Wildwood Springs was the place that Rusty and Mary had met, and over the years it had become something of an annual Poco Family Reunion for the most hardcore fans – so we kept that on the books.

Over the course of the next few days, the pieces began to fall into place for a separate memorial of sorts, a gathering of musical brothers-in-arms to testify, to tell road stories, and to remember him…it started out as a radio show, but grew – and kept growing – right up until time to go on the air. It was originally a two-hour slot on a radio station in Columbia, just south of Nashville…but by the day of the show, it was a full audio and video livestream broadcast on well over a dozen Facebook pages and ultimately seen and heard by almost 80,000 people (and charting in the Top Ten in Pollstar Magazine’s Livestream charts for the week).

It feels like name-dropping to list the folks who participated, but the list felt like a who’s who from the liner notes of the record collection of my youth…some in the room with me, some calling in from parts unknown to share Rusty Stories. The assembled folks in the room got together the afternoon before the show to run through a handful of songs that we were to play live over the air, and looking around the table was humbling. I sang the lead vocal on a pair of songs, both songs that were always Rusty’s domain in the set – Call It Love and Keep On Tryin’ – and when Timothy B. Schmit called in afterward, he complemented us on the job we did on his song.

Yet another thing that would’ve been fuel and inspiration under just about any other circumstance…but had only managed to ring somewhat hollow in the moment.

The show was supposed to have been two hours, but the owner of the station – who had attended in person – gave us his blessing to go on for as long as we wanted, and we did. The final caller said their goodbyes somewhere around 9:30, and the total running time was just a half hour shy of being double its original allotted time slot…and could’ve went longer, honestly.

Jim Messina talked about the story of how Rusty came to Hollywood to play pedal steel on “Kind Woman” – a story I thought I knew until that night, but he dropped a bit of a bomb on me in his telling of it during the show.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the instrument, the pedal steel is essentially a math problem with legs…there’s a network of metal rods on the undercarriage of the instrument attached to a hinged mechanism that either raises or lowers the pitch of the strings, either individually or in tandem with others. When the system was first invented, the combinations of pitch changes were endless and the means of setting up the instrument had very little rhyme or reason until a handful of folks started standardizing the sets of changes into a loose standard. Eventually, two “setups” rose to the top – the “Emmons” setup, named for Buddy Emmons, the recognized and accepted Black Belt of Pedal Steel, and the “Day” setup, named for Jimmy Day – another admired and accomplished player.

Over time, the Emmons setup became the VHS, the Microsoft of the two, while the Day setup became the Betamax, the iMac…superior in the eyes of its faithful devotees, but not as accepted by the market as a whole.

Rusty (as well as John David Call of Pure Prairie League) were both Day guys, although I never knew it until I got to know them both. Rusty once told me he’d been playing the Day setup since he was 11 years old…and this is important to know when you hear the story of the Kind Woman session – although I don’t think Jimmy was aware of the specifics of any of this before the radio conversation that night.

Rusty packed his Day-modified pedal steel guitar and set out for the airport to fly to the west coast for his fateful date with destiny…playing on a Buffalo Springfield record…only to find upon arrival that the airline had managed to mangle his instrument into an unplayable state. Here he was, on maybe the biggest day of his musical life, without a functional instrument.

But wait – all wasn’t lost. Stephen Stills, it turns out, had just bought a pedal steel guitar, and it was available…so let’s just borrow Stephen’s guitar for the session and we’ll be back in business!

Except – as you might’ve guessed by the blatant foreshadowing from earlier – Stephen’s pedal steel was configured in the Emmons setup. A pair of pedals backwards, knee levers slightly different, and somewhat foreign to someone who’d been playing the other way for half their lives up to that point.

I’ve often made the analogy, when I retell the story, that it’d be like opening your laptop and finding that Windows was installed in Spanish…all the icons were in the same place, they did the same thing, but it’d be different enough that you couldn’t just sit down and open up Microsoft Outlook and begin checking your email without slowing down to think about every click you made.

