Are there any roads or intersections in Boise that aren’t a) closed, b) torn up or c) gone?

  Of course there are. It just doesn’t seem that way when you’re trying to reach a destination more distant than, say, your front porch. 

  I’ve lived in Boise virtually all my life and can’t recall another time when so much roadwork was being done. It seems that no matter where you go, you run into signs warning of roadwork, actual roadwork and/or roads doing passably good imitations of bomb craters. 

  If you live in East Boise, plan on taking extra time to go anywhere west of, well, East Boise. That’s because two of the main streets in the East End – Warm Springs and State Street – are closed. They’ve been closed for weeks. I have more than a passing familiarity with this because I live in the East Boise and for weeks have been late for virtually everything west of there.

  And occasionally east of there. A couple of weeks ago, some friends who live east of my neighborhood planned to meet me for coffee. A logical spot to meet would have been The Trolley House, a cozy little restaurant on Warm Springs Avenue.

  I say “would have been” because The Trolley House was closed. Instead, we decided to meet at the Warm Springs Golf Course clubhouse. The decision made, I confidently drove up Walnut to Warm Springs, something I’ve done almost every day for years.

  What greeted me, however, wasn’t the traffic that makes you wait forever to get onto Warm Springs ever since Harris Ranch was built. People coming from Harris Ranch or other locations east of Walnut have to wait for oncoming traffic to make left turns onto Walnut, meaning that those of us wanting to get onto Warm Springs have to wait forever.

  That wasn’t the case on this particular morning, though. Instead of the usual, annoying traffic, the problem was even worse. Barricades had been erected and, just in case you were tempted to try to slip around them, heavy equipment had blocked the road completely. Short of abandoning your car and walking, there was no way to get onto Warm Springs. 

  My friends, meanwhile were enjoying their coffee at the golf course clubhouse and wondering where I was. When I called to explain, one of them suggested abandoning my car and using a bicycle.

  Barring that, he suggested a circuitous alternative route that, if I understood him correctly, would have put me somewhere in the vicinity of Tablerock. It sounded like a recipe for getting lost, something I’m extraordinarily good at doing. We never did meet for coffee, agreeing instead to postpone until Warm Springs is open again – whenever that is – or choose a different meeting place.

  There’s no guarantee, of course, that a different place would be accessible. So many roads are closed that you never know what’s accessible and what isn’t. I passed no fewer than nine roadwork, road-closed and detour signs on Front Street alone last week.

  Have you tried to drive down Mallard Drive, off of Park Center, lately? Mallard happens to be the street that leads to a clinic where I get allergy shots. It’s gone. Not the clinic, the street. Completely gone – sidewalks and all. It looks like a bomb went off there. You can’t even walk around the crater.

  “How do I get to the clinic on the other side of the blast zone?” I asked a workman.

  He thought about it for a few seconds and suggested backtracking a couple of blocks, parking my car at a business on the opposite side of what was left of the street and walking. This involved walking past the back side of the business, through a park and a marsh and across a rather large parking lot. Bottom line:  15 minutes late for the allergy shot.

  That isn’t the only crater in town. Another one has closed the street where a member of a band I play in lives. His home is where we rehearse. The street where his house is located looks like a scene from “Casualties of War.” He was told that it would be closed for two years.

  Parts of Warm Springs Avenue and State Street have been closed for weeks. This, of course, has meant multiple detours. You have to wonder how long it will be before the people doing the work run out of detour signs.

  To find out the reasons for all the roadwork and when at least some of it might be finished, I contacted the Ada County Highway District and was surprised to learn that ACHD isn’t doing most of the projects. Most, according to ACHD public information officer Rachel Bjornestad, are “utility improvements and/or work related to new development.”

  In the downtown area, she added, “a lot of the utilities are old and need repairs or replacement even without the new development. The Capital City Development Corporation also has several projects in the downtown Boise area, including Eleventh Street and the Linen Blocks projects.”

  When will it end?

  ‘We have seen this level of activity, especially in the downtown core, for the last two to three years and expect to see it continue.  As one project finishes, there is another waiting in the wings.”

  No end in sight, in other words. 

  It looks like my friend may have been right when he suggested an alternative to driving.

  It might be time to drag out the bicycle.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at  woodwardcolumn@gmail.com. 

Matthew Hartz is a champion fiddle player with scores of fiddling trophies from competitions around the country. So you might expect him to have scores of books, records, posters and other fiddling oddments.

  You’d be wrong.

  It’s not exaggerating to say that Hartz is a world-class musician. He’s won the Grand Masters Fiddle Contest at the Grand Ole Opry three times. He’s won the World Fiddling Championship in Texas and recently became a member of the multiple Grammy-winning roots group Asleep at the Wheel, playing venues throughout the U.S. and as far away as Switzerland.

