Weblog of Leland Rucker

A crow (top) gets ready for another pass at the turkey vulture below.

I was driving down Moorhead, waiting for the heat to come on in the Subaru, the sky flint gray with bursts of clouds running north to south, when I first saw the three black shapes.

Three birds. All pretty large. And it only took a couple of glances away from the wheel to notice that it was two crows dive-bombing a turkey vulture. I pulled over as soon as I could and jumped out of the car with my camera. They were high enough that I couldn’t hear any sounds. I’m not that great a photographer, but I managed a couple of shots, including his one, which shows the larger vulture at the bottom with its white underwing markings. The crow at the top is about half the size of the vulture, with a black undercarriage.

The birds must have found some wind thermal up there in the cold air, and the vulture was soaring in the way vultures do, flapping its wings only when necessary and sweeping across the sky on the rising current. The two crows were flying recklessly around it, coming in from different directions, their wings fluttering as they tried to swoop in close without actually hitting the much larger vulture. (Well. That’s the way it looked. There is documentation of crows attacking turkey vultures, but I’ve never been inside a bird’s brain, so perhaps they were all just enjoying themselves up in the rising air current.)

Their ever-widening circles took them away from me until they were almost out of sight in less than a minute. Jumping back into the car, just thinking about how much fun that (at least) the crows seemed to be having, and marking up my first turkey vulture sighting this early in the year made an otherwise cold, miserable day lighten up considerably.

George Na'ope, kumu hula: Feb. 25, 1928-Oct. 26, 2009.

I just read the obit in The New York Times of George Na’ope, kumu hula and the keeper of Hawaiian tradition, at his home in Hilo, Hawaii. He spent his life committed to keeping Hawaiian culture and traditions alive. We certainly didn’t know Na’ope, but Billie and I spent a fascinating evening in Kona with him during a 1990 vacation.

From my trip-notes:

We drive up to the ramshackle town of Kapaau on the northernmost part of the Big Island, and stop at the Puukohola Heiau, a holy place for Hawaiians built in 1790-91 by Kamehameha I. We walk up to the ranger station, where we are given a short talk, with a model, on the heiau’s history, including a story about part of it being made later into a fort. The ranger’s name is Paul Andrade, an engaging Hawaiian man, and with no one else to give the talk to, we spend a half hour chatting with him. A poster of what the heiau once looked like keeps catching my eye while I listen to his stories.

Billie asks him about a book on myths that she saw on the shelf and mentions that it says the author was a man who brought back the real hula, and Andrade said that it was, and that the author was a kumu hula, or a master of the hula.  I had recently written a story about Robert Mugge’s excellent documentary film Kumu Hula: Keepers of a Culture, for the Colorado Daily, which I mentioned to Andrade. When he asked who was in the film, the only name I could remember was George Na’ope.

“George Na’ope was my teacher for sixteen years,” Andrade says.

It is a nice moment, made even nicer when Andrade mentions that George would be performing that night at the Keauhou Hotel in Kona.

He speaks very emotionally about the hula, originally a worship form, and the loss of the original chants and traditions. Like Na’ope, Andrade represents an element of Hawaiian society that wants to retain its heritage, almost destroyed since the missionaries decided to “enlighten” the populace about the Lord and brought with them the diseases that would decimate the native Hawaiians in a short time. When I asked whether real kumu hulas were performed in the hotels today, he says, rather matter-of-factly, “we have to make a living, too.” But, he complained, it would soon be necessary to be bonded to even appear in the better places.

Andrade is eloquent and quite opinionated, and as we walked out on the front porch, he points south to the scrubby brush and volcanic rock, and says that construction would soon begin on a golf course for a nearby resort out of sight near the water. I imagine green, lush fairways, deep white sand traps and palm trees instead of the shrubby no-man’s land there today. “At least I won’t have to look at the resort,” he says somewhat cheerfully.

He also explains about how George Na’ope would berate him when he didn’t live up to his expectations. How once Andrade had appeared at some live performance without a proper instrument or something, and George had showed up and given him holy shitfire for it. Andrade backs off when I asked if he was kumu hula because he didn’t want us to think he was cocky and he felt that too many cheap kumu hulas were around these days.

Later that evening we drive to the Keauhou Hotel and walk into an open-air bar right on the sea where a couple of women are playing instrumental music. A waitress informs us that George won’t start for another hour.

