Harleys, Cars, Girls & Guitars

July 4th Weekend at Tail O’ the Pup

I pulled up to Tail O’ the Pup in Lake Placid last Friday morning for The Nite Train Band’s three day gig. The owner greeted me with a handshake, and asked:

“You guys any good, or do I have to get out the chicken wire?”

For those of you who don’t get it, this is a reference to The Blues Brothers first movie. The boys get out of prison and head to Chicago to reform their band. Of course, you can’t just hit the stage for your breakthrough gig, so the boys find an agent who’ll book them in a dive in the stix.

The Blues Brothers is probably the best movie ever made about the realities of the music business. The agent finds a booking for the blues band… in a country and western honky tonk in downstate Illinois. This is a common practice in the music biz. Agents lie. Club owners lie. Musicians lie. Everybody lies.

So the band takes the stage and begins to play some classic blues song. The audience of rednecks and cowboys takes offense and begins to scream curses and throw beer bottles at the band. A curtain of chicken wire descends in front of the boys to protect them from the audience.

In an effort to pacify the rioting audience, the boys try to come up with a country song to play. The only one they know is the theme from Rawhide, which they proceed to play repeatedly.

The gig at The Tail O’ the Pup was fun and hilarious. We played seven hours a day for three straight days. Ken did a great job of engaging the audience. Every day, we brought in a different drummer and guitar player.

Since our audience consisted of campers and families stopping in for the BBQ, we almost always had a group of little girls, under 6 years old, dancing in front of the bandstand.

On Sunday night, the owner sat down with us and said: “You guys are the best entertainers we’ve ever had here.”

We laughed our asses off.

We‘re back at the Tail O‘ the Pup this Sunday for another marathon seven hours of jamming. Chicken wire not required.

In the Meat Grinder

I’m in the midst of an intense struggle. Ironically, transferring to part-time at nursing school means attending full-day clinical sessions for the entire month of July.

On top of that, I’ve got a weekend of gigs in the Lake Placid area with Nite Train coming up.

I’ve been playing gigs with Ken Briggs and the Nite Train Band for a couple of months. They mix up blues, rock and R&B. Ken is a good front man who engages the audience. His wife, Marla, has a very strong blues voice.

Sometimes, Ken’s daughters join in for a few tunes.

Add to all of this my work for the pharmaceutical company, and my continuing work with Big Joe in The V-Twins… whew! Big Joe and I will have a new album of acoustic songs together within a couple of weeks. I’ve got to design a logo and a CD cover.

I’ve been working in the cancer ward at a local hospital. The work is emotionally demanding and physically draining. And, working with the cancer patients reminds me always of those weeks in the hospital as Myrna’s life came to an end. She has been gone almost five years.

If I can just get through clinical, I’ve got August off. Might take a vacation. I’ll get out to look for gigs for the V-Twins and Nite Train.

Life is full.

Taco Juan’s in Saugerties

Finally, a day without rain! I tried to focus on business, but no use. This morning, I took a long walk around the lake. Mid-afternoon, I jumped on the Harley and took a ride.

I stopped in Saugerties to take a stroll, and I immediately noticed a sign for Taco Juan’s. Since Taco Juan’s, a fast food Mexican restaurant, has been doing business in Woodstock… well, forever… I had to stop in to take a look.

I walked in the door and there was Taco John.

“I didn’t know you had a shop in Saugerties,” I said.

“How are you doing, man?” John asked as he shook my hand. “I haven’t seen you in ages.”

Then, John told me his story. After 30 years of doing business with a partner in Woodstock, the partners had a falling out. John discovered that he really didn’t have any ownership rights in his business, and he was odd man out. So, he opened the new shop in Saugerties because… well, he really doesn’t know anything else to do.

I ordered a beef enchilada, and handed John a ten dollar bill.

“I hope I’ve got change for a ten,” John said. “You‘re the first customer I‘ve seen today.”

John is really struggling. He doesn’t have the kind of foot traffic in Saugerties that the Woodstock restaurant has. After decades of hard work, he’s struggling just to survive.

