T'was Never Thus

The Radiators (Rads) from New Orleans have been my favorite band since the first time I saw them in 1984 in Minneapolis, MN.  Oh sure over the years they came up against the Grateful Dead a few times and each time I chose seeing the Dead over the Rads just because, well...they were the Grateful Dead.  The magic those guys could weave on any given night was incredible and powerful, but not promised every night so you had to see as many shows as you could to make sure you did not miss one of the great nights.  I managed to see them exactly 100 times and most but not all were great shows.

With the Radiators however, you were practically guaranteed a great show every single night they went onstage.  The epic 3-set concerts they put on in the 1980's were a test of your endurance...just how much fun can one person handle, night after night?  That was up to you.  For me the Radiators were not only the backdrop to hundreds and hundreds of great nights, including my wedding to Nadia, but they were also a conduit to a huge network of life-long friends from all over the country.  I could post blog entries about nothing other than my weekends with the Radiators and never run out of material, but I will control myself.  The story below just popped into my head because it happened exactly 15 years ago to the day.

The Krewe of DAD's had arranged a pretty good 3-day weekend for the Radiators and their devoted fans that summer in Minnesota from 6/27-6/29/97.  The ‘DADs’ are a Krewe of extremely cool Minnesota folks who have been staging concert-parties here since 1982.  Most notably the annual Halloween costume balls that always prove to be an out-of-hand great time with The Radiators acting as the house band for those parties every year.  That is until sadly the Rads folded up the tent and shut down the band one year ago in June of 2011 after 33 1/3 years together.  The Krewe lives on without the Radiators and the Halloween bashes continue, but of course it is not quite the same without the Radiators.

The Friday night concert 15 years ago was a 90-minute drive south of us at the beautiful and friendly Harmony Park in Geneva, MN with a large outdoor stage in the woods and a lake right behind it.  Saturday night was scheduled for John Mackie's farm which was a 45-minute drive west of us in Waverly, MN...a large private gathering with ‘Twas Ever Thus’ as the party-theme.  This was the site of the famous ‘Between Two Fires’ bash three years earlier, with the outdoor stage set down at the bottom of a hill and a small river running behind it.  Then the mini-Minnesota tour continued on Sunday night in Apple Valley, MN with the Rads playing at the scenic Minnesota Zoo Amphitheater, another outdoor stage with a lake behind as a backdrop.

The Friday night gig on 6/27/97 was a great gathering of friends from all over the country, including one of my all-time best friends Special Kaye who drove up from Milwaukee, WI.  We all set up camp in the woods surrounding the stage at Harmony Park, with the party promising to go on all night after the concert.  Dave Ray and Tony Glover opened the show, and both their set and the Rad's long set were awesome.  The Radiator's encore of 'Out In The Woods' was appropriate and everybody left the stage area and drifted back to their campsites inebriated from the music.  The woods were dotted with campfires, and our group of close friends headed to the area that we dubbed 'Bookerville' with Ted Booker as the Mayor.  Ted and his wife Polly had rented a camper so we circled our tents around it.  It was a cool scene and the Radiator guitarists Dave Malone and Camile Baudoin even stuck around for a bit, hanging out in Ted's camper after the show. 

The next morning we wearily packed up our tents and drove back to Minneapolis to shower and get ready for the day's activities out in Waverly, another camping show at Mackie's farm.  This was the crown jewel of the weekend and expectations were especially high for those of us who were there for that crazy good time in 1994.  That first show there was on 7/16/94 and was one of the great nights of my life...it could be a whole 'nother story if I set my mind to it.  But basically the theme of the party that night was taken from a Radiators song “Between Two Fires” and there was literally 2 big bonfires on either side of the stage.  As the first set ended with the crowd pleasing “Wild And Free”, I watched Dave Malone jump off the stage, hop up on the hood of one of the band's rented Lincoln Town Cars and light up a cig.  I looked over at him with a huge smile and he smiled back screaming "Yeah baby!" at the top of his lungs while pumping his fists in joy from within his rising cloud of smoke.  This perfectly captured the mood of the entire scene, and the acid Mitch Manson and I had taken during the first set was happily starting to kick in.  The second set was buggy but great, and the night ended with the sun coming up on Mitch and I while we kicked the soccer ball over, through, and around all the tents set up in the field.

