I have had no Thai food for six months, and that’s not a recipe one wants to follow. Thankfully, all that changed last night, as we met an old friend at Kao, a French-infused Thai restaurant on Savannah’s east side.
Adam and I both opted for salmon in green curry sauce. Darby had cashew chicken and Adam’s friends shared mussles and a bottle of champagne. The service was outstanding, the decor inviting and the food perfect.
Okay, you can ask me if I miss living in the West now. Today, I do. Because shit like this only happens in Colorado, California, or Oregon. The news came to me in an e-mail titled, “Wolf Sighting In Denver,” which revealed that Jerry’s wolf guitar, hand-made by Doug Irwin, was played by Ryan Adams last week in Denver.
After rehearsing at The Philmore Thursday night, Phil and Ryan decided to cross the street and enter Deadhead bar deluxe, Sancho’s Broken Arrow. According to reports:
As the two walked in, the Dead played over the speakers and a stunned crowd couldn’t believe their eyes. The two shot pool for about an hour, hanging out with fans and taking pictures, and generally having a good time. The vibe was so good that Lesh and Adams decided to play an impromptu set a couple doors down at Dulcinea’s.
The crowd shuffled down and assembled in front of the small stage to watch Adams, hair recently dyed orange and donning a cowboy hat, and Lesh in typical t-shirt and jeans, play as a duo for roughly 90 minutes (12:45am-2:15 a.m.). Also of note was the fact that Adams was playing Jerry Garcia’s Wolf, the white guitar made by Doug Irwin that Garcia played throughout the `70s. This is the first known time that someone else other than Garcia has played the guitar publicly.
This is the first time in roughly 30 years that Lesh has played a free, impromptu show. Lesh commented that he had wanted to do something like this for many, many years but the opportunity had never presented itself. It seems that last night for Lesh, Adams and about a 100 people, the timing was just right.
As told to Josh Baron by Tim Donnelly
Set list: He’s Gone, Not Fade Away, Wharf Rat, Saint Stephen, Franklin ‘s Tower
Encore: Ripple, Friend of the Devil, Stella Blue, Shakedown Street
Flick user, Rich Anderson, snapped some telling images from Wakarusa.
Flickr user, McAuliflower, has a great photo set from Veneta.
Flickr user Koshi, a visual designer at Yahoo, gives us a great look at High Sierra.
In 1956 the James F. Byrnes Bridge, a two-lane toll swing bridge, was constructed at a cost of $1.5 million. This opened Hilton Head Island to automobile traffic from the mainland for the first time. The toll, which was $2.50, was discontinued in 1959. In 1978 the bridge was widened to four lanes. According to the county, the bridge is actually interconnecting twin spans. The one nearest Hilton Head, crossing Skull Creek, is the J. Wilton Graves Bridge. The other, crossing MacKays Creek, is the Karl S. Bowers Bridge.
To the casual observer, it may seem that the bridge is what brought the flood of people to an island that had been dormant and underpopulated since the War of Yankee Agression. But one local sees it differently. Retired journalist, Fran Heyward Marscher, who was profiled on Tuesday in Bluffton Today, is a Bluffton native, as was her daddy and his daddy. When she grew up here there was no grocery store, so her family went to Savannah every Saturday for supplies. There was no A.C. either. Her house had fans.
This isn’t some long lost era were speaking of. A 1959 high school graduate, Marscher mentions she was but one of six in her class. Summing up the reason for so much change in such a short span of time, she says:
Air conditioning is what caused all these people to move here.
While I love the drama and simplicity of that cold hard fact, in fairness, Marscher also says:
I could never have stayed here if the community had not changed. There would have been no newspaper for me to work on. The people who have come here include many smart, creative, interesting people, so there have been many benefits to the growth. It’s a tradeoff.
Roger Pinckney XI (yes, the eleventh), who I mentioned here the other day, deserves a closer look. Since, moving to the area in February I’ve been learning who the local writers and other artists are. Pat Conroy is undisputed top dog among Lowcountry writers. His long list of books and the commercial success of those books is hard to argue with, although I’m sure some do argue with it.
