Sadly, blues great and longtime friend Dave Shorey passed away on May 8, 2009, in Los Angeles. He was suffering from "4-level" cancer, whatever dreadful thing that is, and I was fortunate to have had a couple of good conversations with him before he became too weak. Dave was a true original - uninterested in doing things that had been done before, or in the pursuit of commercial success except insofar as allowing him to continue to play. He also wrote terrific, image-filled poetry, and wrote and illustrated several books. Rest in peace my brother.

I Went To See The King Today

I went to the temple to see the King today
Because I’d heard he wasn’t doing well
They showed me in and softly then, the heavy doors swung to
Leaving echoes as my footsteps fell

From the dark, into an arc of soft white light I came
I could see he was asleep there on his throne
And regal though he was, there was a sadness to the scene
An aging king, left there all alone

I went to the see the King today - I saw his gnarled hands
And in my mind I felt a subtle snap
Those hands once wrested fireballs from sunburst Strats and Teles
But now those hands lay limp upon his lap

I took a seat there at his feet, and listened as he breathed
His barrel chest now sunken, rose and fell
And once I thought I heard the slightest whispered melody
It might have been a sigh - I couldn’t tell

I went to the temple to see the King today
His minions scurried, hushed and heads all bowed
Urgently they bent to tasks of unknown purpose
Finding truth too grim to speak out loud

And like a cancer I inflicted my appearance there
Urged to leave by disembodied calls
As if I were a clot in their efficient artery
They flowed around me in those garish halls

And when I saw the King was not to wake for me that day
That he might never even know I’d been
I detached and let myself be flushed away downstream
Away from the hive and the maladies within.

I went to the temple to see the King today
To pay a final tribute to the man
For in the end that’s what he was - royalty or no
He could stay no longer than the least of us can

Shut Up, Grandma's Talking

"When the wisdom of the Grandmothers is heard, the world will heal."
--Native American Prophecy

Who ever really listens to Grandma? Seriously. She doesn't email, she doesn't text, she certainly doesn't have a blog. If you tell her you have one, she'll probably suggest you get it off before it stains. And she'll recommend you use baking soda or something else you don't have anyway. The world is moving too fast for Grandma now. She's like Brooks in Shawshank Redemption - likely to get mowed down from behind by current events, or the camera crew from TMZ. She tends to find quiet places where she can stay out of our way, as we rush around doing all the very important, plugged-in things we do. We see her sitting there as we scurry past, and we know we ought to spend some time with her, but we just can't be bothered to stop and listen to her stories. Which is part of the problem. Because Grandma knows a lot of things.

The Native Americans didn't text either, except in a smoke-signal kind of way. Which, when you think about it, was just about as efficient as broken sentences and emoticons. I think they saved it for big stuff though - like "OMG! The US Army is totally coming your way!". Many native American tribes had what they called a "Council of Grandmothers". While the tribe's chief was in charge of major decisions about when and where to hunt, to camp, to go to war or not, how to punish Running Skunk for graffiti-ing the teepee, etc, these councils of elderly women actually had veto power over the chief. They reviewed every major decision he made, and they did it based not on whether it was a good idea for today, but on the "Seventh Generation" test. That is, how will this decision impact our tribe seven generations in the future? Now that's taking the long view. Our leaders today have compressed that down to about a seven-day test. How will this stimulus package affect my poll numbers next week? Come to think of it I may be giving them too much credit - Washington may be on the seven-minute test.

Things have gotten a bit out of control, in case you hadn't noticed. GM CEO Bob Lutz may still think global warming is a hoax, but when methane gas starts bubbling up through the polar ice cap, we have a problem. Fortunately, there is a growing movement towards listening once again to our elders. If you google "Council of Grandmothers" you'll find there are a number of them active around the world. One in particular, The Indigenous Council of Grandmothers, consists of women of various ethnicities as their name suggests, and travels the world's poorest areas dispensing their wisdom about environmental and social issues. Another one, called the "Great Council Of Grandmothers" www.grandmothersspeak.com is active in California. Their main message: our world is out of balance. As spokesperson Sharon McErlane says, "Today planet Earth and the life it sustains are in jeopardy; the energy of yin and yang is and has been out of balance for several centuries. As this imbalance increases, fear and violence hold sway, horror escalates and loving sensitive souls find themselves depleted and running on empty."

