Playing the Blues with Barbara, Part I
1974 was a tough year for me – that was the year I lost my first wife. Well, I didn’t actually lose her, to paraphrase Bobcat Goldthwaite. I mean, I knew where she was. But when I looked, she was with someone else.
We were in Kodiak, Alaska, doing a six-week gig in a hotel called Beachcombers, which was an old steamship that had washed up on shore and converted to a hotel/bar/restaurant. In Kodiak, the emphasis is always on “bar.” People imbibe with fervor there. It’s really all there is to do. Well, that and hit on other people’s wives. You see, there are ten men to every woman on the island, or at least that was the ratio back then. And Jeanne, my wife, had this remarkable long blond hair that went to her ankles. It was quite beautiful, really.
We had been married for a few years by then. I was twenty in 1974, and had been the leader of my band for a couple of years. Jeanne, whom I had originally met in high school (where she had been my teacher), was the keyboard player and a singer in the band. We had a cool outfit named Colefeat, which was primarily a blues band, or at least that was our intention. Heck, in 1974 I was a kid off the hardscrabble streets of Lafayette, CA., and knew next to nothing about life experiences of the kind that launched or sustained blues lyrics. But I was playing guitar for John Lee Hooker, and learning an awful lot about that life from listening to him and his cohorts.
We played a lot of clubs in the East Bay then, including Keystone Berkeley, where we were the house band for a couple of years. We also played the Longbranch, and West Dakota, and Great American Music Hall, and Wolfgang’s, and the Point Richmond Pool Hall (about which more next week). With the exception of the Music Hall, none of those clubs remain today. But you may have heard of Eddie Money, Greg Kihn, Randy Oda, Jimmy Lyon, Tower of Power. . . those were just some of the folks getting their start back then in those same clubs.
We were not bad, given our youth and inexperience. At one point, a record company executive from ABC Records heard us, liked what he heard and invited us to spend six weeks in Kodiak, tightening up our show and preparing to record an album when we got back. That was the ticket to my dream, and I was sure from that point on that my life was going to unfold as I had always imagined it would – records, adoration, money, endless tours, interviews in Rolling Stone – you know, just the average day in a rock icon’s life.
So when we got to Kodiak, me and my band, we were pretty jazzed. What I hadn’t counted on, though, was the allure of this amazing landscape on my wife, who was eight years older than me and growing bored of being married to a kid posing as a man. She found herself a tour guide in the form of a hunky fisherman named Ed, and after the first week, I never really saw much of Jeannie. When she wasn’t singing love songs to Ed (songs I had written for her, about her, whatever), she was hanging out with him, touring the island and who knows what else.
After a couple of weeks of that, and the fact that the drummer was plotting a coup to steal my band from me after the gig was over and form his own group (which he did, by the way – google The Shakers, Yankee Reggae), I just cashed in my ticket and went home. Broke up the band, spent some very despondent weeks licking my wounds and listening to Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.” Jeanne came home after a few weeks, and we tried patching things up, putting other bands together, but all in vain. The damage had been done, and the bad blood wasn’t going away.
Around that time (by now it was 1978), a friend of mine in the newspaper business invited me to join a bluegrass band. Not having any other musical iron in the fire, I agreed, and went to his Point Richmond home to do a little jamming. He had also invited a woman who he said sang backup vocals. She was late in arriving, but when she did, she drove up in a pink 1954 Buick, wearing a bowler hat on her massive afro, a summer dress on her 5’3” frame, which she carried quite well, and a bottle of something in her hand.
She opened her mouth to sing, and out came the voice of a blues angel. This was no background singer, I thought.
And that accounts for the next three remarkable years of my life, which I will tell you about next week.
