This is the second post in my series of tour reflections. For the first one, go here. For the third one, go here. - Pat Kearns

I love trains.  I don't collect toy trains, I don't know the names and types of engines or cars.  For me, it's the romance.  It's the sound of the whistle, nowadays the horn, off in the distance.  It's witnessing a train navigate the Tehachapi Loop, one of the wonders of track engineering.  And it's the sound of the train rolling down the track and how it's permeated into the Rock and Roll, Folk and Blues music I love. Trains have stoked the fires of free wheeling spirits, my own included.


Watching trains brings me back to an older, slower time.  A time before Google.  A time before we had smart phones, and every answer was at our fingertips.  Watching a train cross a trestle, go through a pass, or even navigate the famous Tehachapi Loop takes some pause in these modern times.  But it's impressive how much is getting done, how many hundreds, even thousands of tons are passing by you, moving from one destination to another.


The opening track on my album, So Long City, is called When You're New to Town.  It opens with a train coming up the tracks, a couple of horn honks followed by the Doppler Effect of the passing engine.  I recorded it myself in the Columbia River Gorge.  To me, the sound of the train established movement, which is what that song is about at it's start....but by the end it's about trying to find roots.  These two elements play out inside my heart all the time.  I long for the road, but once I'm on it, I can't wait to get home.  That lonesome train whistle, or again these days a horn, perfectly captures that feeling for me.


I can't remember how we found this Navajo market off of I40.  I think Susan was driving. She probably saw a sign and pulled off.  Once we exited the interstate, we were in a much more interesting world.  It could have been an old section of Route 66.  It was at least an old country road.  The pavement was cracked but it ran straight both east and west as far as my eyes could see.  Power poles running parallel to the road gave the distance an even eerier and lonelier perspective. I stood out on the road with our dog, Paco, for about half an hour.  No other cars ever passed.  Susan was in the store shopping for moccasins.  After one quick spin through, I was bored.  But that empty road and the fantastic, "HERE IT IS" billboard on the other side, was drawing me in.  I took some pictures, but nothing seemed to completely capture the magnificence of this sign.  It was both ornate, for a billboard, and dilapidated like an old barn.  I stood there for a long time, taking it in.  I mellowed.


We crossed back over the road to the store's parking lot.  I thought about going back in the store to see what was taking Susan so long.  I looked one more time down the road to the west and to the east.  No one coming still.  But way off to the east, I saw it.  A train was lumbering down the tracks.  Here it is, for you.  I find this soothing to watch.  Take your time.  Watch a train.

I'm back home in Landers, CA, from playing shows back east and in the southwest.  I'll be posting a few reflections about the road over the next couple of days.  Here's the first in the series. Go here to read the second and third in the series.  - Pat Kearns


Everyone loves a great song.  But our society doesn't put much value, at least cash value, in them.  We all heard that it takes 562,000 Spotify plays to earn $12 (I'm probably exaggerating.  I'm not trying to make a point about streaming revenue here, even though it's definitely a bad deal for artists.)  Our culture even has a colloquialism that captures the cheap value we set songs at: "I bought it for a song."


But songs do have value.  They may even be so valuable, that we have trouble putting a price on them.  For example,  there's a song that saved a town.  A whole town.  I've been there.  I saw it with my own eyes.


I hate The Eagles.  That's my dad's music.  One of the few tapes he ever had in his cigar stinking Oldsmobile. Now, I do get along with Stevie Wonder, which my dad also introduced me to. But The Eagles....and Steely Dan, for that matter, no way.  Those songs still did get into my brain and probably into my DNA.  I can't go through Palm Springs without thinking about Hotel California. And since we were passing through Winslow, Arizona, on our way to play a show at Red Door Brewing in Albuquerque, we had to stop and take time to see "the corner."

