Trump Jam [Historic]
Music is Carrboro and Chapel Hills primary world export and the place of the Cave in that is pivotal. Hauling my Amp & guitar & sound processors and wires down to the Cave stops me dead. I need to be booking a stagehand. I have a hand truck.
First Time I was in the Cave I was just getting off with my girl from some Purple Haze we got. Maybe it was Orange Barrel. No it was clean ass blotter. She and I did acid the weekends, and I think we even did some Wednesdays. Since she was my Art of Film Teacher in Greensboro we came over to Chapel Hill.
I remember liking the Cave a lot. There were those netted red jar candles on the table. It was a cool afternoon as outside it was Sunny and hot as hell that day.
Sun went down. I wasn’t 18 yet at all. Or did I turn 18? LSD. Sun was going down when we headed back. I was driving on 54 towards 85 what it was back then. All of it but I was on 54 & there had been a little hot rain the mist coming off the blacktop and I was going 95 miles and hour with a mind screaming and Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress blaring out the radio.
Car backed into the road and there was oncoming traffic. My girl I called Flick as code since she was a secret affair. Of course a young man has the compulsion to think of this is going to be forever. I remember later my friend telling me to shut up about it. It was over, you’ll find another girl. 17 to 24 does influence your expectations. So I stepped on the gas.
I stepped on the gas and whipped the car around the tail end of the other white mid size muscle car like a Le Sabre back in our lane. Her body had been thrown my way and I asked her if she was all right, which she was not. That is an acid trip impression violating some of the peace of set and setting. From calm candle table rush looking up at each other deeply taking off to beautiful highway and near carnage death as seen in the papers pictures of head ons combined speed of at least 140 miles per hour and she was crying so hard rivulets down her cheeks that I felt mean for what I had done and apologized.
Chapel Hill has long time been the place to come to for some sort of adventure in hip but now not so hip or even happy. I’ve come to feel a little oppressed. I take it personally what has happened to the airport. May 30 is also the day all of the small planes based at Horace Williams have to fly away. It is so backwards and disturbingly ironic I failed to make the airport nice, fun to be at.
May 2018 is going to go down in North Carolina History as the month the perfect little airport where Presidents learned to fly closed and the Cave Closed. What a perfect Beat place even with Poetry Evening my wife made. Mouse asked her to bring it to the Cave and she did and then I met her. I went down there when I moved here from Greensboro to read what I wrote out loud. Yesterday I made a CD of performances meant to be on the NPR Local Radio as a challenge to the University Poetry Classes & Writers living after the boxes and grass.
Hippies got off on Beat places. The Cave is Beat to its soul. It is a set. I wanted to make a Jukebox changing eras movie down there with a good camera & ensemble cast with Jack Whitebread in it. I might go down there tonight. Nancy Alex says she will only go the last night which I thought was the 30th.
I wasn’t barred from the Cave. John Howie was sweet to us about the sound system. My guitar is heavy and I ought say stuff independent of my addiction to my guitar now. Most of you play guitars. I might let someone play Intendor Tm #13. What a monster I built that one is. So I remember now the other Cave Era and why all has returned to “Beat”. I am explained by it. Also Rochdale, but in North Carolina.
The Rathskeller got cockroaches down there and the pizza was perfect. I ate down there with another love. I stayed down in Wilmington for a year. It has been NY and NC places I’ve been. Being there for since I was in high school and seeing it die makes me understand I am really getting old and near dying myself.
It is interesting to be here so close to the end of humanity as civilization again.
People now must not want to be in a real Cave, with cave drawings. Underground was where we had to go. Us, Beats. People with candles and playing music and singing and shooting the shit. God I was horrible drunk when my friend Joe Bell & and Slingblades sang and and to walk home because I couldn’t get a cab.
Who knows but maybe from this end there will be some movie or a national TV show with James Taylor the most famous of players I knew of around here thinking I don’t know as much as Mouse & Dave Robertson and the rest of you. I only been back around now 17, 18 years. You that I know around here have been here and it has always been here for you all.
All the local Beats is what I see. All the stories. The Cave Underground to end being, Damn.