The Hackensaw Boys : Rob

Or, I was Genghis Khan’s ne’er-do-well alcoholic brother and I was ashamed.

Decadence: 1. the act or process of falling into decay; deterioration. 2. Moral degradation
— Noah Webster

Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

The Very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
— Samuel T. Coleridge

All along the bow line we sang that melody,
as all good sailors do when they’re far away at sea
— Bob Dylan

* * *

I now say “A-hem!” and I clear my throat for I desire your attention.

* * *

In the year 2003, We (I mean, humanity in the larger scope of things) continued to make war upon each other even as we used the increasingly long arm of technology to take a stroll upon the surface of Mars—a planet long named for War but, so far as we know, completely at peace. Meanwhile, the Earth swallowed a city in Iraq and tens of thousands of our brothers and sisters died.

All of which makes the passing of Johnny Cash seem small and unimportant, but it still made me sad. Even the small things seemed to irk me last year. Like the way my young male cat won’t stop splashing water out of his bowl before he takes a drink, and the fact that my boots have developed a leak at the toe, or that I can’t afford the good wine, the choice cigars and the true life of crime.

But, we are in a New Year and anything is possible.

Though the cold grip of winter is on the land, and the wolf scratches hungrily at the door, I want you to know that there is a place where a T-shirt, sensible pants and a light jacket are sufficient protection for an afternoon outing. I know this place exists because I have been there. You see, I have been on the “Jam Cruise” and remained sober enough to remember the experience.

But, before we can get on board, so to speak, we must establish what constitutes a “jam” band. For too long this term has been tossed about by all sorts of inebriated critics who, in the midst of their festival revelries, have thought little about what it means to be a band much less what it means to be a “jam band.”

Many believe the progenitor of all jam bands to be The Grateful Dead. These California hipsters parlayed a blend of country, jazz and rock into a multi-decade suspended sort of childhood marked by lots of touring, copious musical experimentation, tireless rhythm sections and plenty of cocaine, pot, LSD, heroin, nicotine and domestic beer. A lot of people thought their scene was beautiful, many believed it to be sad, some hated it and others barely knew it existed except as a sort of cultural footnote to the 60’s extreme Left wing.

Certainly the term “jam” has been much bandied about. Webster’s dictionary offers fifteen definitions of the word but of those I believe #14 most appropriate for the concertgoers at festivals like Bonnaroo and High Sierra—“a mass of objects, vehicles, etc. crammed together in such a way as to stop or severely impede movement.” For the Jam Cruise, however, I would have to go with the definition Webster chose to list first—“to press, squeeze, or wedge into a confined space.” Not because the ship was crowded but, as I will endeavor to explain, because there was no escape.

So what have we got so far? Free form musical exploration, a mass of objects and a powerful verb pressing, squeezing and wedging the two concepts into a confined space.

But what does this have do to with musicianship and why would anybody pay money, much less develop a lifestyle, around such muck?

In an age that has witnessed the ascension of punk rock, the demise of disco and the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast on national television, what does it mean to be a “jam band” anymore?

Is it a style of music or a demographic?

Where do the Hackensaw’s fit in to all of this?

And where, Goddammit, is The Love?

The regular readers of this column may find it odd that its author has had little exposure to the “jam band” scene since the days when Jerry Garcia was merely overdosing instead of simply dead. True, I have chronicled the Hackensaw Boys’ experiences at jam band sorts of events like the Bonnaroo Festival in Coffee County, Tennessee and the High Sierra Festival in Quincy, California, but during those events the author of this column was engaged in activities such as searching for a working pay phone, looking for a free beer or catching up on a missed night’s sleep; these pursuits left little time nor inclination to delve into the music offerings.

