Waging Heavy Peace (35 page)

All I have to do now is navigate the waters of venture capitalism, those treacherous shorelines of commerce, in the HMS
Pono
, a fine ship of significant age and worthiness, with a crew I barely know, but who seem to be committed to the great cause of delivering the cargo to safe harbor in the Heart of Music. I can’t tell you how scary this is. I have never been here before, on this vessel, in these waters, with the cargo on board. I seek counsel continuously from a wealth of friends who are experienced in carrying the cargo home to port. They have done this before me. But this is my cargo. I chose it myself, and it has gone undelivered for what seems like decades. How often I wake up at midnight full of questions. Am I alive? Yes.

I may have been asleep for forty years. It’s hard to tell. Some people have pointed out to me how great I used to be when I wrote a bunch of songs, but I’m not sure they know what they are speaking about, or the subject, even. Why so pensive about the past? What can it say or do for you now? Nothing much, I fear. I used to wonder if people recognized me, and I was even worried if I thought they did because I didn’t really need to be reminded what I was like or when something happened or if I met you once.

Perhaps I overstated that. Forty years is not an amount of time to ignore, though. I think I will have to use my time wisely and keep my thoughts straight if I am to succeed and deliver the cargo I so carefully have carried thus far to the outer reaches. Not that it’s my only job or task. I have others, too. Sacred things that I need to protect from pain and hardship, like careless remarks on an open mind. I need to guard against that and honor the source of my feelings, not hide them in a blanket of doubt. My songs are hidden now, orphaned from their melodies and structure that once contained them. How am I, some forty years down the road, to deal with that past accomplishment? Cast it off? Relinquish it to the others who value it more? Was it me? Or who am I now that I cannot see or meet myself the way I was? That is not for me to know, because I am busy with new things now and have no time at all. I am very busy with all of this, and every day is shorter and I wake up earlier and go to sleep at a different time than before. I dream all the time at night, not like before, when I induced dreams in the waking hours to snatch them in their innocence and commit them to song and melody and words captured. Not now. It is not now for that. It is far over for that, I think. I am hoping for a revelation of dreams I can remember, but that is never the case with dreams, is it?

So now I am in the song machine gone awry. I wander the halls of straightness, not knowing how to hallucinate. Finally the course is clear and the sound of waves on rocks is fading. The fog is clearing and there is so much sea. An endless chorus of waves, melodies, refrains, and codas, cropping up and fading away, are a reminder of the duty at hand and the wasted moments. It is the time to gather this and make something of it, or it is not that time. There is no clue. Just the clear sound of the waves on the wood as the ship moves dutifully toward delivery of the cargo. I am on the deck now, at the wheel even, the wind in my hair, such as it is. And my hat is gone, blown away by the same wind that powers me on. The Heart of Music to be saved, delivered, moored, and off-loaded. This is my life, my dream, my moment in the wind. Escape me if you will, songs. Let yourselves go now. We approach safe harbor.

Chapter Sixty-Two

I
t is 9:43
A.M.
on the West Coast. I will hit the “Buy it now” button at exactly ten
A.M
.

My latest love affair is a 1961 Lincoln Continental with about fifty thousand miles on it. Very nice original condition with a few hot rod appointments, and not what I usually go for, but this car really caught my eye. I was looking for a Ford product to replace the Eldorado in the video series. One reason for this is the damage I did to the Eldorado that day on I-5 with little Nina.

The other reason is the real reason: For the same amount of money it would take to rebuild the engine in the Eldorado, I can purchase another Ford product. (Of course, I will rebuild the Eldorado anyway, so the money is not really a valid reason.) “Why is that so important?” you might ask. It is important to me because I will be taking Bill Ford, executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, for a ride and letting him feel Pono. I really like Bill because he is a futurist, and not many people would actually believe how much of a visionary he is, since he is at the head of one of the oldest car-manufacturing companies in the world. He is taking a hard look at the future while he is here on earth. He is trying to understand where traffic will be in twenty years, what cars will be like, what people will need for transportation. He and Jim Farley, head of global marketing for Ford, have changed a lot of things.

