Weblog of Leland Rucker

A familiar view for those of us crazy enough to watch the Tour de France from beginning to end on television.

Ah, yes, it’s that time of year again. The Tour de France begins tomorrow morning in Monaco. My Twitter account is atwitter with those following and riding the race, and I’m trying to catch up on hash marks and RSS feeds. I just found the weblog of Martin Dugard,  whose commentary on the last few races generally rises a step above the usual swirl of rumors and speculation.

And the rumors and speculation could not be at a higher pitch. Will Lance Armstrong win the race for an unprecedented eighth time, eclipsing even teammate Alberto Contador, generally recognized as the best cyclist riding today? Phil Liggett, erstwhile television commentator, is not alone in already proclaiming that Armstrong will be on the podium come July 26. Our local newspaper has had stories on Armstrong every day for a week, and stateside interest in the tour seems higher than, well, the last time Armstrong participated.

Drugs still loom large over the Tour, and given the ingrained nature of doping I’m sure a few riders will be bounced before it’s all over. Tour officials have bragged about increased testing procedures, yet they were forced to allow sprinter Tom Boonen, who tested positive for cocaine in the last year, to compete after a last-minute ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport of the French Olympic Committee.

Le Tour. All the highest and lowest qualities that sports has to offer wrapped around three weeks of epic European backcountry scenery. Who could ask for more?

Anybody can join the Bluegrass jam every Tuesday night at Oskar Blues in Lyons.

Every Tuesday night about eight o’clock they pull back the chairs in the upstairs bar at Oskar Blues and line them up in a circle. Various guitars, banjos, mandolins, dobros, fiddles and a big acoustic bass are pulled from cases, and players begin to sit down and tune up. Soon enough someone calls a song, and the Lyons Bluegrass Jam is underway.

More players arrive as the night goes on, and as diners start to leave over in the next section, some pickers standing around the edges break off and start their own circle. Sometimes upwards of fifty musicians are huddled in different circles, passing around songs. The jams generally wind down around 11, but occasionally, like one night in March when Vince Herman and his son, Silas, stopped by, the picking went on after midnight.

Seeing someone like Herman, a founder of Leftover Salmon, isn’t that unusual in this little town, now home to a growing number of world-class musicians.  Lyons and the mountain communities from here up to Nederland have quietly become a roots-music artist colony. The gypsy jazz group Taarka, Grammy-award-winning slide guitarist Sally Van Meter, the bluegrass quartet Spring Creek, bassist Sally Truitt, Elephant Revival, bassist Eric Thorin, Dave Watts from the Motet, songwriter Nancy Thorwardson, guitarist Jason Hicks of the Blue Canyon Boys, Caleb Roberts of Open Road, drummer Brian McRae, luthier and guitarist Romano Paoletti, bluesman Lionel Young, classical violinist Mintze Wu and multi-instrumentalist K.C. Groves are just a few of the many accomplished musicians living in the Lyons area.

What is curious about the jams is that despite the plethora of talent, players of all levels are encouraged to pull up a chair. “Bluegrass, by nature, is a pretty competitive music,” explains resident Eric Zilling, a jam regular. “At festivals there are contests for best fiddler, best guitarist etc. Here, everybody knows where they stand. You go around the circle, you get your opportunity to play, and then somebody from Spring Creek, who’s sitting next to you, plays. It’s a welcoming atmosphere.”

Longtime resident Dave McIntyre books music and runs the soundboard at Oskar Blues. Fresh from New Jersey, he fell in love with Lyons, at that time, he says, “a sleepy bedroom community, good-old-boy oriented place.” McIntyre, who bought a house near downtown in 1976 and has watched the music and arts scene blossom over the last dozen years, says, “Planet Bluegrass was the catalyst for people to move here.”

Craig Ferguson, who heads Planet Bluegrass, which books the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and brings high-profile national events RockyGrass and the Folks Festival and other concerts to its local stages, first moved to Lyons in 1994. “I would guess we had something to do with it, probably more to do with bringing people to experience Lyons and having them fall in love with it — like we did. Now I’d say there really are a lot of musicians in town.”

Ferguson says that the scene is “more self-generating” today. “There is so much music in town, pickin’ parties, jams, that we really have nothing to do with.”

Singer and bassist Jessica Smith relocated to Lyons with the other members of Spring Creek three years ago. “We had been in Crested Butte and knew Colorado was a good market for bluegrass,” she says. “We wanted to be closer to the Front Range so we can get to places more easily, but we didn’t want to live in the city. We had been to RockyGrass, knew of other musicians living here and decided it would be a good place for us.”

