Nov 10 2009
Jamming at Festival Express on CC Rider Blues
Mr. Cage…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but having just seen the “the festival express”, that was u in one of the final jams onstage with… everybody. I might have been 13 at the time, but we all heard about it (underground radio) and thought we could hitchhike,easily enough and catch that train from Minnesota. We were wrong. Yeah, there was no way anyone could have hitched a ride on that train - it was a private coach.
Uh, Todd - you seem to be referring to the Ian & Sylvia segment - CC Rider Blues, it’s called. Sylvia singing the lead. Tyson’s wearing the cowboy hat.
That was done at the Calgary, Alberta show. You perceived it as a ‘jam’ - okay, I guess there’s some validity to that. The personel in that shot (r. to l.) included myself, Garcia, Ian, Sylvia downstage singing lead, Delaney Bramlett, Jim Colgrove our bass player, and Amos Garrett our genius guitarist with the Strat. Onstage as well, were Danko, Bonnie Bramlett, Kreutzmann also…
As we took our stage positions, Jerry asked Ian if he could sit in - Ian knew full-well Jerry’s relevance and warmly made room. Gar wanted to stand next to me cause he was crazy about pedal steel (obviously!) and wanted to see what I was doing. He had asked me to replace him on steel w/NRPS (relatively, newly formed at the time) back a few days at the Toronto show of the train tour and was still sizing me up. Plus he was FULLY a fan of Ian & Sylvia, knew all about the recent album we had recorded in Nashville and just wanted to be in on what we were cooking up at the time.
Btw, there’s really some neat attachments to that stage moment - you’re a writer, you should get a kick out of some of this…
Look at Gar, he starts chuckling - reason? Well, he just was hearing Amos playing the kickoff to our CC Rider (a stunning intro!) over stage-left and was looking at me like, “W-h-h-a-a-a-t the fuck???” You’ll notice me shrugging my shoulders indicating, “How the hell should I know how he does it??!”
Right after, GD played then Janis closed. I had to stay around to grok this whole production whilst Tyson was urging me to ‘get the fuck moving’ - he and Sylvia were sitting in the rent-a-short down on the tarmac beside the stage. I waived him off and said I’d take a cab back but brought my steel down and placed it in the trunk. Amazingly, he stayed! Wouldn’t leave me behind.
On the drive back, we had a formiddable crew in that car: I & S up front, me, our drummer (martial arts student) and one of the larger, meaner GD roadies Sonny Heard from Pendleton, OR. We were being dogged by a car containing 4 drunk, young Canadian cowboys making catcalls to Sylvia all the way back to the hotel (Calgary Inn). Every stoplight, these pricks pulled up besdie us and got in Tyson’s face, to which he calmly invited them to a street fight, conveniently just outside the hotel (where the cops were being summoned as we got out of the car).
As in a Hollywood script, I called to Ian as we came to a full stop, “The KEYS!” He, in SloMo tossed them over his shoulder while he was getting out, they magically sailed right into my left hand, I beat it out to get into the trunk, open my steel case and got a purchase on one of my guitar legs! One of those babies can pack more of a whallop than a skinny, 120 lb. hippie can. And when I spun over to the fight, fuck - it was over! Mere seconds. The 4 young cowpokes were unconscious, spread over the street!
Here I was, armed, full of adrenalin, blood-in-my-eyes and no place to go!! Janis had just arrived, saw my sorry state and invited me up to her room for a drink, ostensibly to settle me down and tell her what happened. It was the last I would see of her - she was gone, three months later.
Ian called me up in her room and asked me to come by his, for a moment. Seems like he had broken his hand in the fistfight - Sylvia and I had to call the house physician and get him to a hospital. The concern was that we had to shoot a pilot for an TV show in Toronto the next day! Ian’s a tough cookie…
Then they sent me back to Janis’ room…
Buddy
