Late Spring / Summer
It took a long time for summer to arrive. But good things come to those who wait, and it’s definitely good now that it’s here. A garden of vegetables is flourishing in the yard, even here at 8,000 feet. The mornings are warm enough to enjoy coffee and breakfast outside. Windows are left open all night.
Plenty of things have happened since April. All of them good I’d say. A few more prints have sold, been playing lots of music, performing a few times a month, with a variety of bands…from Old Coyote Moon to the Ragged Spurs, to just me and sharon, otherwise calling ourselves The Littlest Birds….there’s talk of a fall tour even, with sharon, around the west…i’ll keep you posted.
Old Coyote Moon will be playing at Millpond Music Festival outside of Bishop, CA, Sept 17-19. We’re on at 11 am, Sunday the 19th. so BE THERE OR BE SQUARE.
There was a trip to Pt. Reyes a while back that finished up in kirkwood with a recording and hang out session with friends, which we now call The Ragged Spurs. An old time group without bass or guitar. There was a 12 day ski tour into the middle of the High Sierra with a few friends….we got great snow and skied some awesome stuff….hopefully an article will come out of that trip and those pictures…There was a quick trip to Ojai for my brother’s performance at the festival and an afternoon of wine tasting at their wine festival. There’s been the usual landscaping work outside in the hot ‘n dry high altitude sunshine….and there’s been lots of dreaming.
Got some good one’s cookin’ for the coming years I think.
Basically life is as good as it gets these days. My toes are about to be in the sun, the coffee is not yet done, and another day is unfolding. unraveling perhaps. Where will it lead? so many good things, different things, all coming together….i’m about to make another payment on a beautiful piece of land in baja mexico…working towards that dream still….gardening and dreaming about farming and playing music, and who knows where that will go…just throw the instruments in the car babe and lets hit the road….see where we end up…
it’s all very exciting. Check out the photography section for new prints now available, and I hope to continue to keep adding them as well as take on a website remodel, and add additional products for purchase….it’s all a matter of time.
And fortunately, time is something I’ve got.
that’s it for now….
Desert Life
Well, the skiing has been great this spring, but I personally always have to give it up for a bit to slip away to the desert before things heat up too much. Spring is a great time (tho the winds can blow), with flowers and greenery in abundance. Here are some images from last week’s six day adventure through northern Death Valley National Park….
I was traveling with my friend Sharon, who’s never seen these particular parts of the desert before, never rambled in the shadows of the Inyo Mountains, or the washes of the Saline Range, and so it was extra special to be sharing a place that I hold so dear with someone seeing it for the first time….
Something about the open road, warmth, and empty spaces of the desert just draw me in, hold me down, and peel back the layers of bullshit piled on by even the most blissed “regular life” … the moment gains its proper priority …
history of people and mountains, lost times and forgotten “ways”, trails fading into steep ridges and another day passing by into long shadows…
home time
a variety of good things lately: good music and performances, selling photos, big backcountry travels on skis, powder, great spring corn, even a taste of bouldering….classic home life, absolutely classic…
so here’s a few random shots to celebrate such good times (it makes ya feel guilty livin’ ‘em they’re so good)…
“music” often means good food cooked at home, beers and wine, hours of playing…
which is usually followed every few days by some sort of adventure like this: 4000 feet of perfect corn! (see video too)…
…a fine evening rolled out in the sagebrush and budding flowers of the Owens Valley writing a new song on the banjo…
da Pow!
Well….
i’m back home and wouldn’t ya know it, the skiing’s GOOD.
REALLY GOOD.
Lots of snow on everything. The White Mountains look amazing. The Glass Mountains are covered, the Sierra is solid down to the highway around mammoth, and down lower than usual the rest of the way south…EVERYTHING’s IN.