So we drive back down to Kailua for fish and chips and a walk through Kailua, which is deserted tonight, the complete opposite of last night. When we return, George, immediately recognizable from the film, is playing to a crowd that consists of only three or four tables of people in a room large enough to make it conspicuous. At the next table is an elegant, well-dressed Japanese couple, and there are two women at another table behind us. A couple over by the bar are talking, and an older Archie-Bunkerish-looking man is talking to himself down by the stage.

George, who must be less than five feet and 100 pounds, is one of those charismatic performers (Willie Nelson and Ruben Blades are two others that come to mind) that can make you believe that he’s always singing directly to you. His fingers are covered with rings, and I wonder how he can play the gorgeous six-string custom ukulele he’s strumming. There is a guitarist and bassist backing him up.

Soon Archie Bunker is up, talking and harassing the shit out of George, who has obviously seen this hundreds of times, making cracks back at him between songs and grimacing when he interrupts a tune. Although Archie is drunk, it’s obvious he is knowledgeable about Hawaiian music. “George, he’s the best,” Archie is slurring, twirling around in a kind of stupor. “And look, there’s no one in here. Nobody knows.”

I turn away to the bar just as the woman sitting there falls off her chair. Her companion tries to revive her, and the waitresses all run over. Archie tells George that he’s been watching him perform for twenty two years, and he asks George about old singers I’ve never heard of and requests various numbers.

Onstage, George asks us where we’re from, and what we want to hear. I just want to hear whatever he wants to play, I say, and he does a few more songs. The woman is still on the floor, and Archie is moving over to our table, repeating that that George is the best musician in Hawaii and nobody knows it. We try to be tolerant.

Sometimes Archie cries as he sings along with a song George is doing. George says he feels sorry for “the Colorado couple,” but it goes right past Archie, who is explaining to us how he “messes up” a lot. “Am I messing up?” he asks the two women behind us as George struggles through another song. “You want to hear the truth?” one asks back, but Archie is beyond the truth. You don’t know whether to smack the guy up the side of his head or humor him because you feel sorry for him.

He drags George over to our table, and George sits down while Archie tells him again that he is the best singer in Hawaii and look how few people have turned out to see him and isn’t it a shame. Like a 45 single repeating itself over and over.

It turns out that the Japanese couple are hula students of George, and they speak no English. So Archie is trying to tell him that he’ll teach them the language while we talk with George.

George says he considers himself an American first and a Hawaiian second, because, at age 64, he has always lived in the islands under American control. He spends his time recording and transcribing the old hula chants that he even used in his set tonight. He loves studying the history of his people.

All through our trip we have heard stories of the resentment of the Japanese invading the islands, this time with piles of cold cash. But as George explains, there isn’t much Hawaiian music left in Hawaii. All of the real Hawaiian music is now in Japan, and the Japanese are the true audience for real hula today. Most “hula” in Hawaii is done for tourists and bears no resemblance to the original chants and dances.

Later, as if to prove his point, the Japanese man at the table next to us plays along with a chant that George does while his partner, responding to George’s chant, does a hula that is stunning and incredibly sexy in her muumuu.

George smokes tiny cigarettes that fit his hand size perfectly. He says he doesn’t make a lot of money, but he is comfortable enough. He makes one or two trips a year, in three-week spans, playing music in Japan. During those excursions, he doubles his income for the 46 weeks he is in Hawaii, he says.

He says he paid off his Lincoln Continental with the money from his last trip to Japan, and I am left with the image of this tiny man, the keeper of Hawaiian tradition, pulling away from the hotel in a big-ass Lincoln.

George Lanakilakeikiahiali`i Na`ope died Oct. 26, 2009, of lung disease. He was 81.

The Flatlanders at KGNU studios, Nov. 1, 2009. (Photo by Scott Replogle)

It wasn’t until Friday afternoon that I got word from KGNU Music Director John Schaefer that the Flatlanders were coming in Sunday morning to play some songs and talk on the Roots & Branches program I host.

As an old-time music critic (remember those), I have known about the Flatlanders for a long time, dating back to the days when their debut album was passed around only on cassette among cognoscenti for eighteen years. But like most people, I didn’t really come in contact with the group until Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock reunited for the three albums they’ve made together since 1998.

