the waves never stop rolling, though they may roll afar, leaving the surface of the nearby sea an unbroken fleeting mirror.  around here a temporary calm reflects the rocky skyline of the tip of russia. 

Far From Sinaloa

            anyone can travel
             far from carolina
big ol jet airliner    slow boat to china
 ticket to the sky    take it anywhere

                         anyone can ramble
down some lonesome highway    take the high road
start to get too dry,  hey...        or take the low road
                              let it all go by
                                    let it all go by...

        we are on a side road
        on horses that the kings rode
        and when the river wide's rowed
        we might just strike the main
        lode
               
                     anyone can paddle
up the mighty/big ol' river    into some wide water
feel the first time shiver    good ol alma mater
                        feel it fade away

                     anyone can straddle
any great divide line        pick a side or pass time       
drink in deep the fine wine    where the spillflow's divine
                      try hard not to pay
                               try hard not to pay...

        right outside the forest
        tomorrow is before us
        mumble through the chorus
        and get back on the tour
        bus

all the world's a wander    wonderful is so wide
all the wonder's inside      wonder where the dreams hide
                   anyone can freeride
                   wave one hand for show

                        there's a far horizon
past the one we came for    past the one we ordered
there's a hundred names for    there's another border
                          the easy way to go


                       anyone can travel
far from north dakota        hibbing, minnesota
get out on the road, yeah,    driving round a skoda
                       like some epic poem

                       anyone can ramble
take off on a Friday        take off on a Friday
take the lonesome highway    take the lonesome highway
                  then take the road back home

                            take the road back
                            take the road back
                        take the road back home

In the end, it's all just a big blur with only the folklore to make any sense of it.  The stories may or may not reflect what really happened.  The ice came.  The ice went.  Earlier, later, climate change, balls of fire.

There have been some great movies made around these parts, but nobody watched them.  We have all sprung forward now, in more ways than several.

There was a sleepless and blustery Bering February, memorialized by the 3-cd set which will be available in demo format on the summer ICE LOVE tour.  All the songs will also be available here as impy 3s:

The High Road in Hard Times

As of this writing, only the first 2 discs are up.  But the best is yet to come, with even spicings of fireball songs, fireball words and music done by others, and other people's songs covered by fireball.  All created during the shortest month of 2009.

On a little island between the Pacific and the Arctic.

Happy New Year!

From the whole crew here at fireball headquarters. This was meant to be a holiday greeting, but time slips away, leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of holidays.

"Blessings" instead of "Cheers" brought to you by Sarah C. Hofstedder, née Hanson, who played with fireball in Nome on December 19. First time in a long time, first time ever in Nome, first live performance of "Katherine" maybe ever. "Rosetta" was also set for a first, but the scene just couldn't handle such startling tenderness...

The trail continued around the wreath of fire...

And down by the river in Kampot, Cambodia, there happens to be a little recording studio. Late on December 30, Hugh brought his speedboat downriver in a heavy, low-visibility downpour --- through the black pilings of three bridges, the old ones still bearing civil war scars --- and he sped fireball up for a late-night joyride to record "Sisophan Road" complete with giggling by Rosie and Sam... a really rough demo from the last day of 2008. Check the map, baby.

Sieg's helicopter has returned Fireball once more to the little island. Spring in the Bering Strait... Jaro na Aljašku...

Blessings, indeed.

Copper Center, AK – A man attempting to impersonate Willis Fireball was apprehended late Monday night at the Tonsina River Lodge, during a Peter Mulvey concert [image below]. The arrest follows a number of reports of Fireball impersonators spotted throughout Alaska since Halloween.

"We're happy we caught him," said Sheriff Don Grey. "We knew it was our guy when he sang the Coffee Song about eight octaves below the real Fireball's version. Freakin' amateur."

News of the Fireball fake had music websites buzzing, and even caused willisfireball.com to shut down for several hours on Sunday. Devoted fans were unable to access their favorite quirky videos, or read third-person blog posts.

"I thought I might die," said Chestnut Denali Rodriguez, a longtime fan. "Part of my morning ritual is to enjoy the extremely low quality audio and video on Fireball's website."

For his part, Mulvey seemed stunned by the realization that he'd unwittingly allowed a fake Fireball to join him on stage.

"This is a tough one for me," said Mulvey. "After all he…the real one…has done for me…the carhartt's should have tipped me off…and that baseball cap…since when does Fireball wear a normal hat?!!"

The real Fireball could not be reached for comment. His agent indicated the performer is currently living in a very remote village in western Alaska, and "he's so close to Russia he's practically a foreign policy expert."