The trick, of course, is getting governments and people in power to listen. For that we are going to need more foot soldiers - ordinary people like you and me - to keep talking about these issues. Already the ground has shifted a bit, as I see more Priuses and fewer Hummers on the road. And our children will grow up to do a better job as stewards of this earth. That's only a one-generation test, but it's a start. We just have to keep hammering away.

A basic tenet of all the Grandmother councils holds that women are more open to this message. I think that's true, but as a man, I see that changing as well. I'm going to do my part: my Nana isn't around anymore to share her wisdom with me, but I do know some grandmothers, and I plan to spend some time listening to them. I may even go get some baking soda, just in case of accidents.

No, I Don't Want To Rock

I'm definitely a campfire kid. As a boy I was lucky enough to get sent north every summer to live for a month or so in a cabin beside a lake, surrounded by thick forests of pine and birch, where I would learn to say strange Indian names, and be a Mohawk or an Algonquin or an Iroquois. We'd carve tikis, and lace lanyards, and drink bug juice, and of course, spend hours around campfires. I can still point out the constellations I first learned there, and remember ghost stories from counselors that scared us to pieces. Oh, and at night we shared all our 9-year old boy wisdom on important issues like masturbation and feeling up girls.

Sitting around a campfire is still a sacred thing to me. Watching the flames dance, looking up through the branches at a million stars, sharing songs and stories with friends, taking in nature at our most thoughtful and reverential - I feel closer there to God, or the Great Spirit, or however you conceive the creator of this world, than in any man-made house of worship.

Not everyone looks at it that way, as I recently found out. My family was part of large camping weekend, sharing a beautiful site on a lake with seven or eight other families. It was a great bunch of people, mostly old friends, and a few new ones. During the day we played games, rode bikes, took turns saving each other's children from peril on the dock, and shared a cornucopia of outdoor cooking. The kids, marshmallow-fueled, patrolled the camp in bunches, heavily armed with squirt guns.

Then there came trouble in paradise. That first night, with the young and less nocturnal zipped into their tents, conflict reared its ugly head at the roaring campfire in the form of a boombox. As soon as I saw it approach, carried by the blonde woman who had seemed perfectly lucid earlier, I knew it was going to ruin everything. Still, I tried to go with it; maybe she would play a few Jackson Browne or James Taylor songs - maybe it would be some African rhythms, new age stuff, something soothing and appropriate. How bad could it be? When the cassette door snicked closed and Led Zeppelin roared forth, I knew how just bad.

My friend Scott protested first. Come on, turn that off, he said. Others of us chimed in. Our tone was chiding but gentle. Surely she would back off. Surely she realized how out of place "Whole Lotta Love" was in this peaceful setting. She didn't. "Come on, don't you want to ROCK?". She turned it up louder, apparently thinking that surely we'd come around. Surely we didn't actually think listening to crickets and frogs could compare to Robert Plant at full yowl. And she wasn't alone - there were some others at the campfire taking her side, ready to ROCK.

We argued for a while. They were as baffled by our view of the campfire as a spiritual place as we were by their belief that loud guitar music was a necessary ingredient. Not known for his timidity, Scott finally got up, walked to the boombox and shut it off. She turned it back on. She wanted to rock.

Now don't get me wrong - I am not an old fogey. I am a musician, a drummer, in fact, and I have rocked, most of my life. But how often do we get to sit around a campfire on a star-studded night? How often do we actually listen to the crickets and frogs, or to each other? We can blast loud music pretty much anytime we feel like it.

One by one, most of us non-rockers got up and left the campfire. I wandered away, down towards the lake. The frogs went silent as I came to the water's edge, then started up again as I stood motionless, my eyes adjusting to the dark. I tried to block out the music from behind me. I thought about the other campsites around the lake, all hearing every note carried across the still water. I felt like I owed an apology to everyone out there, in their sleeping bags or sitting around their own fires, wondering what the hell was wrong with the city-mutant barbarians across the way.

I guess for some people, life has to have a soundtrack - a party just isn't a party unless the music is cranking. But nature does have its own music, if we turn ours off long enough to hear it. Maybe that's part of what I learned in all those summers at camp. There's a time to rock, and a time to not rock. I think the Iroquois would have agreed.