1 August 2007

7/4: The 4th of July was celebrated on a day off with Ross and his friends, a fantastic barbeque, and a screening of Sergio Leone’s, “Duck You Sucker, A Fistfull of Dynamite,” which I’ve never seen despite the fact that I’m a huge Leone fan. There seems to be some kind of mystic connection between the name Ross and good music
and good times, in the South anyway.

7/5: Another double bill, this time at the Grey Eagle with the Ahleuchatistas, in Asheville, NC. Tim and I did an acoustic set before turning the stage over to them, and they played an electric set that reminds me somewhat of our Italian friends from ZU. The two of us were pretty wiped out after our day off, and we needed to drive a couple more hours after the show to make headway towards a student workshop we’ve got to do at noon in Morehead, KY…

7/6: Tim and I get up early and make quick time to get to the workshop. The two of us do some playing and answer questions for about 150 advanced placement high school students. The questions are very good (“If everything is improvised, how do you know where you are in a piece?”), and I am struck with the realization that, because of the failures of my generation, these kids are going to be faced with the worst political, economical, and ecological problems of the last half century. If they don’t come up with some solutions to the problems we’ve handed them, what will be left of the world for their children?

We quickly left after the workshop to drive some hours to get to an early concert in Somerset. In every town we see churches with religious slogans in front of them. (“Don’t panic! God is still in control.” Somehow I didn’t find this exactly comforting. In a bathroom in a gas station in the middle of South Carolina someone had drawn a pentagram and the numbers 666 with a black magic marker on the wall. Another person had then scratched this out with a knife or a screwdriver, and then magic markered next to it, “Jesus wins again.” Nice to know that the forces of good an evil are battling it out in the bathroom trenches for us.)