Coming in October: Origin Stories — Time, Flames, and Music
September and October have multiple music-related anniversaries for me, but October also includes a fairly harsh one: on October 9th, 2017, historic California fires destroyed more than 10,000 structures across Sonoma county, including almost 6,000 Santa Rosa homes, among them the one that used to be on the spot from which I’m writing this.
We rebuilt and recovered. I’ll share a different essay about the fire on the appropriate date, but other pieces I’ll be sharing over the next couple of weeks are about my time in the music and concert industries. There is, however, a direct connection between my concert work and the 2017 wildfires thirty years later, because with the exception of a figurative handful of memento’s from my music history that weren’t in the house that fateful night — a platinum Journey album at my friend Steph’s office; all but one of my tour jackets in a closet-sized Santa Rosa storage space in a facility barely a mile from us but untouched by the fires; and an item that is at the center of the Journey-related essay to come — everything else went up with the rest of our, well, our everything. I was fortunate that a few more things of emotional and sentimental value were outside of our home. Elizabeth…not so much.
I’ll send out an essay on October 9th that I wrote for Real Simple magazine in 2019 about the fires, and follow that with a piece about my time as a hawk watcher for the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory and what rejoining my team on Hawk Hill for the first time a few weeks after the fire did for my psyche.
October’s issues will have the usuals, the Open Tabs, A Photograph, and a ‘Not that. This!’ piece, but it will all start with an Origin story about a 1977 spur of the moment road trip from Elmhurst, Illinois to San Francisco (and back) with my then good friend Gonzo, in his van. The journal from that time that was one of those items not inside our house in October 2017. That’s how I know that on today’s date (or yesterday's date, for those who weren't up late enough to see this), I made the first of multiple entries in a spiral notebook, documenting: what turned out to be a life-changing road trip: what happened over three nights of Old Waldorf Journey shows; hanging at His Master’s Wheels studios during the making of Journey’s breakout Infinity album; and — full disclosure — anecdotes about weed, Thai stick (I'll expalin what that is to the young'uns), and peyote, in that order.
Um, yeah, it was all a bit surreal, not just that we did it and lived to tell the tale, but that I ‘journaled’ about it all. Good on me!
I’ll also share a remembrance about my work as road manager in Australia and Japan for Michael Jackson in 1987, annotating a blog post I wrote years ago on the Bad album’s 25th anniversary, and sharing my current perspectives on all of that, and on MJ.
New readers may be reading this, so thanks for your curiosity and support. To my current subscribers, I’ll be contacting you about some changes to subscriptions and other blahblahblah. Not only is the design of Story and Pictures being revamped, but the migration — or not — to a new or additional platform is still under review.
Gonna be a busy month. I’ll work hard to justify your time and hopefully entertain you to some degree, because I know your time could be spent doing all sorts of things in all sorts of places, like, in scootin' along in a van, truckin’ across the country to see amazing people and places.
It could change your life.
Thanks, as always.
MWH