Not that I didn’t know about the trio. Joe Ely has been a presence dating back to his MCA albums in the 1980s. I first saw him during the SXSW years in Austin, where the Flatlanders were gods, and I’ve enjoyed his last three albums, especially the live one with accordionist Joel Guzman. I kinda circled Gilmore and Butch Hancock, and often mixed up the latter with Wayne Hancock, another Texas musician. But after the always prescient G Brown put three songs from the Landers’ Wheels of Fortune onto the KCUV playlist back in 2004, I became a fan, and I’ve finally caught up with their catalog.

So the chance to throw them a few questions and listen to them play an intimate set in the studio on a program created for their kind of music on our community-powered radio station was a chance to revert for a couple hours back to rockcrit days. And there was a special bonus: I finally would get to ask Jimmie Dale Gilmore about how playing the character Smokey in one of our favorite movies, The Big Lebowski, affected his life.

The trio arrived at the studio with fourth member, guitarist Rob Gjersoe, about halfway through the show and spent half an hour setting up. Instead of forming a line, they set up in an arrangement that allowed them to face and see each other. One of the things that distinguishes the Flatlanders is that they are true collaborators. They don’t just pass the guitar around and add harmonies to each other’s songs. Though all have distinct writing styles, they somehow manage to come together in way that accentuates each others’ strengths. (You can stream or download the show’s podcast for the next couple of weeks by clicking here.)

Radio interviews are a lot of fun. You don’t have to take notes, just lob a thought out there (”how has being Smokey changed your life, Jimmie Dale?”) and when they get bored, ask for a song. In that regard, the Flatlanders were more than willing to accommodate.

A common theme when we talked was the Halloween celebration on the Boulder Mall the night before, which they attended. Apparently someone spotted Gilmore as Smokey, the “Mark-it-eight-Dude” league bowler who upsets Walter (John Goodman) in The Big Lebowski. “I should have told him I was Smokey in costume as a Flatlander,” he joked. Gilmore said he is no actor, and that he never expected the acclaim he has gotten for that bit part in a film that has a huge following. He has been asked to appear at the Lebowskifests that have sprouted around the country. After noticing that Jeff Bridges has appeared at a couple, he says he might start doing it, too.

They played four songs, trading verses with each other while guitarist Gjersoe shot licks and riffs at them, and their versions of “Homeland Refugee,” “Borderless Love” and “After the Storm” were exquisitely performed, even with a couple of clunker notes, which made it very live and more powerful.

The little guitar riff that opens “After the Storm” really lit up the studio, a song that Gilmore introduced as taking them three years to finish (critic’s note: it was worth the wait), and they closed with a spirited “Sowing on the Mountain,” which Gilmore said they learned from a Woody Guthrie record (it’s on Guthrie’s Muleskinner Blues recording).

Flatlanders (l to r, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Rob Gjersoe). Photo: Leland Rucker

Later, Dr. Reptile and I were walking down Spruce Street at 14th, heading for the Boulder Theatre, where e-Town was featuring the Flatlanders and Bob Schneider, when we ran into Gilmore on the corner. He was heading for a rehearsal, but he stopped and we talked for a few more minutes. I’ve chatted with my share of professional musicians, and Gilmore, whose father was a non-professional musician and whose son Colin is a songwriter, too, was as unpretentious as they come.

The show was fantastic: the Flatlanders reprised the songs from the radio session with a full band, aided by e-Town host Nick Forster, who added 12-string guitar, mandolin and even some screaming electric guitar leads, and the always amazing e-Tones.

I hadn’t seen Bob Schneider before, and with a coterie of fans that included his sister, he quickly took control of the room with some incredibly catchy songs off his new album, Lovely Creatures, bringing the crowd to its collective feet for the Latin dance number, “Tarantula,” that put me in the mind of Vince Herman.

Just a Flatlanders kind of day.

And they’ll never find my body, boys
Or understand my mind
– Dave Alvin

So it turns out that the bones found by a reporter and brought to the University of Colorado for forensic examination weren’t the remains of Everett Ruess after all. National Geographic Adventure magazine, which has been trumpeting the finding as its own discovery for the last few months, at least this morning hasn’t corrected its story.

Dorothea Lange's photo of Everett Ruess

Kenneth Krauter, a CU professor in molecular, ellular and developmental biology department, told the Camera, “We still don’t know exactly why, but it’s my fault,” after a re-examination of the DNA findings originally conducted by CU researcher Dennis Van Gerven concluded that the remains were not those of Ruess, the young wanderer who disappeared near Escalante, Utah, in 1934 and whose writings have inspired environmentalists ever since.