Annie Sirotniak moved here in 2007 from Boulder. “There are folks to pick with, friendships form and there’s a great vibe,” she says. Sirotniak books 4-7 shows a year through High Street Concerts, an all-volunteer consortium started in 2003 by Sam Tallent, Mike Whip and K.C. Groves. This year High Street has presented guitarist Beppe Gambetta, fiddle wizard Casey Driessen and Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum, among others. “Profit isn’t the motive,” she says. “We have a committed volunteer crew. We’d rather put on a show and give as much as we can to the artists. I’ve been a performer as well, and know firsthand that it’s tough to make it as a musician. I guess that’s part of the reason I volunteer all my time.”

Profit isn’t the motive at the blues jams Patrick Cullie hosts each month at Oskar, or at the popular Tribute Nights that Jami Lunde manages once a month, either. Up to 20 bands each perform two or three songs from the catalogues of, so far, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Neil Young, Hank Williams (I, II or III) and Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris.

The idea, Lunde says, grew out of endless nights in living rooms and festival backstages when guitars are passed around the circle. “Oftentimes the circle will come around to cover songs,” she says, “and it ends up that we are having so much fun playing, singing, dancing.” The format has caught fire with musicians and audiences alike, making it one of Oskar’s biggest nights.

Last year several people, including Zilling and Groves, who co-hosts the bluegrass jams with Eric Thorin, started Redstone Radio, a station that streams the music of Lyons over the Internet. Zilling says the idea started at a Spring Creek show last May. “I had bought a handheld digital recorder, and I was walking around Oskar and I showed my new toy to K.C., and she started walking around interviewing people like a television reporter. It was pretty funny, and afterwards she came over and said we should start a radio station.”

The idea stuck, and working incrementally, they created Redstone Radio, an internet-only station. Without doing a lot of promotion, the station logs about 800 listener hours per month playing 80 percent local musicians and 20 percent musicians with local ties, like Herman or Tim O’Brien. Everybody gets paid for their music, and Zilling says that after a year of operation, “It’s pretty darned self-sustaining.”

Redstone recently took a further step, renovating an abandoned cinderblock building at 4th Street and Broadway. Volunteers, many of them musicians or local music fans with trade skills, are bringing the building up to code, adding drywall and converting it into the Groove Shack, which gives Redstone Radio a physical space, but more importantly, adds a rehearsal and teaching space for musicians.

The gap that usually exists between artists and fans is absent here, and the synergy between residents, fans and musicians is as organic as it is self-sustaining. “Mostly, I think that musicians attract musicians at this point,” says Ferguson. “They also seem to attract other artists, as I’ve felt that there are so many more ‘artistic’ people around now, painters, potters, you name it.”

“It’s a great little town with a great mix of people,” Smith says. “There are people whose families have been here for generations, and people like us who come for artistic reasons. Planet Bluegrass brought people who wouldn’t have come here for any other reason and settled here. And it’s still happening.”

This article appears in the Summer issue of Boulder magazine.

A coyote heads off near the Boulder Reservoir last month.

A columnist in the Denver Post today talks with some common-sense Greenwood Village residents circulating petitions to stop the killing of coyotes in their city.

After a spike in dog/human/coyote incidents, the city hired sharpshooters to kill “aggressive” coyotes with high-powered rifles within the city’s park system.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife has killed several coyotes in the city of Broomfield in response to a couple of well-publicized dog/human/coyote interactions in that city earlier this year. The DOW, which knows that killing the animals doesn’t address the problem – its spokesperson recently said that if the entire United States were paved with asphalt, we would still be living with coyotes — is instead overreacting to mostly misguided public fears that somehow “more aggressive” coyotes have become a threat to our well-being and our way of life.

These knee-jerk, appease-the-populace reactions will almost certainly guarantee that the cities will continue to experience dog/human/coyote interactions. Greenwood Village says its main goal is to educate, and to its credit has generally good advice about coyotes on its website.

But instead of vigorously enforcing current leash laws (which is the underlying reason for almost every one of these so-called “attacks”), the city has decided to blame the wild animals. It’s so much easier than actually dealing with the problem.

I think most people who have been around animals understand that most animal-behavior problems are really human-behavior problems. Even people who experience the harshest of wild-animal interactions – being mauled by a grizzly – generally understand their own culpability in an “attack.”

The word “attack” has all sorts of negative connotations. This YouTube video, for instance, is labeled as an “attack” by a polar bear. My immediate reaction to the video is that there was no attack, except perhaps that the woman could be seen as attacking the bears by jumping into their enclosure. But had the bear chosen to “attack,” the woman would certainly not be alive to tell her story. The bear, though it appears to bite her on the ass, seems more curious about the intruder than anything else.