But Rusty sat down and played the solo on Kind Woman on Stephen Stills’ borrowed instrument and changed the course of musical history in a matter of a few passes…and an entire movement owes its genesis to the origin story written in the space of that moment.

And from the time I first heard the full story from Rusty many years ago right up until that Sunday night, that was the story as I understood it.

The next thing you need to know about pedal steel before we finish this story is that – while this has changed in the last twenty years or so, most pedal steel guitars have always had two necks, two sets of strings tuned differently with independent sets of knee levers and pedals assigned to change specific strings on either neck. The front neck has historically been the E9 neck, often called the “Nashville” neck, while the back neck is in a C6 tuning, often called the “Texas” neck…as that tuning is usually used for western swing, jazz, and chord voicings that fall outside the stereotypical chord changes available on the “Nashville” neck.

I’d never for a moment considered that to be a factor in the Kind Woman story until Jimmy’s telling of the story, when he revealed that Rusty played the solo for “Kind Woman”…

…on the C6 neck. On the back neck.

On the neck that wasn’t NEARLY as affected by the differences in Emmons and Day setups as the front neck was.

Let me tell you…in the decades that I’ve had Rusty’s phone number in my Rolodex, I’ve never, ever wanted to call him as bad as I did when I heard this bit of the story that night.

I wanted to bust his chops for never having told me that, for letting me think all these years that he’d been visited by some genius spirit that allowed him to make split second judgements about the differences between the instrument he was playing and the instrument he was used to, to laugh about the fact that I never figured it out for myself…and to tell him that – really, it’s another kind of genius at work to evaluate a crisis like that and adapt so goddamned beautifully and to make history with one hand tied behind your back.

Then I got angry at myself…angry for all the down days during COVID that I didn’t pick up the phone and check in because I didn’t want to seem like an overeager teenage kid – not wanting him to feel pressured about going back out on the road, to feel somehow accountable for the downtime coming when it did. It seemed more pragmatic to let him enjoy the extended stretch with Mary, to work in the yard and fish the creek – and when we did talk, I always made a point of telling him that this will all be over soon enough – we’ll restore some degree of sanity in leadership and we’ll find out way out of this mess, and…if he feels like it…we’ll all be here and ready to go back out with him.

I know he missed it. I know he was excited about fine-tuning this lineup and going back out. I know it because he told me multiple times, up to and including the week he died, and I’m really thankful for those conversations…and I wish I’d had a few more of them.

There’s a long list of “a few more”s that we can’t go back and collect, and that’s a huge multiplier of grief. Grief is, at its core, a personal inventory of just that…the things we lose by virtue of losing someone we love. That loss manifests itself not just in shows we won’t play or in songs we won’t sing again, but in hotel breakfasts and backstage conversations and soundcheck jams and rides to the airport and phone conversations about tuning and string gauges and memories of shows past, of departed band members…in movies I wanted to watch with him on the road, songs I wanted to try to squeeze back onto the setlist…in endless undailed and unspoken telephone conversations that are lost to the ages now.

One last instance of foreshadowing before I close, if you’ll indulge me:

Rusty used to tell the story of Richie Furay’s exit from Poco from the stage at shows, often to illustrate the rewards of tenacity – Poco was formed in 1968, Richie left in 1973…and they didn’t enjoy their first real chart success for another half a decade, with the two hit singles from the Legend album. But on that day in 1973, David Geffen (yeah, that David Geffen) called the band into a meeting…everyone filed into a conference room, and Geffen pulled Richie out of the room and took him to an office down the hall. They’d been gone for some time, and the band had no idea what was going on – until Geffen returned alone a while later and announced that Richie was leaving the band, that he’d put together a deal for him to make a record with JD Souther and Chris Hillman.

He announced it in a manner that seemed to indicate that Geffen thought he was announcing the bands’ breakup to them, and he went around the room, addressing each of them.

Paul Cotton: “Paul…you know, you sing…you write songs…you’re gonna be just fine.”

Timothy B. Schmit: “Timmy…you sing, you write songs…you’re gonna be fine.”

He then turned to drummer George Grantham and Rusty Young and – with a dismissive wave, said:

“You two – you don’t sing. You don’t write songs. I don’t know what happens to you two.”

