We left the Sphinx's Nose thoroughly chastened.
While gassing up in Goldendale, we considered the route home. Neither
of us wanted to risk the Twilight Zone of the Tricities again. So
we noticed US 97 going north from Goldendale. While I studied that
potential route, Larry looked at the posters stuck up in the window of
the gas station.
"Hey, Phil," he said, "We might still
make this trip less than a total disaster. The Big Bambootees are
playing at the Gorge Amphitheater tonight. We could catch their show
on the way home..."
You may have forgotten the Big Bambootees.
They were one of the biggest gateway-from-folk-to-rock groups of the late
1960's. Their big hit was about taking a stick of bamboo and throwing
it in the water and calling for somebody named Hannah. Dave Van Ronk
wrote the song, but the Big Bambootees popularized it, in a way Van Ronk
could only wish for. I heard he was still suing for his share of
the songwriting profits, even though he's been dead 4 years...
"Yeah, Larry, let's do it. It's
a sort of straight shot up US 97 and we're there."
There wasn't any part of that road
that was straight, but by evening we'd pulled into the Gorge Amphitheater.
Neither of us had been there before, although plenty of big name acts from
our heyday had been through there, tempting us, but not removing us, from
our complacent lives. This was all grace.
I guess their equipment was set up by
roadies, but one time I thought I saw Phat Fred out there adjusting his
drums. He still looked fat. Larry and I weren't sure how many
of the original members had survived. Besides Fred, there had been
Big Wally on the electric 12-string, Lanky Frank on the mandolin and fiddle,
and my own favorite, Polly Esther Scriggs on the banjo. Although
we had a good view of the stage, it was hard to make out details like how
many heads a person there might have, since we were sitting back quite
a ways. That wasn't much of an issue unless Zaphod Beeblebrox happened
to sit in with them...
The concert was crazy, man. I
took some photos, but they all came out like this:
It must have been something they did with
the lights... So either all the Big Bambooties were there, or they'd
gotten good fakes to fill in. It didn't matter. Everyone was
singing along, which surprised me because I'd never known any other Big
Bambootee fans except Larry, back in the day. When they played a
fast one, everyone would stand up and gyrate. When they played a
ballad, most of us would sit down and act our age. Then they finished
up with a fast one, and went off stage, and I realized they never did the
Bamboo song... Everyone was clapping and yelling anyway, so they
came back on and started the Bamboo song, really quietly. Everyone
joined in and started swaying back and forth. At the end of the song, people
that had lighters lit them in applause, but it wasn't so many people that
had them as back in the old days. I guess the heavy smokers had already
died...
We drove off into the night toward
home, high on adrenaline and memories.
Larry and I talked about the movies
and cigarette smoking.
Larry said, "You know all those old
movies like Casablanca. I don't know if they had product placement
payments per se, but it seemed like smoking scenes came up as regularly
as tv ads in those movies. Now I hear they want to edit the smoking
out of the classic cartoons."
"I suppose they've already edited
most of the racism and ethnic stereotypes out. They've probably removed
Porky's and Elmer's speech impediments. Smoking was the last
thing left, except for the senseless cartoon violence. Whoops! What
was that?"
"We just hit an owl..."
"Do you think we should stop?"
"It was a good solid hit, Larry, I'm
sure that owl was toast..."
"Where was I. Oh yeah, senseless
cartoon violence. I mean, it's hard to be funny without a bit of
slapstick..."
"So what's funny about killing an
owl, Larry?"
"Did I say that was funny? It's
funny when the coyote gets an anvil on his head... Because you know in
the next scene he's going to be strapping on a rocket pack. Well,
actually, I never really cared for the Road Runner cartoons. But that was
because they were stupid. Nothing but slapstick. Now when Charlie
Chaplin took a dive, he'd already made sure you'd won his sympathy, so
that later when the big palooka got taken out by the little tramp,
that was funny..."
"So the owl dying wasn't funny, unless
we'd just seen him terrorizing the mouse family that we knew and loved..."
"You know, Phil, you're weird.
But that's one way of looking at it..."
Behind them on the road, the mouse
family was dancing in happiness off in the ditch. A coyote came up,
grabbed the dead owl, and set off into the field to eat it... A roadrunner
went "Meep, meep," and stuck out its tongue...
Use this chart to find the next of the cartoons (first 47 entries) or the stories (starting with 1 A River Too Far 5 rows below week 8)