Of course, that’s the story for a lot of people nowadays, isn’t it? Could be me in the future.

The Saugerties Car Show will be held on July 12th. I hope that it produces some business for John. The food, by the way, was great! Better than the Woodstock shop. If you’re in Saugerties, stop by and say hello to the original Taco Juan, and have lunch.

Busy as a Bee With a Red Butt

I’m in over my head. Playing music with everybody who will show up and play. The Karaoke Queen laughed and offered this Filipino idiom to describe me:

“You’re as busy as a bee with a red butt!”

A bee with a red butt! I’m still trying to work that one out. So, I PhotoShopped the above picture of a bee. Apparently, the bee’s butt gets red because he hops from place to place.

The world is going to hell in a hand basket. The North Koreans are threatening to lob an atomic bomb at Hawaii over the July 4th weekend. (One of my sisters lives there!) Mexico has blown up into a full scale drug war that apparently threatens the stability of the government. Iranians are fighting in the streets against the mullahs.

I can remember when I thought that I could do something about this madness. When I was much younger, I was busy as a bee with a red butt… playing music, working and raising a family. And, I somehow also found time to try to save the world.

I ceased trying to save the world over 25 years ago, because I didn’t seem to be producing a noticeable effect, and because I just got tired. Hell, I couldn’t even prevent Myrna from dying. Often, I wonder whether I might have been much more successful if I’d never been infected with the save the world bug.

The world’s gonna do what it’s gonna do. I have a very small role to play. Big Joe and I are recording an acoustic CD. We've got eight songs in the can!  I’m praying that the weather clears up over the July 4th weekend so that I can get in a gig with Nite Train up in Lake Placid.

The Grateful Dead, in their infinite wisdom, wrote a song called “Hell in a Bucket.”

I may be going to hell in a bucket
But at least I’m enjoying the ride

Here’s the YouTube version.

All I can do is enjoy the ride.

At the Nursing Job Fair

Like everybody else, I’m learning to live on less. At least, I can see a day in the future when I’ll be doing a lot better.

While I continue to do multimedia work for the pharmaceutical company, I’m preparing for my retirement career… working as an LPN. One of the steps toward that goal is to work as a CNA, a nursing assistant. These folks do the dirty, hard work of caring for patients in hospitals and nursing homes.

Yesterday, I attended a job fair at my school. I interviewed with three different organizations. I plan to work part time as a CNA while I finish school. The wages are laughable… a fraction of what I’m used to making.

“Don’t think about the money,” the Karaoke Queen advised. “It’s something you need to do to get where you want to go.”

Oh, well... at least the part time work will pay a few bills.

My first interview was with a nursing home where I’d done a clinical turn for school. They were very receptive and encouraging. My second interview was with an agency that mostly services the home care seniors. The guy who interviewed me was very enthusiastic about my computer skills.

“You should try everything!” he exclaimed. “When people see these skills that you have, they are going to steer you toward administrative and computer work.”

The third interview, with an assisted living facility, produced exactly the opposite result.

“You should downplay your past experience,” the interviewer told me.

She was a very pretty young lady in a pink dress suit.

“Because of the economic downturn, we’re getting a ton of applications from people with great qualifications. If I were you,” she continued, “I’d stress my clinical experience and push the rest of that stuff way down your resume.”

Incidentally, the picture at the top is just something I pulled off of Yahoo.

I’ll be working part-time at the CNA job for a year while I finish school. I’ll learn the basics of patient care and I’ll be more marketable as a nurse. Fortunately, I’m still drawing an income from the pharmaceutical company, and I’m working in a couple of bands that are making a few bucks.

But, as I said, I’m tightening the belt a little bit.

Woodstock Reformed Methodist Church

I haven’t added to my walk through Woodstock’s business district for a while. This church faces onto the Village Green.