The moral of the story, of course, is that Rusty ended up writing and singing the bands’ biggest hit (cue the intro to “Crazy Love” here).

The Saturday morning of the weekend of the livestream, I felt no real immediate need to get out of bed. This isn’t to say that this day was much different from most others in that regard, but this particular Saturday, I doubled down…I woke up a little before 10AM, rolled over and went back to sleep. Woke up again 45 minutes later, rolled over and went back to sleep.

Then, at some point after falling back to sleep, I found myself loading gear into the back of a trailer after a show…it was dark, the show had been over for some time, and I was stacking road cases into a trailer when Rusty walked up to me with a Sharpie and a poster from the show we’d just played.

“…the promoter wants everybody – band, crew, and staff – to sign this. Got a minute?”

he handed me the Sharpie and the poster, and I held it up against the trailer door to sign it and saw that there were already twenty five or thirty signatures on it, but one person wrote the words “I like the trio version better” under their autograph…so I made a point of signing my name as close to that signature as I could, and wrote “THE NEW GUY” under my name.

Rusty saw what I’d done and laughed about it as we both turned to start walking back towards the stage door area of this outdoor pavillion we’d just played earlier.

(Poco did tour as a trio – without a drummer – for a time with Rusty, Paul Cotton and Jack Sundrud on bass.)

I said to Rusty as we were walking back – “I’m a little shaky about this particular trio version, boss. We have to play your memorial at Wildwood, and I know we’ll pull it off, but it won’t be right without you.”

Rusty put his hand on my shoulder and said…“I’m counting on you.”

(“I’m counting on you”…was the last thing he said to me on his way out of my hotel room in California when we were there to play the Gallo Center…right after a conversation about how pleased he was with what I’d brought to the band.)

I didn’t look over at him, but I said…“I don’t see myself ever getting over this, man.”

He stopped walking for a minute and I looked over at him and he said:

“Hey, you know what?

….you sing. You write songs. You’re gonna be fine.”

Rusty Young: 1946 – 2021

Whoever said that you should never meet your heroes never met Rusty Young.

I became aware of Rusty in my teenage years as the maverick pedal steel virtuoso in Poco, a band already on their way to becoming one of my favorites at age fifteen. It was a time when it was still common to become aware of a band in the middle of its trajectory – to have the now-largely extinct experience of going back and discovering an artist’s older works, tracing the path from their own origins up to the point you had boarded the bandwagon. By the time I’d gotten on board, Poco had morphed from their origins as the midwives of Country Rock into a more mainstream sound – and I went on the adventure of going back through their catalog and discovering that they were there – in the room where it happened – when my personal favorite musical movement was conceived.

These were still my formative years – I’d started out as a drummer and had only just begun to pick up the guitar and learn other peoples’ songs. My kid brother and I shared a room, and he asked for a stereo for Christmas – his only demand being that it have both a cassette deck AND an 8 track player. I went to buy my first 8 track tapes and found copies of both Legend and Indian Summer, and bought them both. I’d put them in and let them cycle on repeat while I slept…further engraining those songs and that sound into my musical DNA.

To say I was a fan was something of an understatement…but in those days, the thought of actually meeting any of the guys in the band felt as unlikely as the notion of being knighted by the Queen of England.

I continued buying up the entire back catalog whenever I’d find a copy of something I didn’t have…and that pursuit became a lot easier when I left home and set out into the world. I bought a Tascam 4-track recorder at eighteen and one of the first songs I recorded on it was a cover of Magnolia – which I only knew to be a Poco song in those days, since my cassette copy of Crazy Eyes didn’t have liner notes. My musical aspirations had taken over every ounce of ambition I possessed – I honed in on songwriting, started playing live shows as a one-man act, and recorded my first release in 1991, which featured a cover of Rusty’s song Made of Stone (from the Under the Gun album).