Peter Mulvey's Alaska tour blog 2008

this is the non-musical blog of the month, and it's a bit overdue.

of the small handfull who might read this, i think there are several who should really know about this thing i'm about to drop on you...

i'll soon be moving to little diomede island. i'll be living, teaching, and learning there for awhile. my only break will be the short christmas vacation --- although today i heard that christmas vacation doesn't necessarily happen around christmas, if there's no transportation off the island ---

i was planning to spend the break in mexico and cuba, but i'm leaning now toward cambodia.

mostly because of solaid.org

i know some of the people who run this very young organization, and i know that the ideals and goals on the website are exactly what they are pushing. their passion and commitment put me to shame, frankly.

so i hope to be volunteering there for christmas... or maybe just visiting.

there should be some fireball-solaid connections one of these days, musical and otherwise... i'd be writing cambodia songs now if i knew anything about cambodia. i hope to be wiser by january.


hey, fireball knows you're all terribly busy, but check out the website and consider contributing in some way.


and write to me for more info.

wfb

the blog has idled for 10 months...

fireball music slowed during that time. fireball silliness churned onward in many directions.

figuratively speaking.
geographically, the train stopped in aniak last august, and it’s been there on the banks of the kuskokwim river through the long northern winter, watching the river chill and freeze and become the road for snow travel and bootleggers.

meanwhile, the bootleg cd Live from Chena is out.

and the long aniak february produced its FAWM album: Aniak Trains

there have been other songs and travels throughout the year. in fact, i’ve been out of aniak for a total of about a month... resulting in some manic, interesting, and not-at-all-relaxing travels. i did take in the trans-siberia railway and the capital cities of prague, moscow, ulaan bataar, hohhot, and beijing.

and then i caught a glimpse of stockholm, tromsø , oslo, and amsterdam. if "oslo" doesn’t mean "godfield", it should. as should kris delmhorst, who pregnantly played a 12-song set at paradiso in amsterdam.

now we’re doing "macbeth" in aniak.

and starting in may, it’s "the taming of the shrew" in fairbanks.

i’ve heard that breakup on the kuskokwim is explosive.

15 days in china

a break from the performance part of my springtime travels.

on april 24 i got on a plane and flew fairbanks-seattle-los angeles-hong kong. it was a long but comfortable trip... punctuated by an uncomfortable need to get business done in airports on wireless internet. i thought i'd learn a good bit of the history and language of china as we crossed the pacific, but instead i mostly watched films the whole 14-hour flight. thus, i arrived even more ignorant than i planned.

but hong kong was british till 1997, and it's a disneyland kind of china. not just in the new theme park, but all over the islands, with crazy nighttime lights and lasers all over the smoggy skyscraper waterfront. so no chinese is necessary there.

i wandered around the kowloon area for a couple days, went to the art museum, sat on the spectacular waterfront, went to ned kelly's... then kaci showed up and we went over to real china. spent a few days in shenzhen.

hong kong is an SAR --- a special administrative region, retaining its historic capitalist systems for another 40 years before cutely re-integrating with mainland china.
shenzhen is an SEZ --- a special economic zone: a city in the pearl river delta which was constructed out of thin air and a fishing village in the early 80s as an experiment in the new chinese economy.

shenzhen is huge, and the little bits i saw just looked like endless suburbia dense with bustling chinese people. chinese people, though, come from all over a huge country, with all kinds of ethinicities. not that i thought they all looked alike, but i was struck by how very different and amazingly interesting the millions of faces seemed. yes, i looked at tens of hundreds of thousands of faces. and a large fraction of them were staring at me. almost all of them would've been staring at me, but many were unable to stop staring at kaci.

if i spoke more mandarin than "hello" and "have/not have", i might've heard some pretty good stories from those faces.

anyway, we flew from shenzhen to lijiang in the yunnan province. spent 2 nights in the amazing tiger leaping gorge. i was a little depressed about the steady stream of foreign backpackers that run along the trail and populate the guesthouses... but, in fact, it's nothing compared to trying to visit yosemite, and the gorge is better. so i have attempted to force some perspective on myself.

in the yunnan, we checked out the towns of lijiang (great canals) and dali (between a lake and a hillside).

in lijiang we watched live music on two different nights. on the first night we watched a girl play guitar and sing. we struck up english conversation with a guy who had played earlier in the evening. he was from south korea, and he said that he opened the evening of live acoustic music almost every night. our second night in lijiang, we went to watch him, and he was great, singing lots of english songs (doors, dylan, simon & garfunkel...) plus songs in korean and chinese, and even one in spanish (besame mucho). i recorded his last song ("ain't no sunshine when she's gone") on my digital camera, and i hope to edit that into a semi-watchable thing soon...

