A Blues odyssey tour diary – The Boneyard

THE NEXT DAY:

It feels good to wake up in a city like New York. You tend to do things you don’t normally do. Like go to church. I’ve been doing this every morning since I arrived. Not sure why. Maybe I’m finding God. Or maybe it’s the church organist who seems to always be in there practicing his chops, but constantly hitting wrong notes… or maybe they are actually the right notes. Either way, I find his unsettling chords are quite pleasing to my eardrums.

After visiting the public library I strolled on up to Central Park and remained there for most of the day. I was meeting friends for dinner but still had time to kill so I dipped into a bar for a drink. The bar was called The King Cole.

A fancy joint. Too fancy for a bum like me. Not wanting to look out of place, I ordered a Rusty Nail, Sinatra’s favourite drink apparently. I was shocked and appalled when the barman hit me with the tab of 40 bucks for my one drink. But it was cheap compared to some of the other drinks.

A Bloody Mary would set me back $190, as I soon discovered that this was the very bar that lays claim to having invented the famous drink.

I savoured every drop of that Rusty Nail and sat there among the yuppies until it was dinner time. Dinner quickly escalated into a booze up and the rest of the night is a foggy blur.

THEN:

I was still feeling the after effects of the prior night’s cocktails when it was time to hit the road. Myself and Brain took his 66 Mustang and travelled in style to his house in the Woodstock mountains. But it had been raining heavily and when we got there we discovered his basement had flooded.

The next few hours were spent pumping the water out of there, until the rain stopped and we called it a night.

We met Gary Sales for lunch the next day before heading to Levon Helm’s barn, where we were invited to a show. After everyone had left we got the special tour of the many artefacts in the barn before we left. The last to leave. A little sauced. The Irish way.

FURTHER:

Chad was on top form when I arrived in New Orleans. The first place we got to was Mt Moriah Baptist Church, where Mathalia Jackson learned to sing gospel songs.

Then we hit downtown for the Mardi Gras super Sunday parade and followed it all the way, until we got lost in an unsavoury neighbourhood. We went too far. Too deep. It was getting dark and we needed to get outta there before shots were fired.

We rolled back townward and onto Frenchman Street to sample the nightlife, but hit the hay early, as our blues odyssey was to begin first thing the next morning.

We would have to leave at the crack of dawn if we wanted to make it in time to Hazelhurst, the birthplace of Robert Johnson.