Despite the biblical injunction about dominion over animals, humans have never been good stewards of wildlife; indeed we seem incapable of “managing” wild animals beyond exterminating them when they become nuisances.

Think of the consequences of the United States’ decision, for instance, to eliminate the top predators, wolves and grizzly bears from the entire Western ecosystem to accommodate ranchers with cattle and sheep, The consequences of that decision still reverberate across the Western landscape, with no end in sight.

One of the effects is that about half a million coyotes, along with hundreds of thousands of other animals, under the guise of “wildlife management,” are killed every year under the Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division. Despite the annual slaughter, which in 2008 was almost five MILLION animals, coyote numbers are increasing around the country, even in places that have never seen coyotes before. (For more on coyote behavior, here’s an excellent report from Marc Bekoff in Canid News.

In Colorado, the DOW and Greenwood Village council members over-reacted mostly to appease the fears of a small percentage of citizens. And instead of concentrating on human behavior (”my dog is under control, even without the leash,” “I left my leash at home,” “My dog wouldn’t hurt a fly,” “Why aren’t you out catching real criminals?”), we seem to easily defer to expecting the animals to change theirs. And if the animals, in this case coyotes, don’t comply: Bang, you’re dead.

There’s one constant in the spike in dog/human/coyote interactions in the Denver area: Off-leash dogs were involved and often initiated contact with the coyotes. The inference is, of course, that coyotes, because they’re wild, “attack” dogs, which are “tame.”

If you’ve been around animals, you know that’s not a given. The coyotes might have attacked the dogs, but it’s equally probable that the dogs, off-leash and curious as all dogs are, approached the coyotes, who, perceiving them as attackers, responded accordingly. We won’t know exactly what happened – eyewitness accounts are wildly inconclusive  — but what if the dogs were the aggressors and the coyotes just defending themselves or their territory? Would we shoot the dogs?

But it’s easy to make some sort of distinction between wild animals and pets, even if domestic animals are just wild animals bred to be tame. (Consider, for instance, that if your housecat weighed 105 pounds, she might consider you a snack instead of a food provider and a lap to sit in.)

Our general fears in this regard are completely out of balance with reality. Domestic dogs are inherently more dangerous to humans than coyotes ever will be. Domestic dogs actually do kill people — and many dogs that kill were trained to do so by humans.

Only one or two human deaths in history have ever been attributed to a coyote. More than FOUR MILLION Americans are treated for domestic dog bites EACH YEAR, and 10-15 people annually are fatally attacked by domestic dogs.

But hey, it’s easier to blame the coyotes than change our behavior, right?

Could you tell if this Fanner 50 was a toy at fifteen feet?

PRINCETON, N.J., June 3 (UPI) — Princeton University students were cleared to resume normal activities Wednesday after reports of a campus gunman were determined to be false, officials said.

Upon questioning, it was determined that the suspected handgun was only a dark green plastic toy that could be confused with an actual weapon, they said.

I read this story with interest. I once would have laughed at the stupidity, but after a toy-gun situation of my own, I’m not quite as glib about the subject. I wrote a column about it for the Colorado Daily, and I thought it was worth reprinting in light of some of the jokes I’ve read already about the Princeton situation.

Disarming Situation

It was all so innocent.

Saturday afternoon I was in Denver working with my partner Gil Asakawa on the introduction to a book we’re writing about toys of the fifties and sixties. After a couple hours, we decided to take a break and go out to a local antique store to look for the real thing—research purposes, you know.

I came away with a treasure from my childhood: a Fanner Fifty pistol. Mattel’s signature gun from my adolescence and the inspiration for my part of the Western gun-and-holster section of the book. The Fanner Fifty trademark was an elongated hammer that allowed you to “fan” off a series of caps with a staccato motion of your other hand.

I seem to remember about half my childhood spent in the crouch you had to take to fire off the Fanner. Besides being a fine specimen of toy workmanship, it had a special place in my heart (and often , under my pillow, next to my head at night).

So Saturday we were in front of Gil’s apartment, he carrying the other games we had bought and I walking behind him with the Fanner, aiming out ahead at the wall of the building and pouring off rounds against the same imaginary Black Bart I battled in my imagination as a kid.

At the same time, a Denver police officer was passing by in a cruiser. When I turned around after seeing him out of the corner of my eye, the Fanner in my hand, I found myself face-to-face with a police car as it slipped over the curb and   came right at me.

Officer Dennis Moon came out of the car with his gun drawn, now aimed directly at me. “Drop the weapon.” Both of us were wearing sunglasses; neither could see the other’s eyes.

“It’s a toy, it’s a toy,” I yelled, kind of laughing and playfully holding the gun up for the officer to see.

