I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me. ~Hunter S. Thompson
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| Ross William Perry at the Snout Saloon |
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| Written by John Abbott | |||
| Friday, 07 October 2011 15:10 | |||
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The music season is upon us. It was fantastic to be in downtown Chippewa Falls tonight. Three music venus within walking distance of each other. It was great! I caught most of three sets of music at the Snout Saloon, who welcomed back Ross William Perry. Then, during set break, Jason Chambers at the Sheeley house. Fantastic! The first weekend of the music season is always like old home week. All of these people who you haven't seen since spring rolling out to hit the bars. I thought Ross was sounding great. He is doing more of his own songs now. Less covers. He has a new CD coming out in two weeks and some of the tracks he did from the cd were really great. I am looking forward to the release date. Those songs were defiantly the most polished of the night. Some of his older covers it seemed like he had some trouble with. What? How dare he! To be tired of playing Hendrix, _Hey Joe_ for the thirty thousandth time! So what is usually a stellar performance with a jaw dropping solo, was instead a little rough with some timing issues. ..It was also first set. Where the performance made up for it was the new stuff. One of the new songs in particular that Chad, the Snout bartender and I greatly favored. Of corse I didn't get the name of it. But it has me feeling really good feelings about what he is going to be putting out. And, it maybe bodes well for a time where you go see Ross for his songs, not Ross playing Stevie Ray Vaughn As what feels to me like the norm these days, I tack a eulogy on the end of a post. I am sorry to do this, both for myself and the artist. I have no pictures or video to go with this, because when I left the house I wasn't totally thinking straight and forgot to bring my camera. I didn't want to go back home and get it. Before the show I got a call from a high school classmate sounding grim. Those are never good. Dave Harvey, who I graduated with had passed away in the night. He wasn't feeling good at supper, went in to bed and never woke up. As far as ways to go, he got lucky. Just over a year ago his wife had died. She was the one who took care of Dave. And when she died, Dave died too, just with a delayed reaction. Back in high school Dave Harvey was of course called Harv. As I am sure every person named Harvey is. But Dave was also christened _Grumpy_ to us in school. He was a loaner who often slept in class and was never happy to be woken. It was like poking a bear when a teacher told us to do it. But he had a surly exterior to a really quite amusing interior. I don't think there were many that saw the interior part. I know I did. He skied. I was his ski partner. I don't think I can ever remember a time skiing in high school when we didn't ski together. And we had some good times. We road a lot of chair lifts together. Talked a lot and had some great fun. But the thing that I remember the most, no one could wipe out more spectacularly than Grumpy. We were young. We were invincible. We downhill raced one another. Straight down the hill as fast as possible. Granted, we aren't talking the Alps here, but even at Welch Village Minnesota, you get going pretty darn fast on the pelletized ice they call snow on the slopes. We had a favorite trail on the back side of the hill. We raced a winding slope, down the hillside. The trail was maybe a hundred feet wide, and a little over a mile in length. It had some sharp corners and good vertical drop. Something on the order of sixty percent of the time Dave could make the run without wipe-out. My average, only slightly better. For Dave though, that other forty was an amazing study in physics. One time, the two of us were streaking downhill. Close to neck and neck, he was in my periphery. He was there… I could see him… but I really had to concentrate on what I was doing. Even through my concentration though, I could tell something wasn't right. I spared him a quick glance. He was six feet in the air, coming off a bump in the snow. His body was angling towards sideways. Dave had a low center of gravity and it was wanting to move up. That was all the time I could spare him. I had to return my concentration forward again. So I heard the crash behind me, I didn't see it. Shortly after I had my own problems. Weak ankles made it difficult to keep my skis from crossing at high speed. I had come over a mogel and hit the snow on the other side fast, with crossed skis. Always a doomed state, and this was no exception. I hit hard, but I was young and flexible. The skis broke free and I slammed into the snow. Humiliation as I heard the jeers from the chair lifts above. But I groaned and pulled myself up. I walked back up the hill to check on Grumpy. There was a perfect hole through the red wooden snowfence. Above the middle wire, below the top wire. He must have still had some altitude when he hit. The impact hole, being between wires seemed to indicate no wire had beheaded him. I was happy to see that. When I arrived, he was spending his time between moaning and cursing. Cursing was winning. The snow between him and the fence looked like one of those impact craters when the good guys land a space ship on the soft ground at the end of an action movie. Harv was balled up at the end of it. But that's where the memory ends. It was only early afternoon. I know he crawled himself back out of that trench and clamped those skis back on at some point. He and I would catch the lift to the top and try our odds again. Doing crash analysis on the ride back up. We had some good times, created some memories, and I can tell you for a fact that I have thought of Dave Harvey and smiled every time I seen a red wooden snow fence for over 30 years now. So thanks Harv.
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