Today’s Ford cars are very different from yesterday’s. They have evolved the interior and its features into many levels while using the same exterior with few changes from the top of the line to the entry level. That is really revolutionary. The quality is added inside. It’s in the user experience inside the car. That is where the big difference is now. This enables a lot of money to be saved and put into the inside of the cars, where people are. So I want him to hear Pono in one of Ford’s own cars. No car in the world has ever sounded that good, and I think he will hear that. Being me, I have chosen a 1961 Continental over a new Ford Focus, but I want to take the prototype system out of the Continental and put it in the Focus to show how easy that is as part of the demo I plan for Mr. Ford.

So I located this Continental and plan on buying it at ten
A.M.
PST, when the owner will put it up on eBay for a prearranged price, which is actually still a little too high. I go by feelings, and my feeling is that this is the right car, even though it is not standard stock, because it has nineteen-inch wheels and a new exhaust system resonating the original 430-cubic-inch V8, and I am paying for extras I don’t really want. That said, it is rock and roll and worthy of the Pono feature. It is quite possibly the Hot Rod Lincoln you have heard so much about! The rest of the car is a really nice, near cherry original, beautiful in every respect, a true work of automotive history. I have looked at this car for almost two weeks in pictures, checking out each one and reading the description over and over. I trust the seller.

The car is in Canada, and I may go up there and get it next week and drive it home, stopping in Seattle on the way back to celebrate Pearl Jam’s twentieth anniversary with them. Sounds like fun. 9:59
A.M.
! Gotta go!

Chapter Sixty-Three

I
n Kansas City for Farm Aid 26, I found myself strangely lightened, with all of the harsh business negotiations I am so unfamiliar with over for the moment and gone from my thoughts. I thought of myself as a breeze blowing through Kansas, not worried, not pensive at all. I saw my old friends in the Farm Aid family: Willie, John, Dave, Carolyn, Glenda, Corky, David, and a couple of new friends, Willie’s talented son Lukas Nelson, and Jamey Johnson, a great singer/songwriter from Alabama who has landed in Nashville, I imagine temporarily. Jamey and Lukas are the new guard. Real country. Real good. No bullshit. They are not the only ones, but if they were, they could handle it.

Musicians like to check the stage and make sure everything is working before a show. Some groups let their crews do it. Some don’t. If a band is running late, then the crew has to do it. If you sing, it’s good to know that the monitor speakers onstage are right for your ears. Some singers today use in-ear monitors and listen to their voices pretty loud directly in their ears. I don’t do this. I love to hear the sound of the hall, the echo off the walls, and the sound of the instruments onstage blending together. That is key for me if I’m going to improvise or get lost in the sound. I want to walk around the stage with my guitar, finding the sweet spot where I can hear everything in balance. That is key for me playing extended jams. In-ear phones are way too sterile and clinical for me. I have to hear the speakers and the amps and the hall sound.

The night before the Farm Aid show, I had a sound check and it was different. I sang the set I was planning on doing in the empty soccer stadium. I started with “Comes a Time.” There was so much echo that I really couldn’t hear too well, and the monitors sounded really harsh to my ears. I sang “Powderfinger,” and it was too high for me to reach the notes that night. I hadn’t really warmed up and it was hard to sing those high notes. I tried a few things and nothing really sounded too good, so I asked Mark Humphreys to just turn off the monitors completely, which not many musicians feel comfortable doing. All I could hear was echo now, just the sound of the stadium. I sang “Sugar Mountain.” Actually it sounded good to my ears; notes just lasted forever. Nothing was abrasive. I tried my harmonica. It was like floating on air. The echo was amazing. I did “Peaceful Valley Boulevard” and then “Love and War.” I tried out the harp in “Love and War.” It worked, and the sound just floated out into the Missouri night.

So the next day at the show, when I was watching everyone play, adjusting their monitors all the time, trying to find a good sound and struggling, I used no monitors at all. I just didn’t bother using any. I knew it was going to be cool. Just like a breeze blowing through Kansas. Everything sounded beautiful. I did an acoustic set and really enjoyed it. One guitar, one harmonica, and six songs were all I needed.

