So there is this ocean liner cruise that happened last year. Not just any cruise, mind you, but a cruise ship with a band (No, not the Titanic II). And, mind you again, not just one band, but six bands. And not just six bands you might expect on a sea cruise, but six BLUEGRASS bands. Yes, “Bluegrass Heaven,” on the deep, blue sea.
These six bands for this cruise were well known. They had been headliners for the major bluegrass festivals for the past five years. Never mind the names of these bands, you readers already know who they are (unless you’ve been in a temporary coma while at those festivals). The bands had been booked two years in advance, thereby giving each band a false sense of financial security for the near future. But the thing about that is, one of the bands had broken-up just two weeks before the cruise began, leaving a one-sixth hole in the bluegrass bands line up.
This left the band organizer for the cruise in a minor panic, but her long term memory reminded her that she had met a bluegrass band at a relatively unknown festival in the town of Bluegrass, Virginia, not that long ago. Said band members had come up to her at the festival and let her know, “If you ever need a band for any kind of anything, please think of us.” Long story short, she did remember the band, gave them a phone call, and hired them for the cruise to fill the now vacant slot that was open. Immediately after the phone conversation, she got to work on the publicity for the new band she had just hired. So the, “Well-Fed Bluegrass Band” was aboard.
Anyhow, the bluegrass sea cruise finally got underway, was three days in the journey, and everything was going fine. For a time. I mentioned that the cruise liner was not named, “The Titanic II,” but that is exactly the name that a rebellious, wild, California Youth Authority graduate painted on every flat surface he could find on the ship, with a can of brilliant, red spray paint (that he pilfered from his neighborhood hardware store). His actions arose due to the fact that his parents made him go on this ocean cruise with them (his choice of music was a “Death-Metal” band, with a name so obnoxious that it won’t be written here). Be that as it may, this lad’s spray paint escapades turn out to be semi-prophetic.
It happened one night when, without warning, a summer storm, undetected, that had been making its way toward the cruise liner, unleashed its fury on the unaware ship’s passengers. And as things happen as they do, the Well-Fed Bluegrass Band was taking an evening stroll on the ship’s port side. Now for an ordinary band of five persons, what happened probably wouldn’t have happened. But the physical description of every band member was, well, way beyond portly. You have to realize that the total weight of this five-piece ensemble was just over 1500 pounds, distributed almost equally among these boys of bluegrass. So five goes into fifteen hundred, well you can do the math. And when the storm hit the ship it dipped drastically to the port side, and as it did the rotund five were all thrown overboard (Speculation arises that the boys’ weight is what tipped the ship’s port side so drastically toward the sea, but it can’t be proven). That’s the bad news.
The good news is that as the musicians were being hurled from the ship into the air toward the unforgiving sea, the strongest member of the band (an avid weight lifter and steroid consumer) reached out and grabbed the quick release on the nearest lifeboat. Five minutes later the soggy-everything-boys were safe from the angry sea in a twelve foot lifeboat, with two wooden oars (oak). They gave a collective sigh of relief (with harmony) as the ship slowly left their line of sight. And the storm left just as quickly as it had appeared. The captain of the ship wrote it off as, “A oceanic fluke,” figuring all was well on board with the passengers. After all, his ship hadn’t sunk or gone under water. This was the captain’s first voyage as the supreme being of the ship (any ship really), and he got the job because the regular captain was extremely sick with the flu.
As the sun was coming up the next morning, our boys in the rowboat spotted a small island, toward which the strong ocean current was carrying their water craft. But suddenly that was not all they saw. The fiddle player, who held undergraduate and graduate degrees in music from The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, shouted, “Oh, oh, look. There is a leak in the front of the boat that is getting bigger and bigger!” But being highly educated, he took immediately took off the California Bluegrass Association’s Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival tee-shirt he was wearing, and stuffed it into the gushing hole in the bottom of the boat. That did the trick. It took two hours and five minutes to reach shore, which was greeted with loud shouts of relief by the now instrument-less band. Lucky for them, the island was rich with bananas, berries, and fresh water. As the lead singer of the band viewed the bounty of the island, his thoughts were elsewhere, as he said, “I sure hope that somebody on that cruise ship realizes that we are gone!” Well, as it turned out, nobody on the ship did realize it, because the band wasn’t due to perform their first set until three days after they were thrown overboard.
On the island, two days later, the band was adjusting to castaway life, actually getting used to it with a modicum of intermittent joy. In the afternoon the banjo player was walking along the shoreline. As he was watching the gentle waves caress the shore, he fixed his gaze on a large, irregular shaped, amber colored glass bottle that washed upon the sand. Hoping for a bottle of beer, he approached the bottle, looked at it for a minute, and then picked it up and took it back to where the other band members were taking a nap under the warm, afternoon sun. “Hey fellas, look what I have,” he yelled, holding up the interesting looking bottle for the others to see. The mandolin player questioned, “What is it?” “A bottle of beer, I think,” the discoverer and newest owner of the bottle replied. Then the bass player questioned, “Well, why don’t you find out?”
Pulling the tightly wedged cork from the three foot long bottle’s top, the banjo player said, “Okay.” Immediately there came a gush of white smoke, rising ten feet in the air, accompanied by an ear piercing laugh that could easily break windows (but not thick glass bottles). After the smoke cleared, a vividly colored blue genie appeared, wiping her saucer-like eyes with her long, wrinkled fingers. The she roared, “That’s the longest sleep I’ve ever had! Okay boys, you set me free from a three hundred year sleep, and for a reward each one of you boys with a bluegrass persuasion gets one wish. And that’s one wish each, no more, no less. And once a wish has been made, you can’t go back and change your mind.”
“Me first, me first,” the bass player shouted. Genie then responded, “Okay, what is your wish sir?” “I wish I was back home on the farm, seeing my family, and tending to my animals.” And bam! The bass player was gone from his island prison.
Then the big, blue wonder from the bottle asked, “Okay, who’s next?” “I’d like to be at a David Grisman Bluegrass Experience concert, in the very front row,” the mandolin played piped up. A strong gust of wind suddenly came forth, and the mandolin player disappeared from the view of the three others who were still left on the island.
The guitar player/lead singer was astonished at the disappearance of his two band mates. At first he thought he was day dreaming. But a moment later he came to his senses, and said to the genie, “Okay, well, I guess, no, wait, okay, I’ve got it. I wish I was at Tony Rice’s house, and he is giving me a free guitar lesson.” In less than an instant the guitar player was whisked away, leaving only two of the boys left on the island.
The fiddle player, and largest member of the band, was by now very, very excited by what he had just witnessed with the his three former comrades. In spite of the fact that he was a recent graduate of Over Eaters Anonymous, his appetite overwhelmed him. After all, bananas, wild blackberries, and water can only go so far in the mind of a big, healthy, omnivore. “Hey genie, oh genie, I wish I was at the best steakhouse in the state of North Carolina, for an all-you-can-eat, free meal.” And then the biggest, thickest, juiciest steak you can imagine was staring the fiddle player in the face as he sat at a red and white table clothed, wooden table, at the “No Bull Steakhouse” in North Carolina.
“Okay Mr. Banjo player, you are the final wisher, and then I’m on my way to total freedom. I’ve been trapped in that bottle for a long, long time, and I don’t plan on going back any time soon. Last wish buddy, make it a good one,” the genie said with a grin a mile wide. So the banjo player thought about it, and thought some more. Finally he could not contain himself any longer, and said, “You know, it’s really lonely on this island, and I surely do miss those guys who were with me just a few minutes ago. I wish they were all back here with me right now!”
