The Hackensaw Boys : Rob

“With friends like these, who needs a sack of shit?”
—Salvage Hackensaw (just prior to playing a Handsom Family album)

After a solid hour of sitting unproductively at the typewriter searching for a unifying theme or representative event that will explain to you, dear reader, the High Sierra Music Festival in Quincy California, I am forced to concede that the muse has abandoned me on this dusty stretch of Nevada highway.

But that’s just the way it is and only a foolish man would become frustrated by such a fickle muse as inspiration. Because sometimes inspiration is like a jelly fish—slippery and hard to see and ready to reject you with a painful, discouraging rebuke if you accidentally brush up against her. Other times, of course, she’s more akin to a great blubbery cow walrus who sits astride your body demanding that you massage her bulbous rolls of fat in exchange for the barest shred of a song or scrap of a story. The most insulting and personally humiliating aspect of the muse in her walrus suit is though her immense mass presses you to the cold ground and the noxious, fishy expulsions of her nether regions overpower your olfactory sense, you are terrified she will leave and never return.

But I shall risk the jelly fish’s tentacles and do my best to call down the walrus for you dear reader for we have grown to be good friends and I would not leave you so unsatisfied. Certainly the Hackensaws were satisfied by their experience at the High Sierra Festival but after four weeks on the road and numerous festivals under our collective belt we have become somewhat numb—not exactly jaded and certainly not somnambulant but definitely distant. All the essentials for a summer festival were there: a relativey diverse selection of music on multiple stages, a confusing array of multi-colored tickets and wrist bands, expensive beer, seasoned vendors selling everything from straw chinamen hats to pepperoni pizza, and befuddled staff hired for the weekend—hopelessly disoriented and unable to give reliable directions. And the ever-present golf cart crews, the upper echelon of temporary festival staff, who usually have worked for the promoter on a prior event and having not fallen asleep at the gate or been arrested for selling drugs have proven their worthiness thus earning the keys to a cart. It should be noted that many of these people are exceptionally cute girls who drive like demons and don’t hesitate to help late musicians who need a quick shuttle from the bus to the stage.

Maybe it was the intensity of the sun, maybe it was the altitude or maybe it was simply the potency of the marijuana, but I noticed that the average High Sierra festival attendee seemed somewhat more subdued than his/her Bonaroo or Telluride counterpart. Of course, what I perceived as a condition unique to the festival may have been simply a distillation of the California attitude (especially prevalent in Northern California) which is a sort of lackadaisical demeanor coupled to a keen sense of personal responsibility borne of ambition and the desire for status. Given that a large percentage of the population has emigrated to the state I think that the credit must be given to the influence of the sublime California climate upon the brain. Or, as I mentioned earlier, maybe it was just the quality of the pot.

After a long day of driving from Tahoe, the Hackensaws rolled into Quincy in the dead of the night just as the last of the first day’s festivities were ending. As such the road leading into the festival was choked with delirious concert goers still reveling in the ecstasy of musical rapture and unmindful of our 30 foot, 16,000 pound bus attempting to pass. Wisely, Pee Paw elected to park the Bird across the street from the entrance which is where it sat for the duration of our time in Quincy. For awhile some pretence was made of hanging out in the shaded grassy spot reserved for the bus inside the festival grounds but even though she baked in the sun and sat exposed to the comings and goings of the crowds the Dirty Bird is our home and that was where most of us elected to spend our time. Eventually the reserved space was ceded to some needful campers with the understanding they would be sharing it with our new friends in the Snake Oil Medicine Show who were encamped next door and were using the spot for late night playing sessions. Also in the general vicinity were the Japonize Elephants, a group from San Francisco who were kind enough to share their brown liquor with the Hackensaws on that first, dark night in Quincy.

Really there’s not much to say about those thirty six hours at the High Sierra Music Festival. We played three sets of music that I feel went over fairly well. We learned that there was really no difference between the red and blue beer tickets (at least none of which the vendors were aware) unless they were meant as a kind of joke upon thirsty and confused musicians. We spent very little time together as a band which is the natural result of being on the road a long time together—it’s more polite to go off and have experiences apart from the group so that you have something to talk about the next time you have to do a fifteen hour drive.

Perhaps the only real surprising thing about the High Sierra festival, at least as far as the Hackensaw Boys are concerned, is that it happened at all. I find it hard to believe that even as we roll through this dry, desert landscape populated by large crickets, gas stations, power lines and the occasional Mining Lubricant Manufacturing Facility, that there is a place high in the mountains where several thousand people are intermingling in half-naked, sun drenched wonder for no other expressed purpose than to shrug off their work-a-day lives, ogle members of the opposite (or same) sex, and haggle over the price of vegan burritos, all the while dancing, swaying or stumbling in place to well amplified live music.

Goodbye California. You’re a queer and wonderful bird and though we may not always understand you we most certainly love you. And this is goodbye, for awhile, to you as well dear reader for while we have more adventures in store before we reach our beloved Dominion State I know now that I will lack the energy and presence of mind to call down the walrus of inspiration until my creative batteries have recharged. Lord only knows whether I’ll end up finishing up, fleshing out or flushing down these journal entries and even if they are completed the same deity knows when they will actually be posted to our website. But know that our appetite for this life is but merely whetted and our race is not yet run.

All the Best,
Mahlon