the lake in dali is great, and worth riding a bike around. the hillside is a lovely hike, and gives a great view of the city. there's a hostel at the top, very worthy of a night. in between are the old city --- full of old women in colourful traditional garb whispering, "you wanna some ganja?" in the streets --- and the mall/circus which is closer to the mountain.

i was hoping to cross paths with fellow travelers steve and gwenola. they were heading circuitously from cambodia to beijing in order to catch the trans-siberia railway. many e-mails narrowed the possibilities to one brief moment in kunming, and i ditched kaci in order to remain there an extra day. but the meeting proved impossible, and the next day i began 30 hours by train back to hong kong.

before leaving hong kong, i wanted to see the world's largest outdoor seated bronze buddha, which is near disneyland. but it wasn't to be. i DID, however, go to ned kelly's one last time for the jazz. this time, there was a seat right up front. when i arrived mid-song, the bandleader made great note of my silly beard. when i said i was from alaska, he became very boisterous and ebullient. a fine way for a bandleader to be. he bought me a shot of something.

later, during a band break, he came over to tell me that he had been to skagway. wow, i said, i was just there 2 weeks ago. "is the red onion still there? we played there."

zpatky al norte

april 1 - april 18

started april fools day in las cruces, new mexico.
planned to make a quick border crossing into ciudad juarez...
just a token appearance in mexico.
wasn't sure if one can get in/out with just an alaska drivers license.

but i didn't leave cruces in time,
so instead i just hung around the old plaza in mesilla.
a sunny afternoon and a few beers in el patio,
where that great pat benatar video was filmed.

april 2 included the trip to TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
and the show at the blue dragon in ALBUQUERQUE.

and that concluded the coup de deux tour.
john keech flew to mississippi on the 3rd.

i spent a couple more days with the fireball folks in los alamos,
then boarded a plane for seattle. AMERICA WEST to phoenix.
stupid america west. a busted fire extinguisher in the cockpit
resulted in a 2+ hour delay in departure.
just enough to miss my alaska airlines flight to seattle.
it became very uncertain if i'd catch the marquetta miller
performance which was the main reason i booked a night in
seattle. but alaska airlines and a great $40 cab ride got
me downtown in time to see her play at the sky church.
she was great, of course. afterwards i got to hang with
rock stars like ELECTRIC TAPE and WHISKEY TANGO.
i was exceedingly tired that night. next morning we ate
at some place and ben gibbon got food there, sending the
young ladies who were my cohorts into fits of giggling, twittering,
and text messaging. okay, i was doing it, too. but more manly.

ketchikan: it wouldn't've felt right if s. scott spring hadn't
left me in the rain for half an hour when i arrived in town.
mr. busybody was late for his own gig playing classical guitar bits
at the cape fox lodge, and on the way we had to put up some flyers
for our later duo gig in an office cubicle somewhere.

ketchikan was fun. relaxing. rainy. a few fun shows.
played a lot of songs i hadn't been playing for awhile.
s. scott spring generally didn't ruin them too bad with his
rock star "lead guitar." and, i must say, the three songs we
played on the radio down there were pretty cool.
on tuesday night, s. scott spring took me to a fine restaurant.
of course we went so late that we ended up late for our "gig."
also, our server dumped s. scott spring's dinner on the floor.
just once i wish i could keep supper off the floor...
soren wuerth attended the tuesday night show, and he ended up writing about
it, seeing parallels in the low crowd turnout and the general
apathy of the ketchikan political populace...

insurgent49

every night i fell asleep watching THE YOUNG ONES,
usually after one episode, even with 3 or 4 on the schedule.

at the very last minute before racing to the airport,
i got s. scott spring to record a spontaneous solo on a
ryan woodard transatlantic demo. it was funny, and yet,
sss once again impressed. musically, anyway.
i'll be adding some vocals to that, and then i'll probably
put the demo up on the ol' myspace until ryan woodard sues me.

then juneau.
i caught an earlier flight than scheduled, so i easily heard most
of the music at the folkfest in centennial hall. including the great
russ kelly and ruby, aka THE TREADWELL TWO.
nights and nights of music, and the alaskan hotel, and riesa rose, etc.
the usual juneau rain. i went running in the rain every day.
played a 4-song set on the stage on friday night.
i may put them up here on the myspace soon.

and then monday i caught a ferry to skagway and a ride to whitehorse.
one CAN still get into canada with just an alaska drivers license
hanging out downtown in whitehorse.
watching hockey on the t.v. at bars, eh?
the wireless craze has not swept downtown whitehorse...
how i wish i were happy about that,
and not needing constant internet injections...
don't ask.

whitehorse.

which great pat benatar video, you ask? i'm not sure.
what i read on the wall of the place was vague.
i'm looking into it.
mail any tips to:
willis fireball
attn: URGENT
p.o. box 84017
fairbanks, ak 99708
united states of america