  But his other passion – the one you wouldn’t expect – has nothing to do with fiddling. 

  He’s a diehard, lifelong Beach Boys fan. 

  With the Beach Boys memorabilia to prove it – enough Beach Boys memorabilia to fill three rooms.

  “I’ve been collecting it my whole life,” he said. “Some of it dates back to my childhood.”

  Hartz, 54, became a Beach Boys fan when he was three years old.

  “I was raised on Dixieland jazz and Simon Garfunkel. Those were my Dad’s records. But Mom was a Beach Boys fan.

  “I didn’t understand their music because I was just a little kid, but there was something so resonant about it that just stuck with me. It was so enveloping. I’m a Beatles and Rolling Stones fan, too, but it doesn’t go to that depth. I appreciate it all, but nothing as much as the Beach Boys.”

  He was such an avid Beach Boys fans that his older cousins brought him programs and photographs whenever they attended a Beach Boys concert. 

  A Boisean since he was 16, Hartz grew up in Blackfoot and Pocatello and has been playing music virtually all his life. His father started him on banjo and guitar, which he still plays, and, when he was eight, gave him a violin.

  “He said I could probably use it to play in the school orchestra. I joined the school orchestra at Syringa Elementary School in Pocatello, then got some private lessons and did classical competitions. Then one night Mom and Dad took me to an old time fiddle contest.”

  The contest changed his life. He was in third grade then and has been playing old time fiddle music ever since. He started small, playing at rest homes, never dreaming that one day he’d be knocking them dead at the Grand Ole Opry.

  As much as he loved fiddling, his love of the Beach Boys music never dimmed. He refers to the three rooms that house his Beach Boys collection as a “sanctuary.” Each room is dedicated to a specific era of the group’s long career – an early 1960s room, a late 1960s room and a 1970s-and-beyond room. Expecting to see records, photos and a modest assortment of other Beach Boys memorabilia, I was amazed at the scope of what he’s assembled.

  In addition to scores of records and photos, he has a Carl Wilson signature Rickenbacker 12-string guitar. (For those unfamiliar with them, three of the Beach Boys’ original members were brothers – Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson.)

  He has replicas of the Pendleton shirts the group wore for photos on two of their early albums. 

  He has a surfboard signed by Brian Wilson, who wrote virtually all of the Beach Boys songs and according to Rolling Stone is the 12th greatest songwriter of all time. (Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and John Lennon are the top three.)

  He has dozens of books about the Beach Boys.

  He has the set list from one of their concerts.

  He has a picture he drew of the Beach Boys – when he was seven.

  And a whole lot more.

  Hartz has seen the Beach Boys in person about half a dozen times. At an age when most Boys his age are excited to go to a movie or a ball game, he’d attended two Beach Boys concerts. His first was in in Salt Lake City. He was ten and living in Pocatello then.

  He knows things about Beach Boys concerts that happened before he was born, including one I attended at Boise High School in 1963.

  Or so I thought. 

  “It wasn’t ’63,” he said. “It was in ’64. That was during the time when the Beach Boys were touring and everyone thinks of as the classic Beach Boys tour with everybody, including Brian. What most people don’t know was that it only lasted eight months.”

  A troubled genius, Brian Wilson stopped touring in 1964 after having a nervous breakdown. He resumed touring much later in his life, though, with a large band and multiple backup singers. I was fortunate enough to attend one of their concerts. Wilson was in his 70s then and showing his age. He couldn’t hit the high falsetto notes he once sang so effortlessly –  but the backup singers could. And he sang and played everything else perfectly. It was a great show.

  Occasionally the Beach Boys’ influence shows up in Hartz’s fiddle music.

  “It’s there, no matter what kind of music, even when I’m with Asleep at the Wheel. There are guys that are hip enough to ask about a note choice I play that other people wouldn’t play, like ‘Wow, how come you used that?’ like in the context of the blues. It makes it a softer sound to use to shape a passage.”

  To hear him discuss the Beach Boys’ music, check out the In My Beach Boys Room podcast, hosted by his Harts and his friend and manger Adam Schreiner. 

  Given the myriad items in his “sanctuary,” it’s surprising to learn that he only started it a short time ago.

    “I’ve been collecting my whole life, but it’s just been two years since I started putting it on display in these rooms,” he said. “And this isn’t all of it.”

  He had to be kidding.

  He wasn’t.

  “It’s not all out yet. Some of it is still put away. It’s sort of a work in progress.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  It’s been a tough few months for aging pop stars.

  Since November, we’ve lost Jeff Beck, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, David Crosby, David Lindley, Tina Turner, Robbie Robertson, and Jimmy Buffett. 

  For those of us who grew up with them, their deaths were personal. We bought their recordings, watched them on television, went to their concerts. We read about them, felt as if in a small way we knew them. With the exception of Tina Turner, I’ve played music by every one of them in my group, the Mystics.

