The Trip Home & The Naples Hotel

I am now home, sitting in my studio, the place where much of the music from my album was written and a good chunk of it recorded.

Up on my wall there is a single wire brush—you know, the kind drummers use: “Shush-cha-cha shush-cha-cha…” Its mate lies in pieces in the corner underneath an large upright piano and between the floor boards of the Naples Hotel in Naples, New York,.

In 1986 I was attending Finger Lakes Community College. My good friend Jim was attending SUNY Geneseo and playing guitar in the string band. Also pickin’ in the string band was a talented lefty guitarist named Bobby Henrie.

Bobby had been home-schooled up until college. Geneseo was the first formal institution of learning he had known. He wasn’t home-schooled for religious reasons, he and his brothers, “The Henrie Brothers Band” traveled so often, attending public school wasn’t practical.

The family band, a blue grass string band would show up at fiddle competitions in West Virginia or Georgia and assume southern accents. They would forget to mention they were from New York, even the very rural Middlesex, New York. They won more competitions that way.

Bobby attended college to study something that life on the road couldn’t teach him: electric jazz guitar.

Bobby’s junior year guitar recital was coming up and he needed a band. My friend Jim volunteered to play drums and gave me the call to play bass. Though I played upright (acoustic) bass, I didn’t own one so Bobby brought along his brother’s bass when he and Jim came to my place to rehearse.

After we were done playing Bobby jokingly said. “Hey, it’s a Thursday, we should go down to the open mic at the Naples Hotel and blow their minds with some straight jazz.”

“Okay, let’s go!” Jim and I chorused.

“Really?” Bobby said.

 The Naples Hotel

The next thing I knew we had driven almost thirty miles to Naples and were walking into the Naples Hotel. There were a large number of motorcycles parked out front.

“Playing for bikers wearing colors: When they hate you it’s bad, when they love you, it’s worse."
                                                                                                                                         -Me

The open mic had already started and a lone woman was on the stage singing Janice Joplin’s “Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz” a Capella, complete with a hammed-up southern accent.

The bar at the Naples Hotel from the 'stage' looking towards 
the handsomely appointed parlor in the front

“Lord, won’t you get me the heck outta here” I thought. Maybe this was a mistake.

A few of people seemed to know Bobby. That and his fearless confidence tempered my fears a little bit. There was a blue grass band on the stage while Jim set up his drums in the front parlor off the bar. It felt more like I was in someone’s living room than a bar. Regulars sat around in antique chairs chatting and sometimes just sitting and listening to the music from the band in the bar wafting gently in the room. I saw Jim Miller, a old neighbor and camp counselor from my youth.

Maybe this urban assault of jazz on this rootsy crowd wouldn’t lead to bloodshed after all.

When it was our turn to play it became clear the venue was not set up for bands with drummers, there was no room on the stage area for Jim’s modest three-piece drum kit between a piano and a pinball machine. He would have to make due with a snare drum and one cymbal and he very nicely did just that.

Unbeknownst to Jim at the time, he was not finished paring down his kit to a minimalist wind-blown ghost town of percussion.

At some point during our first song, one of the brushes Jim was holding decided it was done being a drum brush and released all its bristles at once. The thin steel wires flew everywhere.

Bobby just kept right on playing. Jim managed to keep a good solid groove going with one brush on one drum.

Bobby, who is a consummate showman and who these days has a rockabilly trio called “Bobby Henrie and the Goners” and a Django Reinhat tribute band called the "Djangoners", had the bikers and lovers of old timey music eating out of his hand and cheering on his straight jazz. He ended our set with some rockabilly tunes that I didn't know. She shouted out the changes and I somehow kept up.

The Djangoners, playing in the style of Django Reinhardt. 

Bobby Henrie is on the far left

During part of our recent visit home, we stayed with my sister only a few blocks from the good ole Naples Hotel. It’s still brimming with bikers.

At my parents’ 50^th Anniversary party Jim and I were honored to meet Bobby’s Father.  He said the Goners are still going… going... strong.

Our last leg of our road journey home from New York to LA was uneventful compared to the storm the night before. It was extremely beautiful though.

 Devil's backbone, Utah

I-70 through Glenwood Canyon, Colorado

Westbound lanes on top, Eastbound below 

There are Sante Fe Railroad tracks across the river

We crossed the Rockies and the Utah desert in the daylight and passed through the sea of light that is Las Vegas at night.

Win, win.

Las Vegas at night

Not a half mile inside the California state line, we saw a strange site ahead of us: lights waving up and down and side to side. Soon wee could see three people in the middle of the fast lane waving their cel phones and a flashlight so that people wouldn’t hit the car lying on its side just behind them. I was too busy avoiding jagged pieces of debris to notice if there was anyone in the car, I was told by Audra there wasn’t. It looked as though it had kissed the pavement from every conceivable angle before coming to rest perpendicular to the lanes.

It was a sobering site. I drove on balancing my urge to floor it all the way just to get home with my need to safely get there in one piece. I also noticed after Las Vegas that the courteous drivers we had seen all across the country had been replaced by aggressive non-signaling race competitors.

Would that same car accident have happened in Arkansas?

It was just after midnight when we arrived at Audra’s parents’ house in Highland, the place where the majority of my album was recorded. The next day, home in Hollywood proper.

A chapter has closed in my life. I have now released an album of my own creation and fronted a band playing music I wrote in a public venue.

Fantastic!

I think I’ll turn the page and continue.

It’s been good to be back at work and yet, I walk around now knowing more profoundly than ever that I am out of my element, a musician trying to make a living in the real world, where people pay more for peanut butter in a year than we do for music –myself included.

Ah, but for a couple of weeks there I was a musician and just a musician, toolin’ across the country with my gear in the back of the car. It felt freakin’ great!

I don’t need that single remain drum brush on my wall that Jim presented me with before I moved to LA to remind me of that night at the Naples Hotel. It’s not necessary to look at it to remember why it is that I moved here, to become a musician, a recording artist…

But it helps.