Day Sixteen - 11/1/07 - The Haunted Halloween Hangover/ Pickin’ Up My Dawg at the Bear’s Tooth

After staying up to an hour at which we would have seen the morning sun had we not been in Alaska, we groggily greeted the first day of November around noon. Despite the pounding in my head and the gang of gremlins in my stomach throwing a house party, it was comforting to wake up with a real roof over my head and a sparkling Gretsch drumset next to me. As much as I love these guys, there is something about the sight of beautiful birch drums waiting silently for me upon waking that soothes me to the core. They don’t snore, they don’t hog the blanket, and they don’t emit poison from their anus without warning, drums don’t even need an anus. They’re sort of like Jesus in that way (this relates to an earlier discussion we had about a 19th Century Pope declaring that Jesus did not defecate and therefore had no anus). As I stirred about in my toasty sleeping bag trying to figure out where I was and recollect the events of the previous night, only one regret came to mind: late night shots of Patron. I seem to have inherited this habit from my brother, but I tend to convince myself and those around me that expensive shots of tequila are just what the doctor ordered at the end of the night. Brad was smart enough not to give into my Halloween trickery, but the rest of us had to wrestle our Mexican cousins for the better part of the next day.

We slowly yet triumphantly emerged from our respective sleeping quarters, Brad and Gordon from the garage and Bryan and I from the basement music studio, and we gradually began to form coherent sentences. Our couchsurfing host Nick, who had not had anything to drink the night before, but partied just as hard as anyone and boogied down with the most beautiful girl in Anchorage, lent us the motivation we needed and soon we were off on foot to the local market to pick up some breakfast provisions: eggs, cheese, bacon, and toast. There’s nothing quite like the morning after camaraderie of cooking or going out for a big breakfast after a particularly exquisite bender. It’s one of those “we’re all in this together” sorts of things. You piece together the events of the previous night, tell some funny stories…that combined with some solid food quells the gremlins and turns them back into cuddly little mogwai.

We lazed about for most of the afternoon, taking much needed showers and getting entranced by our computer screens as we tend to do from time to time. Let it not be said that we are addicted to LCD, we are the computer generation, and our level of symbiosis with our electronic companions is frightening in a Terminator-we-elected-a-robot-from-the-future-to-be-governor-of-California kind of way, but normal in a hey-we-can-find-the-answers-to-our-questions-at-the-push-of-a-button kind of way. I think I’m somewhat of an anomaly in this scenario, because I hate my computer. The only reason I have it with me on this trip is so that I can complete this online course and finally graduate from college. It is absolutely the bane of my existence and I fantasize about throwing it off of tall buildings to its imminent and glorious demise. That this is not the normal response to the modern day necessity of computers has dawned on me only recently. I was initially astonished by the level of comfort and lack of frustration exhibited by Bryan and Brad whilst on their computers. Their laptops function as if they were some sort of cerebral annex, with no synaptic disconnect between the human body and its electronic counterpart. The fact that it takes Bryan’s computer 5 seconds to do anything that would take my computer 5 minutes probably has something to do with it, but in my family, the reactions to computers have always been confusion, frustration, and rage, tolerance at best. Though my current trajectory has me staying as far away from computers as possible (working in the woods where my most complex piece of equipment is a compass, maybe a cell phone), my experience on this trip may be enough to convince me that a peace between man and machine is possible…nah, that’s actually never going to happen, I will officially be reverting to the oral tradition for the remainder of this blog…

Okay, fine, but don’t think for a second that you’ve heard it all just because you’ve been reading the blog…there’s plenty more going on here than you computer-toggling jerks can tell, go out and ride a bike, play with your children, take a friend out to lunch, do something healthy instead of increasing the curvature of your spine as you drool all over your keyboard…

Sorry, got a little out of hand there, you’re not jerks, you’re all lovely people, it’s just kind of a touchy subject for me.

Anyway, after we came out of our trance, we got ourselves together enough to be proactive and go to the Bear’s Tooth to buy tickets for the evening’s festivities: The David Grisman Quartet live in Anchorage. To our dismay, tickets were sold out, so we pouted and went back to Nick’s place in order to see if we could find some online. We tried to no avail, resolving in the end to head to the show a bit early in hopes of sifting out some extra tickets from the crowd.

Now the Bear’s Tooth merits some explanation. It’s kind of like the Wal-Mart of Anchorage entertainment, but much cooler and lacking door-greeters with speech impediments. The Bear’s Tooth is a concert venue, movie theater, brewery, pizza/burrito joint and upscale bar and grill all-in-one. They use the same area for concerts as they do for movies. For movies, the place is set up so that there are alternating rows of seats with tables in between. You can head out into the lobby, pick yourself up an Alaskan salmon burrito and a fresh microbrew, take it into the theater and enjoy your movie. For concerts, they simply take out all of the seats and tables and you have a legit theater a la Orpheum, Colonial, or Palace (yeah collective hometown!). For this particular night, our homeboy Ivan Night was helping out with sound and it was excellent, but first I need to rewind a bit.

