I was driving the bus - our first bus, the 1960 International Harvester which had already fallen on its side in Evergreen - and we had just come out of the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70, below Loveland Pass. If you've ever traveled that way, you know that there is a 7% grade for six miles; truck drivers are warned to USE LOW GEAR to avoid "runaways" - a situation where a heavy vehicle can not stop or slow down because the brakes heat up and fade, and engine braking is not enough to overcome the vehicle's weight. I think there are runaway ramps now, but there were none at the time.
A few hundred yards down the mountain, I went to touch the brakes, and... my foot went to the floorboard. No brakes.
I announced our predicament to the fellows. We quickly devised a plan: Someone would pull on the parking brake lever enough to slow down so that I could shift down to a lower gear. Then, we would repeat the maneuver until we were in low gear. Thank God, it worked.
Finally, I got the bus stopped by steering into the mountain at the side of the highway.
Had we been a little farther down the slope, we would not have been able to stop without serious damage to us and the bus. We were towed into Vail.
Bud
learns the mandolin.
Mike
Roark had played mandolin. Now, carrying on
that tradition, Bud learned to play it too. He
got himself a nice old Gibson A-style and was soon
pickin' up a storm. We typically began our
sets with three or four bluegrass
numbers before reverting to electric instruments.
Here's a photo of one of those bluegrass sets, fairly early on (I know it's early because the bass-drum head is the one Buddy used in the Penetrations, and he's not wearing a hat!):
Here's a photo of one of those bluegrass sets, fairly early on (I know it's early because the bass-drum head is the one Buddy used in the Penetrations, and he's not wearing a hat!):
The
Winnebago.
After Mike Roark's accident and our near-death experience
with
brake failure - not to mention the fact that the bus's
six-cylinder engine
wasn't adequate for long stretches of highway and pulling us up
mountain
sides - we procured a Winnebago. Not a big one, but big
enough to
haul us in comfort while pulling a trailer with our gear in
it.
418 cubic inches of Mopar V-8 power, walls of styrofoam, and
best of all,
air conditioning.
The
boys
and the Winnebago. Looks like Hays, Kansas as I
recall it.
Here
are Andy (emulating the cover of Bobby Bland's Two
Steps from the Blues album) and Carol with
the Winnebago in July 1976.
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Here are
the boys sporting during a break in the comfortable
confines of said Winnebago:
1976.
Our primary goal in 1976 was to stay busy enough to keep going.
We played pretty much wherever we could - Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri...
and we were very popular in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for some reason...
Our primary goal in 1976 was to stay busy enough to keep going.
We played pretty much wherever we could - Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri...
and we were very popular in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for some reason...