“Throw the gun down and raise your hands,” he ordered.

I threw the gun down and raised my hands heavenward. He told me to turn around. I did, kind of grinning incredulously at Gil, who looked as amazed as I at the sudden turn of events.

I couldn’t believe what was happening. Thoughts leapt crazily around in my head — but the main one that took over was that I had just thrown down one of my favorite childhood memories into the grass, and in exchange a real pistol was aimed directly at my heart.

I’d never had a gun drawn on me before. My obsession with guns ended with my Fanner; I’ve only handled a real gun once or twice and never shot off a round of real ammunition in my life. I never even had a BB gun. I have no problem with the constitutional right to own a gun, but I am disturbed at how easy it is to purchase a deadly weapon in the United States.

And I’ve read all those stories in the papers about a police officer accidentally shooting some idiot brandishing his little brother’s toy assault rifle. But I never thought of it as being anything that would ever be of concern in my life.

That changed forever in an instant. As Moon realized the situation and lowered the gun, my first reaction was of anger at being singled out for such a minor thing. After all, goddam it, it was a toy. What flashed through my mind was that I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

It was his first reaction, too. “It’s shit like this that can get people killed,” Moon said, in a flush of anger. For all he knew, it could have been a hostage situation, the way I was playing with the gun behind Gil’s back.

I couldn’t argue with that. The Fanner looks authentic enough, especially from a distance, and we were in an area where there is a lot of police traffic.

And my anger turned to complete embarrassment as the overwhelming reality of the situation crept up on me. What was I doing waving this gun around like a fool? How could I be so stupid?

I think Officer Moon felt the same way. He asked for our I.D.s and called in on his radio. He seemed relieved, and in what seemed like less than a minute, several other cruisers arrived at the intersection.

“We’re writing a book about toys,” I said in a deliberate a voice as I could muster. He laughed, and the other officers engaged in some good-natured police banter at his expense about the incident.

We promised him a copy of the book, and he replied that he hoped he didn’t ruin our day and added that he was really thankful we didn’t ruin his.

Gil and I went upstairs to his apartment, and for a while we were kind of hysterical. It was funny, we kept telling ourselves. What a great story, we thought. It was, to use our own journalistic catch-phrase, good copy.

But then reality crept in, this time the fearful, fitful kind that takes awhile to settle in your brain. It almost wasn’t a good story, I keep reminding myself each time I think of what might have happened if I had innocently pointed my cap pistol at the officer while telling him it was only a toy. Or if he hadn’t kept his cool with the finger on the trigger.

I’m thankful he maintained his composure. The entire situation wound up being nothing more than an embarrassing mistake. So why was I still uneasy? The line between fantasy and reality, which had always been clear in my mind, grew fuzzier in those seconds.

I’m sure Dennis Moon has thought about that more than once since then, too. We were bonded together irrevocably in those moments when I was in his sights, my future in the twitch of his fingers.

I drove back to Boulder with the Fanner in a paper bag. I’m going to keep it down here in my office in the basement with my other toys from now on.

Colorado Daily
August 29, 1989

The view of the board at KGNU studios, Boulder, Colorado.

I host a program called “Roots & Branches” some Sunday mornings 9-11 a.m. on our local community radio station KGNU. The program is loosely based around American music, which I interpret as all recorded music in America that is blues, folk, country, gospel, soul, rock or bluegrass-based and whenever possible, played on acoustic instruments.

It’s a pretty big area from which to choose, but as one who is still amazed by the incredible depth and breadth of American music, it’s territory that I love exploring for program ideas.

This Sunday’s program was titled “History Lessons,” and it includes only songs that concern historical events or periods in U.S. history. After introducing the concept in the first set, the show follows a period the period from World War II to the fall of Saigon, with the songs interspersed with original audio clips of current events of the time.

As usual in this type of endeavor, I left off a batch of good songs that I forgot, couldn’t fit into the concept or the time frame. I received lots of good calls reminded me of songs I left off or forgot about, which means there is a chance I’ll get around to a Part Two sometime.

You can stream the program for a couple of weeks here.