It was a great story, but an even harder lesson that reminds us that even DNA evidence isn’t unassailable if it’s done incorrectly. And I really feel for Ruess’ family, which has had to endure an emotional roller coaster ride.

The original “discovery” changed Dave Alvin’s song about Ruess, an account of the young Californian’s life written in first-person style. It concluded with a chorus that reflects upon his early death and provides a wonderful commentary on the aging process.

You give your dreams away when you get older
Ah, but I never gave up mine
And they’ll never find my body, boys
Or understand my mind.

And I guess that the Twitter feed that appeared after the “re-discovery” will probably go dormant again.

I was on my way to meet friends for breakfast Saturday morning, riding the path that bisects CU’s east campus approaching the location called the Confluence, when something caught my eye across the lake to the west.

It was this group of turkey vultures perched high in the trees letting the morning sun warm their wings. I count 13-14 of these wonderful, huge birds. When I first saw them, at least four were opening their wings to the sun’s warmth.

I was reminded that a large group of vultures used to roost in an old cottonwood on the other side of the bike path until it fell in a storm several years ago and is now a pile of old wood.

I am always watching for turkey vultures , and I have seen a lot of them high in the air, especially on the trails near the East Boulder Rec Center, but this is my first good group sighting this year. I was late and didn’t get to spend enough time with this bunch, but what a sight. Vulture wingspans range from four to six feet, and even from this distance, you can see how enormous “buzzards” really are.

Vultures are common migratory visitors in the spring and fall along the Front Range, and provide a valuable recycling function by cleaning up carrion and carcasses otherwise left to the elements. The bald head which many consider “ugly,” is actually an adaptation to its diet, since it has to put its head inside rotting meat and feathers are bacteria-prone.

When I was a student at St. Paul’s College in Concordia, Mo. I was skinny (!), and somehow I got the nickname Henry Hawk, after a comic-book character at the time, and then Buzzard, and finally Buzzard Hank. I found this photo, circa 1966, of Buzzard Hank trying his best to look like one. Do you notice the resemblance?

Ever feel like this?

From my favorite movie about friendship.

(Tip of the cap to Doc Reptile for making my morning.)

The leaders fly into the River Quay. In about one second they will pass where Dinkeldorf's Deli was located.

It’s no secret that I have a kind of love-hate relationship with my hometown, Kansas City, Mo. It was a wonderful place to grow up, but as I got older, it became a more foreign place. After Billie and I moved to Boulder in 1983, we have never looked back.

But I have to admit to feeling a huge sense of civic pride in my old hometown on Sunday afternoon as I watched the final stage of the Tour of Missouri wind through the hills, parks and boulevards of downtown Kansas City on my computer.

Part of this is just utter fascination with the sport of bicycle racing. I stopped watching all televised sports several years ago, but about the same time we began watching the Tour de France, a ritual that Billie and I have enjoyed since 2002. This year, thanks to cable coverage of the Vuelta a Espana (the three-week-long Spanish version of le Tour), and online videos of the seven-day Tour of Missouri, which ended in Kansas City, I have been able to indulge my bike-racing obsession much as I used to do with football, golf, baseball and tennis.

It was just mesmerizing to watch many of the same cyclists I watched bike their way through more than 2,000 miles of France in July fly down streets that I remember intimately from the first half of my life. The aerial footage was astonishing, and I got a much better sense for distance. In their 10-mile circuit, the riders passed three buildings where I worked, including the place where Billie and I met, and the Star/Times complex, where I spent the first four years of my journalism career.

The riders head up into Penn Valley Park past the Liberty Memorial.

The race began on Grand Avenue at Crown Center heading south and wound around past Union Station and through Penn Valley Park to 31st Street before turning north down Broadway to Southwest Boulevard and up Summit Street to the downtown area.

After passing the Folly Theater at 12th and Central streets, where I worked from 1977-79 during its reconstruction, the riders turned north on Main Street at 12th Street and took off for the River Quay. They passed the building at 512 Delaware Street where Dinkeldorf’s Deli was located, the place where Billie and I both worked and where we met. The camera took us past where Nick’s restaurant  and Yesterday’s Girl were located, the parking lot that used to house Sam Aron’s warehouse and the parking lot where Poor Freddie’s stood before the riders passed the City Market and took off east for the river bottoms past the ASB bridge.

