Music, Music, Music (and expensive gas)

As I'd hoped, last night I found myself in San Francisco, at the request of fine singer Johnny Smith, who asked me to accompany him on this edition of his regular Friday night gig at the Beach Chalet. Bonnie and I were already planning to head down there to visit her mom and brother, so the whole lot of us ended up having dinner at the gig, where Johnny and I played from 8pm until 11pm. Big fun for me. Long-time friend Kevin Madden stopped by for the last couple of sets, and everyone seemed to have a good time. At one point I looked up to see Bonnie and Kevin sitting at the table, their eyes glued to their respective laptops. Bonnie said later they were e-mailing each other over the local wireless network. We live in the future.

By the time Bonnie and I got back to Petaluma it was 12:30am. I barely got enough sleep before the alarm went off at 7am. Had to catch the Zephyr carpool to San Jose, where we (Steve Ewert, Russ Gautier and I) met up with banjo wizard Sean Barry to do a little strolling Cowboy Zephyr music from 11:30am until 2:30pm. It was fun, it was grueling, it was fun, it was a long time for me to pump away on the old accordion while standing up. But it was fun.

And I got to take naps both coming and going, holding down the back seat in Russ's car. Ewert and I contributed $10 each to a gas fund, which we felt would be ample to fill up Russ's car in San Francisco on the way back. Lucky him. From the twenty bucks he got back 37 cents change. And this was in a mid-sized Lexus, not an SUV!

Russ treated me to a tour of his guitars and other musical toys when we got back to Petaluma. He just acquired a new Martin which I'm afraid to say seems to blow away both his old 1964 Martin and an old original jumbo Taylor. Rus has many fun toys. I must make the time to inflict myself upon him and coerce him into making some music with me.