I have to admit, I love the story about Jackson Browne crafting this song, and Glenn Frey listening through the wall of the duplex they shared.  Browne was stuck with the lyrics.  He had, "I was standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona...." Frey finished it with, "It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin' down to take a look at me."  Take It Easy was The Eagles first single.  Growing up on the west coast in the 1970's, it seemed like every station on the FM dial played it on an hourly basis.  You couldn't escape that song.


Winslow, Arizona in the past was a bustling town on Route 66.  But the Interstate 40 was completed in 1977 and it bypassed Winslow, effectively cutting it off from eastbound or westbound travelers. And since it was a stage stop town and relied on people passing through on their way one direction or another, Winslow's economy died. 


In 1999, the city of Winslow erected a statue of Jackson Browne with a corresponding mural featuring the reflection of a girl in a flatbed Ford at the corner of Second St and Kinsley Ave.  It takes some effort to visit this spot from I40.  You have to drive about 10 minutes off the interstate into downtown Winslow where Route 66 used to cut through the center of town.  But I knew instantly when we had arrived.  There were groups of tourists on the street, many of them taking their pictures with Jackson Browne's statue, the mural, or the new statue of Glenn Frey that arrived in 2016. 


Tourists' money doesn't make a community...but Winslow has that too.  I knew it when we were down the street from the corner eating some Mexican food.  A big flatbed Ford, no lie, came down old Route 66 and was trying to make a right hand turn but had to wait for two locals who were walking across the intersection and into town.  The truck honked it's horn and flipped the pedestrians off out the driver window.  The pedestrians, one big guy about 250 pounds in a basketball jersey and shorts and his skinny half his size friend also in jersey and shorts, flipped the truck off and started yelling back.  Then everyone laughed.  The  walkers approached the passenger window of the truck while it blocked the not too busy intersection.  They were all friends and were having a laugh and catching up. 


It occurred to me that that song by that band, The Eagles, that annoyed me so much might possibly have made this moment a reality.  The town was packed with tourists there to see old Route 66, but they were also there to see the park, which only existed because of a song.  The locals were on their way to grab some lunch at one of the restaurants near the corner which tourists also frequented.  The park provided a town square. Like many of the other towns bypassed by Route 66, Winslow might have withered and completely died.  But the town had turned themselves and their section of old Route 66 into an attraction because of that song and the old highway too. 


I know that song gave Winslow the edge.  I live near Amboy, California, also on old Route 66.  They don't have a song.  They aren't even mentioned in the classic old highway tune, Route 66....Chuck Berry has my favorite version of that tune.  And Amboy, along with it's sister towns of Bagdad and Chambless, along that section of Route 66, has shriveled and died.  All the old hotels and gas stations are gone, with the exception of one gas station and mini market in Amboy.  And even the one existing gas station and market seems to be slowly melting back into the desert along with the rest of the signs for closed motels and diners.  If only they were so lucky to have a mention in a tune as famous as Take It Easy.  I sure couldn't get that tune out of my head while we were in Winslow.  It's even helping me get over my aversion to The Eagles.


Amboy's population is hanging in there today at a total of four.

The desert is magical...but there's both sides.  Both good and bad magic.  Today, I experienced both.


Preparing to leave here to go to the East Coast for a run of shows hasn't been easy. I don't feel like leaving.  My schedule was thrown off the last few days by work....files for mixes were supposed to come in, but my client was bogged down in the chaos side and files weren't coming through to me correctly and they didn't make any sense inserted into the mix...wrong key.  I think we got it in the end, but the magic wasn't with us until the last hour.


When chaos rules, there's nothing like a good friend.  Joe Garcia was the first guy to ever stop me down here and ask, "Hey, man, what's your story?"  And, man, did Joe come through for me today.  He helped me prep things around our cabin so I could head out on the road with some peace of mind.  And in return, I did the traditional thing. I offered to buy beers.  Joe picked the most expensive establishment in town....well, really, it's the only place; Landers Brew.


