2003-09-26 - 4:27 a.m.
I haven¹t written here lately. I¹ve been home and keeping busy. The best I can hope to do is give impressions how the summer went. I¹m sticking to the highlights with more description where warranted. I¹d like to be up to real time when I get back out on the road next week. So here goes.......
May......
We played a great theater in Harrisburg, PA called “the Whitaker” w/ Allison Brown on the 2nd. She¹s great and a real sweet person...... The Bowery Ballroom in NYC was a blast on the 10th. Our good friend Alan threw a huge pre-party at another bar altogether and he had a limo pick us up after sound check. There was a big crowd out front to greet us when we got there. He presented us with commemorative pocket watches for our 2nd anniversary and had a ton of food and an open bar! For one night we got to be rock stars!.....Sirius Satellite radio on the 16th. We had fun with my good friend Meg Griffin......We played The Station Inn in Nashville, Tenn. on the 22nd. Folks, this place is full history! Every major bluegrass star has played here including the man himself, Bill Monroe......We played in Fayetteville, Ark. on the 24th. The town is the home of the University of Arkansas and is in a really beautiful part of the Ozarks! Who¹d of thunk Arkansas would be so lovely?......Played with Nickel Creek at Riverfest in Little Rock the
following day. That was cool. Stood around ohhing and ahhing the fireworks after the show with Chris Thiele and Sarah the fiddler.
June......
The Narrows Art Center in Falls River, Mass. on June 1st was a cool as shit gig. Really neat building filled up with artwork. It was a very listening audience. Hope to play there again!.....The River Bend Festival in Chattanooga was great. Half my family showed up and we had a ball!......We were back at the Eclipse Theater in Waitsfield, Vermont for 2 days on the 12th and 13th. Our sicko friends from Jersey were there (you know who you are) and we got hammered and had a righteous time......Loooong drive to Denver to play Quixote’s for 2 nights in Denver (20-21). Very “Dead’ bar with a laid back groove. There¹s a place where you can trade shows downstairs. I picked up some Tom Waits and Blind Faith. It’s too bad the Blind Faith didn¹t play. We¹re going back so I¹ll try again......Our angel in Colorado, Ann, hooked us up with a great show in her hometown of Breckenridge after we lost out on Telluride. It was a great show at the River Walk Center. Thankfully there was a tank of O2 in the dressing as the town is basically at treeline! The next day we had off and some of us went on a great hike up to Ann¹s old cabin. I grilled a huge piece of salmon and made a pile of potato salad for dinner and we chilled out in the mountain air.....
Our next show was in Albuquerque, NM. The venue was another Grateful Dead bar called Stella Blue. A really cool band opened for us called Mary and Mars. The place was packed. Not bad for the first time in a town on a Wednesday …………We make it to Flagstaff for a 2-night stand. I love this town. Nestled in the mountains a mere half hour from Sedona and an hour from the Grand Canyon, the town exudes old west charm. Our second day is interrupted by a performance in the afternoon in Sedona at the Thunder Mountain Festival. Once again we play with Allison Brown and Sam Bush. The festival, unfortunately, is under attended. We play again that evening in Flagstaff and it’s a blast. After the show some of us are locked in heated battle with the club’s booker in a game of Golden Tee. Fueled by Jamieson’s, we play until 4 in the morning…..The drive to “Winston’s” in San Diego takes us through the desert. Skirting the border of Mexico we pass through the Vellocito Mtns. At the summit is a huge boulder field that dominates the landscape. The boulders vary in size from Volkswagon to tractor-trailer and were softly rounded. It looked like the set of the Flintstones spilled out into the real world and gone horribly wrong. The gig goes reasonably well. We have the next day off and Andy and I decide to go to the San Diego zoo. It’s amazing! What a great way to spend the day.
July……..
