Colorado (Yes, All Of It)

So. Several days to cover, as always. Hard to fathom that this is almost done; I'll be back in Flagstaff in just four days, maybe even three if I'm feeling feisty after the gig on Wednesday in Albuquerque. But enough about the future! Let us reminisce about the past.

I arrived in Grand Junction well before the gig; it's less than a two hour drive from Moab, and I didn't really feel much like dawdling there. I've been to Moab a ton; GJ would be a first for me, and I wanted to spend a little time there.

I hit up a coffee shop/bagel place downtown, to get some grub and catch up on me blog (an ongoing theme). The place was a little surreal, playing 40s pop music while people chowed on bagel sandwiches and joe. I spent a good couple hours there, then headed out to shower before the gig. I managed to get a brief nap in, too, which was just dandy.

I was supposed to play on the patio at The Ale House, a brewery/restaurant. The weather looked spectacularly uncooperative (c.f. the last two days in Moab); but I packed up and headed over to check the place out. When I got there the manager said I could set up and give it a shot if I wanted to, but that he expected that it would rain, and no one would be on the patio; he also couldn't have music inside, as it would just take up a table that people would have otherwise sat at (Fridays being, apparently, completely berserk there. And it was; though a waitress told me, it was actually a bit slow. Mahgod.) Anyway, he and I went back and forth a bit, and he finally agreed to pay me half of the guarantee, even though I wouldn't play at all and wouldn't even try. Nice sometimes to get paid for not playing; I was a bit disappointed, but at the same time somewhat relieved that I would get a night off. The previous few days had taken it out of me, what with the long drives and multiple giggery. So, I accepted my filthy lucre, carried my stuff back to the car, and tried to figure out what I'd do with myself.

Someone told me about an art show with live music downtown; that seemed like as good a place to start as any, so I drove over and parked across the street. It was about 8; the place was still pretty slow, and I needed to get some food anyway. The next building over was a coffee shop, so I decided to grab a cup & ask a few questions. Roasted Coffee and Subs was the name; a pretty small place, with a long-haired, bearded dude behind the counter, and a knot of people just inside the door at the counter. I ordered the coffee, and asked about music that night; he said "Those are the people you'd want to talk to", and directed my attention at the aforementioned knot. They proved to be mostly musicians themselves, but offered the opinion that there was, in fact, nothing to do in town, and nothing worth checking out. Kind of grim, really; we talked a bit about some other possibilities, but then I finally suggested that we just jam right there in the coffee shop, which they were into. One went to get a guitar, another a violin, and we sat around trading songs for a couple hours, attracting a small group of people in the process. Turns out that Roasted is quite the nexus for people to meet an connect with one another; the lady at the art show next door told me later that she had been waiting for years for that kind of connecting to really start to happen. Who knows, really, how in tune with everything in town she may or may not have been; but it was definitely an interesting idea, to think that Grand Junction might have been in the beginning of a renaissance (the Redneck Renaissance, as I like to call it). The guy running the coffee shop (he turned out to be one of the owners) fed me a sandwich for playing and getting the jam session going, which was nice. Sometimes that's all it takes.

I headed over to the art show, which by this time had wound down to an almost empty room. I paid the cover, figuring it is always good to support local art in its most interesting forms, and wandered around checking it out. The theme was "Gifts of the Goddess", and had pieces by something like 35 different artists, in all different media. Plus there were snacks, which always helps. There was a DJ, who seemed not to be super thrilled about spinning for nobody; I guess it was his last show in town, he was moving on to greener pastures - to be expected, perhaps.

I split after that, to head out to hang out more with the guys i had been jamming with before; the violin player had called it a musician's collective, which effectively meant six or so people living in an apartment together, playing music a lot, and letting things get cluttered and dingy together. Bohemia at its best, really. By the time I got there, the guys I had been jamming with were gone; but I ended up jamming with the folks who did live there, one of whom played clarinet, and gave me a basic intro to playing the clarinet. She said I was doing well for someone who had never tried to play one before, which was encouraging; the strange contortions you have to put your hands in to get the valves covered to play the most basic scale were definitely not, however. I wondered if my damned hands were just too big to play the dumb thing, but I will persevere.

Headed out at about 1 a.m. to crash, having counted the night a great success; the gig getting canceled was actually a very cool thing for me, as it gave me the chance to hang out and jam with several local folks, which I wouldn't have had the opportunity to do otherwise. I passed out and slept well.

Let myself have a nice, mellow morning the next day; the drive to Boulder wasn't that long, and the gig in Nederland didn't start until 9 PM, so it was fine getting out of town by 1. The drive was epic; amazing mountain views, with tons of fairly fresh snow in the higher elevations and carpeting the mountains all around. I took a bazillion pictures while behind the wheel; really ridiculously gorgeous. Drove through Vail pass, at 10,300 feet or so; tons of snow on the ground there. Then descended back down to more human elevations, at around 5000 feet: Golden, Colorado, home to one Seth Ruggles, younger brother to Erik Ruggles. Seth and I hadn't seen each other in a long time, and couldn't remember when the last time was; great hospitality, the first manifestation of which was offering to drive me to my gig in Nederland - a good 35 minutes and 3000 feet in elevation away. I took him up on it, and he and is girlfriend Shea helped me move my gear into the back of their Saab, so we could cruise on up to the Pioneer Inn, the site of my next gig.

