Sedona Gig

Let me tell you about a road gig show in Sedona with Mark and Band #2 (also called Common Ground) and Mark’s second wife, Kari.

I remember crossing the California desert on I-10 with Mark and Rory in a high-profile van in a windstorm, a van full of musical stage equipment where we just barely found room for my golf clubs, listening to Firesign Theater on a cassette tape, Mark and Rory vamping along with the comedy they had learned through shared repeated listenings.

Months earlier, the simple, elegant beauty of Don Mclean’s “Vincent” had captivated me, and I HAD to learn how to play it.  This was before chorded lyrics or tablature (tabs) were readily available on the internet, so if you wanted to learn a song you had to listen to it, repeatedly, like I did when I agreed to learn a teary torch song by Bryan Adams to sing at my niece’s second wedding. I learned it by listening to it on a portable cassette player that only required 2 AA batteries on the ride into DTLA on the Commuter Express one weekday morning. 

I found a copy of “Vincent” that I could play on a device with rewind capabilities. I got out my guitar and found the key (G) and the opening riff, then put guitar aside and listened to the details of the song. Over and over again.

Then I tried to play it.

The verse was straightforward, but the transitions into the breaks and the chorus were giving me trouble, over and over again.

“What is it?” I screamed at the part that was wrong again.  (“It’s on there somewhere,” I heard my childhood guitar instructor needling in my head.)

“Try a minor 6th,” came my daughter’s voice from the other room, and by God she was right!

I practiced it and practiced it and played it for myself every night for my own enjoyment for months, and I tried to get the band to do it, but it didn’t sound right for our female singer, so we kept putting it aside.

We spent the first night on the Sedona trip at Kari’s parents’ house in Cottonwood, 20 miles southwest of Sedona. After I got over my fear of strangers, we had a wonderful evening. Kari’s younger brother, Vincent, is blind and was just beginning his adolescence at the time, but he spoke with the confidence and intelligence of a college senior, actively steering the adults’ conversation in some unusual directions. That night, I slept on the living room floor in a borrowed sleeping bag, because this lodging choice had not been expected. (Well, it had been expected just not communicated.) I was mortified not to be prepared and to have to rely on people I had just met for safe harbor, but at the end of the day I hadn’t thought about it until just now, and anyway there wasn’t room in the van for a sleeping bag.   

The gig in Sedona was at a brewery. We set up between 2 giant metallic brewing vats in the path from the pool table to the bathroom.  Rory was our percussionist that weekend. Many of the pictures of the gig don’t show me and Rory because we were behind one curve of the vats while the “front people” (Mark, Marcy, Karen – guitar, viola, and singer, respectively and respectfully) were out in front of the curve.

In the first set, me and Rory thought the rhythm section sounded awesome because we were finding the groove between the live sounds and the echoes off the vats, but the front of the band told us at the first break that they couldn’t hear us (we could hear Mark’s guitar, but no viola or voice), and our imported audience members (3 spouses, a sister, a child, and a brother and his family) said it sounded like we weren’t always playing together. (They put it nicely.) A couple of the pool players told us the same, also nicely, surprisingly.

We couldn’t move the set; there wasn’t room across the front for a fourth, especially not a 225-pound bass player. I suggested maybe I could step one step forward, which would enable me to hear the front without echo and adjust the rhythm section so we were in time with the front through a different echo frequency.  (No, I was not using THC in those days.) We gave it a try. To put it another way, I stepped up.

It worked.  At our second break, our imported audience members told us enthusiastically that we sounded much more in rhythm, and even the pool players had applauded a couple of the numbers.

When it was time to start the third set, Mark suggested to me that I sing and play “Vincent” for Vincent.  like CSN at Woodstock, I was scared shitless.  Nevertheless, I strapped on the guitar, strummed an E chord to check tuning (some artists would strum the G chord for tuning AND pitch), announced the name of the song and who it was for, then launched into the guitar intro.

I don’t remember my performance, but I remember Vincent smiling and listening to my voice and guitar echoing around the brewery, and as I sang the line, “But I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,” I could see both his mother and his big sister wiping tears from their eyes as Vincent beamed.  

I have never played “Vincent” in public again.

I spent my entire gig pay that night on a t-shirt from the bar that I still have and that I still wear in summer when I am doing yard work.

Afterwards, we went to a pie shop, the only restaurant still open in Sedona, and had a great dessert. Someone has pictures, maybe Karen or her sister or Derek, but I don’t.

Coming home, crossing the California desert, listening to Firesign Theater and Rory and Mark.  At the end of the day, I hadn’t thought about it until just now.