Then there’s Roger Pinckney. He’s an interesting character. He rightfully places himself in the action in his stories. We see Rog hunting deer up in a tree and boar from a mule’s backside. We see him enjoying hellfire and damnation sermons on Sunday. We see him struggle with the women in his life. Pinckney also struggles mightily with the powers that be in Beaufort County, SC and the changes (not all for the better) happening everywhere around him. Some call it progress. That’s what his short essay, E.O.D., the final statement in The Right Side of the River, is about. Being at the end of his own personal dock in the face of unforgiving progress.
Hilton Head, South Carolina, the island where golf is king. I am waiting on a boat, waiting on the end of the dock. E.O.D. Tags on my groceries, the parts for the ailing Toyota, the box of Kentucky sour mash, all bear the initials.
I’m headed for Daufuskie, where the dockhands will paw over a jumble of golf bags and suitcases and sort what is going to the beachfront inn from the grocieries and parts and whiskey for people who live on the back of the island like I do. I will collect mine at the end of the dock. E.O.D.
But I am too late for one boat and too early for another, so I pour a dram of Rebel Yell and think many things, as I do when sipping good whiskey.
Lawrence, Kansas city commissioners met recently to consider approving a recommendation by the city’s Historic Resources Commission to place the former home of renowned but controversial author William S. Burroughs on the Lawrence Register of Historic Places.
Burroughs lived in the city from 1981 until his death in 1997.
Thanks to Living with Legends: The Chelsea Hotel Blog for the pointer.
Willie Nelson is releasing a new reggae album, “Countryman,” out today.
According to AP, Nelson began work on the album in 1995 for Island Records, but the project was shelved after Universal bought Polygram, and Island founder Chris Blackwell left the company. It languished until Nelson moved to Lost Highway Records.
Produced by Don Was, who’s worked with the Rolling Stones and Bonnie Raitt among others, the album includes reggae versions of Nelson songs such as “Darkness On the Face of the Earth” and “One in a Row.” There also are covers of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” and “Sitting in Limbo,” and a song called “I’m a Worried Man” by Johnny and June Carter Cash that Nelson recorded as a duet with Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals.
That Nelson’s country songs stand up so well to reggae’s offbeat syncopation and upstroke guitar strums is a testament to their durability. Nelson said he recorded them about 10 years ago in Los Angeles with Jamaican musicians, including some from the late reggae star Peter Tosh’s band.
“The musicians told me that reggae was invented really by listening to country music coming from the United States. They put their own rhythms to those tunes,” he said.
While the music on “Countryman” might raise the eyebrows of country purists, so will the cover. With green marijuana leaves on a red and yellow background, the cover art makes the CD look like an oversized pack of rolling papers.
The marijuana imagery reflects Jamaican culture, where the herb is a leading cash crop and part of religious rites, but it also reflects Nelson’s fondness for pot smoking.
Universal Music Group Nashville is substituting palm trees for the marijuana leaves on CDs sold at the retail chain Wal-Mart, a huge outlet for country music that’s also sensitive about lyrics and packaging.
“They’re covering all the bases,” Nelson joked.
Associated Press: A 7,600-pound nuclear bomb dumped off the Georgia coast in 1958 remains lost – and is best left unfound, the Air Force concluded after its first hunt for the missing nuke in decades.
“We haven’t found where the bomb is,” Billy Mullins, an Air Force nuclear weapons adviser who led the search, told a news conference in Savannah. “We still think it’s irretrievably lost. We don’t know where to look for it.”
The Air Force says the bomb is incapable of an atomic explosion because it lacks the plutonium capsule needed to trigger a fission reaction. The device does contain an undisclosed amount of uranium and about 400 pounds of conventional explosives.
“The best course of action in this matter is to not continue to search for it and to leave the property in place,” said the report by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency.
A damaged B-47 bomber jettisoned the Mark-15 nuke into Wassaw Sound, where the Wilmington River meets the Atlantic Ocean about 15 miles from Savannah, in February 1958 after colliding with a fighter jet during a training flight.
City officials on Tybee Island, a beach community of 3,400 residents, urged the government four years ago to recover the lost weapon. But after hearing the Air Force report Friday, island City Manager Bob Thomson agreed that it’s best left alone.
“I’m not saying it’s a good thing that we have a warhead out there,” Thomson said. “But I believe the greatest danger is it being disturbed from its watery grave.”