Trying to get 4 (it later turned into 5 with Lee’s arrival) tickets to a sold out show can be somewhat of a daunting task. Having been the scruffy longhair trying to score tickets everywhere from Phish shows at Hampton to Ron Carter’s 70th birthday at Carnegie Hall, I was up to the task. As politely as possible, this Masshole got up in the collective grill of the Alaskan bluegrass crowd and asked if anyone had any extra tickets. I was surprised at how nice and genuinely sympathetic these hearty Alaskans were, seeing these poor smelly young men from out of town eagerly hoping for their chance to see a living bluegrass legend. Our first ticket came from a woman whom we didn’t even ask; her husband couldn’t make it, so it was one down, three to go. This old guy came through and said he had an extra waiting at will call and he’d come right back out, he didn’t. Another guy said that we should await the arrival of a short woman named Abby who would have an extra ticket for us. So every remotely short or stocky woman who came by from then on got a tentative “Abby?” from one of us. Abby never showed up, but sure enough we got tickets one by one until we were all guaranteed entrance into the show. Lee showed up part way through and his tactics were much less subtle, yelling out “tickets!” to everyone within a hundred foot radius of the front door. We were relieved to have all gotten tickets, and even though we’d just been to the ATM, Brad needed to go again. So Bryan, Gordon, and I went in and grabbed a pitcher of freshly tapped beer as Brad proceeded to get lost within the five minute walk from the Bear’s Tooth to the ATM which we had just done a mere half hour before. Bryan was legitimately worried that something might have happened to Brad while I refused to accept that as a possibility. Gordon went out to search for Brad as Bryan and I sipped on the sweet nectar and soaked up the vibe. Soon enough Brad wandered in, issuing only a nonchalant “What? I got lost” in response to our collective “Whahappend?”

So we made our way into the theater minutes before the start of the show and breezed through the comfortably spaced Alaskan crowd to within feet of the stage. There were a lot of old timers in the crowd, a few dancing gypsies, maybe a shovel-full of people our age and a palpable excitement and anticipation of the show to come. Soon enough the lights were down and the maestros had taken the stage. For those of you who are not familiar, David Grisman, or “Dawg” as he is affectionately known, is a living legend of the mandolin. Famed for his solo work as well as his collaborations with the greats Stephane Grappelli, Doc Watson, and Jerry Garcia, there is no mandolin player on Earth who is as widely acclaimed as the Dawg. This was sure to be a treat, and they did not disappoint. Dawg has been doing his thing since long before the four of us were born, and I always enjoy seeing a performer who is fully actualized and integrated with their craft. The band took us through a chronology of Dawg recordings including blueses, waltzes, and some shredding uptempo numbers that really got the boots a thumpin’. Dawg was in a gypsy swing kind of mood, so they played a lot of stuff from his work with Grappelli.

Coming into the show, I was most excited to see Dawg, but what I was most impressed with was his band. Some of these guys have been playing with Dawg for over 25 years and had played on those classic recordings with Jerry Garcia. The interplay between the strings was remarkable in its subtlety and taste. Perhaps the best thing about the band was “Flutor,” the spandex-wearing flute player who was most entertaining during the other band members’ solos in which he would bop around with an ecstatic grin on his face as if each note was the greatest thing that had ever happened. The youngest and newest member of the band was the guitarist Frank Vignola, who bared an uncanny resemblance to Becket’s own Dave Cantler. According to Nick, Vignola is one of those guitarist’s guitarists who guitar nerds drool over at conventions the world over. Every single solo this guy took was amazing. I think the rest of the band was positively frightened by his prowess on the guitar and the rousing ovation he got from this Alaskan crowd after each solo. He even teased “Stairway to Heaven” while trading fours with the other guys in the band; that was enough to make everyone in the audience who’d ever touched a guitar squeal with delight. The bluegrass powerhouse rolled on, the microbrews kept flowing, and I felt extremely happy to be there. At the end of the encore, Dawg threw his pick out into the crowd, and it hit me in the chest. It took me a moment to realize what had just happened, but once I did, I took out my cell phone and used its light to search the ground for treasure. Sure enough I picked up the pick amongst the envious stares and comments of numerous grizzly Alaskan dudes. I felt just like Charlie Bucket…I wanted to run home and tell Grandpa Joe. I’ve never won anything in my life, not a raffle, not a lottery ticket, not a sports championship…actually I won the Dare poster contest in 5th grade, but that doesn’t have the same random component to it and that was 13 years ago. Anyway, I felt like the good graces of the folks upstairs were shining down upon me and rewarding me for taking on this great journey. To my delight and cosmic boon, this feeling stayed with me throughout our time in Alaska, and this was only the second night, read on…