There was something about that set that still haunts me. I was ready for the echo. The sound was like I was in another world. Every note just hung there in space. I drew them out and felt them all lingering and fading. Somehow, just by myself, I had become so free that it was almost transcendent. The place was not that great of a venue, really. It had everything going against it until I stopped fighting it and dropped the onstage monitors. When I did that, it was like the gates of heaven swung open. I swear that sound was like being in a hallowed place. I was so free and unencumbered, really a very rare thing, very rare. Especially solo. “Golden,” as Briggs used to say. I love it when it works. That echo was a gift from the gods.

Earlier in the day I had gone out for a walk around the grounds with Carolyn Mugar, Farm Aid’s wonderfully dedicated executive director and a good friend, accompanied by some security people. They (security) were pretty subtle, and it all was good. I kept moving. I have learned how long I can stay in one place in that kind of situation: Not very long. I listened to the music playing from the stage as I walked around the concession area through the crowd, wondering how I would sound with just my guitar and harmonica. Pretty good, I thought to myself. Then I saw a guy with a really old and cool Neil Young and Crazy Horse T-shirt. He was lost in thought. I walked up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Really nice shirt.” He looked up and I caught his eye. Then I kept moving. People were beginning to notice me, and a little crowd was following me. We disappeared into an elevator and went back to the bus.

—

T
he Zen art of paddleboarding has been creeping up on me now for months. Recently my friend Rick Rubin, a great record producer, has taken up the pastime. Rick is quite Buddha-like, and to think of him on his paddleboard is a very harmonic vision. I went out this morning and only fell off five times, which I am feeling very good about. My knees were shaking as I stood for the first time and surveyed the great open expanse before me on the bay by our Hawaii home. I paddled for a long time until some disturbance in the force overtook my groove and I plummeted face-first into the welcoming sea. Doggedly, as in “like a dog,” I climbed back on board with my beautiful Koa paddle resting on top of the deck. Then, on my knees, I resumed paddling until the nerve to stand assembled itself in my balance-challenged form. Suddenly I was up again and under way, gleefully rejoicing in my newly found existence as a man of the water. I approached a rock outcropping and had deftly avoided getting too close to it when a subtle swell rolled beneath me, completely throwing me off balance and into the welcoming sea again. The water was relatively calm, and the swell was a little like jelly when it came through. I vowed to be more aware and reasserted myself, standing once more with paddle in hand, looking out on the distant shoreline and feeling at one with the board.

The time had come to make a turn, an adjustment in course, and I was experimenting with this, first paddling on one side, then reversing the flow on the other side, making the craft unwieldy, and once again I found myself in the welcoming sea. On my knees, I continued toward the launch point, thoroughly worn out and totally invigorated by my new experience.

This, I felt, was the beginning of a new chapter for me, the basis of a more broad understanding of my place in the universe. Perhaps I was taking it a little too seriously, but the bottom line is I had a great time out there. On this journey, my maiden voyage, I was accompanied throughout by my neighbor and friend Greg McManus on his paddleboard.

I told you before that Greg and his wife, Vicki, own and operate the Napa Valley Wine Train, which he repairs himself, among other feats of engineering. Previously Greg’s engineering prowess had been demonstrated many times, notably in the design and implementation of a system he developed for getting Ben Young into the ocean via a system of wires and pulleys that was tied off on the shore to a tree and in the water to a big lava rock under the surface. The system was devised because carrying Ben into the water over lava rock was obviously a source of danger and concern. So, with this new idea, we would get Ben Young in a giant sling with pulleys on it connected to an overhead wire and let him glide down along the wire until he splashed into the water and the waiting arms of his dedicated support team, Dustin Cline and Marian Zemla. Of course, Ben Young was laughing his ass off all the time and having a wonderful water experience! (Since Ben had his feeding tube implanted, we have not been doing this sort of thing, but I am not so sure we need to stop it. We are getting familiar with the tube, and it’s really quite stable. It just takes some serious getting used to. Ben should still have those ocean activities, and I see no reason to stop if it’s safe.)

Although Ben will not be able to paddleboard with me, I know he will enjoy watching. He always likes sharing himself with us by watching, which is one of those gifts he has. He just enjoys what we’re doing through our joy. He has become a master of that. Life is short and should be lived to the fullest. We will be trying to do everything we can to get back in the ocean again with Ben Young.