But such is the inertia of the road and it would be wrong to cite these endeavors in any litany against the touring life. Indeed, some of my most pleasurable moments on a tour occur in the struggle to secure a working payphone on a rainy night with only 10 minutes until the bus will finally and irrevocably leave my ass behind somewhere in Missouri. For it is of this stuff—an essence distilled from anxiety, exhaustion and inconvenience—that being on the road truly consists. All of this is, as usual in my columns, beside the point. My intention in this essay was to bring some sense of the Jam Cruise II and hopefully add a kernal of truth to the dusty grainhouse that is the sum of all human learning. Why do I want to do this?

Because nothing less would do, nothing more can be done.

But you’ve perhaps grown accustomed to my penchant for tangents.

You see, one of the great ironies of touring is that though a band may appear at a dozen festivals in the course of a summer they actually spend very little time being part of those festivals. The sad truth is that the musicians very rarely experience the event itself, which has little to do with music. Because it’s one thing to be on a tour and to stop off where a group of people are having one hell of a party, but it’s quite another thing to get off work at 2pm on a Thursday afternoon, drive several hundred miles, wait in traffic for eight hours, secure a campsite and proceed to form spontaneous and lasting bonds with complete strangers that in few days’ shared experiences blossom into deep and abiding friendships.

But I fear that I am waxing sentimental.

The cold hard fact was that the Jam Cruise was most unlike a normal festival in that we (the staff the performers and the attendees) were all on a ship at sea from which there was no escape.

The Jam Cruise was the great leveler. Everybody was on the boat.

Everybody was vulnerable.

You could not simply walk away or hitch a ride back home. As C.B. Hackensaw decided a scant 24 hours prior to the cruise, once you’re on the boat there’s no going back. If you want to leave you better make sure there’s some dry land on which to put your feet.

Sure, you had the option of jumping overboard but who was going to save you if the going got rough?

Indeed, as one Jam Cruiser warned me late on the third night, any one of the thousands of porpoises swimming beside the ship would have no doubt cut any jumper to shreds with their sharp beaks. When I expressed my doubts concerning the reality of the porpoises and posited the alternate theory that the observer’s poison had simply kicked-in, the gentleman assured me that I was mistaken. He promised me that if I would only look at the empty waves long enough I would see the porpi as well. Though I was tempted to linger, I was unwilling to miss the next feeding at the ship’s sumptuous buffet and so I declined the man’s offer and left him in the same posture as I had encountered him—hands on the rail, head bent forward, eyes aglow, keenly studying the waves.

The ever-present potential for porpoise impalements aside, the Jam Cruise consisted mostly of carbohydrates, recreational drugs and live music—all enjoyed at sea. It was as though the summer festival circuit had outstripped its normal climatalogical and terrestrial limitations and during the coldest month of the year a small, precious pod of that scene had taken to the ocean and warmer climes to keep the party alive so that in the spring it could blossom again into the familiar terra firma festival circuit.

We were the torchbearers and the stewards, the keepers of light in a dark time.

We had only what we took with us and we lacked for nothing.

We were at sea.

With the exception of golf carts, all the essentials for a summer festival were in place—nearly round-the-clock live music on several stages, sun-worshipping frolickers, college students getting drunk on love and more mature couples looking for a few laughs and maybe a chance to shrug off the worries of the workaday life.

Furthermore, as Shiner Hackensaw observed early one Caribbean evening, the Jam Cruise also had the requisite gangs of young Turks—festival-wise young men who hustled for inter-personal leverage, made connections and worried about the quality of their stash. These young men went to the shows (and could tell you all about them) but spent little mental energy on the music. Without them, however, the whole scene would go bust and thousands of Americans would lose their guiding light. Their presence on the Jam Cruise was a comfort and assurance that the forces of corporate darkness had yet to discover this particular pocket of hope.

In fact, the Jam Cruise was so legit that High Times sent a representative journalist accompanied by a Samoan chemical analyst bearing false legal credentials and a 24-hour liquor buzz.

Truly, if there was to be a party at sea this was it.

And a party it was.