It was an all-around perfect night...however 3 years later on 6/28/97 the weather report was not good as rain was forecast with possibly severe weather.  I drove Mugsy Millen (this was a couple of weeks before we officially started going out for three long years) and a few other folks out from the city that afternoon and headed to Waverly.  We got about 10 miles away when the sky turned an ugly, creepy, dark greenish-gray.  The air was thick and eerily quiet, but then suddenly the wind, rain and hail hit.  We pulled into a gas station and waited it out for about 20 minutes until the craziness had mostly passed.

We got back on the road and continued towards Waverly, eventually reaching the small country dirt road leading to the farm.  I was driving slow and cautiously, weaving left and right to avoid downed trees and branches and about a mile or so from the farm.  Suddenly I hear a bellowing sound and look up to see a lone cow galloping up the road towards us at top speed, eyes wide with terror and drooling ferociously.  The cow and I stared at each other as she passed our car, and it was just all too weird watching in the rearview mirror as the cow continued her mad dash down the road while we ominously crept onwards to the farm.

We got to the entrance of the place and it was suddenly sunny now, but it looked like hell with trees and damage everywhere.  A tornado had run through the farm, collapsing the stage and filling Ed Volker's piano with gallons and gallons of water.  The show was cancelled, and the theme of the party was instantly changed in everybody's mind to ‘Twas Never Thus’.  We were not going to be denied our good times however, so we headed back to Minneapolis, called up a bunch of friends including Dave, Camile, the Rad’s drummer Frank Bua and their bass player Reggie Scanlan, and had everybody come over to Mitch's house for a consolation tornado party.  We had a birthday cake there as well for Mugsy and Camile who share the same birthday.  It sucked missing the show but we whooped it up all night and had a blast.

The next day was exactly 15 years ago on 6/29/97.  We headed out to the Minnesota Zoo for night-three with our boys and of course it was a great show.  They dried out Ed's keyboard, and he peppered the set list with numerous innuendos and songs pertaining to the tornado including “Hold Back The Flood”.  Two out of three shows ain't bad, and it was a weird but fun weekend.  15 years ago...so much has changed since then and yet it seems just like yesterday.  I really miss the Radiators.  They were like a friendly but hardcore tornado that would spin their way into your town and raise hell for a little while and then move on...but always with a promise to return.  New Orleans and Minneapolis formed the two ends of tornado-alley but San Francisco and New York City took a lot of direct hits as well, along with countless cities in between.

The tornado finally spun itself out after 33 years.  I saw their final shows 12 months ago in New Orleans, and it has been a long strange year without them.  For a third of a century these same 5 incredibly talented, extremely cool, and sincerely nice guys were playing their hearts out and leaving it all on the stage of a funky venue near you.  Thinking back, in all those years since 1984 I have never gone more than a few months at most without seeing them.  Now it is over and I feel like they have broken up with me with the old "It's not you, it's me." line.  The end of the Grateful Dead was sudden and tragic, but final.  With the Radiators however they are all still alive...and not making music together.  I know the road always wins, and their reasons are understandable, but it still doesn't make sense on a larger level and I will always hope that Dave, Camile, Reggie, Ed and Frankie will get back together some day and raise a little more hell.

Justin Miller

Anything my 9 month old son Jack can get his hands on instantly goes into his mouth.  So in my ongoing effort to keep his diet limited to people food, I was just picking through my living room carpet a few minutes ago looking for the bits of bird food that my cockatiel 'Dusty' spreads all over the carpet whenever she eats.  If you run your hand around the carpet near her cage it is like popcorn with the little dry pieces of food popping up everywhere.  So I was just running my hand over the area around her bird cage carefully picking up bits of food and it suddenly reminded me of a scene with one of my old best friends Justin Miller.  I have not seen him in 7 years and I assume he is dead.  Maybe (hopefully) in jail, but probably dead.

