This year I started playing Jake and Lindsey. Lindsey played the drums and Jake and I would switch between acoustic and electric guitars, keyboard, singing, the thunder tube, a train whistle, a güira, a suitcase, a plethora of shakers, and Jake had a variety of flutes to choose from that I never learned to play. I quite respect anybody who figured out how to make flutes and woodwinds effortlessly make pleasant sounds.
They had begun a certain krautrock/psychedelic/indigenous-rhythm style that I first heard and was invited to contribute to in February shortly after returning from the second bocce journey. We played in the basement of a friend in Pacific Grove who was also of Bob's generation, that is to say, part of the most nostalgic people to have ever remained a community, those who lived their twenties in California, specifically Monterey County, in the late 1960s, and remained in the redwoods and oak groves untouched by the deflation of the esteem of Vietnam-era bohemianism in the aesthetics of the present cultures and counter-cultures of the modern world. Anyone who doesn't ascribe to the Rolling Stone-subscribing utopia that America failed to uniformly celebrate and become is an ewe to be adopted into the flock of the promised land, though the stories, the music, the people are past, occasionally writing autobiographies and going on stadium tours.
Having said that, I did very much enjoy and appreciate playing music in a cabin atop a ridge above the Pacific Ocean and making dinner and listening to NPR and hearing outside a painter painting a house listening to an NPR of one second later on the ridge across the way where Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers supposedly lives; and it was an ideal expression of my existence to ride my bicycle from my house with my glockenspiel and güira in the milk crate affixed above my back tire to a cabin in Pacific Grove and play music in the basement that sonically described my conception of freedom.
However, the second time—I played once with just Jake—just the second time the three of us were to play together, I was coming off of work and heading over and I received a message from Jake that the practice was off: our host flipped out over nothing and we were no longer welcome. Jake was already back in Big Sur and our sessions were postponed indefinitely.
Weeks passed and it seemed my house was the only option that made sense. We met again, Jake driving from Big Sur and Lindsey coming from work with her drum set in her Jeep, and we began a series of Tuesday weekly sessions that would continue through August with a few exceptions—a band visit to a postman friend of Jake's who explained to us his moonshine whiskey operation and the English composer called Nurse With Wound, a visit to Hawaii by Lindsey, and, increasingly as the summer/tourist season wound on, my inability to get Tuesdays off at the restaurant.
On Wednesdays Jake would wake up on the sofa earlier than me and I would struggle to go with him to his friends' breakfast pizza/coffee victorian house in downtown Pacific Grove and then we would proceed to "bottom feed," in the parlance of a friend of Jake's, meaning go to the half dozen charity thrift stores off of Lighthouse Avenue. In April my first article in the Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin appeared. It came out on the first and third Wednesday of the month and often I would hungoveredly search out my fame in the newspaper dispenser in front of Grove Market. One Wednesday Jake found a book on backgammon, which he, recently having acquired a backgammon set, had meant to master. Bruce Becker's Backgammon for Blood became a motif for our a no-holds-barred attack on rock and roll mediocrity. "Luck is for losers," the back cover reads. I began to rethink the name of the 2nd installment of Bocce Balling on the West Coast. Instead of the working title:
Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2: Bocce Harder
a better option presented itself:
Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2: Bocce for Blood
Peyote Thunderbird
The Peyote Thunderbird
The Peyote Thunderbirds
Peyote Thunderbirds
Crushing Jake's dream of being of the Peyote Thunderbirds Lindsey and I decided Peyote Thunderbird sounded better.
One week we were able to practice twice: on Monday night and Tuesday night. We practiced Monday night and tucked the drum set in a corner afterwards. Jake and I did our routine Tuesday morning and it was decided the night before that Lindsey would pick us up from my house and we would carpool to the Tuesday farmer's market together, walk around, and go back to play at my house.
On the way there they saw a friend of theirs leaving work and we pulled over to say hello. We said hello and explained we were on a band date, carpooling to the farmer's market before heading back to my house to practice. We had not been very public about our project, so this was a bit of a first. We hadn't considered how to describe ourselves to an outsider until she asked us what kind of band we were. "Native American Trance Revival," Jake said. We decided to meet downtown at a coffee shop off of the market and chat further. We did, and, further along our visit downtown we, as on a band date, ran into more people we knew and had to explain we were a band. "Lindsey plays the drums, we have one that starts with Jake on the thunder tube and Andrew comes in playing guitar through his karaoke machine..." We were Peyote Thunderbird: three people who sometimes played music and sometimes went to the farmer's market together.
During this time I had also decided I would move out of my house, quit my jobs, and leave the area indefinitely in September. In May it seemed perfectly natural to me that both this could be true and that the flight of Peyote Thunderbird could occur. We would play shows and record songs by August. We were good, we knew everyone in the area, and I already had a dozen cassettes filled with recordings from my tape recorder. However, after I mentioned my plan a pall was cast over the evening and I sabotaged the momentum that I thought I was galvanizing. A week later I wrote Jake this email:
Jake,I once was told by a friend of mine that life is cyclical, like the seasons and whatnot related to the patterns of our own lives. Everything fades away in autumn leaving us with nothing in winter, regrowth in spring and fruition in summer. Since this bit of wisdom was imparted to me five years ago I have recognized it every year. And I believe in riding the wave, not fighting it and drowning. And this wave crashes with fall, September 21st.I am not a lunatic (though I am if you follow the metaphor, moon (luna)=tides, following tides, nature, etc.=lunatic), I realize I need to compromise with how civilization and all other factors have made reality, the waves of the short term. But I take hints from the universe. I attempt to be natural in an unnatural world.My plan, considering these interpretations I have made, is to leave my house in either September or October, quit my jobs and visit everyone I know with the money I have saved, perhaps ending up in LA in January to be with Alexandra, Portland to be with old friends, St. Louis to do something else, or back here.If this wave is (The) Peyote Thunderbird(s), then that is what I will catch. We can get our shit together by September, record, tour, and I can plan around that. I could travel, we could let the bird burn and resurrect it in the spring.
As August came we still did not have enough staff to give me my Tuesdays off, and I began the process of moving out. The day I took the train from Salinas to Oakland to start my journey, September 29th, Tristan was arriving in Big Sur from a three day hike from Arroyo Seco and hitchhiking back to Monterey to catch the train with me to his house in Oakland. He caught a ride to Carmel Valley, sat by the side of the road for awhile, and then saw Jake waiting across the street for him. Jake drove him to Monterey and Tristan's mom brought him to my house which is the last time Peyote Thunderbird almost came back together.
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