We were the only ones in there for quite awhile. Just me, Joe and Phillip, the owner. It wasn't long before Joe had grabbed one of the guitars laying around the room. We weren't really playing....just knocking on the strings for comfort while we drank our beers, passing it back and forth.  After a little while, a trio of desert walkers came into the bar....not the usual zombie sort of walkers.  These folks were actually quite normal.  Even a little Los Angeles in their mannerisms.  Lindsay, Levi and Barbie were good people; friendly, open, and honest. 


Pretty soon, maybe through a haze of some purple smoke and more beers, that guitar was playing us.  I played a Dave Van Ronk tune and Gram Parsons tune.  Joe played a couple of his own, capping the night off with one of the best versions of Shadow of a Ghost I've heard him play. But the magic first came when our new friend, Levi, was passed the guitar.  I realized he had to know something about songs after singing along with me for Hickory Wind.  I slid the guitar right across to him and he knocked us out with a lustful tune he wrote about Mary Tyler Moore.  Beautiful.


The desert is magic.  I haven't hung out with strangers in a bar and passed the guitar...well, maybe ever.  Thank you, Levi.  And thank you, Barbie and Lindsay for being part of the party. And Joe, you're a great friend and an even better human being....and a damn fine guitar player and songwriter too.  And Phillip, the owner of Landers Brew.  Thank you for keeping this amazing establishment open and the beer pouring. 

I'm so lucky to live in a town that has a place like this....even if it's the only place.  See you back in the desert in a couple weeks.  It's time to hit the road. I'm off to the East Coast in a couple of hours.

I'm excited to announce solo shows for this September on the East Coast and in the Southwest.  I'll be going to quite a few spots I've never played before.  Help me spread the word!  I'm thrilled to be ending the run in Tucson with a show with my old pal, and contributor to a couple of songs on So Long City, Gerald Collier.  More details here.

I try not to complain much.  You know the old saying, "There's always someone worse off than you."  It's true. 


I just came back from Portland, OR, my old hometown.  The place that I lived for nearly my entire life. And, man, do those people like to complain about the weather.  Too hot, too rainy, too dry, too anything.  Living in the Mojave, people consider you an idiot if you complain about the heat....for obvious reasons.  If you can't take it, maybe you should be somewhere else?  Ken Layne, the editor and voice of The Desert Oracle magazine and radio show (which you can listen to on podcast), called summer in the Mojave "the price of admission" to live here.  I think it's worth the ticket.


But I can say this....we moved here full time this past May after living here part time for a few years.  And now that we were exercising our wimpy, 12 volt, off-grid solar power set up, we realized it wasn't up to snuff to make day to day living work out here (or anywhere else).  That 12 volt set up wasn't powerful enough to run the most efficient standard refrigerator we could find.  If I wasn't working in the studio, we could afford to run the swamp cooler for no more than 90 minutes a day.  And sometimes even less than 90 minutes would cause our inverter or controller to shut the whole system down.  If I was working, we couldn't use the swamp cooler at all.  The studio often drew too much power causing a voltage drop, which took our power off line sometimes for the remainder of the day.  I worked a string of days in June above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes only in my underwear.  Thankfully, the band I was mixing is in Canada. 


Susan and I lived out of a cooler that you might take with you for camping.  We got ice every day or sometimes every other day if we could stretch it from early May until August.  I tried not to complain about the heat....I had gotten us into this situation in the first place.  And so we began the process of upgrading our solar power set up from 12 volts to 48 volts beginning in late May.  We ended up calling Ameresco, a company that specializes in selling off-grid power equipment.  We settled on new panels, new batteries and a device called Radian by Out Back Power, which combines controller and inverter into an all in one, wall-mounted unit.  This thing is robust.  It took three of us to lift it onto the wall when we mounted it. (Thank you Joe Garcia!)  We ordered the parts on June 10.  They arrived just before 4th of July weekend.  We picked them up from the warehouse in Temecula and realized we made a mistake in the order.  We forgot to order mounting brackets for attaching the panels to our roof.  It took another 10 days to get those to us in Landers.  Susan and I started tearing our the old panels, batteries, conduit, inverter and controller on July 20.  We finished mounting everything the morning of July 22.  We couldn't schedule the off-grid electrician to come and help us finish the type of work only a licensed electrician should do until August 10.  By the evening of August 11, we had power. 