They came back up into the northeastern part of downtown, finally cresting on Eighth Street before turning south on Grand, where they had a wide two-kilometer boulevard straight to the finish. By the time they passed the building that houses the Kansas City Star and Times at 17th Street, where I worked in the late 70s and early 80s, they were literally flying.

One thing that’s hard to appreciate about bicycle racing is how fast these guys ride. Knowing the distances involved, I was able for the first time to realize just how fast they really are, especially as they wound through Penn Valley Park, for instance, or how fast they went up that hill on Summit from Southwest Trafficway into downtown. These guys are good.

There was a nice hill to climb after coming down Grand Avenue to the Crown Center finish.

Crowds were enthusiastic, especially on Summit Street, cowbells were ringing, guys with paint were running alongside offering encouragement, and Kansas City looked gorgeous from the air. For the first time in years, I felt a kind of civic pride about the city I grew up in. Now if they would have just gone past Winstead’s …

Forty years ago this weekend I was driving out of New York, where I had spent the summer as a counselor at Camp Pioneer on the shores of Lake Erie in Angola, New York. It had been an exciting summer. We looked up at the moon on the night Neil Armstrong walked there. I had played guitar and performed for the first time and bought the Crosby, Stills & Nash album while there.

About the time two of my counselor colleagues and I hit Pennsylvania, we heard on the radio about a music festival northwest of New York City that was closing roads and causing mass confusion.

News and photos of the event were plenteous, especially after pictures came out of nude, stoned hippies celebrating the rain, the music and seemingly, life itself. Newspapers and magazines, including Life, Rolling Stone and The New York Times, covered the event.

Seven months later, on March 26, 1970, I stood in line for opening night of Woodstock, the movie, a sprawling documentary that celebrated rock music, peace, love and dope as well as an audience of hundreds of thousands enduring a monsoon, food shortages, bad acid and impossible conditions. The film seemed as long as the festival itself and featured some of the most diverse, celebrated artists of the period at their peaks — Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Santana, Sly Stone, Crosby, Stills and Nash etc. – in brilliant color and dazzling, close-up camera angles. Woodstock literally made the careers of everyone who appeared in it. I went back the second night and saw it again, my enthusiasm stoked, and I bought into the hype hook, line and sinker, as you can see from a letter I wrote to my best friend after seeing the film for the first time.

As I began learning more about the background of the festival and the forces behind it, I began to realize that there were actually two events. The first was the three-day gathering itself; the second was the documentary that showed it. The latter was one version of what happened, but it was a carefully edited version, and for those of us who weren’t there, which is most of us, it’s really the only version.

Was it an important gathering of the tribe? A cultural milestone? Proof that the hippie generation could live in peace and love no matter the obstacles? Yes and no. For some it was blissful; for others, not so much. Mike Jahn, the Times rock critic who covered the festival, wrote recently:

“Woodstock was far from the mythological wonder, but that 90 percent of the attending were miserable and would have left after the first night had transportation been available. I spent time with them, not with the celebs backstage where it was dry and there was food and drugs. They were huddled under blankets in the rain, looking more like those photos of the fields of bodies at Gettysburg than like the nudes prancing in the lake or the celebs shouting ‘far out’ at one another and gabbing about the wonder of it all.”

Actually, for anybody watching at the time, the euphoria over Woodstock’s wonderfulness faded rather quickly and dramatically. It should be seen in the context of another outdoor event that took place less than four months later. On December 6, 1969, a festival headlined by the Rolling Stones at a speedway near Altamont, California, also captured with cameras, showed the darker underbelly of the peace-and-love subculture. The cameras caught Mick Jagger, then the king of rock, pathetically trying to calm an unruly crowd that had gotten ugly and confrontational. The resulting film, Gimme Shelter, showed one homicide, but there were other drowning deaths, and two others killed in an automobile hit-and-run. It wasn’t pretty, and it dampened the enthusiasm I felt about Woodstock Nation.

