50 Years entry #2

January 31, 2024

We’re about to leave stormy Glasgow on a prop plane flight to Dublin. I think the last time I flew on one of these was with Danny Barnes maybe 20 years ago. That flight was from Leeds to Dublin, going west over the Irish Sea like we will today.

We had a wonderful turnout at the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow last night and Jan and the guys in the band really came through. It was really fun to play that music from “The Crossing” and its follow-up “Two Journeys” after more than 20 years.

A friend has given us use of his cottage on the Dingle peninsula in County Kerry for some welcome quiet days after the tour in UK. The same friend sent me this podcast about a pretty interesting series of events in 1977 just north of where we’re staying.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/documentary-on-one-podcast/id10792...

Our accommodations are also very close to where, in the 6th century, Saint Brendan and 17 other Irish monks launched an Atlantic voyage in a wood framed, skin covered boat called a currach, a type of watercraft still used on the west coast of Ireland. Brendan, then in his 70’s, and his companions fasted and prayed for weeks before their departure. Historians have studied the text in “Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis” - an account of the voyage published in the 10th century - and comparing its text with what they now know about Atlantic currents, have concluded that Brendan reached the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, and the Faeroe Islands. Norse sagas suggest that Irish monks were already in Iceland when the Vikings first arrived there late in the 9th century. Some say Brendan may have reached Greenland and even North America at Newfoundland before returning to Ireland.

Later: Prop plane in wind and rain? No problem. We ate a burger before the flight and didn’t even feel the need to pray. The plane wanted to skid a little sideways on landing, but the tires held. After we loaded our gear into our rent-a-car, we noticed it had a flat tire, so we exchanged it for a different car and headed to Kildare for dinner and a room for the night.

February 1, 2024

This morning, I noticed a poster listing events commemorating Brigid’s Day which is today. Brigid, the daughter of a chieftain, converted to Christianity under Saint Patrick in the 6th century, and later founded a monastery here She is a greatly revered Irish saint, the patron of among other things, cattle. Maybe it makes sense that Kildare is also horse country. One tradition of Brigid’s day is making crosses from reeds. As we were leaving town, the high school students were assembling to form a giant human Brigid’s Cross at 10am on the racetrack nearby. We were here in Ireland for Brigid’s day last year.

There are two ways to approach Dingle from the north, and we chose to drive over Conner Pass. I’d been over it once about 30 years ago, and today looked like a clear day for what should be amazing views. Wishful thinking! It is a dramatic, twisting, cliff-hanging narrow road. The sheep grazing on steep slopes seemed happy enough in the sideways rain and mist, but we felt sorry for the motorcyclist we saw. I wonder if any human beings have ever seen anything but clouds from the top. Now we’re settling into a cozy cottage, a peat fire burning, listening to the Gaelic language station.

February 17, 2024

From Dingle, Jan and I went to the White Horse pub in Ballincollig, near Cork City, where we rehearsed with two wonderful Irish traditional players, guitarist Steve Cooney and accordion player Dermot Byrne. Among other material, we worked up versions of traditional Irish pieces “O’Carolan’s Concerto” and “Arthur Darley”, a version of the Hot Rize song “Colleen Malone” and a new song original called “Tunes I Used to Know”. Joe Carey at the White Horse has been very supportive over the years, and he helped arrange a live multitrack recording of our show there. After that show we played at the Glor center in the bustling market town of Ennis in County Claire, shopped at Cash’s Men’s Wear, and heard concertina master Noel Hill in concert in nearby Milltown Malbay. We got home to Nashville on the 12th, but I’m still waiting for my guitar to get here. Jan made me a yummy steak dinner and bought me flowers for Valentine’s Day. I made rough mixes of the live recording and there’s plenty of good results. Seems like it’s a whole cd’s worth. Tomorrow, we head to Colorado to play three sold out concerts with our bluegrass buddies Mike Bub, Shad Cobb, and Cory Walker.

February 1974

In last month’s entry I said that gigs in Jackson Hole got thin in mid-February of 1974, but I guess they were already thin by the end of January. There was a girl living north of San Francisco who I thought liked me, and I decided to go see her.