With my colorful past I may not be the one to talk out against a certain drug...or maybe I am.  It all started with pot…I used to love weed.  My last two years in high school and my first year of college I was almost never not stoned.  That changed during my second year of college though.  Up until then school had been easy, stoned or straight, and despite my love of marijuana I was still getting mostly straight A's.  Then I ran into Calculus IV.  It was hard.  Not like Calc II hard or Calc III hard...but insane hard.  I realized that in order to pass this I was going to have to study and study well and study straight. 

I did that but the thing was that after I quit smoking weed for awhile I forgot how to be stoned.  Every time I tried it I was paranoid-high and had no fun whatsoever.  Plus the weed just kept getting stronger and stronger.  In high school we smoked brown seedy Columbian weed and we loved it because that's all we knew.  But in college it was a whole different game.  With the mid-80's came better and better weed...brown went to green and seeds became a thing of the past.  Every once in awhile I would try taking a hit and I would be so high it was ridiculous.  So I have not been a regular weed smoker for over 25 years and probably have not had even a hit in 10 years.  I have absolutely nothing against it and firmly believe it should be legalized, but I just do not choose to smoke it anymore. 

Anyways, I have dabbled in a few things and regret none of them except for Crystal Meth.  I tried it once 23 years ago in Phoenix and it was not good.  I was visiting my friend Chris Galanos in Phoenix, who had moved there a couple years earlier from Minneapolis.  We went to a party one night and it was the weirdest thing…normally when you go to a party most people have a drink in one hand, and maybe a cigarette in the other hand.  But at the Phoenix party most people had a piece of tinfoil in one hand and a straw in the other hand.  Every once in awhile they would drop a few small white crystals on the tinfoil, run a lighter underneath until the rocks turned to liquid and produced smoke, and then they would suck up the smoke with a straw.  Everyone was doing it in mid-conversation as casually as you would take a sip of a beer.  I felt like I was in bizarro-world…the people seemed like the same sort of cool people I normally hung out, but yet it was so very different from the hippie parties I normally went to in Minneapolis.

I asked Chris what the f*ck was going on and he told me what it was.  I had never even heard of Crystal Meth.  But of course being young and stupid and invincible I gave it a try.  I was up for a couple of days and felt sort of great, but it was a 'false' great.  It did not feel real.  I was aware that my grinding happiness was manufactured and just wasn’t real somehow.  The pure joy of watching Jerry Garcia singing 'Comes A Time' or 'China Doll' in concert while high on pot or something would melt me into a puddle of delirious happiness that I felt and spread to anyone I could for hours, days, years and now decades after the fact.  But with Meth, instead of the deep, lasting, life-changing happiness I felt with pot or acid, it was more like eating shards of broken glass with your body’s engine continuously red-lining.  It was horrible. 

My friend Justin owned a garage/auto shop that he built on his home property in Princeton, MN about an hour drive north of me in Minneapolis.  He was a genius.  I nicknamed him 'MacIver' because he could fix anything.  You put him in a row boat in the middle of a lake with nothing but a pen-knife, a straw, a piece of rope and a 9-volt battery, and before you know it he would have somehow built a jet engine that would be whisking him ashore in no-time.  I exaggerate, but barely.  The guy was not only a genius, but he was an ex-special forces Navy guy who was 250 lbs of solid muscle and skill.  He had a wife, 2 young daughters, a thriving business, a pole-barn full of cool cars, several horses on many acres of land, and he was one of the most loyal, cool, fun guys I ever had the pleasure of knowing.

His only vice was that he somehow got into Crystal Meth.  In the last year that I knew him, he had dropped over 100 lbs and was like a walking skeleton.  What was left of his hair had turned white, but most of it had fallen out.  He had sores all over his face and head.  His teeth were brownish-grey.  He was dirty and smelled like chemicals.  Every time I left his house that last year I was practically in tears as I watched him deteriorate before my eyes.  I would try and talk to him about his drug use, but have you ever tried talking to someone when they are high?  It doesn't work.  I kept thinking that I would try and catch him sober and talk some sense in to him, but he was never sober.  It was useless.  I watched as all of his possessions were slowly sold off to pay for his drug use.  I watched as his wife eventually packed up the 2 kids one morning and escaped for good to her mother’s place in South Dakota.  I watched as his auto shop disappeared.  I watched as he disintegrated into a babbling, broken, confused shell of a once great man, all for Meth.