LA is next. We stay at a cool hotel in Japan town. I fail to hook up with my friend Moris as he is producing a record and can’t get away from the studio. After the show (which is great) we notice a noodle shop open across the street from the hotel. I proceed to wolf down the most delicious bowl of chicken teriyaki I have ever had…..The High Sierra Music Festival is the pre-eminent hippie, jamband music fest on the west coast, if not the country. We have a mainstage play and a late night performance with the Hackensaw Boys and the Snake Oil Medicine Show. They’ve put us up in a cute, log cabinesque hunting lodge. It’s right out of the movie “High Sierra” with Humphrey Bogart! Our mainstage play seems like it would be in a great spot; sandwiched in between Soulive and Steve Kimock but the crowd dissipates before we take the stage. It would be until our fourth song before a sizeable crowd assembles in front of us. As is usually the case at HSMF, I would discover a really cool and unique band I had never heard before. This year it was a band from San Francisco called Japanise Elephants. I don’t know what’s up with the name but the music was fab. They had a marimba player and horns and generally sounded like a circus band from another dimension. Very eclectic and cool. Tom Waits would approve! Our late night show was packed and was a lot of fun. I was talking with the fiddler from the Hackensaw boys and he asked me to show him some tunes. Instead we ended up jamming with the whole band in the dressing room. We were so caught up that they almost forgot they had to go on! They were great and then we rocked out till 3:30 am….Then the long drive to Chicago. I am impressed by the immensity of Wyoming. At one point we pass a line of giant windmills that stretch nearly as far as the eye can see along the top of a gently curving ridge. They must be at least 200 feet high! They turn slowly in the steady wind and I visualize a day when much of our energy could come from such a benign source…..Martyrs in Chicago is a really nice venue. We get a decent crowd for a Thursday including some of our Jersey posse and our Chicago friends, Steve and Sarah. On Friday we play a show at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The stage is at lakeside which provides a beautiful background. The place is absolutely packed and goes fairly well bonkers. We even have a number of folks dancing on stage with us at the end. Just when we thought the night couldn’t get much better, Mother Nature outdoes us with a show of her own. For just after we finish our performance we are blessed with a spectacular performance of the Northern Lights! They started out a subtle, shimmering wave of green out across the lake. Soon reds and purples are added and the night sky is ablaze! It looks like a Technicolor stage curtain waving in the soft, night sky. It was a wonderful way to end a wonderful night!…..Our drive the next day takes us to northern Wisconsin and then across into the upper peninsula of Michigan where we ride along the sparsely populated shores of Lake Michigan until we cross the Mackinaw Bridge to the “glove” of lower Michigan. We’re Blissfest bound; the last shows of the tour. What a great festival! We play on the main stage just before Leo Kotke. I take the opportunity to tell him I saw him at the Nassau Coliseum in 1971. He quickly says, “I remember that show! That was with Frank Zappa and the Mahavishnu Orchestra! That was a good one!” The man has a great memory to remember a show 32 years and thousands of shows in the past! Blissfest has a neat camping arrangement. The camping is done in a large woods. Through these woods snake paths that are strung with lamps that provide a soft glow that permeates just a few feet off the path. It’s all very surreal. After the mainstage closed down, Mike and I go for a walk in the dreamy woods. We seem to be following lines of people all going in the same direction. Soon we’re hearing music. A band is playing somewhere off in the forest but we can’t yet tell which direction the music is coming from. It brings to mind the scene in the Hobbit where Bilbo and company encounter elves magically partying in the dark woods only to disappear as they step into the firelight. We soon find the source of the music. A band is set up and rocking the night away in a secluded glen. We are told they’ll be at it well past 3 am! It’s a wild scene but we are too tired from our travels and playing and are soon off to our hotel and the arms of Morpheus. After Blissfest we drive straight home. It’s great to finally be there!…… I played a solo show and a gig with Kings In Disguise when I got home that were lots of fun………Falcon Ridge!! This is my favorite festival of the year. My wife and I have been going to it for years and I’ve been in the house band for three years. As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to play with some of my heroes including Guy Clark, Greg Brown and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Martha and I showed up on Thursday and had a great time listening to Richard Thompson. He just ripped it up! We played Friday night just before the Friday night songswap. I knew that would be a great spot because the songswap is one of the more popular events of the festival. It turns out there were over 5000 folks there to hear our set, which included an emotional duet between Tracy Grammer and myself. We performed a song written by her late fiancé Dave Carter called “When I Go”. Dave passed away from a heart attack, just weeks before he and Tracy were to play the festival last year. We performed the song then as a tribute. It was still very poignant a full year later. We played a fun workshop the following day with the McCrells; a celtic/bluegrass band from New York state. Later that day I played on a workshop called “War No More” with Tom Paxton and Holly Near amongst others. It was a real thrill! Holly did a song called “I Ain’t Afraid” that blew my mind. The first verse goes..
I ain’t afraid of your Yahweh
I ain’t afraid of your Allah
I ain’t afraid of your Jesus
I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your God
Stunning stuff sung unaccompanied! I now do the song in my solo show. My brother Doug and my niece Barbara and her beau Jay came to the Festival. We had a great time partying and hanging out together. The next day we had to hightail it to another Festival to play a morning set. I sat in afterwards with the Recipe, which was a lot of fun! Had to get back to Falcon Ridge though to do a dance tent dance lesson and to play the mainstage with John Gorka. As is always the case, it was sad to leave Falcon Ridge. Hope I get to do it again next year!
August….
The band is taking a lot of August off but I elect to work. I play a couple of solo shows and some Kings gigs and I start production on an album by a singer/songwriter named Gary Gulberg. I use Carey and Grubb as the rythym section and will use Andy eventually as well….. We return to Beardslee castle in Little Falls, NY to play a bug bitten show. Mosquitoes keep things hopping!…..The Knowlton River Fest is a stone cold knockout! There’s got to be a thousand people that are going berserk! And we finally get to play a rain free set at Hookahville! We later sit in with our hosts, Ecoustik Hookah and have a great time!
And that folks was my summer…..please visit my website…. http://www.timcarbone.com