My dad was a Methodist, my mom was Catholic. Somehow, that meant that the kids were raised Catholic. So, I’ve never set foot inside Woodstock Reformed Methodist Church. Catholics, at least when I was a kid, regarded Methodism as a very soft religion… we heard tell that they didn’t even believe in hell. The Methodists were a sort of social organization, a tea party, devoid of any recognizable punitive structure.

I checked Wikipedia to try to find out what that “Reformed” was all about. I thought that Martin Luther reformed the Catholic Church when he formed the Methodist Church. Apparently another reform was needed. This is certainly in keeping with the spirit of Woodstock, where a new revolution must be waged every five years or so.

Note that the board above refers to Calvinism, a concept that I wouldn’t have expected to have any takers in Woodstock. At least as I understand it, Calvinism teaches the doctrine of hard work, and the belief that those who work hard will prosper more than slackers.

The church has been sponsoring weekend rock concerts stage on a flatbed truck in front of the building. A poster for those concerts is visible in the notice board. I’ve walked by while these concerts are in progress. The bands are full of very young folks just learning how to play.

I’m Building an Ark

Rain, rain, go away! Damn! It just won’t stop raining!

On my way home from school today, I ran into a detour. Sawkill Road, an old route between Kingston and Woodstock was flooded out.

I took this picture on the bridge over the Millstream in Woodstock.

Rain is forecast every day except for one over the next week and a half. No relief in sight.

Forty Day and Forty Nights

Seems like it’s been raining forever in Woodstock. Great for the garden. I’ve got more lettuce and spinach than I can eat.

Haven’t taken a ride on the Road King for a week. But, I’ve got to say, the rain fits my mood. I’ve got the blues. Who knows why? Maybe I was just born with the blues.

On a day like today, I often think of this song, recorded by the great Muddy Waters and written by Bernie Roth:

Forty Days and Forty Nights

Forty days and forty nights
Since my baby left this town
Sunshinin’ all day long
But the rain keep comin’ down
She’s my life I need her so
Why she left I just don’t know

Forty days and forty nights
Since I set right down and cried
Keep rainin’ all the time
But the river is runnin’ dry
Lord help me it just ain’t right
I love that girl with all-a my might

Forty days and forty nights
Since my baby broke my heart
Searchin’ for her in a while
Like a blind man in the dark
Love can make a poor man rich
Or break his heart I don’t know which

Forty days and forty nights
Like a ship out on the sea
Prayin’ for her each night
That she would come back-a home to me
Life is love and love is right
I hope she come back home tonight

That’s one of the great blues lines ever written: “Love can make a poor man rich, Or break his heart I don’t know which.”  Damned if I know which.

Facing Alzheimer’s Head-on

Dad suffered through an almost decade long bout with Alzheimer’s Disease before he died. Mom nursed him at home, at a very high cost to herself. I remember, just before he slipped away into that horrible loss of self, he asked me to come home and talk with him. We took a walk around the block.

“This is probably the last time I’ll be able to talk with you,” he said.

He knew it was coming. As he always did, Dad told me that he loved me, that he was proud of me, and that he wished he had been a better father.

I often attend Alzheimer’s patients in the nursing home or hospital. When I look into their faces, I see Dad, and I see my future. Alzheimer’s occurs with much greater frequency in those who are genetically predisposed. Short-term memory loss is one of the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s. I’ve already been dealing with that the past few years.

Myrna died so suddenly. She was diagnosed with cancer in the late spring, and she died in the early fall, less than 5 months later. When I tell the Karaoke Queen this, she replies:

“She was lucky. She didn’t linger.  Everybody would like to die like that.”

The agitation and anger of Alzheimer’s sufferers is often noted. What, exactly, are they agitated and angry about? My observation of my father and my patients leads me to believe that it is social isolation that is the cause. Loss of the ability to communicate and to be understood drives people mad. Deprivation of social contact is the ultimate horror for humans.

“How much longer do I have?” I often wonder.

Dad didn’t enter into full-blown Alzheimer’s until his mid-70s.

I decided to become an LPN for a variety of reasons: income, useful work, the desire to be helpful, etc. Going to school has helped me to focus on the future, instead of focusing only on the past and the loss of Myrna. I also decided to become an LPN because I’m hoping that the continuing intellectual and physical challenge helps me to maintain my intellectual and physical health.