After having made that record, I actually got an opporunity to meet Rusty and Paul Cotton not long afterward. I sheepishly handed Rusty a cassette copy of the album after the show and said, “If I’d thought there was a chance in hell you’d ever be hearing this, I’d probably still be working on it.” He was kind and gracious – and signed the copy of Legend I’d brought with me for an autograph with “Tom – it’s great to meet you! Keep on pickin’!“

It was a four hour drive from that show in Pittsburgh back to Reading, PA, where I lived…the sun was up when I got home, but I was still wide awake.

That was over thirty years ago. I’ve known Rusty for well over half my life.

There are a hundred more stories from the years since – as Rusty morphed from a hero to an acquaintance to a friend to a peer, and – eventually – to a bandmate. Time passed and we exchanged phone numbers, occasional Christmas cards, and played together on the same bill many, many times…and he always had a kind word, always had time to talk shop.

There was a show at Sellersville Theater a decade ago that I played with Tracy Grammer, opening for the band…when Rusty made a point of remarking about how much my playing had been improving, my phrasing and intonation. He didn’t have to say that, and he wasn’t exactly known for bullshitting people or handing out compliments for the sake of flattery. As such, kind words from Rusty went a long way.

The one that will stick with me was our show in Modesto, CA last year – I was in my room, using my phone to record a video playing mandolin and singing a John Moreland song when there was a knock on the door…apparently we were next door neighbors in the hotel and Rusty came over with his acoustic to sit down and play a bit, with an eye on working out a specific part for Rose of Cimarron for the show. As he left, he was effusive about what a great job I’d been doing – how the vocal blend was the best it had been in a long time, how well everything seemed to fit musically…

…that kind of praise is inspiring. Words like those become fuel…and that kind of fuel burns a long, long time.

Thankfully, because my phone was still recording, I have the whole exchange as a keepsake.

It made me want to be a better player, to be deserving of that kind of praise from someone who’d been a big part of the reason I chose this path in the first place.

Last night, he texted the band to let us know that a planned event was being postponed from May until the fall…I quipped that “by then, maybe I’d have figured out those 9 mysterious notes in You Better Think Twice that had been eluding me…“

He texted back – “I can show you that! G tuning!“

I replied with a video of myself playing the lick that I’d figured out with a note about the part that I hadn’t gotten the hang of yet…and I figured that we’d circle back and run through it when we started rehearsals in a few weeks.

Jack called me unusually early this morning – we were planning to get together tomorrow for another vocal run-through, and I thought that maybe something had come up with regard to timing or something of that nature…but I answered the phone and he simply said “Rusty died.”

I told him I was gonna need a minute to process this…I got out of bed and stumbled into the shower, as I had a full plate at work…I guess I figured that if I pretended I hadn’t heard, maybe I’d wake up for real and none of it would be true.

I got in the car to head to the office and Rose of Cimmaron started playing when I turned on the ignition – I immediately turned it off and drove to work in silence…with Rusty’s pedal steel guitar gently shifting about in the back of my car, having just been picked up from the shop the day before.

The loss is compounded by knowing how much he was looking forward to taking this version of Poco back out into the world – he seemed re-energized in a way that seemed to have been missing for some time, and I’m not the only one who noticed it…and while Rusty’s passing wasn’t COVID-related, it can certainly be said that the pandemic robbed us all of what could’ve been if we’d been able to see this phase of the band to fruition.

I suppose that writing this remembrance is an effort on my part to make it real to myself, to try to accept the fact that this has happened, that my friend and bandmate is actually gone, that it’s not something I’m going to wake up from like so many bizarre COVID fever dreams from this past year.

It’s not really working.

I’m not really ready to say goodbye to him.

So for now, I’m just going to say thank you. Thanks for everything you did – whether consciously or otherwise – to help me make my way down this trail.

See you on the other side, cowboy.

IN MEMORIAM

In a year that lasted longer than any other year in my own recent memory, it’s hard to believe that Neil Peart, David Olney, and legendary Philadelphia DJ Gene Shay all died this year.

This year we also lost civil rights era heroes John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, Bruce Boynton and Charles Evers – as well as Chuck Yeager and the Notorious RBG.