“History Lessons” Set List

“Everett Ruess,” Dave Alvin, Ashgrove
“Sailing To Philadelphia,” Mark Knopfler, Sailing to Philadelphia
“Galveston Flood,” Tom Rush, Take a Little Walk With Me
“When That Great Ship Went Down?”, William & Versey Smith, Anthology Of American Folk Music
“True Story Of Amelia Earhart,” Plainsong, In Search Of Amelia Earhart
“Franklin D. Roosevelt, Poor Man’s Friend,” Willie Eason, Sacred Steel
“New Orleans Wins The War,” Randy Newman, Land of Dreams
“Eisenhower Blues,” J.B. Lenoir, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Blues
“The Great Atomic Power,” The Louvin Brothers, Hillbilly Music…Thank God!
“The Merry Minuet,” Kingston Trio, The Kingston Trio at the Hungry i
“On Beatniks,” Carl Sandburg, The Beat Generation
“Little Boxes,” Malvina Reynolds, Washington Square Memoirs: Urban Folk (1950-1970)
“Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased
“I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Phil Ochs, Washington Square Memoirs : The Great Urban Folk Boom 1950-1970
“Fortunate Son,” Todd Snider, Long May You Run : 15 Tracks In The Key Of Neil
“Tears Of Rage,” The Band, Music From Big Pink
“Vietnam Blues,” Cassandra Wilson, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Best Of The Blues
“Okie from Muskogee,”  Merle Haggard, Vintage Collections Series
“What Is Truth,” Johnny Cash, The Legend
“Armstrong,” 2:40, John Stewart, American Originals
“Find The Cost Of Freedom,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Single
“Galveston,” Jimmy Webb, Ten Easy Pieces
“Lord God Bird,” Sufjan Stevens, Single
“Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight,” Plainsong, In Search Of Amelia Earhart
“Sail Away,” Randy Newman, Sail Away
“Talking Green Beret New Super Yellow Hydraulic Banana Teeny Bopper Blues,” Jaime Brockett, Remember The Wind And The Rain
“An Account Of Haley’s Comet,” John Stewart, Sunstorm

Here’s a good one.

An Associated Press story carried by major news outlets announces that a few Bob Dylan items are for sale, including a high school yearbook with his inscription and a lyric sheet with a poem, “Little Buddy,” that he wrote about a dead dog at summer camp when he was sixteen years old. Go to Google and you’ll find the story repeated in at least 39 different publications.

The lyric sheet in question, which the story says Christie’s auction house hopes will bring upwards of $10,000 – “the earliest example of Dylan’s lyric genius,” enthuses the Guardian’s headline — makes you wonder whether the infamous auction house or media outlets actually check their items for authenticity.

From the A.P. story: A spokesman for Christie’s auction house marveled at the poem’s genius. ‘It’s a very early example of [Dylan's] brilliance,’ Simeon Lipman gushed. ‘It comes from the mind of a teenager [with] some very interesting thoughts … percolating in his brain.’

That might be — if it came from his brain. Even a simple blogger could have done a Google search and find that “Little Buddy,” the lyric in question, was written and recorded by Hank Snow. It’s a sentimental tearjerker that apparently Dylan copied in his own script and should have made any Christie’s expert, or journalist, suspicious. But apparently it didn’t, and even the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, along with many other organizations, fell for it.

Watch the YouTube clip of the song here.

Broken hearted and so sad, golden curls all wet with tears, ’twas a picture of sorrow to see
Kneeling close to the side of his pal and only pride,
A little lad these words he told me
He was such a lovely doggie and to me he was such fun
But today as we played by the way
A drunken man got mad at him because he barked in joy
He beat him and he’s dying here today.

Now I ask: Does that sound even remotely like Bob Dylan, even at age 16? Doesn’t it make you even a little suspicious? And one more question: And media wonder why we don’t trust them anymore? As Dylan actually did write: When you gonna wake up?

Everett Ruess's remains might have been identified, but he's still on Twitter.

So I’m sitting at my computer yesterday and I get an email. It’s from Everett Ruess. He’s on Twitter, and he announces that he’s following me. So I checked his profile, determined he wasn’t a threat or a security risk, and now I’m following him.

Ruess, of course, is the wanderer who disappeared into the Utah badlands in 1934, became a Western environmental icon and whose remains were recently identified and now reside no more than a half mile from my house on the CU campus. Twitter is the popular mobile internet messaging service that allows you to say anything you want as long as it’s less than 140 characters. (Which, if you’re wondering, is exactly the length of that last sentence.)

Wonders never cease. We spend two vacations chasing Ruess around Utah’s hinterlands, and now I’m following him down here on my computer. So far he just quotes (pithily) from his own works, but I’m hoping he’ll start answering some of the many questions left by the discovery of his remains. I won’t hold my breath.

Perhaps this is part of a new social networking trend. Doing some research for “Roots and Branches,” the Americana radio show I host on KGNU, I found that Gene Autry has a MySpace page, where he lives on even though the Singing Cowboy died ten years ago. With the right social networks, you no longer have to die – you can live on in MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. Maybe someone will develop a special app for that.

If you don’t know about Ruess’s disappearance and discovery 75 years later, it is a compelling story. National Geographic Adventure takes far too much credit (one headline reads “After 75 years, National Geographic Adventure solves mystery of lost explorer), which is really stretching it, since the story belongs to a Navajo family who tried to tell people the real story to no avail.