The morning of departure I arrived at the ship still reeling from the effects of a long night drinking bourbon and playing Risk at a friend’s house located in what’s described as the “more relaxed” section of Boca Raton, FL. I remember somewhere around dawn, the party next door had ebbed to a dull roar, and I made some noises about a boat I had to meet.

“Besides” I conceded in a drunken slur, “my policy of seizing and holding Africa at all costs has left me little more than a deposed warlord roaming the Asian wilds, outgunned, outmatched and in the bottle.”

I was Genghis Kahn’s near-do-well alcoholic brother and I was ashamed.

Three hours sleep, two limp waffles and a strong cup of coffee later I was whisked to the docks of Ft. Lauderdale by a dark-haired physical therapist in a late model American sedan. The rest of the Hackensaws had already parked the Dirty Bird and unloaded the necessary equipment and I knew we were running late. After an embarrassing moment at the security checkpoint, during which I could not remember the name of the boat nor any relevant information that would explain my presence there, I was duly deposited next to the ship and set forth to locate my mates and gear.

Then I stood in line for five hours.

Suffering under the combined effects of sleep deprivation, hangover, dehydration, and the strain of my luggage, I staggered onto the boat and immediately consumed two of the free beers being offered at a makeshift welcome station.

In this way did I meet The Olympia.

She had been renamed The Regal Empress by a bunch of Pompano Beach cruise line types who had purchased her at an auction after she’d spent ten years as The Caribe in the Caribbean service.

But before all that she’d been The Olympia, the pride of the Greek line. Her maiden voyage was October 20th, 1953 and for two years she plied the North Atlantic service between Bremerhaven, Germany and New York in the United States before moving on to the longer “sun route” from New York to Halifax, Lisbon, Naples, Messina, Piraeus, Limassol and Haifa.

Then she was mothballed in Piraeus, Greece for ten years.

A seemingly ignominious end for a ship that had once had once had a line of ball gowns and summer dresses designed specifically for her by Normal Hartnel.

If this had been the end of so proud a ship surely Posieden himself would have wept and the oceans themselves heaved in protest.

Fortunately for people with coast-line real estate, the oceans stayed more or less put because in 1982 The Olympia was refitted with diesel engines and returned to the Caribbean where her old-world charm and smaller size immediately endeared her to a certain type of cruise seeker—the kind who appreciates the mom and pop hotels and has an eye for what many call an “old-time” feel.

Certainly the Hackensaws, as men who travel in a forty-year-old bus, were quite taken with The Olympia. I decided early in the trip that if I was ever to have a ship of my own I would want it to be very much like The Olympia. She was, I thought, the perfect ship for the Jam Cruise.

On several occasions, I turned from the poolside bar, a dearly purchased fresh beer in hand, and nearly laughed myself sick at the sheer spectacle of it all. Golden sun, uninterrupted sea, girls in swimsuits, an international staff at one’s beck and call, bartender’s with exotic accents, live music, and ... Webster’s first definition of “Decadence” is appropriate here: Deterioration.

Yes, there is no reason to read between the lines, for my aim is true and I will speak it plain—there were lots of kids on lots of drugs—from cocaine to nicotine, from MDMA to C6H10N4O2—and they were having themselves a good ol’ time. The Jam Cruise was not a place to seek personal epiphanies or cosmic knowledge.

This was a party and on this boat you did not bring your homework.

If there were any beatniks or accountants on board they were hidden deep in the bowels of the ship’s hindquarters because everybody I saw was in full festival mode—the stars and the numbers be damned.

If it served no other purpose, the Jam Cruise answered the eternal question—what would happen if the rave sensibility ran headlong into the Cruise mentality?

The answer: Deterioration and plenty of it.

The tootsie roll center of this particular tootsie roll pop was less than 3 licks away and warn’t no bullshit owl in glasses gonna take it away from you.

Word.

So now you know the whole truth. Has it made you richer? Has it made me richer?

No.

But we shall press on, dear reader, and see what comes rolling down the pike.

That is what we are meant for.

Nothing less would do.

All the Best,
Mahlon