On the last day that I ever saw him I went up to his house hoping to have him fix something on my car.  I knew he could use the money, and I think he still derived some joy from fixing things. Even from the depths of his seemingly inescapable whirlpool of drug use he showed glimpses of happiness whenever he would fix something.  But the only fix that was going to happen that day was him getting high if possible.  I got to his place and for over an hour I tried to coax him out of the back of his carpeted dirty old van parked between his house and his shop.  But he spent the entire time I was there on his hands and knees with a ruler and a piece of paper picking at his van carpet...much like I was just picking bird food out of my living room carpet a little while ago.  Except that he was slowly and meticulously going over every square inch of the carpet, scraping it with the ruler and catching pieces of dirt onto the piece of paper, hoping to find a meth rock while babbling nonsense to me. 

It was sad and sickening and I have never felt so helpless.  I tried in vain one last time to get him to step out of himself and look at what he had become, what he had lost and what a short and miserable future he had left if he didn't stop.  It was no use.  I left one more time in tears and never saw him again.  I tried calling about a week later but the phone had been disconnected.  I drove up there about a month later but the house was empty, the shop closed, the horses gone...no Justin.  All of his normal friends had vacated months/years ago and I did not know any of the people he had been hanging with recently so I had nobody to call.  None of his old friends knew what happened to him.  Every once in awhile today I try and Google him, but with his common name it never brings up anything of use.  He has simply vanished.

None of the people I hang out with do Crystal Meth so I am preaching to the choir there, but for anyone else…I do not like to be preachy and I usually support just about anything in moderation, but I will say with no reservation to please never try Meth.  It will take everything away from you...and I mean everything, one little rock at a time.

Not-So-Deep Thoughts, by Sneaky Sweets

I woke up this morning at 2:30am and I could not get back to sleep...I laid there for hours...thinking and thinking...I hate that.  I don't mind thinking, but not at 2:30am.  One of the things I was thinking about was bikers...Harley bikers.  If you think about it, you almost never hear of a Harley in an accident or a Harley biker getting a DWI.  I know a few bikers and none of them ever get DWI's.  And its not like they don't drink and drive.  I mean hell, if you go down to The Cabooze/Joint/Whiskey Junction bar-strip in Minneapolis on any given night or especially on the weekend you will see several hundred bikers just pounding beers like their lives depended on it.  So, the only conclusion I came up with is that they must be really, really, good drunk drivers.  I guess the old saying that ‘practice makes perfect’ is true.  But how do they get to be so good at in the first place?

So then I was picturing potential biker gang members having to attend and pass a drunk-driving class before they could get into a gang.  The Hell's Angels class would of course be the most rigorous because they are the toughest gang, but pretty much all of the gangs would have some sort of ‘Drunk-Driving 101’ class that they would have to pass. 

Students would show up for class and the huge, long-haired biker teacher wearing his denim and leather and chaps would take your breathalyzer reading when you got to class.  If it was too low you would have to go back outside and pound more beers until you were drunk enough to get back into class.  ".06?!  T-Bone!  I told you before, nobody gets into my class unless they blow at LEAST a .10 goddammit!  Now quit wasting my time and drag your sorry, sober ass out of my classroom!  I don't want to see your face back here until you're good and drunk!  Here, you'll need a hall pass." 

And if they were drunk enough to attend class, they would have to sit through filmstrips of sober nerds riding Honda's and Suzuki's, getting busted, and taking horrific falls on the pavement.  Then they would have 'simulation', where a fake cop comes over to the fake motorcycle that you're sitting on and you would have to learn how to intimidate him until he lets you go.  Then at recess all the students would rumble (skin only, no weapons) for about a half hour.  Then a couple more beers and its back to class. 

After passing 'simulation' you would go out in the parking lot where you would learn how to properly rev your engine and smoke your tires.  Then, finally, when the teacher feels the class is ready for their final exam he would take you on a field trip to a roadhouse where the assignment is to get really drunk, pick up 1 biker chick, and make it back to the classroom with you, her and the bike all in one piece without getting arrested.

Unfortunately, I have a Yamaha so I could never be in a cool gang.