Woodstock wasn’t really a celebration of the Sixties as it was a harbinger of what was to come. The marketing of the event began almost immediately. I bought a Life special issue with lots of large photos of the event in the fall of 1969 (see photo). Posters of the event proliferated. Many of those who appeared in the film and on the album became superstars. The release of the Woodstock album, which featured two records of selected music from the festival, certainly caught the ear of my generation, but more importantly, caught the attention of record executives eager to cash in on the burgeoning rock phenomenon. Add advances in touring sound and stage technology, and Woodstock helped usher in the era of rock superstardom, big tours and even bigger money.

The myth of Woodstock is that we think we remember the event when we actually only remember the movie. And the truth is that Woodstock was much less about the decade it closed down than the one it begat.

Cabretta is still a masterpiece after more than thirty years.

Sad news this weekend: Willy DeVille, founder of Mink DeVille, the soul band that made its name at CBGB’s during the punk era, died Thursday in New York City of pancreatic cancer. Depending on the obit or music encyclopedia you reference, he was 55 or 58 years old.

I was already aware of Mink and into the band’s debut album Cabretta when I caught Mink DeVille on May 20, 1978, at the Uptown Theatre in Kansas City, Mo. DeVille was first up on a triple bill that included Rockpile and Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Tickets were five bucks, and Billie and I were front and center for the show, easily one of the best bills I have ever seen. Dressed in a tailored suit with his gold-capped tooth, DeVille was charismatic and confident, strutting like Bernardo in West Side Story. His drawling Spanish-inflections were mesmerizing, and the band seemed perfectly in sync. This was before they banned cameras in concerts, and Billie got some good shots; one of DeVille throwing his suit coat over his shoulder caught the pure magic of the performance.

Cabretta, produced by Jack Nitzsche, is still an amazing record. When I first heard it, I was convinced that the tunes were all old soul songs I had missed somewhere along the way. One, “Little Girl,” really was (written by Barry Greenwich and Phil Spector), but to my utter amazement, incredible songs like “Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl,” “Can’t Do Without It” and “Venus of Avenue D” were written by a very young DeVille. The equally remarkable Return to Magenta followed, and the possibilities seemed endless.

In the fall of 1983, walking down the Pearl Street pedestrian mall, we spotted DeVille sitting in an outdoor patio. I had just gotten a job writing for Audience, a local entertainment publication, and somehow I found that Boulderite Michael Barnett had signed Deville to a management deal, and his first act as manager was to pluck him off the streets of NYC (”directly from the streets of Ninth Avenue,” DeVille said) and flew him to his Martin Acres home in Boulder, to cure him of heroin addiction. (Barnett at the time was also representing ex-Rhythm Ace Russell Smith, a very funny guy who was fronting a local band then called Dawn Patrol, and Alaska’s Hobo Jim, a folksinger who sounded like an up-north Woody Guthrie and could bore a hole in a wooden stage with his stomping cowboy boots.)

I talked with DeVille in January of 1984, an interview I have never forgotten. He drove up to the appointed meeting place, La Francaise, a local bakery then located in the Baseline Shopping Center, in a two-toned 1957 Chevrolet. During the interview he was pleasant and accommodating, smiling that gold-toothed smile.

He would lower his sunglasses periodically and ask, “My eyes are clear, aren’t they?” He was honest about his addiction, mincing no words while trying to explain how it felt to be straight for the first time in four years. “I tried to do it, but you have to have somebody’s help,” he said, and that he tried the black box, electronic acupuncture, endorphin stimulation and even quinidine, and nothing worked until he just cold-turkeyed out here. But he said he didn’t want to turn into a People magazine “look how I cleaned up” story and asked that I write that he was here only “for health reasons.” He said he was taking dance lessons from an instructor in town.

When he was young, he said, he wanted to look like John Hammond Jr., the blues singer known for his black hair and black leather jacket, and sing like John Lee Hooker, and somehow he managed to do both. When asked if he got along with the other bands during the punk era, he said, “I came in the door looking like George Chakiris and I was trying to be James Brown onstage. What do you think? They were playing sloppy and getting a lot of press, and I added the competitive element.” I gave him an 8×10 of Billie’s photo of him looking like the star of West Side Story when we finished the interview.

I bought a few more albums, but it wasn’t until 2004, when an incredible new DeVille song titled “Muddy Waters Rose Out of the Mississippi Mud” was added to the playlist of KCUV, the short-lived Denver Americana station where I was working, that I caught up with his music again. Crow Jane Alley, the album it came from, was an indication that DeVille’s talent was still intact.

