Originally published in Tacoma City
Paper
It’s an hour before Wednesday’s
thunder storm hits and another kind of storm is brewing at Sylvester Park in
downtown Olympia. I’m lunching
on the grass in a crowd of thousands: gray bearded hippies, young couples of
all persuasions, parents swinging toddlers ‘round and ‘round in time to
the music, a hundred or more dancers crowded up near the gazebo swaying like
sea grasses the in wind. On
stage, Jude Bowerman is doing things with a guitar the good Lord never meant
fingers to do, playing hard rocking blues riffs a la Johnny Winter, with a
hint or two of Hendrix and Santana. The
man makes a guitar do everything but cook supper and deliver it to the table.
The performance builds over an hour, with
crescendo after crescendo, like the man is building to some kind of climactic
finale. But hey, he’s just
playing music. Then he does goes
into the real finale. It’s a long,
long, long solo with drummer and bass man laying down a solid back beat.
Bowerman walks down into the crowd and the crowd parts like the sea for Moses,
and he’s walking around the park, shaking hands, shouting greetings, his
metallic purple shirt sparkling like the lightning that is building up behind
the clouds, while lightning fast fingers run the frets, never losing a lick
as he wanders around the crowd.
Standing on the sidewalk at the edge of
the park, a heavyset man with beard holds a dog on a leash.
Bowerman walks up to him, shakes his hand, talks to him a good three
minutes while still running blazing riffs and endless chords on his guitar,
his backup band 100 yards away still laying down that pulsing back beat.
"He teaches writing at Capital
High," a woman next to me says. Makes
sense Jude would talk to him. Probably
took one of his classes. Yeah,
Bowerman is a native son come home to perform for friends.
He went to middle school with my son.
They were in a guitar class together.
My boy never learned to play; Jude never had to.
"He just took the class for an easy credit," my son said.
"He could have taught the teacher."
Then I see the shirt the man is wearing,
a black and gold college sweatshirt with the letters USM.
That’s the University of Southern Mississippi.
My alma mater 2,000 miles away. I
went to school there in the ‘60s. Taught
there in the mid-‘80s. So I get
up and walk over there and introduce myself.
Jude is heading back to the gazebo, still playing.
The teacher and I gab for about five minutes, discovering we have
mutual friends. Writers from
Mississippi. Barry Hannah, the
king of the cover blurb, and Larry Brown, one of the best fiction writers in
America today.
I go back to my family and Jude’s still
wailing and the audience is clapping like they’re asking for an encore, but
Jude ain’t finished yet. He’s
going into yet another crescendo. I
think about Thom Jones, Olympia’s most famous writer, author of Pugalist at Rest and Sonny
Liston was a Friend of Mine. I remember that Thom Jones is also friends
with Barry Hannah and Larry Brown, so I’m thinking I bet this guy knows Jones too; so I get up and walk over and talk
another three minutes, and sure enough he and Jones are friends, and Jude is
finally winding down. The crowd
is so worn down they can’t even clap anymore.
Everybody sits in stunned silence for awhile, then they go home.
It’s not even dark yet. That’s
when the thunder storm hits and South Sound is entertained by thunder and
lightning for the next hour, but I’ve had enough entertainment.