Transcript:

Echoes . . . Waves . . .

The day never started because the night never ended.  

My fried mind resisted the violence of the morning sun.  I was reeling with echoes and waves from what should have been compartmentalized by sleep as yesterday. 

Echoes.  Enough noise for 20,000 amped-up fans still clanging in the bell of my skull. Waves of nausea—residue from what followed the show.  Tequila, hashish, cocaine, and I can’t remember what else, smoldering in my bloodstream.  Surfing ragged waves from a night not yet ended was nothing new.  So, despite a bent brain, a part of me was still able to read the new day’s crystal brightness as full of promise.  The April breeze blew stiff and chilly across middle America.  Hints of pale green laced bare branches.  Daffodil buds decorated winter’s brown grass along the roadside I drove.    

It had become routine for my workday to begin at some small private or municipal airport where our rent-a-plane waited to carry us to the next city and the next show.  Before Homeland Security, you could drive out onto the tarmac and unload your bags right next to the plane.  As my Hertz car approached our plane, I swerved sharply to avoid killing Jaco Pastorius who cut in front of me racing to catch a frisbee.  “DAMN . . .!”  My dozing bandmate Leo sprang to consciousness.  “What was THAT . . . a rabbit?”  Leo, you see, was legally blind and known for interpreting the world around him in amusing and memorable ways.  

For two weeks that spring we played venues where we were preceded or followed by the renowned jazz-fusion group, Weather Report for whom Jaco played bass brilliantly.  Every other day we crossed paths and a musically unlikely camaraderie developed.  This would prove to be a foundation for my future encounters with Jaco in NYC where he would sometimes show up at Dave Perkins Band shows expecting an invitation to join us onstage.  Seeing Jaco in New York was a regular thing until his life and musicality went off the rails in what was one of the greatest wastes of human talent I’ve witnessed.  And I’ve witnessed that crime a number of times.  I nearly inflicted it upon myself.

As we approached our plane there was a new face.  Ron, our road manager, introduced us to our new pilot.  Josh was a lot like the guy he was replacing.  He was preppy and bright.  A straight shooter, all business.  You could tell he was reliable and not inclined to enjoy the kinds of mischief that swarmed around our band like a purple haze.  But that is what we thought about Josh’s predecessor, Clayton. 

On the previous day, flying over Iowa, Clayton in the cockpit, our plane lost all the oil pressure in its right engine.  The prop quit spinning and the plane rocked back and forth as Clayton scrambled to find an even balance.  He yelled for road manager Ron.  With a touch of grim on his face, Ron returned and announced that we were officially looking for a suitable place to land.  “Hopefully, that will be an airport of some kind,” said Ron in his reserved English poshness.  Without that engine, our overcrowded, over-weighted Cessna Navajo would fight gravity in a slow but steady descent.  Ron added, “Clayton says we won’t make it to our destination—Ames is still an hour away.”  

This is the scenario every performer flying private dreads.  The Buddy Holly syndrome. To make the situation even more dramatic, it was in Iowa that Buddy’s plane crashed carrying him, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper in Rock and Roll’s first tragedy.  We were on track to duplicate.  

You’ve seen this scenario played out in movies like Almost Famous and Spinal Tap.  It’s humorous to see attitude-rich rockstars reduced to blubbering as they attempt to find the right words to appease the sky gods.  In wartime it’s called “fox hole faith.”  When you’re suddenly faced with imminent death, you rush to do existential business.  And, in a way, it is funny.  Promises get made, confessions spill out of moaning mouths, weeping and anxiety prevail on individuals who, seconds before, were cocky masters of their universe.  

More echoes rushing in.  A line from an ancient Hebrew song: “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”  And another: a recently-read interview where a weary Bob Dylan said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, I don’t want to go anywhere—you end up dying in a private plane in the hills of Tennessee.”   

The night before our engine trouble, there was a ripping post-show party in one of the major Midwest cities.  There was always a party of some kind, but this was a spectacle.  The room temperature was elevated by the presence of several very beautiful women.  I’m sure they felt bruised from the gauntlet of attention they navigated not only from us performers but also the local celebs and friends of the promoter.  It was approaching 2AM when I noticed that Clayton was among the revelers.  Out of place in his sport coat and slacks, he had corralled one of the beauties.  He held a water glass full of bourbon.  There was an abundance of cocaine available (local dealers had bought their way into the party) and I noticed that Clayton, our trusty pilot, now lit from the alcohol had a trace of white powder in his moustache.  As he speed-talked the girl, his face became increasingly flushed.  This was not good.

The party was still winding down when, with scant sleep, we piled into our mini-fleet of rental cars and headed for the small airport.  We neared the airport following a car that made all the turns we needed to make.  That car was driven by our pilot wearing the same clothes he wore at the party.  For a 9AM departure, our flier should have been onsite since 7.  There were pre-flight protocols.  Important ones like safety checks, system checks, and fuel checks.  The idea that we would take off without these tasks completed should have sounded alarms.  However, we were all semi-wasted.  All we wanted was to get on the plane, get to the next hotel, and sleep.  There was jockeying to get aboard.  Each man wanted to get a seat by the bulkhead on which he might lean and, hopefully, snooze.  In the shoulder-to-shoulder cramped cabin, sleep did not come easy.

Thirty minutes into the flight came Ron’s announcement of engine failure.  The cabin took on an uncharacteristic stillness.  Without the consolation of the usual engine noise, the stillness was made even more visceral.  I got the sense that we were flying in a toy, sailing the vast ocean in a dinghy.  The band’s near constant joking and verbal sparring suddenly stopped.  This silence lasted less than a minute but, in it, I was thrown into an internal dialog the violence of which shook me for days.  With the abyss now opening its gaping mouth, my ongoing philosophical thinking around the matter of what, in a metaphysical sense, is believable seemed like a mere game.  Suddenly, it was no longer academic.  No longer a matter of the high ideas I moved around on my chessboard in a game of truth acquisition.  I saw in that moment that I needed something.  Something I could put my existential weight down on.  Not an intellectual construct, but something outside my own head, if there is such a thing.  What I visualized was something, for lack of a better word, alive—something that would keep me buoyant in life and even when facing death.  Again, if there is such a thing.

I would like to say that I was not the blubbering kind, but alas, I blubbered internally.  The life force of our band was vital enough that we remained fairly stoic.  Or seemed to.  Both our performance life and our extracurricular activities were so audacious, I think we felt bulletproof.  There was no weeping and wailing but the cabin got quiet.  In a group where anything was joke-worthy, no one was joking.  I admit that my internal dialog in that quietness turned toward the spiritual.  I had been fighting a protracted rear-guard action against my religious upbringing.  I had done my best to jettison the whole thing—the baby, the bathwater, everything.  Or so I thought.  However, scenes like this had been popping up occasionally.  Situations where I needed help or strength.  You see, despite the distractions of my high-velocity life, I was beginning to pay attention.  

As it turned out, I was not destined to leave this world falling from a great height.  

What was more likely to take me was the damage I was doing to myself.  

The heart of darkness dawned like a sullen sun over the jungle of bright lights and high decibels.  Echoes and waves.  

As I see it now, an episode like this was just another blip on life’s radar, another moment where the spiritual spiked into my awareness as it would many times, each an invitation to look more closely and listen more deeply . . . to awaken.