when i wake up in oklahoma its not so ok.
it’s a sad day. hard to explain why.
could be because you got to have one every now again to balance out the good days. could be because of the strange dream i was wakened up from when my phone rung. its all left me with a sadness. then i left the bus to get some coffee and all that was there was a cracker barrel, which is where my dad used to like to go. so i began missing him, him and his wife having just passed away last december.

it’s just a sad day.

when i enter the restaurant the rest of the bus are all sitting around a huge round table. there is no more room and i saunter off to read the sad newspaper.

it’s just a sad day.

then the others all leave the restaurant and i sit there finishing my sad eggs.

cause its just a sad day.

and then neko come in and startles me by just sitting down and she is a ray of sunshine. so i feel better after we talk about sad things and the way we deal with em.

after all that sad muck, the bus heads out to the venue.

people it is in the middle of nowhere. it’s on the outskirts of town and is the kind of juke joint that the texas playboys must’ve played back in the day.

it’s just a sad joint today.

and robert plant and alison kraus are coincidently playing in town here again with t-bone, but it is 13 miles away.

which is very sad.

- – - – — – — -

well sir,

sadness is just gravity seeping through the buoyancy of existence and doing its dirty work. the gravity of the situation is always daunting that way.

so … we take the stage tonight with another game plan. every night is another game plan. in the band huddle i lay out the plays of the night. ok men, we’re going in and not playing any piano songs cause they are too quiet and vulnerable in a non theater atmosphere, and in a full blown bar, they can get murdered.

and then i lay out the rest of the set of songs, but i have taken to doing it verbally like a coach. not writing set lists, just directions on how to find our way through the set and home again.
ok. good to go. i am ready for it to be a crowd of indifference and encrusted with infinite sadness.

we take the stage in a bound. first thing i do is play the piano. hard. rocking piano.

the crowd yelps at the end of it and sizzles the sensibilities. i grab a guitar then and am already in love with this crowd. i think i outfoxed that sadness demon when he thought i really wasn’t gonna play piano and then confused the hell out of him by doing just that.

cause now he is running just behind and having a tough time catching up. we lean into ‘out there’, which has such a fine lope to its strum tonight and folks respond so well to it. the odd clinking and spoink effects of my magic blue and gold pedals seem to reward the effort.

onward to ‘robes of bible black’. why not? it turns into a storm chaser and folks are wriggling and smiling and then hoopin’ and hollerin’.

next up, i don’t remember. coulda been ‘paradise here abouts’. just can’t remember. i know i meant to do ‘the ballad of the tucson 2’, but don’t think we did. anyhow, the crowd was just so wonderful.

oklahoma was making very much sense to me. felt like we could have a real conversation.

so i played em a quiet piano song. the one about ‘vortexas’. and they seemed tickled as the keys.

then we belted out ‘increment of love’ and ‘can do’. and funny enough, out of all the songs, it seemed ‘can do’ got the lightest applause, whereas everywhere else we played it in this country, it got the biggest cheer.

but i think it was a severe compliment, because it sounded too real for them. the kind of country song they have been pelted with since birth and could use a break from right about now. the notion of that just made me so proud of my boys here from the deep south of scandonavia that they made it sound that real.
they done good. real good.

then we brought out the delightful miss Kelly Hogan to sing the duet on ‘stranded pearl’. sheer sweetness peppered with distortion.

then we pummeled through the new one, just me and peter, on ‘a better man then me’. folks went wild for peter’s drums on that one. he is a professor, you know, of drums, back in denmark.

and finally we brought up jon rauhouse and paul rigby for the noodle fest finale ‘loving cup’. it roared and so did the crowd. we left em happy and drenched, and so were we.

severe yippity was in the house.

well, john convertino’s niece was there somewhere and i had not seen her since she was knee high, but sadly we did not locate each other.

so then we were off after taking in some of neko’s set, i informed the boys we were back on the guest list of the plant/kraus shindig and why not make a run to see it again no matter how far it was from nowhere.

so we did.

apparently they were playing at the zoo.
off we rode into the night with the light of the GPS device guiding our way.

we got there late and right on time for the last song.

but it was sweet delight none the less. robert plant had suggested they set up this show to help out the hurricane ike victims in houston where they were supposed to play. they set up this gig with only a week’s
notice and 5,000 folks showed up here for it, bless him.

when you get to be my age, the planet gets a whole lot darker and colder from the grand lack of elders that have left this existence for the next. we stumble on slowly becoming the next in line for younger folks to lean on us the same way. but the ache in our eye is from so many we cherished being gone now and never getting enough of that pathfinder advice or warmth of close proximity.

for a few moments there when robert came out to greet us, that feeling of grace filled me. he gave me a bear hug that had both rainer and pappy in it. i can only ever talk to the man for so long before the dylan effect begins to kick in. but he is a source of sage advice and warmth that this world could use every drop of.

ok. well.
we talked a bit and bid safe travels and it was off into the night a whole lot less sadder then the day originally was laden.

when i got back to the bus, i was crumpled from it all.
how hard we are on ourselves sometimes and how much this world delivers upon us too. everyone was just hanging out outside the bus taking in the splendor of each other’s company, neko on the phone checking in on her sick dog back home, her band enjoying the lull and fetchings of a sweet oklahoma midnight. the danes stained with smiles. the high lonesome of the western night & me quietly noting the tour is ending tomorrow.

up in the mother ship we clustered then.
diesel engines toiling.
a short single malt to end the day.
and in need of a 2 day shower and semi brain baked from this life, i tucked into the coffin like bed and closed the curtain. the rolling bus rocking this boy to sleep and delivering another morning.

sleep is transportation too.