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In 1986, during the Busking Season, I was sitting on a bench in front of
Bloomington, Indiana's (now) oldest music club, the BLUEBIRD TAVERN, or DA `BOID!
to its habitués, playing some now-forgotten song. I got that "inkling of a song"
feeling...In my subjective experience of this, my Mind's EYE
"rolls up" skyward, and I see/hear the song in my head...in a way that isn't
word/sounds - yet, paradoxically, IS!!!. In a nonce, I fingers a C-chord - the
kind everybody who plays folk-guitar learns first. The rhyming couplet that had
appeared in my head came floating off my tongue: They said that no GOLDEN lockets/could ever be arranged A verse form for the song evolved, custom fit to the sense of the first verse. It took me through a thicket (hee! hee! - here's another -icket sound) of enjambment in the rhyme scheme; awkward enough to be irksome to fastidious critics with no apparent sense of the humor (which in itself is quite absurdly ludicrous - isn't it?), yet playful in its wander from alley to alley in the labyrinth we call LIFE. ...forget not ARIADNE'S THREAD. Fairly soon, I had five verses of a1, a2, b1, b2 form. I was becoming adept at the French call bricolage. Shards of meaning, sprung clichés, snippets of image... A chorus got written in Tucson, Arizona - back where I once belonged. The next time I was in Bloomington, Indiana, a friend appealed to me to "finish" the song. You need to bring us up after all that "season in HELL" stuff...The last two verse were command composition, then. The whole thing got sung on the CONEY ISLAND boardwalk, facing the Atlantic, in NYC. Then, on the sand dunes over looking OCEAN BEACH in San Francisco. I still see what I saw as I sang the song in the these places - and others, like the Mississippi River levee near Jackson Square in the Crescent City, "N'AWLINS", Loo-easy-AN-nah, and the same river being the border between the TWIN CITIES, Minneapolis and St. Paul. This is one of the "perks" of busking, you don't get blinded by the limelight, and you have reels and reels of "movies" in your memory of where you played, and what people were doing as you sang. WHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I get ahead of myself speaking about the Twin Cities and "N'awlins". Didn't visit those two places along the Mighty Mississip until 88 and 89, respectively. It was in the fall of 87 I chanced to be back on Haight Street in San Francisco, where the homefolk insist you call it "THE CITY"... I was sitting in the window section of a new Café, the Chatanooga, spelled with only one "T". The location must have been some kind of retail store originally, because the window section was a step up from the main floor of the shop. The plate glass windows went from the floor of this section, either side of the doorway, which was in the middle. I love to sit at a two-top table in places like this and peruse people parading by...Before this, I'd gone to a store front where I had the latest word I might find Dylan (...as Whitaker'd write out with phone #) David. He was no longer associated with the organization, I was told. So I'd gone back to the Café. I hadn't been sitting in my window perch more than a minute when who should walk by but DAVID! I ran out to get him. He sat down with me at the table. I was excited about my new epic-length song, and i wanted David, of ALL people to hear it. So, I read it to him - all seven verses and three choruses. His review was short and sweet: "Still on the cutting edge, my man." You may look at the entire lyric right now: Shadows of FAME That winter, I secured employment in a Pastry-shop/deli on Telegraph Avenue in Berekeley, between two famous one of a kind book stores - MOE'S and CODY'S. I'd go get my guitar and play in the area too. Spent a lot of time writing, reading and doing "OPEN-MIKE" night at Berkeley's FREIGHT and SALVAGE coffee house, where I once got to follow Mystery Guest who played as JOAD. Joad Guthrie, Arlo's younger brother and I would cross paths several times in the next five years. Heard him sing a song he wrote called "RED-DIAPER" BABY that night... My Deli job evaporated went the partnership that owned the place decided to close that location. Yet, it was a leg up on the next opportunity, managing a cookie store on Bancroft Way, right across from the main central part of the UC-Berkeley campus. Lots of office workers at lunch time...lines out the door...However, some problems with the General Manager of the five stores the company owned in the Bay Area led me to resign the position. (A year later, I would discover from another EX-employee, whom I had helped secure an assistant management position, that the GM had been embezzling money from the safe to buy Cocaine...so THAT'S why he had such a mood-swing nervousness about him - to think I had unwittingly started the series of events that led to his discovery, AND chanced to meet someone who informed me of his apprehension...). I called a Bloomington friend who had moved to Jerome, Arizona a few years before. I'd first visited him in the fall of 1986 after Graduating from Indiana University. Again in the fall of 1987, on my way to that encounter with DYLAN DAVE, I visited the same fellow and met someone who would introduce me into the Sedona, AZ world of Vortex, Crystals and Star SEED talk. I was all eyes and ears when she would deal in crystals and talk buy low and sell high...could've been shoe uppers for all the difference there was on the "savvy" side of the NEW AGE. Yet, my plan was still California that fall of '87. I wanted to relocate to Northern California seriously, and kept flinging myself at chances to do so. Anyway, the winter of 87 turned to early 88, and I accepted an invitation from my Jerome friend to go there the third time. My adventures in Jerome are related on a separate page.  walk the "cyber" rail to a "ghost" town! Yet, I got restless, and after five weeks, I decided to relocate to Bloomington - for what must have by then been the umpteenth time. A car load of Vietnam vets visiting my friend were driving through Flagstaff, on their way to Salt Lake City. One of them said he'd lived in Brown County, Indiana, one county east of Bloomington's Monroe county. They gave me a ride to Flagstaff, and I was Greyhounding it to Indiana, again. A few months past and I got an opportunity to visit Madison, Wisconsin. There, I found out that there were still some tickets left for a Dylan concert in Alpine Valley, a resort/concert "shed" complex about an hour's drive from "Mad" City. Turned out that the Grateful Dead were playing 4 nights out of the next five days...After the Dyl-stir's concert was done, I was stumped for what to do - hitch-hike back to Madison, or try to connect with somebody - the travelling bazaar known as Shakedown Street to "DEAD"heads was already setting up camp...I decided to sit under a tree quite close to the facility's "will call" ticket window. Took out my guitar and began singing Shadows of Fame. Those of you who have already checked out the lyric on it's page know there's a verse about "an ever-living tree". I was sitting under a tree, singing about the TREE... You can click the Title just above, now, if you'd like to read, or reread the song. I'd sung a few verses when I heard a voice shout, |