I wasn’t sure Matahari would make the trip, so I set out hitch-hiking on February 1st. At Idaho Falls I got a lift with a Mormon guy about my age in a pickup truck with a load of barbed wire. He took me to Elko, Nevada, where his family put me up the night. In the morning, they fed me a breakfast of cereal, toast, orange juice and postum (a powdered grain beverage once popular as a coffee substitute). He dropped me off at the western edge of town where I stuck out my thumb. I wouldn’t get back to Elko until the early 1990’s when I attended the annual Cowboy Poetry gathering. At Winnemucca that afternoon I got a lift with two young women who took me all the way to their apartment in Sausalito. We arrived late at night, and I slept on their couch. In the middle of the night there was a break in. They were probably burglars, but they didn’t take anything. They were gone just a soon as they came in, maybe because they’d assumed the occupants were still away, and maybe because they saw me on the couch. (If there’s a recurring theme in my stories, it might be how I’ve generally been both naïve and lucky in my adventures.) That next morning, I made my way to Berkeley where my friend Dennis from the Jackson Hole summer camp was living in a fraternity house. We hung out that night and the next morning, February 4th, we read about Patty Hearst’s kidnapping which had taken place several blocks away. A couple days later I hitched north past Bodega Bay, turned right at the Russian River, and made to the commune where the girl was living. She had told me I was welcome to visit her and David, and I assumed she meant her brother David, but no, this was her boyfriend, David. After a few days I there I headed back in Berkeley where I bought a used Doc Watson record and went to a bluegrass benefit concert at the Freight and Salvage coffee house. The performers included Butch Waller’s High County, The Phantoms of the Opry (with the great Pat Enright on guitar and vocals) and Shubb, Wilson and Shubb (featuring banjoist Rick Shubb who later designed and marketed the famous capo). The headliner was Mike Seeger who played an amazing solo set. He blew my mind when he played rack harmonica and fiddle simultaneously on a Cajun tune.

When I think back on those times, I’m amazed how little cash I needed to get by. In Jackson I had subsisted on cheese omelets and whole wheat sandwich bread. I remember my dad asking me on the phone that winter if the recession was affecting me, but I was oblivious. On this hitch-hiking trip I generally mooched off friends and acquaintances. Maybe with my naïve optimism, backpack, fiddle and “kinky red hair out to here”, people took pity on me.

The next day I set out to see Big Sur. I got a ride in a VW bus from Berkeley all the way to San Luis Obispo, where the driver, a guy named Jules, let me out about 11pm at night. I grabbed my backpack but forgot to grab my fiddle as Jules drove away south. The inside walls of the VW had Rolling Stone articles pasted on as wallpaper, and there were stacks of back issues in the back where I'd ridden. I went on my way without the fiddle, wondering if I could and should place an ad in the classifieds in Rolling Stone and if Jules would see it. All I saw of Big Sur was rain and fog and the highway. Next, I hitched east to Boulder, Colorado. I remember sleeping overnight in a building near Salt Lake City that was still under construction.

The summer before I’d met a banjo player named Ritchie Mintz who lived in Boulder. I stayed several days with him and met several musicians. Ritchie and his friend Ned had a bluegrass band called Town and Country review and Ned had a store called Folk Arts Music. I jammed with them, and with Kelly McNish and Ray Bonneville who were starting a trio with bassist Eric Johnson. I also met the members of a new Western Swing Band – Dusty Drapes and the Dusters - who wondered if was living there and if I might play fiddle with them. I went with Ritchie to a club in Denver called Ebbets Field to see the new bluegrass group Country Gazette. On the way we stopped at the Denver Folklore Center, which would become the nexus of my world in the coming years. I liked Colorado’s Front Range, and it seemed like I could find a place in its music scene. I went back to Jackson and got a gig playing from table to table. Jann the banjo player named me “strolling Tim.”

Around that time, I considered taking out a classified ad in the Rolling Stone. Swallowing hard, I sent a check for $75 and placed an ad that said "Jules, I want my fiddle back. Call collect”, listing my parents’ home phone number. By the middle end of March, I was back home in Wheeling, and playing with West Virginia Grass again, this time on electric bass, and testing my parents’ patience. My dad helped me make a homeowner’s insurance claim on the lost fiddle under the category “mysterious disappearance”. (I found the same fiddle I still play today at Walter Shalayka’s little store in an alley there in Wheeling and bought it with the insurance money.) There were various crank calls about the lost fiddle for a month or so, and then nothing. But in mid-May, Jules called. It turned out that the VW bus he'd driven that day was not his after all. He’d gotten home, found the fiddle in the back of the VW, and stashed it at his house before returning his friend's car. Then a few months later, he was hitchhiking himself and there on the seat between him and the driver was the April 11, 1974, issue of Rolling Stone. Marvin Gaye was on the cover and my ad was way in the back of the mag in small print.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Rolling+Stone+cover+April+11%2C+1974&rlz...

Jules saw his name and called the number. He'd kept the fiddle at his house in LA and would work with me to send it to my parents’ place in WV. I gave the claim money back to the insurance company, Aetna, who would then handle the transfer and shipping of the lost fiddle for free. There was a delay, however. Jules's home was a block from where the Symbionese Liberation Army, who had kidnapped Patty Hearst, was hiding. The FBI and Police had cordoned off the area, and they eventually burned the house with SLA members inside. Patty Hearst was not there, but the ringleader Donald DeFeeze, known as "Cinque," was. He shot himself in the head as he was getting burned alive in the crawl space underneath the house on May 17th, 1974.

I got my fiddle back soon after, and about six months after that it was badly damaged. By then I was back in Boulder playing with the Ophelia Swing Band. Our band's fiddler, Linda Joseph, liked to play brushes on a cardboard box for some songs. She didn't have a box that night, so she put my fiddle case (fiddle inside) on a stool and then knocked it off the stool mid-song and the top broke in several places. I got it repaired but it wasn't the same and I sold it.

I wonder what Jules is doing now.