[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

… in which nothing was pressed.

In 1991, I went to a party in Lexington, VA, a place I was told at the time was the hot spot for inbreeding in the United States. My dad had recently been to Australia, and flying across that countrinent, he read an article in the in-flight magazine about a restaurant in Perth that was hailed as “The Best Restaurant in Australia.” It was near enough to his hotel so he went. “I’ve never been to the best restaurant in a country before,” he told me.

Being in the most inbred, per capita, city in a country is perfectly safe if you observe from a place of safety like an anthropologist in a blind or an oceanographer in a windowed diving bell. I was visiting a friend at Washington & Lee, so it was kind of like that. I don’t remember the party details. We went to a concert in a small columned structure and my friend was a first semester freshman, so I doubt it was Greek sponsored. It was private. I’m sure of that because there were only three or four hundred people in the hall and the headliner was a Robbie Robertson-less The Band. My friend was cute so she could get into any party. No idea why I was allowed in.

I’d never heard of the opening band. They were good, but fifteen minutes into their set I was pretty sure that they were still on their first song. I’d seen jam bands before. I saw The Grateful Dead when it was still jarring to see Bruce Hornsby out of his “and The Range” role. I laid in the grass at Oak Mountain Amphitheater twice while the Allman Brother played “Whipping Post” for two hours with brief side trips to other songs. It was just weird to hear an unknown band assume people liked a song they didn’t know and wanted to hear it riffed, dissected, and reassembled.

I know it was a small venue, but if the band asked me to play with them, I’d take the opportunity to showcase the breadth of what I can do; cast a wide net. These guys played one song – I’m pretty sure – for forty-five minutes. It was unexpected, but great.

I asked about them later. They were some guys from Georgia who were starting to get national attention: Widespread Panic.