|
1
Ties That Bind
"Dudes! Sounds like it's 'surf's up' time in Seaside!" read the email sent by Phil Miller to a list of names not called upon for thirty years.
E-mails and phone calls had filled our days since Richard died in July. Richard Stacy and I, along with Phil Miller, Scott Stinson, Spencer Stinson, and Dennis Snell, had shared a unique experience for a couple of years during the tumultous decade of the 1960s. Together we were boys in a band called the Blue Beats, a teenage rock-and-roll group in our hometown of Huntington, West Virginia - a city founded and built by transcontinental railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington. The experience lasted two years, but the experience was powerful enough to bring us together in Seaside, Oregon, during October 1998, three months after Richard's death and thirty years after our last performance together as the Blue Beats.
My last visit with Richard Stacy had been fifteen years earlier, in October of 1983 when I lived and worked in Southern California. Meeting at Richard's residence in Northridge, California, we shared pizza, played guitars together, and talked of music, family, and friends. The loss of Richard, now dead at forty-seven, ironically gave new life to the Blue Beats.
Driving from the Portland airport and following the flow of traffic across the Marquam Bridge spanning the Willamette River, I merged with the flow onto the exit leading to Route 26 and Seaside. Vintage homes perched on steep hillsides gracing the outskirts of Portland soon gave way to fresh, suburban construction, open fields, and rolling foothils. Now out of city traffic, I relaxed, and music naturally came to mind. I sifted through a stack of compact disks crammed into the black canvas bag I had carried with me on the airplane from Houston, then slid a jet-black disk into the player. The voice of Bob Dylan's son, Jakob, accompanied by his band of masterful musicians, the Wallflowers, poured forth drowing all road sounds with a precise mix of guitars, drums, keyboard, and vocals.
The roadway ahead climbed, dipped, and twisted along the hilly terrain, once again calling on the driving skills I had developed in the hills and valleys of West Virginia. Soon thoughts of family back home in Huntington, and boyhood friends I was about to join in Seaside for the weekend came to mind:
|
