Really, a fella goes home for a month and a half, reunites with his best chums from way back, plays an all-night show at an iconic country music venue, and then has nothing to say about it? Seriously, it is September the fourteenth for Christ's sake.
The month of July was the coldest and rainiest ever recorded in Dubuque county (that's one county to the north) It didn't hamper our gathering and playing though- we spent many a night out on the back porch at Grace's amongst the evening's recently expired tobacco butts and countless brown bottles who had been freed of their burdens of ale. With myself keeping (setting) the pace on my Powers or 'mills, and all of us picking at the scraps of pork gristle or cold sauerkraut left in the pan.
When faced with a month and a half in familiar territory, you can easily forget that your time is limited. Often times things could, and were, left in a fluid state, rather than cleaned up and made presentable to fit within the preconceived notion of the song.
-And then right in the middle of it all, we tore it all down and trucked out to the Mooney Hollow Barn and I got to play all night with all my friends. Leon Kilburg was the only man to call to open the show. He was the voice of the barn's house band back when I was knee high. BJ played the drums of course, only this time I got to play the bass. My uncle John stepped up and played the old familiar country tunes on his trusty Fender pedal steel, and Steve filled in the tasty licks on the Strat.
After the shit-kicking was over, Esmé pulled out the Martin and Steve did the same while Dan tickled the ivory-colored plastic. It was the only set of the evening that I wasn't on stage for and that's ok, because I can honestly say that a few of my current favorite songs fell out of Esmé's pen, and I'd rather just listen to 'em. (even though she didn't play one of them...)
The out-of-townies (Starlings) let me and BJ mess with their set. You really had to be there to appreciate how easily this drummer found the groove and made me able to slip back into these tunes that I hadn't played bass on for a few months. Nevermind the fact that he'd never once played them before that moment himself. We even had Steve up at the end of the set to jazz up "workin' on a building" -it was lovely, unrehearsed madness.
Then Silverhands played. I picked up the guitar and I made those guys play for an hour and a half. We had John back up on steel for some requisite ET, and Dan was at the keys for the last few tunes of the set. There is no more fun to be had than playing with the likes of these folks. BJ was a rock (a rock that swings real hard) and Esmé was a locomotive. The rhythm was the kind of thing that I can't describe to them, but they always achieve nonetheless. Steve was, as usual, a lessonbook of unexpected melodic explosions, and an explosion of expected perspiration in a six foot circle all around him. The hot licks don't just slide out of that guitar, you gotta bust your ass like you are baling hay in August to coax out the expressive interjections like Steve can.
After the show (when they'd run out of Schmidt and a move to Hamm's was required) we all gradually slipped out and home and I was quite pleased.
Next day, Joy and Tom hit the road a couple times for back west to Polk, and I put my brain back to the task at hand- hitting upon the crest of the hill we'd been on with these tunes. Our first week rehearsing had brought some fabulous new ideas for swing and accent, as well as melodic intros and interludes. At the gig at Saints Rest in Grinnell, I heard Steve playing the tunes at a new, different level. I was thrilled. It was the best delivery of the new tunes that we'd had yet. Three days later at the Mooney Hollow, I could hear where things were heading.
I think great records are sometimes a matter of simple logistics. Things coming together in the right place and time and being able to immortalize a theme without beating it into the ground. Our situation at the time had us peeking over the brink of the songs -how they inevitably were going to sound if we gave them the liberty, while at the same time realizing that the time we had left was simply not going to allow it.
I am often prone to changing horses (several times) in midstream. And I don't even like horses.
We still hung out most every night. We filled every digit on my hard drive with sweet takes that I love dearly, but I was left wrestling the question of which take, which flavor, was the final album track going to be built off of. Because you can only put out one "album" of a particular set of songs. Sometimes when a record has a long enough life for people to be interested in those sorts of things, re-issues appear with alternate takes on them. But until then, only the band knows what cool things could have been done but were forsaken for some reason or another.
So the Caravan made a last gasp trip back west with all the gear and gave up the ghost a few weeks later. What was left of her life was paid out by the ton, and she sits in a row of similar bodystyles and era right now...
I was in love with the possibilities that I had in the can this summer. Still quite optimistic while I was setting the studio back up down here in Auburn. Right now I have an album's worth of recordings that make me grin ear to ear when I hear 'em, yet seem to suffer from an extreme case of inaccessibility. I can make records solely for my own enjoyment all day long (I do) (sometimes I make up to five copies) but that's not the point of making albums with Silverhands. The point is, I wasn't really ready to leave the place we were as a band, geographically, or mentally. Hitting the west coast without them and knowing I still have a lot of work to do was a king-size monkey-wrench in the emotional flow of happy record making.
Well friends, it ain't always a party. The business of making a name for one's self often makes for keeping the happy face on during times of distress and tedium. I was simply not able muster up the spin to describe where I was with the album project, and the band in general. Luckily I was busy enough playing bass for friends to keep me feeling fulfilled as a working musician. The hard questions sit in front of me now- I can keep things on hold until I get back to Iowa and we can pick up where we left off, I could start things over and make a much more stark record, and I could bite the bullet and play my own bass out here and put together a band...

For the time being I'm gonna go with leaving the location on my profile set to Teeds Grove, Iowa, and playing a solo show tomorrow night in Seattle. We'll see where that leads me.

No shit,
Mike.