Other than good skiing, let’s see…Joe Craven, of Garcia Grisman and the David Grisman Quintet not to mention numerous solo and joint projects with others, was in town and gave a “playshop” down in Bishop at the Inyo Arts Council which was really great and lots of fun. My band Old Coyote Moon is playing this Thursday the 18th at the Auld Dubliner in Mammoth, the local coffee shop is hosting an open mic on wednesdays that’s active and interesting, and hosted Wild Mountain Thyme, a local acoustic irish band, today/tnite with a great dinner offered for 9.95 as well….Luv This Town Right Now…um, what else?
I don’t know. McGee Mountain is on tap for tomorrow, might be good snow, might not be, but it’ll certainly be yet another fine day in The Promised Land.
Cheers!
back home, been awhile
so how to explain the last month?
some sort of dreamlike distraction that evoled into reality?
or some sort of reality that evolved into dreamlike fantasy?
one can never really know the answer to such things.
but i do know i have an entire new album of recorded music out of the deal,
i have weeks of steady surf and a few good live shows to gather from,
i have an effortless blissful feeling of joyful freedom.
NO COMPLAINTS BOUT NOTHIN’
Man if that’s trouble
gimee double
cause it’s GOOD.
something about the ocean, not sure exactly WHAT but it just pulls you in, won’t let you go, wrestles you for fun and fires you off down the line on a train to PURE BLISS
xxoo
Oh santa cruz
waves and town and coast and farm
redwoods amidst a host of everything else
yes
you are good too.
Big Valentine’s Swell
I’m still on the coast, and if the waves stay the way they are, I’ll have no reason to leave…it’s just too good…
Played a fun show at Asana Teas and Cafe in Santa Cruz, Thanks to All who came and stayed thru my Crazy Experiment of a show….then we jammed nearly all night with friends, and managed to wake up by about 1pm, Sunday to get some food and coffee in the belly by 2pm, and hop into the surf near 3pm for an EPIC 3 hours of sandbar perfection…no photos from this session, but the others hint at what’s goin’ down right now in santa cruz…sweet sweet sweetness.
ahhhh freedom how I love you. Freedom is my Valentine this year.
Along the Pacific…
For the next little while I’ll be kickin’ it along the pacific coast of California…drivin’ around for surf, music, and to meet up with old friends. The David Rawlings Machine (which involves Gillian Welch and members of Old Crow Medicine Show) is playing at The Fillmore in San Francisco on Tuesday (2/9) and I just grabbed a ticket for that to gain some inspiration and simply groove and listen to the sounds of my favorite acoustic guitar player…
Meanwhile I hope to gather inspiration from the moist climate, green trees and hills, roaring pacific, and clean waves and carry that on into my own shows….
(Friday-2/12 in Oakland at the Nomad Cafe (6500 Shattuck Avenue, CA 94609) from 7:30-8:30pm, and Saturday-2/13 at Asana Teas and Cafe in Santa Cruz (103 Lincoln St., CA) starting at 8pm and going till 10:30 or so…with perhaps a few friends joining in at the santa cruz show…
I’m polishing a host of new songs, including a few new cello songs and am excited to debut the new material.
Meanwhile, right now, the wind sings in the trees, and a light rain patters out of the dark night, good swells roll in off the ocean, wrapping even into the insides of deep bays to peel along sand bars, and the walls of a friend’s old cottage seem to resonate with a warmth and humanity that I really only feel along the coast. It is a fine place, this California Pacific….and I think I’ll lay my head down and rest upon it awhile…
Sugar Skiing in the Pinon-Juniper & Mountain Mahogany
Ahhhhhhhhh the sweet taste of sugar still lingers in my mouth….
Miles and miles of pavement gave way to the steel shimmer of Mono Lake on Tuesday afternoon, and before the sun could finish it’s descent, I’d parked the car and found one of my own, arcing turns in the opens spaces between pinon pines and mountain mahogany above the shores of one of America’s oldest lakes. It felt better than a breath of fresh air, it felt like a completely new stash of blood running through my body.
