Heather and I, as of tonight, have been playing together for 20 years. It’s kind of hard to really comprehend – unless I try to remember playing without her – and though the memories of playing with Audrey are still there in my head, jamming with Abe and Bryan and Ed, they’re pale by comparison, pushed out of my mind by the constant, consistent presence of Heather Aubrey Lloyd in my Life through thick and thin and Life and death and disappointment and glee and mountains and salt flats and deserts and forests… indeed, coffeehouses, colleges and clothing-optional resorts. Luck, fumes, spit, Love.
Happy ilyVERSARY Heather Aubrey Lloyd. I’m so grateful we were unafraid.
Tonight couldn’t be ALL about us, though if I’d been thinking ahead enough maybe it could’ve been. David Eisner booked Mark “Muleman” Massey, and if I’d thought ahead and booked US as my feature to celebrate a special night, well, we’d have missed out on another sort of very, very special night.
Mark was one of my last featured artists at El Golfo on February 19th right before COVID came to America in force. I guess we were beginning to hear rumours of a flu in China and I was beginning to worry about where that might go, I had friends in China and in more international settings who were getting worried about it, but we had no REAL idea… However, about a month after playing in Silver Spring, MD with us, Mark played a gig in Mississippi in which a number of performers, the minister at the church and much of the congregation caught COVID. A member of the band, several of the congregation, and the minister all died by the beginning of April and Mark himself was extremely sick for weeks. He was pulled through by the untiring efforts of his wife who kept him in baths of ice till the fever broke…
We learned all about it when we had Mark back virtually for Institute of Musical Traditions’ IMT : LIVE series on October 20th last year. It was there that he went a little deeper into his own origin story too, which is what made him perfect for this week at the Sandy Spring Museum.
For almost as long as we’ve been running the open mic, the museum’s been home to a traveling exhibit called Incarceration and Creation: Art as a Human Need, a collection of work from artists who are or were incarcerated. The artists’ statements range from simplistic sentiments to haunting statements on surviving their experience – and the paintings themselves are variable as well, but much of it is truly great. Passionate, figurative, stunningly observant.
And it came down the day after Mark’s show.
Mark himself is a product of the Mississippi prison system, having served time in the infamous Parchman Farm Prison for a marijuana charge, he points to learning the blues in prison and performing with the prison band as the thing that turned his Life around (rather than the hard labour).
I’m SURE David didn’t plan it – but the booking was perfect and I wouldn’t have inserted our anniversary in there any more firmly than we did.
Funnily enough – the past 20 years HAVE been defined more by happy accidents than almost any kind of plan. I often mention that my five year plan ended over 15 years ago, but we continue to be very, very lucky.
Happy anniversary Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 20 more?
I’ll be 66. That seems reasonable.