The sports world said goodbye to a laundry list of legends: Gale Sayers, Don Shula, Joe Morgan, Don Larsen, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Whitey Ford, Dick Allen, Tom Dempsey, Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Paul Hornung, Jay Johnstone…and we said goodbye to Sean Connery, Carl Reiner, Chadwick Boseman, Brian Dennehy, Buck Henry, Robert Conrad, Lyle Waggoner…

Behind the desk, we lost some great ears – this year, Keith Olsen, Bruce Swedien, Rupert Hine, Bob Kulick, and the legendary Hal Willner all left us.

Country music took an especially hard hit this year – Mac Davis and Helen Reddy died on the same day. They also lost Kenny Rogers, Hal Ketchum, Jan Howard, Joe Diffie, Charlie Daniels, Billy Joe Shaver, KT Oslin, Justin Townes Earle and Doug Supernaw.

Then there were the folks whose names you might not recognize – Buddy Cage, Pete Carr, Jamie Oldaker, Bucky Baxter, Chris Darrow, Todd Nance, Bones Hillman, Lyle Mays, Bucky Pizzarelli, McCoy Tyner, Eric Weissberg…all great players who left their mark on the landscape for years to come.

Little Richard. John Prine. Emitt Rhodes. Bill Withers.

And because the year just doesn’t seem to let up, we’re still processing the loss of Charley Pride, Leslie West…and Eddie Van Halen.

That’s a herd of huge footprints that’ll never be filled. Fare thee well.

SNS preview: The Road of Diminishing Returns

I got to the venue – Picasso’s in Elizabethtown, Kentucky – about ninety minutes early, and had time to collect my thoughts while I waited for the girl I was billed with.  Her name was Kathleen Roy – she was a talented singer and writer, and we were a good match…she seems to have gotten out of the business, as I did a few cursory web searches and couldn’t find any mention of her.  We were playing both shows together on a co-bill arrangement…neither of us were opening or headlining, it was two sets of equal length, split between the two of us.  As such, we split the proceeds equally as well, but I’d soon learn that I needn’t have concerned myself with that particular topic.

The Picasso’s show had maybe a dozen or so people in the audience – Kathleen had never heard me before, and she was sincerely effusive with her praise, and was full of assurances that the show the next night in Louisville would probably have a LOT more people, and she couldn’t wait to play with me again tomorrow and we said our goodbyes.  I packed up my stuff, and – for the first time that entire trip, it occurred to me that I hadn’t given a single thought to where I was supposed to be staying for this run.  I hadn’t brought it up with Matt once in the time we’d planned the run, and it hadn’t come up in conversation at any point…and now, here I sat in Elizabethtown with no real bead on a place to stay.

Now this wouldn’t have really been an issue in other, more temperate times of year – and I’d slept in the van before, and I wasn’t above sleeping in the van again.  I’d packed well, after all – I had a sleeping bag that stayed in the van at all times, and I had this hooded sweater that I called “Derek” (because it was very much like one that my old manager used to wear all the time – I bought it for that reason on another road trip with Matt and Michelle at a truck stop maybe a year before).  I had the same green army coat that I’d been wearing for years and a few changes of clothes, and I was packed for the trip, so I wasn’t worried about being prepared…but it was fucking COLD at night, let me tell ya.

Leaving Elizabethtown, I hadn’t really given any thought to how far it was from Louisville – and now, it’s kind of comical to think about – but I thought there’d be a rest stop somewhere along the interstate between E-town and Louisville, not realizing that it was barely up the road.  As such, I got to Louisville before finding a place to pull over and sleep – so I’d already arrived in town and needed to find a place to put myself for the night.  I got off the exit for Bardstown Road and started scoping out spots along the route until I saw a cluster of blue lights in the distance in front of me.  My first thought was that it was either an accident or a DUI checkpoint, and I wanted no part of either possibility.  I pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store and circled around back – I backed the van into the parking spot adjacent to the dumpster (it felt important to conceal my “yankee license plates” at the time) and locked it down – then I crawled into the back and pulled “Derek” up right around my neck and zipped the sleeping bag up to the top and dozed off to sleep in pretty short order.  It was probably a little earlier than I’d planned on going to sleep, but I had nothing else to do, so I slept until I woke up to the sound of traffic and general bustling outside the windows of the van.  I tried to sleep through it, but it just wasn’t happening.  If it had been May, I’d have happily slept until noon, but the cold wouldn’t allow for it.

