I love being on the road. Even when that road winds treacherously around the side of a mountain....without guardrails. In Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac had the realization, after nearly summiting Colorado’s Matterhorn Peak,  that “it’s impossible to fall off mountains you fool!” 

Well...I just got back from a week on tour in Western Colorado, and with all respect to the zen wisdom of the King of the Beats, you most certainly CAN fall off mountains. I will never forget looking out the driver’s side window to see our wheels a fraction of a centimeter from the edge of a cliff. I just kept riding the brakes like a senior citizen and praying furiously to St. Christopher that we weren’t about to join the “27 Club.” 

As you might be able to tell, I am not a thrill seeker in the high octane, adrenaline junkie sense. I all but kissed the gravel when we finally pulled off the mountain road and into the roadhouse parking lot where we were gigging. That said, I do have a heart that craves adventure and I view the world through a dewey lens of romanticism. So while I don’t seek out dangerous thrills, I make a point of using any music related travel as an opportunity to seek new experiences, meet new people, and suck the marrow out of life. 

Last week was my first tour run since Covid-19 shut down gigs. In the last year, I had developed grand notions about touring that ballooned with all the time I had in lockdown to ruminate: 

I wouldn’t take anything for granted this time. I would live even more fully. More completely. I would be more open to what new places have to offer. 

I was cautiously optimistic that reality would bear some resemblance to my beautiful fantasy. To my pleasant surprise, I not only found what I was looking for, I found a lot of things I didn’t even know I needed. 

The artist we went out with is an immensely talented pop singer-songwriter who I have been working with for the last several years. The music is fun, catchy, and familiar to me. It’s the kind of great pop writing that you can really live inside as a player. I knew this trip would be incredibly musically fulfilling.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, my understanding about music has shifted. I used to see music as an internal form of expression. Now I feel music is primarily a community oriented form of collective expression. Music is not about the egotism of the "I." Music is about the "we" and the "us." Going into the tour, I knew I was looking to find a deep connection with both my fellow musicians and our audiences. In this respect, the trip exceeded all exceptions.

My favorite part of the touring experience, especially cramped car tours, is the high intensity, summer-camp-like bonding that takes place between musicians (assuming everyone is compatible and there are no bad seeds...no small feat). I have been on three day runs with total strangers who, by the end of a long weekend, became dearer friends to me than people I’d known for over a decade. There is a magic in the concentrated type of bonding that comes with work travel situations. This run was no exception. 

For starters, I was riding in a car with one of my oldest, closest friends in the world. We have logged hundreds of car hours, multiple tours, and thousands of conversations across the last decade. I knew going in that I had at least one reliable companion to cause mischief with. The artist, or  “the Talent,” as we affectionately called her, is as delightful as she is musical. Besides those two, the rest of the entourage was either completely new to me, or a casual gigging acquaintance. That didn’t last long though.

It’s a cliche that belongs on a B-Side of “Running on Empty” but the pressure cooker of the road turned us into a family of kindred vagabonds. It would be pointless to try to explain how the process of bar-hopping to replace a cancelled gig, late nights playing party games on an AirBnB TV, or consulting with the world’s preeminent Diet Coke sommelier was able to turn strangers into a ragtag family of troubadours. But it did. Extreme situations can create an extreme sense of closeness in a short amount of time. After a week we had our own dialect of inside jokes and group slang. It often happens this way but it never ceases to amaze me when it does. I didn’t realize in all my fantasizing about a Kerouacian jaunt on the road that this is what I was actually missing during lockdown. 

You may have noticed, I didn’t even mention the music, the gigs, the venues, the best scat singer I’ve ever heard, the underground speakeasies, the food, the sordid pool hall meets EuroPop dance club, or even the life changing natural beauty of Western Colorado. All of those things filled me with excitement, awe and gratitude. They were essential parts of the experience. But at the end of the day, what I took home with me were the memories I made with new and old friends. 

I know I sound like Mr. Rogers. But is that a bad thing? This is the best the music industry has to offer in its purest form. It’s the scene in Almost Famous when they sing “Tiny Dancer” on the bus. That’s why we do this in the first place isn’t it? 

Nothing is perfect. Was there tension? Yes. Anxiety? Yes. Setbacks? Definitely. Risk of imminent death in the mountains? Yes? No? Maybe??? But even the bad stuff brought the group closer together through a process of bonding over adversity and problem solving. I feel very grateful to play music for a living. But I’m even more grateful that, in its best moments, music brings me into a community much bigger than myself. There are many wonderful people music has brought into my life who I never would have met otherwise.

People I would fall off a mountain for.