Departed Musicians: Colorful, Memorable

  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.