I woke up and started the car – I knew that the expectation that it would heat up was futile at best, so I started up the street until I found an open McDonald’s.  I pulled into the parking lot and went inside to eat something and thaw out for a bit.  I had my backpack with me, so I pulled out my journal and wrote for a while – I ended up going out to the car and coming back in through the side door with my bag and sneaking into the mens’ room to wash up, brush my teeth, and change clothes for the day.  

I had a lot…A LOT…of time to kill between then and the gig.  I read most of “Message in a Bottle”, which Heidi had loaned me before I left…I spent well over an hour at Guitar Emporium, I went up and down Bardstown looking for bookstores and record shops, but I didn’t want to stray too far from familiar territory.  Again, this was pre-GPS, pre-cellphone…and I didn’t want to get lost or have to grope my way back to the gig.  It was a relatively relaxing day of doing nothing, although I regretted not having told my brother Jimmy that I was going to be close.  If I’d known that I was going to have this much time on my hands, I’d have made the effort to track him down, but I thought I’d have been on a straight shot north from Elizabethtown to home from the end of the first show.  Rookie mistake.

The show that night at Twice Told was one of the best shows I’d played in the past two or three years prior to that – it wasn’t a huge crowd, but it was a great crowd.  My voice was in pretty great form, and I’d gotten great reviews from the folks at both gigs, and I was assured that I’d be welcome to return anytime I wanted – which was a big part of the point of doing the shows in the first place…getting my foot in the door and making an impression.  

There’s a political element to forging one’s way through this forest, and I had known this for some time, having played the game locally in Philadelphia – but if I had notions of expanding my base and following my John Gorka blueprint, I had to start working outward.  And this pair of shows had accomplished that – I had return commitments, and it was within the realm of possibility to add venues in Nashville or Cincinnati or elsewhere the next time around.  That’s how the donuts get made, y’know.

I left the show in good spirits with plans to drive as long as I could to try and heat up the inside of the van before I pulled over to sleep – the way I saw it, I figured the warmer I could get it, the longer it’d take for the cold outside to push it out.

I drove for a couple hours and found a rest stop where it felt safe to park and sleep…it was well past midnight at this point, so I figured that it’d warm up a bit when the sun came out – so I was probably looking at six hours or so of real cold before it warmed up a bit, and I felt pretty sure that I could sleep through that like the professional that I was.

I slipped on a second shirt, a long-sleeved henley pullover and put Derek on over the top of it and slid down into the sleeping bag and zipped it all the way up so that the only thing sticking out of it was my face – and hunkered down to get some sleep for the rest of the drive back.

I don’t remember falling asleep – it must’ve been quick.

At some point in the middle of the night, I slipped into a dream…I was outside, and there was a stage – it wasn’t a traditional bandshell, but similar.  There was backline and gear set up on it, and I knew that I was supposed to be playing, somehow.  

Prior to this dream, in real life, Matt and Marlene had been negotiating with an indie label (Palmetto) to sign me – they had an amazing female singer/songwriter named Mindy Jostyn on the label, and I think Matt thought they needed a male contemporary that they could promote and potentially pair up for touring – or at least that’s how they pitched it.

At any rate, this show I was apparently playing in this dream was supposed to be something of a live performance preview of songs from the new record that was coming out on Palmetto – and I was seeing the craziest combination of souls in this outdoor park, gathering for this show.  Steve Wellner was there with his trademark smile, Tom Del Colle from Grape Street was cooking on a grill, a couple of guys I knew from high school were milling about on the grass – my Navy buddy from Iceland, Jay Smalley was there – but all standing somewhat spaced out on the grass, looking in my direction with contented smiles on their faces.

The band was Todd and Bob Stirner on guitar, Lee Shusterman on keys, Garry Lee on bass and Ronny Crawford on drums – every one my first pick if I were able to put together the band of my dreams.  Jayda and Dylan were there with their mom and her new boyfriend, and…

…it was almost as if my subconscious brain had selected a “greatest hits” playlist of sorts to parade past me in this apparition.

