Clap Yea

America is Beauti July 2, 2011

I reconnected with a dear friend just now.  Jed Moffit

Even as these words fall on the page I am listening to his trio make incredible music.  Take a moment to listen if you want to be inspired.

I met Jed when we were both young idealist musicians.  I was an entertainer who was working on the road with my band and needed to change keyboardists.  I cannot recall how the fates put Jed and I together, his home Fremont, California and mine Marsing, Idaho, but we met and the city boy began playing piano in the country boy ‘s band.  It was a journey that took us to every Holiday and Ramada Inn in the western United States and Canada.  (Maybe not every one.  We were cancelled in Red Deer, Alberta and not paid in Castlegar, British Columbia, but plenty.)  We were a working club band and we worked a lot.  Our last year on the road I sang six nights a week for 46 weeks.  That is a lot of tippy patrons, requests for Proud Mary and Color My World and beautiful drives between jobs.

Ours was a journey of youth, music, family and dreams.  We experienced America.  We saw the mountains and prairies and met some of the best people I have ever known in spite of beer stains and cheap hotel rooms. Ever since those days, through every corporate gig,  freelance script, public relations publication, or video shoot I have ever produced,  even working with people like Marie Osmond, Hugh Downs, Larry and Shawn King, Jonathon Goldsmith (the Dos Equis man), Gary Burghoff, Dan Clark and a hundred others, I have always felt that in my heart of hearts I was nothing more than a saloon singer holding down a day job.

We had no government grant; only Frank Ciciulla, our Italian manager to suggest changes and keep us employed.

We had no corporate funding; just a couple of vans to carry equipment and CB radios to keep from getting lost.

No internet.  No cell phones.  No video games or DVD players to mindlessly occupy our minds.  It was wonderful.

We were alive.  Linda and I newly married.  We had our music, our dreams, and a place to play music for six nights a week.  We usually worked four one-hour sets a night and traveled each Sunday to the next gig. It was like being unemployed but with sufficient money for food, lodging and travel to the next job.

Linda and I were on the road for about five years before the needs of babies required a house for us, friends and school for them.

Here is why it was, and I love, America.

The band began with an idea and ended when we chose to move to the next phase of our life. While we made great club music and held the crowd so they could freely consume adult beverages, the call of sweetheart and children required a grander vision and a new direction.

To give you an idea of how successful I was as a nightclub singer as Rodney Dangerfield would say, “At the time that I quit I was the only one who knew that I quit.”

Were we more simple then?  Did the world swirl around us then like it does now or did we simply not pay attention?

I suggest that the cacophony of political talk, economic unrest, and constant access to media has changed all of us, the mellowing of time notwithstanding.

I remember a clarity of purpose then that I struggle to reclaim now.  Nothing is a more lovely time than driving through a clear starry night with the love of your life dozing next to you and the most glorious country on the planet rolling past your view.  The exhilaration of living, doing, and following dreams made those days seem euphoric.

I suggest that in this present world of connectivity, we need to disconnect.  To seek silence.  To reflect on what we have and who we are.  Instead of finding so much fault with so many others we will never meet and can never change, perhaps it is time to change only us.  To find the sought for existence of our ancestors.

My great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Fuller, stepped from the firm soil of his native England onto the deck of the Mayflower to find the same thing that I sought by climbing into my Ford Van; freedom, an opportunity to freely follow dreams, raise children, love a good woman, to believe and live the way that I want rather than in compelled circumstances of our non- choosing.

The essence of freedom is the capacity to choose.  I chose to follow a dream, to raise a family, and seek quiet contemplation while on the journey. Fortunately, I was in a place that allowed me to do that. I know America.  I’ve seen her and she is beautiful.