Our refrigerator is running.  It was over 100 the last few days.  We ran the swamp cooler as long as we wanted. The studio is running better and quieter than before....and even the lights work better in our cabin.  A summer in the Mojave, with no air-conditioning or evaporative cooling is hard.  But I'm still glad we stuck it out.....but I'm so thankful to have stable power now. 

If you're thinking about making a go of it out somewhere in the wilds, I have some advice you might want to take into consideration.  Doing anything takes two to three times as long as it might if you live in a developed area. 

Happy to announce shows on the East Coast and Southwest for September!  Two shows this coming weekend in Oregon.  And more shows in the Mojave too.  Check here for all the details.

Well, it's been a long transition....we began with plans to leave Portland and make a town called Landers, California, our new home a couple of years ago...and we have finally completed the move and we're living full time in a small homestead cabin out in the sand and rocks with plenty of Joshua Trees, creosote bushes, jackrabbits and coyotes as our neighbors.  The cabin is off the electrical grid.  It runs on a small solar power system.  I'm currently mixing, mastering and doing a little bit of tracking using electricity that was created with ZERO fossil fuels.  It sure ain't easy running your own power plant....but it is so rewarding.

Here's a short video that Joshua James Huff and I made about why I had to leave Portland, Oregon, and why I chose this spot out in the desert to build a future.  The urban footage was taken by a drone flying over my old Portland studio, PermaPress Recording.  You can see that the demolition around my studio has already begun.  The desert footage is our new location.  The voice-over was recorded using solar power.

And if you're in the desert this July, I hope you'll come out and see me at Landers Brew....I'm doing a four show long run there and I have some amazing guests playing with me.  And I have a show at the (in)famous Deer Lodge in SE Portland on July 29 with a full band.  Details here.

As the cranes and wrecking crew demolish the buildings around PermaPress Recording, the video for So Long City drops.  Art and life, intertwined perpetually.  Read the review and watch the video in HD on Paste. #SoLongCity

I make my Morongo Basin debut opening for my pal, Joe Garcia, and his Urban Desert Cabaret, on March 5 at 5pm.  Follow the link to the Facebook event to get all the details.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1426956927355034/

Spending time in Joshua Tree, CA, my FM radio dial came across the local station Z107.7 KCDZ right away.  Sometimes, I have an affection for the brand of pop and youthful rock that the Z stations play and it's the only local radio station I've come across. The local Morongo Basin news and the occasional lost dog announcements are worth it alone...even if you're not into the pop. In fact, I only can pick up about 5 stations total while I'm in the area.  I was amazed when we borrowed Susan's parents' car to drive from Allentown to Philadelphia for my show at The Dawson Creek Pub.  There must have been more than 30 stations to pick from on the dial there. 

I'm a regular KCDZ news reader of their online news and I was excited when there was an announcement about their long going local music show hosted by Pat Michaels.  I hadn't stumbled across the show before and I made time to tune in that following Sunday when I was home in Landers.  It was a cool show.  I heard some of the local folks whose music I like; Jessica Von Rabbit and Ted Quinn.  Plus a bunch of artists that I hadn't had the chance to hear yet.  I wrote an email to Pat and asked him if he would consider playing my new record, So Long City.  We corresponded a bit and I mailed Pat a copy of the CD the old fashioned way: US Post. Low and behold, he played nearly the entire thing (I just listened to the show. I can't even think what may have been left off). I was out playing shows on the East Coast when Susan started receiving texts from friends in the desert that they were listening to me on the radio.  In the old days, those electromagnetic waves of my tunes going out the FM band would be long gone by the time I got back to the Morongo Basin.  But it's 2017.  Here's the link to the podcast.  Go to the 1/29/2017 show:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/z107.7-fm-local-music-showcase/id393171775?i=1000380578865&mt=2