Songwriter Doc Pomus was one of DeVille’s inspirations, his songs huge influences on those early DeVille tunes, and they later collaborated. In the liner notes for the album Return to Magenta, Pomus, summed DeVille up best:

“Mink DeVille knows the truth of a city street and the courage in a ghetto love song. And the harsh reality in his voice and phrasing is yesterday, today, and tomorrow — timeless in the same way that loneliness, no money, and troubles find each other and never quit for a minute. But the fighters always have a shot at turning a corner, and if you holler loud enough, sometimes somebody hears you.

“And truth and love always separate the greats from the neverwasses and the neverwillbes.”

After more than 2,000 miles of riding, Alberto Contador won the Tour de France Sunday, defeating a 180-man field. Contador withstood the assaults and attacks of every other rider, including Columbia-HTC’s Frank and Andy Schleck and surprise Garmin-Slipstream contender Bradley Wiggins.

Albert Contador (left) defeated Lance Armstrong (right) in the 2009 Tour de France.

But as Contador said after Saturday’s dramatic climb of Mont Ventoux, the real battle came from one of his teammates. The most serious obstacle to his victory was Lance Armstrong, back after four years away from being the most dominant bicycle rider of his era.

Contador, who won the Tour two years ago, was on a comeback of his own. Denied entry in last year’s tour because he had joined Astana, which had been involved in doping scandals before he joined the squad, Contador had plenty to prove, too. Johann Bruyneel, the director who had guided Armstrong to his seven Tour victories, had recruited the Spanish rider after Armstrong retired.

Then, last August, Armstrong decided to return to cycling and the Tour, he said, completely to promote Livestrong, his powerful cancer foundation. But it was equally obvious that Armstrong intended to win another tour, and he signed up with Astana because of his long partnership with Bruyneel, who suddenly had the strongest team with the best rider in the world and his predecessor on the same squad – both with the same goal.

Armstrong, perhaps the best strategist in the history of the sport, used every kind of psychological warfare against Contador. He belittled him at every opportunity in the press. After Contador missed a break in an early stage, Armstrong reminded us that “he’s still got a lot to learn.” He claimed that Contador wasn’t a team player after the Spanish rider caught out Armstrong and the rest of the pack on the ride up to Arcalis in Stage 7 and later reprimanded Contador for supposedly leaving teammate Andreas Kloden on a Alpine stage.

Contador kept his tongue throughout the race even while Armstrong kept the barbs coming after almost every stage. The American media actually seemed to go along with the idea that Armstrong might (or even should) win the Tour and/or be able to defeat Contador. The irony, of course, is that Armstrong, who rode a sensible and inspiring race himself, would be the one to learn that he could never defeat Contador, or Andy Schleck, either. His third-place finish should be applauded for what it is, a wonderful performance that shows that though his skills have diminished, he can still ride among the best.

What Armstrong defenders seem to be missing is that Contador dominated the field just as Armstrong used to in his heyday. Look at his move on Arcalis. Pure Lance. Look over at the rest of the struggling pack and saying, “Bye, bye.” But Armstrong derided him for disobeying orders, which is ridiculous unless the order was to keep Lance in the race for the yellow jersey. But, just as Armstrong would have done back in his day, Contador picked the perfect time to remind everybody that he was the boss. He did the same thing on the second time trial, crushing the pack as the final rider of the day just as Armstrong used to do. On Mont Ventoux he shadowed Andy Schleck and led Armstrong up the mountain to his podium finish.

But what we heard from Armstrong was that Contador was inattentive, that he disobeyed orders, that a later attack in the Alps eliminated Andreas Kloden, that he wasn’t a team player. What did he expect after hijacking a team designed to perpetuate Contador’s reign and trying to defeat him within the team? Who was a better team player?

Throughout Armstrong’s attempts to demean his accomplishment, Contador has kept a civil tongue about the dissension between him and Armstrong (which seemed often to be the only question on reporter’s minds) and showed the mark of the true champion, the kind of champion that Lance Armstrong once represented.

I began watching and became interested in cycling because of Lance Armstrong. He has brought immense attention to the sport of cycling, and more importantly, has used his celebrity to raise awareness and money to battle the scourge of cancer. But at this Tour de France, his hubris got the best of him, he got his butt beat, and he acted like a petulant, spoiled child who didn’t get his way.