I was watching a YouTube video of Rick Cornish singing “ain’t nobody gonna miss me when I’m gone” at four o’clock in the morning. I’m watching, at four in the morning because I can’t sleep. And I can’t sleep because I’m old and falling apart, or because I have a vaguely guilty conscience about something I may have done or not done and I can’t put my finger on it, or maybe I can’t sleep because I ate four pieces of a vegetarian pizza about eight o’clock tonight and it’s having a debate with my stomach, or it might be that I can’t sleep because of the two trips to star bucks and the extra shot of espresso or maybe It’s because I haven’t slept good since Bakersfield even though I’m tired enough to sleep driving down the freeway and I guess I ought to go back to bed and try again, but I’m thinking about this one particular jam where Lucy, my guitar hero, was playing “bury me beneath the willow” that was kind of slow and cool funky and I was thinking about how when I took the lead I ripped into it like a man just let out of jail, which I wasn’t, but I was excited and it was the first day of the 48 hour jam, and the first day really wasn’t until tomorrow so I was getting a head start and I was playing with Lucy and Mikki and all kinds of wonderful people, and I just couldn’t contain myself, and how are you gonna sleep when you’re thinking about that!
Well…I went back to sleep just in time to get up and go to work and I‘m running late because I was listening to Rick Cornish at four o’clock in the morning and I had a customer of mine tell me that “ain’t nobody gonna miss me when I’m gone” was an old Rolling Stone song, but I don’t believe it because I’ve never heard Keith Richards play the banjo and somehow that just seems wrong, though I must admit that I probably won’t miss them when they’re gone as much as I’ll miss Rick when he’s gone because he plays better music, and I hop into my car and put a C.D in the player and this wonderful Bluegrass harmonica player from the Bakersfield 48 hour jam tears into blackberry blossom and I almost forget that I’m tired until I realize I put the air conditioner on instead of the heater and my eyelids are freezing to my forehead.
Well…My wife Trudy went with me to Bakersfield this year and she brought the video camera and that’s another reason why I was watching Rick playing his fiddle at four in the morning, and I’m at work now remembering how she was filming Jeanie Ramos playing “California blues” and Terry Ramos was slid down in the chair looking like he was catching a quick 40 winks and I’m thinking how can he sleep with all this music when I can’t sleep in a stone quiet house in a soft bed with the lights out, but that’s the way it must be when you’ve got a quiet conscience and were wise enough to retire and not have to work until you stumble into the grave.
And I’ve wondered if anyone was gonna miss me when I was gone, but mostly I think about things like that at four in the morning when I ought to dreaming about the perfect jam, where all the angels are singing “oh come angel band.”
2011