I’m not sure that I buy the health care field’s re-naming of “senility” into “Alzheimer’s.” I believe it when I’m working, because believing it is part of the terms of my employment. Re-naming of things into diseases has been a mania during my lifetime. Old age and the breakdown of our bodily systems is inevitable.

Something within me was determined to survive after the loss of Myrna. What that thing is, I don’t know.  Intellectually, I didn’t want to continue without her. If social isolation is the curse of humans, then social interaction is our salvation. People came to my rescue. Co-workers tried very hard to reach out to me. Fellow musicians, like Big Joe, gave me something to live for just because they showed up to play and laugh. My sisters talked to me as much as I wanted to talk. And, the Karaoke Queen supported me and stayed with me, even when she had to listen to all that talk about just how special and amazing was Myrna (which is, in fact, true).

So, I’m continuing to fight to live. I’m not going softly into the night.

God’s Waiting Room

Big Joe and his wife fed me a very nice chicken dinner last night before we rehearsed. They’re considering retiring to The Villages in Florida.

“God’s waiting room!” I said.

“Well,” Big Joe replied, “You’ve got to wait somewhere.”

Indeed. The Karaoke Queen has been talking about The Villages for some time. One of the cops in her town recently retired there, and he loves it.

I’d certainly have a ready clientele for my LPN work. Never at a loss for customers! I’m now a part-time LPN student. That means that I’ll graduate in June of 2010, instead of December 2009. Multimedia-work is ramping up for me, and the gigs are also coming in. I’ve got to scale back a bit on school so that I can get everything done.

Big Joe says that an old fart band can work all the time at The Villages, and they get paid well. That’s definitely a plus. I took a look at real estate ads this morning, and you can buy a nice house there for $150,000 to $200,000. I hate northern winters. My arthritis hurts like hell in cold weather.

Anyway, as you can see from the above map, The Villages is located in central Florida, just about half way between Jacksonville and Orlando. It’s only an hour drive to the Gulf or the Atlantic Ocean. That big “A” marks the spot. Disneyland is only a hour away. The Queen loves Disneyland.

And, of course, you can ride your Harley year round in Florida. You can even ride without a helmet if you’re crazy enough to do it. That brings to mind the famous quote from Indian Larry. I can’t find it on the internet, but it goes something like this:

“Better to go out in a blaze of glory than to spend the last ten years of your life drooling in your diapers.”

Indian Larry did choose to go out in a blaze of glory, God bless him.

What a thing to be considering! Retirement in Florida! I’ll be 60 years old next January. If I’m lucky, I might have 20 years of good health and sound mind ahead of me.

Big Joe is right. You’ve got to wait somewhere.  Will it be The Villages for me?

Kiss Your Ass Goodbye

We’re on the verge of a major nuclear war, and nobody seems to care much. Iran is about to acquire the ability to construct nuclear weapons and it has missiles capable of reaching Western Europe. And the mullahs have sworn to wipe Israel off the face of the earth!

I’m grew up in the 50s. The world was just getting used to the idea of nuclear weapons. We were panicked by the notion that nuclear annihilation was imminent. In school, we practiced duck and cover. The idea was to crawl under your desk and wait out the mushroom cloud. See the satirical poster to the right to get an idea of the hysteria.

Those who could afford it built underground bomb shelters. A staple of TV programs during this era was this dilemma: what to do about the neighbors who didn’t bother to build their own shelter? Leave them out in the fallout to die? Shoot them? Bomb shelters were provisioned with months or years worth of food.  If you fed the sheltered and fed the neighbors, your own kids might die as a result!

During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, I remember going to bed terrified that the entire world would be blown to hell overnight.

So, how did we become so blasé about our impending doom? The Iranians are nuts. I don’t doubt that they will launch a nuclear strike against Israel. What will happen after that? God alone knows. Israel will probably strike back. After that, all hell could break loose.