But the magazine’s coverage is excellent, with a short video of the pre-excavation, a photo gallery documenting the site and cache and Dale Roberts’ story about the discovery.

For some journalistic balance, however, The Navajo Times puts the tale of the discovery into its proper context without the Geo hype.

And my own personal feelings about the discovery and its connection to one of my favorite Dave Alvin songs.

Gene Autry is still singing about cowboys and riding Champion on his MySpace page.

A CU scientist used forensic science and Photoshop to identify the remains of Everett Ruess, missing since 1934. (Photo by Dorothea Lange)

Amazing news today that CU scientist Dennis Van Gerven has identified the remains of Everett Ruess, the eccentric young vagabond who, with his two burros, disappeared in the Utah desert in 1934, leaving behind a short life, a few snapshots and a sheaf of letters and paintings that have inspired naturalists, environmentalists, wilderness lovers and one of my favorite songwriters.

I’m happy for Ruess’s family, which finally learns the answer to a mystery that must have vexed its members over the decades. And the discovery is an astonishing story that will no doubt show up as a future episode of CSI. The mystery was solved through a captivating combination of ancient oral Indian family history and modern-day forensics technology and Photoshop.

But I feel a twinge of sadness about the discovery, too.

I came across Dave Alvin’s song “Everett Ruess” while working at KCUV (remember Colorado’s Underground Voice?) in 2004 when Ashgrove, the album it first appeared on, was released. Ashgrove was, to these ears, a concept album, a group of songs loosely arranged around the concept of growing older and learning to accept that fate. The title track was an unabashed look back at the former Blasters’ guitarist/songwriter’s days at the storied Los Angeles folk club where, as an underage teenager, Alvin was schooled in the ways of the great blues and folk musicians who inspired him. “Nine-Volt Heart” is a nostalgic memory of an older man’s youth, and “Man in the Bed” a penetrating snapshot of an aging man in whose dreams he is a young man again.

But “Everett Ruess” sealed the deal for the concept. Alvin had obviously read Ruess’ letters, and his song, written in Ruess’s own voice, tells the young man’s story as he builds a case around a notion that nags us all as we age.

I was born Everett Ruess
I been dead for sixty years
I was just a young boy in my twenties
The day I disappeared.
Into the Grand Escalante Badlands
Near the Utah and Arizona line
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Ruess was twenty when he disappeared after leaving Escalante, Utah, in late 1934. But Alvin notes that among the many mysteries about Ruess is that there was no particular rebellion involved in his journeys. He wasn’t leaving because he wanted to get away from his family but because he found something particularly fascinating and illuminating about the wilderness.

I grew up in California
And I loved my family and my home
But I ran away to the High Sierra
Where I could live free and alone.

And folks said “He’s just another wild kid
And he’ll grow out of it in time,”
But they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Ruess traded prints with Ansel Adams, studied with Edward Weston, Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange and sent letters, drawings and poems of his travels to his friends and family beginning with his first Southwestern pilgrimage in June 1930. Though his 1934 journal wasn’t found, he never stopped writing. Were it not for those letters, nobody would have known or cared, and today’s newspaper headline would never been written.

I broke broncos with the cowboys
I sang healing songs with the Navajo
I did the snake dance with the Hopi
And I drew pictures everywhere I go.

Then I swapped all my drawings for provisions
To get what I needed to get by
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Alvin speculates convincingly upon Ruess’ continuing detachment from civilization.

Well I hate your crowded cities
With your sad and hopeless mobs
And I hate your grand cathedrals
Where you try to trap God.

‘Cause I know God is here in the canyons
With the rattlesnakes and the pinon pines
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Everett Ruess and his two burros prowled the desert Southwest in the early 1930's.

Ruess left Escalante, New Mexico, on November 11, 1934, and was last seen by two sheepherders near the Kaiparowits Plateau several days later, who reported that he said he was heading for the Hole-in-the Rock area, a Mormon landmark where the Colorado River could be crossed.

Ruess’s burros were found in Davis Gulch, and the search for his remains was centered in that remote area of the Escalante. Most theories were that he was killed by cattle wranglers, fell to his death, took his own life in that same area or on Kaiparowits Plateau or disappeared and is living in Mexico. One major problem with any benign death theory is that his paintings, paint kit, journal, cook kit, food and money were never found.

This lends further credence to the Ute Indian murder story. His body was buried about thirty miles east of the area where the burros were found and the search for Ruess took place, so he must have crossed the Colorado and headed toward Monument Valley, which he had visited before. Without his burros, food or supplies, it would be difficult but not impossible to reach the Bluff area where his body was finally found.