Home Sweet Home YES!!!! The sparkle and hiss of dried out desert facets days after the last snow, effortlessly skied in a nearly 30 year old pair of lace-up leather boots riding brand new mid-fat Karhu 10th Mtn. waxless touring skis. No one around, no other tracks, just sunset fading pink over the lake, and a beautiful ski line under my feet.
I got home to find my band Old Coyote Moon getting ready to practice…drum kit, amps, beers and friends in the livingroom with nothing to do the next couple of days but play music and ski.
Dry-side desert skiing, with nothing but the finest sugar. Some whoompfing kept us off the bigger stuff, and focused our sights on mining the small stashes…
With yet another storm already raging outside, I can’t wait for the next round of clear sunny dry weather along the Eastern Front.
A Day at Kirkwood
>
So I got back up to Kirkwood after a weekend of music in Mammoth, and picked up an email from long lost friend Holly Taylor – “Keen to do some skiing this week – honestly, it was such a spontaneous trip…haven’t planned anything at all yet, but would love to catch up with you and maybe Todd if you guys are around?”
For those of you who have purchased or seen my first ski film A Story of Mountains and People you may remember her as Holly Pearson from the segment on the 35 day ski tour three of us embarked on during the Spring of 2001. So, as luck would have it, I’m in Kirkwood, and she arrived in time for the first bluebird powder day in awhile. After an evening of catching up and a day of skiing powder, I have to say that though marriage might’ve changed her last name, and New Zealand might’ve changed her accent, nothing has changed about her wonderful spirit. It was great to reconnect with a friend that shared in one of the great ski experiences of my life, and to talk about another tour…a Duct-Tape Fringe Reunion ?…
another house jam…at 90 Shadow…Old Mammoth…
>
since one night’s never enough, we booked two nights at the bar…
but two nights wasn’t enough either…
so here we are on the third night…
Celebrating a friends birthday with a gathering of some fine musicians.
In attendance were Andy Roberts, Meghan Herring, and Ella Naiman of the String Slingers, as well as Yoseff Tucker of the Dalton Mountain Gang, Nina Weisman of Independence CA, Scott Roberts, myself and Jeff Meadway of the Sweetwater String Band, a classically trained fiddler named Amy, and another old time fiddler named Kathy Hillimire of Fretless in Santa Cruz…also Eiger Mike Williams of a variety of nameless or name-changing local bands made cameo appearences on the bucket bass and banjo…
lots of strings, lots of songs, too much in Bb – goddamn Capos! – and lots of beer and good times…drove back up the street to my house at 4:20 in the morning…
(it’s still snowing in the mountains of california, this week promises to be another good one for skiing…)
Music Makin’ in the Mountains of California…
>
Since the days are so short in the winter time, it’s the perfect season for playin’ music…long nights allow ample time for inspiration, dancing and drinking…the past couple of nights some friends The String Slingers have been in Mammoth splitting shows with us, Old Coyote Moon, at the Auld Dubliner, where our friend Chris is the manager…two nights in public havin’ a blast is leading us toward tonight, in private, at home with everyone, playing real backporch acoustic music…
Bruce Medhurst, who has been playing didgeridoo with us for awhile, brought out the guitar this night, playing a Beck song Golden Age, and two original songs of mine, opening up more sweet sounds of the cello.
If you look into the backroom on this one, you see Scott jammin’ with Yoseff Tucker, classic bluegrass, can’t get enough – you’ve got to jam in the back while your friends are playin’…
January—February—March—2005
…in honor of the fine cycle which is currently burying the Sierra Nevada…I give you three months from the Red’s Meadow lifestyle of 2005…ski ski ski
new camera – Canon G10 – playin’
>A storm is ripping across the mountains of California right now…somehow the UPS guy made it to the house, tromping through boot deep snow to the door with a single package. Inside was my very own Canon Power Shot G10. Let the Fun Begin….
