De su facebook:
The first time I drove into New York City I didn’t own a cell phone. I was driving a 20-something year old van with no radio and I had a notebook on the seat beside me filled with detailed driving instructions for my so-called “tour” and it was covered in coffee stains and I was currently looking at the wrong page as I waited in line to pay my toll through the Lincoln Tunnel. Somehow I made it to my gig in Greenwich Village at a blues club and marveled when I realized that the money I made that night would only cover the cost of parking for the evening. In the dark after my mediocre set opening for a large electric blues band I had a snack from my dwindling bag of apples and potato chips (the venue would not feed musicians for free) and I checked my notes for the next night’s show and left Manhattan enroute to New Haven, Connecticut, stopping at a rest area just over the state line that was full to the rafters all night and I counted myself lucky to find a parking spot at all and I huddled in my sleeping bag listening to the shouts and music blaring through the low growl of diesel trucks until I finally fell asleep, buzzing from a raucous drive along FDR Drive and the free-for-all dragstrip formally known as I-95. Days merged together as I did this over and over again, occasionally having access to a phone where I could call home and reassure my family that I was alive and that I was a rollicking success, my smile fading as soon as I hung up because I was far from a rollicking success, I was, in fact, not doing well at all and hemorrhaging money as if my wallet had been neatly cut open by a surgeon. Night after night I played guitar and sang the sad old folk-blues to either no one or some folks who had wondered in on the wrong night and I meekly collected a few dollars in tips or a few dollars that served as the "guarantee" and sometimes I was offered food that I gratefully accepted. I put all the money in the gas tank and drove on to the next place, sleeping along the way and letting my bleary eyes stare from the road to the vistas along the way that I’d never seen before and was not actually seeing now.
I wish I still had that notebook. I wish I still had the courage to drive across the country with no credit card, expecting myself to make enough change playing the guitar to carry me through, expecting nothing to go wrong, no flat tires, no blown water pump or random deer leaping unawares into my windshield. There was no Facebook, I don’t even think Myspace was a thing yet – how on earth would anyone know about my gig? At least when I played on the West Bank I could tack up some flyers on the telephone poles around the U of M which would quickly get covered over with the flyers of every other band in the area, but who would hang those flyers in Philadelphia or Atlanta, where I played a couple songs for the sound engineer before we mutually decided to call it a night and he bought me a beer and recommended that I not sleep in my van in that particular neighborhood. Sometimes I would be caught off guard, playing in some out of the way place or in a small college town and find actual people at my show, dancing and clapping and telling me that they were happy that I’d made the trip, buying my homemade CD’s and giving me tips to buy more gasoline, but that wasn’t the norm – not by a long shot.
And I’d get home after a few weeks of this, exhausted and broke, my guitar strings covered with barnacles and me smelling as though I hadn’t washed my clothes or bathed since I left (because I usually hadn’t) and after a week or so I’d begin thumbing through the atlas and heading to the library to look for phone numbers of bars in Montana or California or Colorado that I could call and ask if I could play there, bragging that I’d just completed an overwhelmingly successful tour of the eastern seaboard and pretty soon I’d have a calendar filled with one-night stands and long drives and I’d thumb a fresh page in my notebook and begin writing down driving instructions for myself and go out and buy a new set of strings for my guitar and wash my clothes because I was a traveling musician, a “touring” musician, and for whatever reason, my vision of success didn’t actually include money, it only included music.
I am grateful on a daily basis for those early tours, for time spent without the frazzled insistence of the internet on what we should regard as “success”, I’m grateful for all those drives without that polite voice instructing me to drive another “two-point-five-miles and you have reached your destination” … and I’m grateful for that voice, too, now that it keeps me company on drives I can do by heart but just want someone to be there with me, acknowledging the left turn I already knew was coming. I’m grateful for this internet, too, and while I don’t agree that I need to compare myself to anyone else, I do like having the ability to discover music that I might have never gotten to hear otherwise. But anyway, listen, among the shows I have lined up for the rest of this year, I have two sets coming up at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis and I’m thrilled to get to play there again, it’s an incredible place and I’m humbled to be invited to sit there for a bit and play my tired old songs and even some new ones that I’ve been working on. There's also a west coast run that will include Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival and a few shows with Watchhouse. So this is my flyer, stapled to a telephone pole in Seward or NE Mpls or Dinkytown, mostly covered up now by another flyer for another tired old guitar player but that’s okay because we’re all here now, and we can see all the flyers underneath all the flyers like we never could have before.