Nederland is a funny town; kind of like Jerome in Arizona, but more remote - and, thus, a bit freakier and funkier. I'd been looking forward to this gig all tour, as being one sure to present a singular experience in one sense or another. Nederland is best known for having an annual festival in honor of a frozen dead guy - i.e., Frozen Dead Guy Days, in honor of a Norwegian man who is cryogenically frozen in a Tuff Shed. Google it, look it up on YouTube, whatever - my descriptions can't possibly do justice to what goes on there. Suffice to say, an interesting place.

The Pioneer was an instantly memorable locale; wood paneling, crusty-looking dudes at and behind the bar (the bartender was an ex-jerseyite named Bones, with the attitude and accent to prove it; he was a chill guy, very friendly, but no-nonsense in the way that you only find in the east coast.) Seth & Shea went off to meet some folks at a nearby barbecue place, while I set up my gear and ate the complimentary meal that was part of my arrangement with the Pioneer. They told me to order the fish & chips, which proved to be mediocre; but I had been pining for fish & chips all trip, and couldn't resist the possibility that they might actually be awesome. Ah well.

I ended up setting up in front of the (unlit) fireplace, which gave me a bit of a raised platform upon which to play, and stuck me right next to a stuffed elk head - makes for great visuals, of course. While I was setting up a dude named David came and chatted with me, telling me about his work as a stonemason ("who holds back the electric car?") and whatnot. This would all prove somehow salient later. I got done hooking up all my gear, and the computer (I had decided to record the show), then went down the street to hang with Seth, Shea, and their friends. And a good thing, too, since the place was otherwise almost empty when we got back, and I started to play.

As I'll often do when I've got a friendly, sympathetic crowd (read: there are people I know there), I blathered on for a while before I started playing. Several minutes in, the guy I had chatted with earlier started heckling me about starting to play - "I can't hear the music, Matt!" (reference to an earlier moment he and I had had earlier). Apparently he was annoyed that I was talking, and not playing, which I found rather amusing in that talking and telling stories is part and parcel to the singer/songwriter whole goddamn raison d'etre. I told him as much, hoping to shut him up without being too rude. He kept it up, though. This went on for a while, though I tried to blow it off, and made the group I had come with uncomfortable to varying degrees. I can take some heckling, of course, but this wasn't your good-natured stuff - he was drunk and ornery, and taking it out on me. I finally just told him he needed to settle down (I may have said "settle the fuck down", I can't really remember), which got an uncomfortable silence from the room but worked. I managed to soothe the situation with the other folks in the bar by going on about how I'd put up with anything up to a point, but eventually you have to draw a line, and everyone relaxed. I wondered to myself for a few minutes there if I wasn't about to get into a fight with a local just minutes after taking the stage. You have to expect that kind of thing when you play small, funky, mountain towns; but, though the heckling is of a higher intensity (and often, frankly, higher caliber) it's almost never driven by any kind of genuine aggressive spirit. This guy, I later learned, had just had a fight with his wife, and was looking to get into it with someone. Anyway, he left the bar shortly thereafter.

The small group that Seth had brought were pretty attentive and cool; I had a great time playing for them. They all left after my first set, except Seth and Shea, who were stuck there because they had foolishly offered to drive me to the gig. But when I got up to play my second set, the bar started to fill up; apparently night life in Nederland doesn't really get off the ground until like 10:30, or more like 11. There was a good-sized crowd there for my whole second set, including a couple who were into King of the Hammers, a new kind of racing that's a hybrid of Baja style high-speed desert racing and rock crawling - requiring that you build a vehicle capable of both. Real Mad Max type stuff, in my book; when the apocalypse goes down and shit gets real, these guys will have vehicles ready to handle whatever the roads or lack thereof will look like on any given day. I just watched a few second clip from the website, and it's fucking ridiculous.

The drive back to their place was a bleary one, and I was glad that someone else was driving down that crazy mountain road. In retrospect, playing such a late show at such a remote spot doesn't seem like such a swell idea, but there you go. Now I know.

The next day I would be playing at The Dark Horse Saloon, which would prove to be an awesome gig; Seth and I got in a quick hike up to the top of one of the bluffs overlooking town, the one behind their house, actually, before I had to roll out for it. More on the gig at the fabulous Dark Horse tomorrow, though, as it is pushing 1:30 and I feel the need to crash and crash hard. Hoping to do a burly hike tomorrow (Monday, being the last day off I have on tour before my two gigs in New Mexico, and my return to Flagstaff). Til then.