The A/C is quickly spitting icy air again and we're all doing the inevitable - calculating how long until home at the present rate of speed. But it's not so bad this time. It was a great trip, in most ways. We started out by playing Duffy's in the rockin' little California town of Chico. Burned the joint down and then hung with the Pub Scouts, Michael Cannon's band of local scoundrels who have all their extracurricular afterdark merit badges and are checked out on all the Celtic traditional musical hardware.
Then it was up to a first-time gig: the Kent, Washington, Balloon Festival. It was on a golf course in the south-of-Seattle suburb of Kent. Laura Love (band friends who just got signed to a bigtime deal with Mercury Records) played an energetic set and then turned it over to us. Some of the crowd was there for the music, but most were there to see the Balloon Glow, a strange deal where these huge hot air balloons are lit up by the burning gas used to inflate them. They do it down here in Tucson, too, at the University of Arizona Mall, but I'd never made the five block trek to watch it before. It drew 30,000 people, at least, up in Kent. A bunch of new people heard us. That's always OK.
Next night it was a return engagement at Conor Byrne, a nice little Irish pub in the Seattle enclave known as Ballard. The place crawls with Scandihoovians of one stripe or another, probably some Sorensons in there someplace. They need an Irishman to help them let their hair down I guess. Conor Byrne is the man for the job. A fine time was had.
That would make it about 3 a.m., after we finished sucking down free beers at Conor Byrne and squeezing the gear and our tired bods back in the van. Then we had to drive north up I-5 toward Anacortes to find a hotel for a couple hours. It was dawn minus 45 when we turned in, knowing we had to rise in four hours to make the ferry from Anacortes out to the San Juan Islands for a gig at Lopez Island. We were told that if you miss the ferry you either wait for the next one - or swim. In fact, we were told unless you were toward the front of the line, especially during the summer, that you could wind up having to wait for a later ferry anyway. So, with a mid-afaternoon soundcheck and a late afternoon outdoor concert, we were up and red-eyed heading for the ferry bright and early. We made it. The seas were kind. Kevin and I went up top and fore in the wind, talking like pirates all the while, as the others wisely tried to catch up on sleep in the van, parked down in the vehicle hold.
The outdoor concert came off without a hitch and the crowd was wildly appreciative, though it was clear that we weren't standard community concert fare. We got booked into the summer concert series based on the word of Brian Massey, a Lopez Island guy we met down in Jerome , AZ, last winter. Now, a lot of people come up to you when you play in a band and tell you some wild stuff. We've heard a lot of tips, and some of them have paid off. But Brian is the master of understatement. He said he'd "put us up." Well, somehow or another, after the gig we found ourselves in a 6,000-square foot mansion with its own cove looking out on the Olympic Penninsula and Olympic Range. I kept expecting Robin Leach to show up at the door. We hung out for four days and recharged our batteries, and got a serious taste of the good life. The San Juans are to scenery what Michael Jordan is to basketball. Although it's true that people from Hell's Back 40, AZ, are impressed with anything below 100 degrees with more than a teaspoon of liquid and a bit of chlorophyl, the San Juans are truly gorgeous. Mountains sticking right out of the cold, whale-filled, waters. Beautiful sailboats cutting figures in the narrow straits between the islands. Eagles swooping down to pick up some sushi. (To the mysterious Peggy, thanks just aren't enough. And thanks to Brian "It's no big deal" Massey and promoter Jeff Nichols.) We'll be back, even if we have to swim next time.
Well, what do you do after that? Go to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and play for 30,000 people in a beautiful park on the breath-taking harbor. Acres of big trees, lush green grass and seven music stages with huge snow-capped mountains on the north side of the harbor in the background. We did workshops and mini-concerts with Dervish, Shoogelnifty and fellow Arizonans Keith Secola and A Wild Bunch of Indians. We ended that last one with a two-band jam on Nancy's "La Llorona." People flocked from other stages to see what the hell was going on - and stayed. It was a moment. I hope somebody was taping.
We played five times over the weekend, including the volunteers' party, packed up and drove straight through, 1800 miles home. I've got van lag, so that's it for this trip tale. More when we head out on our nine-week Whole Damned Country Tour in a couple weeks.