  Speaking of the group, the loss of so many of our musical heroes put me in mind of departed musicians I worked with and knew well, all of them good friends. Musicians tend to be memorable characters, in a colorfully offbeat sort of way, and now seems as good a time as any to reminisce about them.

  Bassist John Hynes was a success story with a shaky beginning. Given a choice between a date with the prettiest girl in our high school and a case of beer, he’d have taken the beer every time. There were a couple of nights when he drank so much of it that he fell down on stage, his bass guitar sounding like an exploding meteorite when it hit the floor.

  John drove a souped-up, bright orange Chevy hot rod with what some suspected to be a rocket engine. If you were a passenger when he floored it, you felt the skin on your face stretch like Silly Putty. The  car was known to every cop in town. And when it came to cops, John was spectacularly unlucky. He once threw a beer can out his car window at a stoplight and it landed on the hood of a police car!

  So much for the shaky beginnings. He was, after all, only a teenager then. He married his high school sweetheart, went to work on the green chain at a sawmill and earned one promotion after another. He and his wife raised two sons and returned to Boise when he retired from his last job – supervising some 400 employees at multiple sawmills. He also was active in his church, which surprised me. Maybe beer was served there.

  Our keyboard player in those days was a boy named Vance Shirley, the youngest member of the group and the one usually conned into doing what none of the rest of us wanted to do. When a rival band broke into the ballroom where we played and took some of our equipment, it was Vance who was nominated to return the favor at their dance hall. The rest of us waited nervously in the alley while he tried to squeeze into one of its windows.

  And got stuck – half in the window, half out. This was his predicament when a police car entered the alley. Its headlights illuminated all of us except the would-be burglar, who was just out of their beams. The driver of the car was the late Vern Bisterfeldt, who went on to become an Ada County commissioner and Boise city councilman. Vern occasionally patrolled our dances.

  “What are you guys doing in the alley?” he asked us.

  “We’re waiting to get into the Rocking Castle for a rehearsal.”

 “You guys don’t play at the Rocking Castle. You play next door, at the Fiesta Ballroom.”

  “Uh … Well, yeah, we do. But we’re doing a special gig at the Rocking Castle.”

  “I see. Well, have a good rehearsal boys.”

  “We will, Vern. See you later.”

  His patrol car moved a few feet, then stopped.

  “By the way,” he said. “What are Vance’s legs doing sticking out of  the window?”

  He not only had seen Vance in the darkened part of the alley, he had recognized him by his stubby legs. Whatever we made up to wriggle out of that tight spot is long forgotten, but it must have worked because none of us went to jail for breaking and entering. Sadly, the only thing extracted from the dance hall that night was Vance. We never did get our equipment back.

 Tom Burke wasn’t an actual member of the band; he was our sound man. We knew he’d be a good fit when we learned that he owned  every Steely Dan album ever recorded – on vinyl. We were all hard-core Steely Dan junkies. Tom was a good sound man, but the thing I remember best about him was his garden.

  His vegetable garden was a thing of beauty. It was huge, row upon row of meticulously tended plants. His tomatoes, “tomaters” as he called them, were his pride and joy. If there are better tomatoes, I’ve never tasted them. Not long after he died, his property was sold and his garden plowed under to build a new house, which in my fond imaginings is infested with tomato worms.

  Russ Martin was one of a kind. Beard, long hair, natty dresser,  magnetic personality. Women flocked to him the way adolescent girls flock to Taylor Swift concerts. He was smart, funny, impossible not to like.

  And one of the most scatter-brained people I’ve ever known.

  Some examples:

  The two of us had been looking forward for weeks to attending a concert in Seattle. We were on the plane waiting to take off when he said something astounding, even for him.

  “You know that Robben Ford concert we’re going to tomorrow night, May 16th?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “I got the date wrong. It was actually on April 16th.” 

  His sense of direction was all but non-existent. When we were leaving to play in New Meadows, he asked if it was before or after Mountain Home. 

  After playing one winter night at the Trail Creek Lodge north of Sun Valley, he turned the wrong way to go back to Boise, drove white-knuckled on the icy highway over Galena Summit and was rescued by a state police officer who found him a place to spend the night in Stanley, possibly saving him from freezing to death. 

  We used to box him in so he wouldn’t get lost – one of us driving ahead of him, another behind him.

  He’d still get lost. 

  En route to North Idaho, he missed a turn at New Meadows and drove all the way to Weiser – 60 miles in the wrong direction. He was so late we had to start playing without him.

  Like many musicians, he was an unforgettable character. It’s still hard to believe he’s gone.

  Or that any of them are gone. Some were younger than I was. The moral, if there is one, is that we should make the most of the time we have. Life is short and time is precious. In a way, it’s all we have.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.