So as we’re doing a line check and I’m looking out at this field full of happy, supportive faces and I see a sandy-haired girl wearing denim overalls and a white T-shirt walking across the grass towards the stage and I know immediately who it is.

I take my guitar off and put it on a stand behind me and step down and take maybe ten or fifteen paces in her direction until we’re standing right in front of one another.

She looks directly into my eyes and reaches up to touch my face and she says:

“Tom – just because I couldn’t love you the way you wanted doesn’t mean I didn’t love you.”

I must have awakened at that very moment, because I don’t remember anything from the dream after that.

When I woke up, it was daylight – sunlight was shining in through the windows and I was staring up at the roof of the van absorbing what I’d just heard in my head in this dream I’d had.  As I was waking up, I hadn’t quite left my brain just yet.

“Just because I couldn’t love you the way you wanted doesn’t mean I didn’t love you.”

I didn’t realize how cold I was until I noticed how strange the tears felt on my face – I’d slept until nearly ten o’clock, and…contrary to my assumption from the night before, it had not warmed up when the sun came up.

In fact, most of my face was numb from the cold – there was no real difference in the temperature outside or inside the van at this point, as I’d managed to sleep for nearly ten hours somehow.  But over the course of that ten hour period, the only heat that remained in the van was what I’d barely managed to trap inside the sleeping bag with me – and that wasn’t much.  

That morning, before I started the van to head home, I had to scrape frost from the inside of the windows.  I’d never considered the possibility of that being necessary under any circumstance, but sure enough…I guess the condensation from my breath over the course of a ten hour slumber had created enough moisture in the air to frost the windows from the inside.

Not just a light coating, either…I actually had to use the scraper that I usually used for clearing the outside of the windows on both sides of the windshield before I was able to pull out of the rest stop to start the drive home.   After I finished scraping, I checked the oil and added another two quarts before starting the engine to let the van warm up for a moment while I tried to regain the feeling in my extremities so I could actually drive…again, I’m not someone with a propensity for the cold, but I was freezing that morning.  

The only other times I can remember being that cold was waking up in our house before I was in my teens – when the only source of heat we had in the house was a wood stove that had long since burned down to embers overnight.  My mom would get out of bed before us every morning to start the fire again before she’d wake us and get us up to get ready for school, but the wood stove was often no match for the cold that had settled in overnight.  When I got up, I’d grab my clothes and run to stand next to the stove and get dressed while standing as close to it as I could to try to stay warm.

The drive home wasn’t unlike those winter mornings getting ready for school – it never really got warm…or if it did, I wasn’t able to feel it.  In fact, I don’t think I warmed up until I got back to my penthouse on North Fifth Street and got myself and my guitar inside.  I remember my feet feeling strange when I got out of the van, because it had been so long since they’d touched anything that wasn’t the floorboard.  

Now, you know by now how I felt about my little nest above North Fifth Street – it was home to me at this point, and it was mine…the first place I’d lived that I could truly say that about.  But when I got home from this particular weekend’s shows, I don’t know that I’d ever been so glad to walk up those three flights of stairs and unlock that door to step inside my place.  MY place.  I was glad to be home in a way that felt like equal parts relief and contentment.

I took off my road clothes and took the longest, hottest shower I’ve probably ever taken – I turned on the television in the bedroom after I got out and put on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, and laid down on the bed tucked into the corner of the back room and let my attention drift from the dialogue from the TV to the delight I felt in actually being warm again for the first time in what felt like days.

It was Sunday – it wasn’t particularly late, and I’d slept pretty long the night before finishing the drive home, but I was drained.  I had come home from two marginally successful gigs with less money than I’d left home with, and I’d been thinking about all of this for the entire days’ drive and apparently, I wasn’t finished mulling it over yet.

I was staring down the barrel at 34 years old and I was beginning to feel the earth shift beneath my feet a little bit.

I’d had almost two years to cobble together a followup to my 1997 record, and I had…nothing.

