Saturday, February 20, 2010

Born To Boogie

My earliest memories are of my father practicing guitar and driving my mother insane. We lived in a small trailer in Gresham, Oregon, behind an old dance hall called "The Flower Drum", where my father played bass for a country western troupe who called themselves "Driftwood".

Here's an old tape recording of them performing "Sister Golden Hair" at the Lariat Room.












Later on they started calling themselves "Cimarron".









They never made the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine, but I remember sitting in my mother's lap, banging on the tambourine while my father and the rest of the group played onstage. I was four years old. My sister was eleven...











My parents divorced just a few years later, and it was a long time before I saw my father again. But those early years at The Flower Drum had an indelible impression on me. I had the bug. It was in my veins. I was born to boogie!











When I was twenty, I joined the Navy, which turned out to be not such a good move. But I learned a valuable lesson from my short stint in the South Atlantic submarine fleet: Never Again Volunteer Yourself {N.A.V.Y.}

Long story short, I couldn't find a job and I was burning bridges with my friends and family faster than I could build them. Before long, I was homeless on the streets of Portland, where I met a lot of interesting people. I started drinking pretty heavily, smoking pot on a regular basis. I occasionally used meth and damn near went to jail a few times.

I had scraped the surface of the bottom. But I hadn't found that out yet. At least not until a group of evangelists swung around the corner of an old bicycle shop we used to hide behind and dink beers.

"Oh, brother", I thought, "Here it comes". These guys were a bunch of crazy Jesus pushers. I didn't want anything to do with them. But for the life of me, I couldn't scare 'em off!

Well, those crazy Jesus pushers saved my life, and if it weren't for them, I wouldn't have found my way into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and back into the arms of my family.

If you'd like to learn more about my experience, then please, sit yourself down and I'll tell you a tale about friends, family, God, homelessness, alcoholism, drug addiction, the guitar, and the modern day prophet, Bob Dylan. Blessed be thy name.

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