The Fretless Path
I was introduced to making music at an early age. I couldn’t have been older than five when my dad started me on the piano, and somehow I managed an award two years later in an entry level category at the SMYF competition in Southern California near my home right before I gave up the piano at seven years old “because I don’t like it” and my dad offered me a cello. Initially I remember being more happy with the cello than I had been with the piano, perhaps because both my brother and father played the piano (my father being a piano teacher actually). But not long into it I began disliking and protesting the amount of practicing I was supposed to do. I just wanted to be a normal kid and go collect baseball cards and stuff like that.
But once I could “perform”, I always enjoyed it immensely. I hated the practicing it took to get to that performance, but I loved the singular, brief moment of sitting down and becoming emotionally involved in a piece of music from start to finish. Often this was how I “practiced”. I would just pretend to be performing the piece and play it as well as I could, doing it again and again. I would imagine an audience but really I just disappeared into the moment. This worked relatively well and natural talent took care of the rest considering I got away without practicing all that much. I read books, drew pictures and day dreamed instead, and once I was in high school and attending Crossroads, a private school in Santa Monica away from home, I practiced even less. Throughout my struggles with the motivation to practice and learn difficult classical music, my love of the moment of performance carried me through.
I believe the underlying root of my struggle to practice was that I’d never personally decided that I wanted to be a cellist. I had been told I was good, a “child prodigy” and very talented. I had been pushed into it and just sort of followed along because it was what my brother was doing too. The difference came when my brother decided on his own that he wanted to be a pianist and that changed the nature of his passion. Now he was practicing for himself, while I continued to play only because I was supposed to.
By my 11th grade year I’d pretty much decided that I should be able to make my own decisions regarding the direction of my life. I’d do my pretend-a-performance practicing routine but the magic had aged and was fading. I thought more and more about being a writer, moving to the mountains and being a ski bum. I guess they never should’ve let me read Thoreau or Kerouac, or Muir, that was their first mistake. Or really, their first mistake was teaching me to ski when I was three. And for that my dad has no one to blame but himself. Thanks Dad.
So I quit cello that year. Much to everyone’s dismay, angering my parents tremendously, alienating me from my musician friends in the school orchestra, but allowing me the freedom to take my first job outside of music, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Eastern California. Working at a backcountry lodge that summer would be the beginning of nearly eight years of wild living where I hardly touched my cello, only sort of ceremoniously bringing it out of the closet to dust off the fingerboard with my stiff and sloppy performances once or twice a year. One thing I slowly began to notice as time went on was that when I did bring it out, I felt a personal urge to practice and get the old pieces back up to par again before putting it away. Sometimes I would and sometimes I wouldn’t but often I caught myself sitting down to my cello for the first time in any given year and playing for hours without even noticing the time passing.
After years of pursuing nothing more than skiing, climbing, and backpacking, I got involved in a relationship with a girl who played guitar. She was also a snowboarder and surfer and we lived together in a cabin on the backside of Mammoth Mountain for a couple of winters. So not only did I learn to surf, but my fingers began gracing a fretboard for the first time. Initially I just sort of banged away at it with no real desire to undertake the learning process. I knew that it would be easier for me than for most because of my cello training but I was hesitant. I’d rejected music so powerfully for a life in the mountains that I think I was scared to open myself up to the effort of it again. It wasn’t until our first (of three) break-ups that I went at the guitar with any sort of passion. I’d learned a few chords, and now all of a sudden I wanted to learn all the chords and start writing songs. With a sort of manic energy it immediately took over my life.
My first guitar was a “backpacker guitar” because I wanted a guitar that I could take with me anywhere and everywhere, and I began writing my own songs since I wasn’t capable enough to learn anyone else’s. Some of the earliest songs have been happily forgotten, but some I still play with as much passion today as the day I first wrote them. They capture a feeling or an image or a time that I’ll never need to capture again because I got it right the first time.
As I played the guitar more and more, I wondered about the cello. I had never been able to “jam” despite my high level of playing ability, and now I could “jam” on the guitar and sing songs which was all I wanted to do. I’d found that my personal love of performance, my interest in writing, a desire to entertain friends around a campfire and a desire to speak out on social and political issues made the guitar my ideal instrument. I seriously wanted to sell my cello so that I could invest in better guitar equipment.
