Do What You Like

After a rather busy week, time to decompress!!  Although it's been rather chaotic, I can look back over the last couple months with a certain amount of satisfaction.  Forward progress continues, my immediate situation is reasonably stable, and I got a much-needed morale boost from an unlikely source.  It came a just the right time, too.


If y'all are familiar with either my Facebook page or my MySpace blog, this chap will need no introduction:

This is of course the great Ginger Baker, one of my Drum Mentors and good Facebook friend {as are his kids Nettie, Leda, and Kofi}.  Ginger turned 72 yesterday - right in the middle of his European tour.  See, last year Ginger was strongly advised by his doctor to retire for good, due to some health issues I won't get into here.  On both his official website and his Facebook pages, Ginger admitted to being a bit at sea about the prospect.


I was fortunate enough to talk with him about it a little bit, and I offered up some modest advice by quoting the title of one of the songs he wrote when he was in Blind Faith.  As intended, it got a laugh out of him, and we dropped the matter there.  Well, it seems that Ginger took my sly teasing to heart - he's out on tour, doing what he loves instead of "moldering away his golden years" as he remarked to me in our conversation.  What with the daily grind, I only found out about it a couple weeks back, but like I said earlier the news was a real shot in the arm for me.  If Ginger can keep fighting the Good Fight despite his obstacles, well then so can I.

This neat little epiphany coincides with some ongoing dialogue between myself and good old Uncle Buffalo.  We got to talking about some of our respective musical experiences, and he reminded me of some of the sheer fun we used to have together a few years ago:

That's my buddy Doc Sweetwood blowing harp on the left, as I groove hard behind him.  For practically all of 2008, I was a Regular at the various weekly jam-sessions Uncle Buffalo sponsored; the above was a Tuesday night at the Delmar Lounge in St. Louis.  Loads of great plays preceded and followed this particular one, and the momentum rubbed off on my regular band gigs that year, to boot.  So much so, that I had a full CD's worth of material ready to record, and a string of regular work lined up for 2009.

Of course, the damn d'horse obliterated almost everything, and I've been scrambling like mad ever since to get back up on that plateau again.  Of all the things lost, time is the clear front-runner as my biggest nemesis.  It takes time to come back from being wiped out; time for wounds to heal; time to stabilize the "three hots and a cot" situation; etc., etc.  There have been days - sometimes weeks and even the odd month or two - when I feel I can't keep going through the daily slog.  But now all I have to do is look at the above pic, or think about Ginger Baker to be reminded that my goal is a worthy one, and much brighter days will eventually come again, if I can just somehow see it all through.

That song I mentioned to Ginger {the title of this very post} says it all, and is exactly what I'm aiming for.

More shortly.