Arlington, Washington, and Edmonton, Alberta.

14 August 2011

Howard DeNike and Gordon Bowker. I went to school with these guys fifty years ago and am proud to have them as friends. They came to see us in Arlington, Washington, about an hour north of Seattle.

Sophia Ramos, la reina de la escena, the queen of the scene. Everybody loves Sophia, especially me.

Tom Finch came along to play guitar with us. This is his 42nd birthday. We had a good set in Arlington.

Skip Taylor and Larry Taylor in the lobby of our hotel in Arlington. They are not related, but Skip manages Canned Heat, Larry’s band.

Dale also from Canned Heat with his sweet wife. Dale is a great player as all of the Heat brothers are.

Even Harvey Mandel who has a huge appetite for a beautiful tone on the guitar.

We played these tunes in Arlington and it was so good to hear Sohpia sing them again.

Skip Taylor was in a good mood the whole weekend. i don’t think i’ve ever seen him so happy and loose.

Tom Finch in Edmonton, Alberta. The crowd was very enthusiastic.

With Tom Constanten. Elise and I used to play in a band with Tom, but now he’s playing with Jefferson Starship.

Never try to hop a train that is moving faster than three seconds per standard car length.

The Romans called coal the “best stone in Britain,” and they made beautiful jewelry from it. Roman priests honored Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, by burning coal in the perpetual fire at her shrine in Bath.

Cathys Richardson and Curtin.

Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, Janis Joplin and Sam Andrew at a Stax/Volt Christmas party in Memphis.

Dr. Seuss pronounced his name so it would rhyme with “rejoice,” or to put it more correctly, he pronounced the “eu” in his name like the “eu” in Deutschland.

James Gurley, Harley Man.

The African elephant has ears shaped like Africa. The Indian elephant has ears shaped like India.

Camille with a nice smile, Mike Somavilla and Elise Piliwale.

Albert Brooks’ real name is Albert Einstein.

I went to high school on Okinawa, Japan, with these fine, interesting people.

Brian Auger, Peter Albin, Sam Andrew and Richie Kirch somewhere in Oregon.

Jerry Miller, Connie and Bob Mosely.

Janis Joplin and Peter Albin doing Combination of the Two.

Elise Piliwale with a Cockette in Seattle.

The Sam Andrew Band: Bill Laymon and Peter Tork. I wish i could remember the women’s names. There were 261 people in the Sam Andrew Band at one time or another. I’ve always wanted to throw a party for them somewhere like, say, The Waldorf Astoria.

Willie Dixon and Gerry Goffin wrote songs that you have heard all your life, songs that are so inevitable that it seems they wrote themselves.

Carmine Appice and Bobby Vega.

There are 350 varieties of shark, not counting loan, pool and lawyers.

There are more Barbie dolls in Italy than there are Canadians in Canada.

Elise Piliwale and Jimi Hendrix.

James Gurley, Michel Bastian and Orion from Mister Gang, Moscow.

Chan Marshall, Cat Power. She sang Down On Me with us.

A real Chinese person doesn’t know what fortune cookies are. They were invented by an American, Charles Jung (Karl Jung!?), in 1918,

Les Dudek and Sam Andrew, Pennsylvania.

“I’ll tell you one thing about journalists, and this has nothing to do with you, baby, believe me. People like their blues singers to be drunk and miserable, and they like for their blues singers to die afterwards too.” Janis Joplin.

Elise Piliwale, Joan Getz, Marlene Dupont.

Melissa Etheridge and Sam Andrew at The Maritime Music Hall, San Francisco.

A rule I have conspicuously ignored. So far so good.

Never plant three of the same shrub in a row. Always offset. That way, if one dies, it will be harder to notice.

Sounds like a fun night, doesn’t it? By my rule of inflation, that three dollars would be about thirty dollars today… still a good deal.

Len Fico, Sophia Ramos, Sam Andrew and Fito de la Parra.

The first Europeans came to North America to find gold, silver and a river passage to China. Instead they found trees, lots of them. You really have to go East and drive through the forests to understand how dense they are. The people in Jamestown, Virginia, had no gold to send home, so they sent trees instead, shiploads of timber.

Elise Piliwale on the upper west side, Manhattan, 2000.

One of Queen Victoria’s children gave her a bustle for Christmas that played God Save The Queen when she sat down.

Salvador Dalì once arrived at an art exhibition in a limousine filled with turnips.

Jeremy Bentham, an English savant who died in 1832, left everything to the London Hospital with a codicil providing for his body to be at the head of hospital board meetings. His bones were clothed and there was a wax mask for his face, so he attended the meetings for ninety-two years and you can still find him there.

Marty Balin, the one with the talent.

If you think that something is obvious and goes without saying, it might be best just to go ahead and say it anyway.

A close corollary to the above is that you tend to undervalue what is the most valuable in you, that is, something that seems obvious and simple to you may be the best contribution you can make. I have always noticed this in musicians and other artists. What they do best, they think “Oh, anyone can do that.” That’s because that is their gift and so they devalue it thinking that it is natural to everyone else, but it often is not natural at all to everyone. Speak up. Express yourself. Make the world a better place. Thank you for your contribution.

My sister Lillian and her children, Paul Bullis and Emily Bullis Rollins.

Long Island is far from the island of Hawaii, but these people got there.

Snooky in his natural habitat. N’Dea Davenport and Little Queenie. Rather interesting set of human emotions here, n’est-ce pas?

Hans Christian Anderson, author of many famous fairy tales, was “word blind.” Hmm, that’s an interesting way of putting it. Now we usually say “dyslexic.” Why, in my day they just plain said, “He’s a poor speller, really a poor speller.” I am a natural born speller. I always won all the contests. i don’t value spelling at all. it’s like being born left handed or green eyed to be born a good speller, especially in the English language, whose orthography is a nightmare for someone of a logical turn of mind. (Now, watch. Someone is going to write me and say, “But you just misspelled “radiolarian” or “comity.”) It’s the short little words like “the” that are most likely to trip us up, because in the proofreading stage, our eyes glide over this kind of word. Anyway, they are still finding spelling mistakes in Hans Christian Anderson, and i bet this bothers him a lot.