This feeling persisted until about two years ago when I first sat down and attempted to jam with some bluegrass musicians that are friends of mine. What happened with the bluegrass startled me. The guitar had opened me up to a different way of approaching music—to just playing by ear, not worrying about the sharps or flats, and not caring so much about mistakes. And now I was suddenly set free of the fretboard and relishing the freedom of a fretless fingerboard. Not only that but I loved how well I knew my cello compared to my guitar. It was like picking it up for the very first time and yet already knowing how to play it completely. Sure my intonation was a little off and my technique was slow, but I was hooked again. And this time it was for me. I felt the desire to become a serious musician, I’d already been feeling it with my guitar playing and songwriting, and now I had this whole other instrument that could allow me to do even more.
These days I can’t even call it “practicing” because I play either my guitar or cello or banjo so much, either with friends or by myself that it’s just a part of life, it’s not practicing. I take breaks only when my fingers literally hurt too much to play anymore. If I added up the hours some weeks it would come close to a full time job. But I don’t even notice the time passing, and I guess that’s been the most powerful lesson of it all. You have to do it for yourself. No one else can ever make you a good musician, you have to want it, and love it, and feel it deep in your heart—it has to be as much a part of your life as eating and breathing.
So I continue to be a dirtbag ski bum, backpacker, desert rat, surfer and occasional climber, but now you’ll also catch me performing in a couple of different bands at the local bars—taking trips up and down the fretboard of my guitar, or long glides up and down the fingerboard of my cello for free pitchers of beer and your generous gratuities. It feels sort of like a circular path coming to a close, but really it continues straight ahead—only now I make my own soundtrack.
2008 The Summer of Music
>
I returned from Oz….a bit changed, and without a girlfriend. But I returned, perhaps dragging my feet, perhaps feeling completely at home in Oz and not needing to return, but truly needing to get out on my own…for both of us needed SPACE. Oz was good to us but we were not good to each other and things went astray. But it’s alright I guess, it seems that it was necessary. And I returned to the Eastern Sierra fresh with energy to play music and work towards saving for our land in Baja. It’s still “our” land and we’re still friends so the magic of Oz is still with us I guess.
What a LONG STRANGE TRIP it’s been…wow…
starting almost immediately upon my return I got a backstage pass from my friends The Trespassers to be their “crew member” at Strawberry Music Festival and got to eat, drink, and watch awesome music up close and personal for free at the end of May, in the rainy pine forests of Evergreen Road…and it did rain boy, and we sloshed in the mud and played music out in it, and stayed up late jammin’ and really ever since then things have been rather crazy. 
A solid group of us pilgrimaged to Telluride, Colorado for the bluegrass festival at the end of June and lost our minds there…left them to be picked up in little pieces and reassembled later by some sort of haz-mat team from the future…it was glorious in all shades of glory, and kept us roaring for four days…(what wonderful things come from a tiny piece of paper sitting on your tongue, anyways….)…I’m not sure the people of Telluride will ever quite recover from the acoustic, without instruments rendition of Shady Grove that occurred on Main Street in front of the Hardware Store when a whole group of us “got inspired”….
After that it was pretty much ON…performing music with two different bands up to five nights a week, and jamming on the other nights, while working 8 hours a day five days a week landscaping, which means shovelling and hauling and lifting and grunting out in the dust and heat and brush sometimes…on other days it just meant dropping in some flowers but….QUITE a summer nonetheless…QUITE a summer….