Alvin weaves in several theories about Ruess’ death before putting everything into context in his last eight lines.

They say I was killed by a drifter
Or I froze to death in the snow
Maybe mauled by a wildcat
Or I’m livin’ down in Mexico.

But my end, it doesn’t really matter
All that counts is how you live your life
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

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

Billie and I visited Escalante, Utah, in 2005, where we first came into contact with the Ruess saga. There we bought Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, the W.L. Rusho biography that included his writings. At times we felt we were following him around the wild areas in Escalante where he went missing, all the while staring in majesty and wonder at the same mind-boggling vistas that captured his imagination.

Reading Ruess’s words, and Alvin’s poetry, especially the lines “all that counts is how you live your life,” “you give your dreams away as you get older” and “they’ll never find my body, boys, or understand my mind” put a spin on his story that I still find deeply compelling. I really liked the idea of Ruess being lost, and staying lost. One part of me wished that he would remain unfound, a mystery – “they never find my body, boys.” Today’s news means that I will now only be able to take comfort in knowing that we will still never “understand his mind.”

Neil Young working the crowd Monday night at Magness Arena.

It was a big Monday night for Neil Young electric guitar fans. Foregoing the acoustic set that he played here in 2007, Young blasted his way through a twenty-one-song list that ended with an blistering encore of “All Along the Watchtower” at Magness Arena.

The band seemed to be the same one he brought to the Wells Fargo Theater in Denver on Nov. 5, 2007, which includes core Young sidemen bassist Rick Rosas, guitarist Ben Keith and drummer Ralph Molina, with his wife Peggi Young and another vocalist and sometime guitarist. That night he divided the show into an acoustic and an electric set, but on this tour he stuck mostly with the latter, only strapping on the acoustic for a few songs to break up the high energy and intensity.

It is testament to his sizable repertoire that he only repeated one song, “Cinnamon Girl,” from the Wells Fargo date I saw a year and a half ago.

It was a long night. Everest came on at seven and played a thirty-five minute set. I had never heard of this Canadian band, but they played well, although the sound was a little muddy for their sometimes acoustic-based music.

The Neville Brothers were next, and for those of us not able to attend Jazzfest (this weekend is the last, with the Nevilles and Young both scheduled there for Sunday), they pumped forty-five minutes of heady New Orleans funk into the hall, with all the favorites – “Hey Pocky Way,” “Caravan,” “Fiyo on the Bayo,” “Fever” — and more. I haven’t seen the Nevilles in at least fifteen years, and their set didn’t seem to have changed too much, but their music is as rich, vibrant and deep as it comes, and they just knocked me out.

Young, dressed in tennis shoes, jeans and a white sports coat, opened strongly with “Love and Only Love,” loud and brash, which set the pace for the rest of the night. The songs from his current album, Fork in the Road, were sprinkled in among the classics and kept the intensity if not quite the impact of some of the older material. For me, only the last two, “Get Behind the Wheel” and “Just Singing a Song Won’t Change the World,” which closed down the regular set, really caught my ear, especially the latter.

Young always manages to surprise even the most jaded concertgoer. Early on he sat down at the piano and lit a fire beneath “Are You Ready For the Country,” and I found myself screaming “because it’s time to go.” He followed that with “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” with all the high harmonies intact. I don’t remember seeing him do this one in concert very often, if ever. “Pocahontas” got the crunch effect, with Young screaming out “Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me” as the song wound down.

But my own favorite section came near the end when he played a mini-set from Tonight’s the Night. After a version of “Heart of Gold” (never a personal favorite) that made me a believer again, he pulled out “Albuquerque,” “Speakin’ Out” and “Tonight’s the Night” itself.

I have long been fascinated by Young’s stage show, and we were sitting where we had a great view of the backstage area. Young is fastidious about his presentation, whether having a roadie go around wiping down each microphone just before the set began to another fellow who walks up between songs and changes out the hand-written lyric sheets.

As we watched guitar tech Larry Cragg set up Young’s onstage rig, Rob Ober, a good friend and guitar enthusiast who accompanied me, said there is a lot of interest in Young’s sound and instruments, and if you type “Neil Young sound” into a search engine, you’ll find a host of sites like this one dedicated to the Rig.

He always employs some kind of onstage shtick, and there was a painter positioned behind the band who created several interesting canvases during the set. For his environmental hymn, “Mother Earth,” Young walked up some steps at the back of the stage to an old, worn pipe organ, which added drama and gave the song the feel of an old evangelical revival.

