Ever wonder what the typical JPFreek business meeting is like? Hint: It includes a road trip, a rough trail, and a high point hike..
“. . . because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live . . .”
– Jack Kerouac
So far, I’ve passed a number of gas stations, all of which I have memories of filling up or buying a cold Mountain Dew or something. Take the Old C at Picacho Peak; I remember waiting out a line of traffic from a wreck on I-10. My friends and I sat in the parking lot next to the railroad tracks eating Pringles and a Blizzard from Dairy Queen. The night before we were at a David Wilcox concert – the very one where we arrived a few hours early and caught him in the parking lot on his phone. He wandered over to us like a gracious host and extended his hand, “You must be musicians.”
I guess if I were a professional musician, I’d get used to other musicians showing up to my shows early, too, just to see if I’d show them a thing or two. We had to let Dave down. “No, not really. Just a little early. We drove down from Phoenix.”
He looked at his watch. “Cool. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
And he didn’t lie. He came right back with his gorgeous hand-crafted Olson guitar.
“I need to warm up, so you guys may as well help me out. What do you want to hear?”
Later that night in the show, he referred to that moment (okay, he played us at least 15 songs out there) as “the parking lot session.”
Otherwise unmemorable mileposts remind me of these things on road trips. There goes 219 and for some reason it always reminds me of that David Wilcox episode. And speaking of music, the song I hear on the radio is saying, “baby let’s get chasin’ that crazy west Texas moon.”
That’s right, because these memories floating by me on the side of the highway go back nearly 10 years. Chase the moon wherever it’ll go. My life has come a long way from the idealist adventurer I once was to this; this nearly dried up dude you’d certainly mistake for just another white male commuter in traffic with an iPod plugged into his head. At JPFreek . . . I get to do this cool stuff: take a trip, shoot some photos, write about it, log another financial loss (oh, it’s not as bad as it sounds) at the bargain price of good times with my friends. That’s no complaint, mind you.