datamusicata

Welcome to 2009. We’ve reached 500,000 hits at this little site. For being a part of it; for your contributions and for your inspiration, I thank you.

The year has been a busy one for me what with being elected to the board of governors for the National Folk Alliance; recording all the music for my musical, Straight From the Heart; writing a new solo album; touring with John Batdorf (www.johnbatdorfmusic.com) behind All Wood and Stones (www.allwoodandstones.com), our celebrated acoustic collection of our favorite Rolling Stones (www.rollingstones.com) songs; recording a live album; recording a live DVD at Kulak’s Woodshed (www.kulakswoodshed.com) in Los Angeles and producing several outside projects at Beachwood Recordings...but enough about me...what do you think about me?

Sorry, that old joke that never ceases to amuse me. Say, speaking of me, in the late summer of 1975, Tom Robbins (author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues amongs many other best sellers - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Robbins ), invited me to travel to Cuba with him. He actually brought up the subject around the previous Christmas when we were having dinner at, if memory serves, the Black Rabbit Inn in La Conner, Washington. Never loathe for a new adventure, I readily agreed.

Then began the process of dealing with Communist Red tape...I know it seems redundant but that’s what it was. If you think dealing with the United States government is tedious, wait til you try it with the Soviets. It took us about eight months to get all the paper work in quadruplicate so that we could travel to Communist Cuba. And then we had to deal with more of the same from Uncle Sam, but finally we waded thru this Kafkaesque maze.

I was so excited to see this land described by some of my favorite authors (Hemingway and Farina come to mind) and I had heard that they even had a communist amusement park with a communist roller coaster. I had to experience the difference between a democratic roller coaster and a communist one. Surely there’s a difference,yes?

The way the trip was layed out, I flew from San Francisco to Seattle, where Tom picked me up drove me back to La Conner. The next day, Tom’s ex wife, Tiny Terrie, drove us to the Vancouver, BC airport for a flight to Montreal, where we would board a Soviet Aeroflot jet to Havana.

Due to the weather, or the traffic or something, we flew to Toronto. No, I remember. Tom was meeting some lovely young thing and her mother there, so we spent one night in Toronto. While Tom entertained this throbbing beauty, I distracted her round and jovial mother—with my guitar. Friendship knows no bounds, but hey.

The next day they couldn’t get any flights out of Toronto to Montreal and so they ferried us there on a bus. Fortunately, I had Jack Kerouac’s On the Road with me and read it the whole drive. It seemed appropriate to be traveling with Robbins and reading On the Road, and I felt it boded well for the upcoming trip.

I finished the book just as we rolled into the airport in Montreal. We checked in for the flight and then were segregated from the other passengers in an area cordoned off with dividers and those thick cords on poles like at the bank, and the entire circumference was guarded by Soviet soldiers with the equivalent of AK-47’s. They didn’t look happy.

Inside our little cage, we waited another several hours while they did whatever it is that communists must do to airplanes to make them fly. After a while, we became tired of the waiting game and in an effort to make the time go, I began to amuse a little boy near us with the only three magic tricks I know.

He was enthralled, but then after I had repeated each one for the tenth time even I could see he was getting restless, so I thought I should throw something new into the act.

The little boy had a paper bag, which I appropriated. In a very theatrical manner, I took the bag and carefully arranged it in my hands so that I could inflate it by blowing into the bag. When it was as round as my date from the previous evening, I looked at Tom and smiled an evil smile.

He knew in an instant what I was about to do and shook his head firmly. I grinned some more and slammed my hand into the inflated paper bag. It went off like the fourth of July and it was followed by an eternity of deathly silence, after which every person in sight hit the floor. I mean it. The entire passenger waiting area was covered with people lying on the ground. The sound of all these bodies hitting the linoleum was unique in my experience. Wish I had recorded it.

Now this is the lame part. I had only thought that the noise would be startling...and hopefully funny. What it was was completely frightening to everyone in earshot. The fear was palpable from all the prone passengers and then the soldiers with the machine guns began running towards us.

Til then I was stupidly standing there with the shreds of the paper bag in my hand. Like Newton’s apple, I dropped to the floor as well, shoving the remnants of the paper bag into the folds of my jacket.

The soldiers were running pell mell and Tom and I were struggling to keep from giving ourselves away by our giggles. We couldn’t stop laughing. I actually did bite my hand and hard enough for the pain to stop my barely controlled choking laughter.

The little boy did not betray me and the soldiers could not find the source of the noise and finally, after only an hour or two, stopped searching. We eventually boarded the communist airliner for our way to the land of Fidel...

More Monday. Happy New Year...