(OK, maybe not nothing – but nothing I’d been as excited about as I’d been when I’d assembled this crew of believers to start working on that record…and no, it’s not fair to compare them, any more than it’s fair to compare your children with that kind of expectation, but…that weekend, it had started to sink in that I was ill-equipped to follow up that record.)

I had songs.  I had songs I liked, even.  But I think that the experience of making Mutual Angels with Steve had…well, it had kinda ruined me.  It’s not as though the door at Longview was closed to me, but I think that when someone (in this case, someone in Steve’s position) decides to invest their time and talent alongside your time and talent to create something, they expect you to be as excited about the prospects of your joint creation as they are, and I will never accept that I didn’t disappoint Steve on that level.  Steve stood next to me as we made that record, he believed in that record, and he was proud of that record, and – it came out and my life imploded and I took my eye off the ball.

When the summer of 1997 happened in the manner it did, Derek did the best he could to try and create a space for both that record and for me as an artist within the sphere of where I lived and worked, but I wasn’t present for it.  I didn’t have my heart in it, as I was distracted by the things going on in my life.  But I got another shot, when Matt came along and was every bit as motivated as Derek had been coming out of the gate, but again – other things in my life demanded my time and attention and I didn’t live up to the work I needed to do to give it the same amount of effort that the people around me were putting into it.

If you’re reading this, you likely know me on some level outside my capacity as a long-winded autobiographer, and you already know that there was never any real follow-up to Our Mutual Angels – there have been records in the years since, but they’ve largely been homemade efforts, and in the years after this particular weekend run of shows, my attention shifted largely away from songwriting to other pursuits.

I don’t recall the exact date, but at some point Steve Wellner evaporated into thin air.  For a while, no one knew what happened to him or what became of the studio – he turned up some years later, happy and healthy and living in Southern California with a great gig as an engineer and is doing quite well.

When I was touring with Marshall Tucker Band in 2013, we were playing a show in Woodland Hills, CA and I reached out to Steve to let him know that I was in town – he came to the show and we got a chance to go sit at the bar at our hotel and talk at length for the first time since he’d left Philadelphia, and…to call it a catharsis still feels as though I’m selling it short.

I got to thank him properly, at last, for the work he’d done on that record, for his belief in me as an artist, and for the sacrifice he’d made to give birth to it.  He was gracious and complimentary and convinced me – maybe for the first time – that it was as much a labor of love for him as it had been for me.  I told him how much I regretted that I hadn’t been as present as I should’ve been in the aftermath of the record, and that I felt like I let him down, but he told me that he completely understood – he’d been present for the emotional turmoil that fueled the creation of the record as well as the fallout, and he was a firsthand witness to what had taken place in my life in those years, and he got it – and he told me that he bore me no grudges about any of it and that he was glad to have been a part of it, and…

…and I don’t know that the words are available to me right now to tell you how that felt.

It was like having a regret that you’ve carried around for years liquidated and washed away.

I hadn’t seen Steve in almost fifteen years by then, and it was as if no time had passed when we saw each other that night…and I think the thing I took away from that encounter was the notion that maybe there was a reason that Mutual Angels was a one-time thing.  I couldn’t have made that record with anyone else, and I would’ve measured anything I did after that with the template that I’d created in my relationship with Steve, and I’m not sure if anyone else would’ve lived up to it.

Now, I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of sessions in the time since that record, and I’ve forged some great relationships with producers and engineers in studios all over the place in that time.  I consider myself a pretty flexible guy in the studio and I can work with just about anyone…

…on other people’s music.

Whether I could ever make another record like Our Mutual Angels with anyone other than Steve?

Well, I know what the answer to that question has been for nearly a quarter century.  I guess it could be said that the jury is still out, but whatever might come next, in terms of a Tom Hampton record of all original compositions – it’ll be apples and oranges to the work I did with Steve.

As I lay in bed after that road trip, though – back in February of 1999 – I hadn’t fully processed this yet.  I still had some work to do and I needed to be gently led in another direction.

I needed a creative vacation – a distraction of sorts.  And I’d soon figure out what that looked like.