All in all, it was a nice surprise, one we hadn’t planned. We got free tickets for the show online Monday afternoon when Magness Arena or Young apparently decided to paper the house, which wasn’t a sell-out, by giving away tickets near showtime. Total cost for the two tickets was about seven dollars, which paid for allowing me to print them on my computer. Other people in our section got their tickets the same way. Not sure who to thank for that, but hey, thanks anyway.

Neil Young
The Neville Brothers
Everest
Magness Arena
Denver, Colorado
Monday April 27, 2009

1. Love And Only Love
2. Fuel Line
3. Are You Ready For The Country?
4. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
5. When Worlds Collide
6. Pocahontas
7. Hit The Road
8. Change Your Mind (Everest - background vocals)
9. Cinnamon Girl
10. Mother Earth
11. The Needle And The Damage Done
12. Light A Candle
13. Goin’ Back
14. Heart Of Gold
15. Albuquerque
16. Speakin’ Out
17. Tonight’s The Night
18. Down By The River
19. Get Behind The Wheel
20. Just Singing A Song

Encore:

21. All Along The Watchtower

Sam Zell answered questions from students and the public at CU Law School this afternoon.

It was close and registration was free, so I went over to CU, where Sam Zell, serial entrepreneur, infamous dealmaker, owner of the private investment firm Equity Group Investments and, according to Forbes, the 68th richest American, was speaking today at noon at the Wolf Law Building.

As advertised, Zell, a gregarious man with a big smile, pulled no punches whether talking about the characteristics of a good entrepreneur, the economy and our current administration’s efforts to control it or the state of the journalism industry, all things he spent time expounding upon during his one hour and eight minute interview session conducted through the Colorado Law School.

Zell began in the real estate industry, but among other things, he created Jacor, a radio broadcast company with many stations, which he sold for a hefty profit to Clear Channel Communications in 1999. His Equity Group is the largest owner of apartment buildings in the United States, and as Prof. Scott Peppet pointed out in his introduction, he sold his Equity Office Properties Trust for $39 billion last year on the day before the stock market started going down.

He had taught a class earlier in the morning, and he reiterated what he told students then: the three years he spent in law school were the most incredibly boring three years of his life, but law school taught him to think, to learn how to ask questions, skills he says he uses every day of his life, something a room full of law students certainly wants to hear.

When asked what makes a good entrepreneur, he said that failure cannot be part of your vocabulary. He said self-confidence (”whether justified or not”) was important, but even more significant was to be able to identify problems and come up with a solution. The two most underrated traits of entrepreneurs, he explained, are the ability to execute, whether by yourself or by delegating to someone who can, and building relationships with the people with whom you work.

Zell said he thinks the economy is “flattening — that’s different than recovering,” he added. He called Barack Obama “a president in training” and unsuitable for the job. And he targeted Senator Barney Frank, who he said pressed Fannie Mae to ease credit requirements in 2000, as the trigger to the current crisis. He also denounced the speed with which Congress was working to make changes, arguing that there will be many unintended consequences. “We need a period of relaxation,” he said.

Of course the subject came around to his ownership of the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs and which, given the amount of debt he took on to buy Tribune, has been criticized as Zell’s worst decision.

Zell doesn’t see it that way and took particular pleasure skewering journalism and newspapers. “People are just finding out how profitable newspapers were,” reminding everyone that until recently it wasn’t unheard of for newspapers, which had a monopoly on information at the time, to show profits of 30-40 percent.

Today, he says, you can get the same information from other places, and besides, newspapers, still thinking as a monopoly, have become incompetent and arrogant. “It’s a business that has made little progress,” he said, “and is using metrics that are no longer relevant.” One of those is home delivery. There is still a market for home delivery, he said, but not according to the current structure. Selling a newspaper at a machine for 75 cents but delivering the same product to your doorstep for half that price is insane, and a business model that will have to change in the future.

He questioned the future of newspapers sharing content with the Associated Press because, he says, AP, which today sells that same content to Yahoo and other search engines, is actually a competitor. When asked what newspapers should focus on, he said a couple of times, “local, local, local. I’m not going to the Chicago Tribune for news about Afghanistan. But for news about the Cubs, I would.” He said that, despite journalist’s objections, shorter stories were better because newspapers’ own research indicated people didn’t like longer stories and wouldn’t read them.

He got some good laughs out of a story he told about his plan to put ads on the front page of The Los Angeles Times. “I thought that God was going to strike me dead,” he said of the response from journalists, “and the building would fall down around us,” he said to applause and laughter. “But we did it, and we’re still putting papers out every day, as far as I know.”

When asked if newspapers should be charging for content, he said that could be a model, but not until newspapers decide what they want to provide that nobody else can. “Newspapers need to understand who their customers are and appeal to their customers.”