I guess we’ve just gotten used to the idea of nuclear war. Nobody seems to be noticing that we are on the verge of Armageddon.

One Thing I Like About President Obama

While I’m not exactly an Obama-naut, here’s one good thing about his presidency: Woodstock is no longer frothing at the mouth over the evil President Bush.

A couple of years ago, Woodstock held its official Hate Bush weekend. It was quite an event… two days devoted to comparing Bush to Hitler, screaming obscenities, the usual boring 60s theatrics, etc. The weekend was capped off with the showing of the YouTube sensation, “Loose Change,” a video produced by two local kids.

The video was the work of a couple of English majors who pasted together various clips that “proved” that President Bush was the conspirator behind the attack on the World Trade Center. The video is a foul, vicious, stupid piece of ham handed political propaganda for the lunatic left… just the sort of thing our loonies love.

The Woodstock Times carried a two page article that weekend that praised the young men for this vicious moronic attack on President Bush. Large crowds gathered in town to denounce Republicans and to attend the movie at the Tinker St. Cinema. It was a complete nutjob hysteria… just what I’ve learned to expect from Woodstock’s deranged left. If you’ve ever seen one of those South Park episodes where the entire town goes completely crazy with lynch mob fever, you’ll get the idea.

The one really positive outcome of the Obama presidency is that the nuts and cultists are no longer howling at the moon and frothing at the mouth. For the moment, our cultists believe that salvation has arrived. Now that the evil Bush is gone, they are hoping that they will stop hearing voices and experiencing hallucinations. A strange quiet has descended upon the World’s Most Famous Small Town.

As the letters to the Woodstock Times demonstrate, a certain cockiness has set in. Now that the Evil America has been defeated, those Iranians and North Koreans will certainly want to kiss and make up. Free everything for everybody! All our problems are solved. Those big evil Republicans were the cause of it all.

Pictures from The Castle Gig

Outdoor gigs are always held hostage by the weather. The V-Twins played The Castle down in Chester, New York on Saturday, and we fought with the rain all afternoon. What the hell! Big Joe and I had a good time anyway.

The Castle offers a combination of carnival, amusement park, roller derby and go-cart attractions. In addition, the park has a food court and a video arcade. It’s a great place to take the kids for a weekend outing. The owner, Brian, is very concerned with maintaining the family atmosphere, and he does a good job of it.

Big Joe and I moved our equipment under cover of the pavilion and cranked it up for our first set. A group of kids danced the monkey in front of our bandstand.

That shiny metal guitar is my Dobro. We’ve just begun to work it into our act. As long as you play in the key of G or the key of D, it’s great. I use the Dobro to play slide guitar in G opening tuning.

Big Joe sang about eight songs. When he played “La Bamba” a Hispanic guy over at the batting cages broke into a mambo.

The Castle reminded me of my days playing in teenage bands. Back in the 60s, it wasn’t unusual for the rock band to play on a flatbed truck at the carnival. A favorite spot for the sock hop was the roller rink.  Sometimes, the skating would just continue through the sock hop. The band’s tunes would get mixed into that sound of roller skate wheels on the wooden track.

After the gig, we took the girls out to dinner at a steak joint. We drank and ate up the profits. It was a good time.

BlameBush! Out of Business!

The venerable blog, BlameBush! seems to have gone out of business. I guess we really don’t have President Bush to kick around any more.

Somebody forgot to tell President Obama that Bush isn’t still to blame for everything. Obama still seems to be 100% the anti-Bush, campaigning endlessly against the War on Terror.

Here in Woodstock, we’re all terribly relieved that we survived the reign of the Bu$hHilter. We were worried that he would refuse to leave office after his second term and set up the Fourth Reich.

Now that President Obama has replaced the dreaded Bu$hHilter, the French like us again. Pretty soon, the Arabs will kiss and make up. We’ll all be driving a car the size of a roller skate. Everybody will be gay, gay, gay!

It was a great run for BlameBush! But, we don’t have Bush to kick around any more. Somebody tell President Obama.