I guess the highlights would be watching the sun rise on the July 4th weekend and rolling into it with bloody marys and music at Gull Lake along the June Lake Loop…the night at LuLu’s when the Irish man and his family kept buying us rounds of beers and we played an hour later than we should’ve….the night at Side Door when the co-star to Kiefer Sutherland from the show “24″ came in and made a fool of himself and I got it all on a recording…uhh let’s see outdoors wise I did some fun climbs this summer with a friend, especially the Hair-raiser Buttress (5.9 R)….more highlights would include the old coyote moon show that we put on at the Auld Dubliner till two in the morning…the jam up at the Mono Lake Vista Point after the Blue Turtle Show on Saturday night back in September when a pile of musicians were there, basically three or four bands converging and combining to make a helluva a great jam that lasted till about four in the morning….followed the next week by our very own show at the Mobil Mart which was the best Calmer Than You Are show in history….
but this all reminds me of a few parties I’ve forgotten…namely the first BBQ at Marshall’s house back in June or July or something, when we had roughly ten musicians, all friends, together on a porch at a 1930s cabin in the woods just jammin’…we had a couple other big jams like that…some fifty strings in a room at once…
It’s been a great summer for music….we’ve all gotten better, gotten more inspired, taken it all more seriously and just plain progressed to being actual musicians.
There may not have been much backcountry time this summer, but the backcountry of my mind has certainly seen some time.
With summer gone, and fall in full swing, a large group of mammoth derelicts pilgrimaged to The City by the Bay for the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival…a wild weekend of music and walking and heavy heavy drinking, thousands of people filling the Golden Gate Park, having a front row position for Alison Krauss and Robert Plant only to turn around a realize thousands of people had filled in behind us making it nearly impossible to escape if one needed the bathroom…but what a show that was….definitely a highlight of the summer festival scene, Plant’s still got it, and the two of them sound great together. Other great bands of the festival were Poor Man’s Whiskey, The Bad Livers, Del McCoury, The Global Drum Project, and Iris DeMent’s solo performance on piano.
Who knows folks. Who knows what will happen in this life. If you claim to know, you’re full of shit or boredom one of the two, cause this life is magic and shifty and always on the move, lookout!—-it’s comin’ after you!
Fall…early Winter…
Eddied out for a bit in a swirl of oak leaves and dirt, helping some friends pack tires for their earthship home in the foothills of the West Slope of the Sierra Nevada. A rather blissed stretch of time that began with a four day music festival at Evergreen Lodge called Las Tortugas Dance of the Dead, with music that went practically all night. Then from there I drifted on to my friend’s property and we began packing the last round of tires for the walls of his earthship. We needed 67 more when I arrived. After a week, and a good work party of ten folks or so over the weekend, there were four tires remaining.
I drove back over Tioga Pass, which remains open to this day, feeling high off the joint we rolled that morning, and the residual high of nothing but music, work, weed, alcohol, and friends for two weeks in the cooling lowland forests of falling leaves. I seemed to be floating as my car sailed through empty Tuolumne Meadows, sunshine warming only the southern aspects, skiffs of snow clinging desperately to the shadows, barely a car on the road. Also I was beginning to feel new excitement as my time in the Eastern Sierra winds down, and the upcoming 4 month winter trip to Baja gets closer. The granite domes looked like waves in my dreamy eyes, my feet turning on the pedals as if steering a board down a fast clean backlit green wall….ahh yes soon….Baja, the beach, endless pointbreak waves….warm sun…Tequila….
Now, a couple weeks have passed. I turned 28 years old drunk around a campfire at Benton Hot Springs, then drove out to Saline Valley for 9 days of the desert bohemian dirtbag existence of beer, bacon, and eggs, and steaks cooked over a wood fire. Drank 42 beers in about four days…and now I’m eddied out in Bishop, trying to dig up some work for the week to help pad the account a bit for this coming winter.
Life out of a truck. It’s a sweet thing. Some say it gets old, and it does. But the hardy get old with it, and embrace the dustiness, the occasional loneliness, cramped quarters and messiness, in trade for the immense amount of freedom. I can just pick up and go. Work enough to fill the cooler with ice, beer, veggies and meat, and dump some gasoline in the guzzler and off I go to the next adventure, the next insane experience, the next total laughter.
