It was a time of great upheaval in America, and it was no different even out on the Great Plains. I quickly fell in with the anti-war crowd and other people as obsessive about music as I was. In many cases, they were the same, and in 1969, pretty easy to pick out in a conservative Lutheran college in a farming community in central Nebraska. We all stuck out, something I would learn very quickly when I took a job as bartender in a redneck Seward tavern.

One of those friends was Ray Dunbar. Coming outta Detroit, Ray was a rather large fellow, 250-plus pounds, and he was as charismatic and charming as he was huge. He also played guitar and was – at least to me at the time, with his girth and his fingerpicking skills -- a white teenage B.B. King when he plugged in his axe.

I had just picked up a guitar for the first time that spring, so anybody who could play better than me (and that included pretty much everyone) was considered a guitar god. Ray and I quickly became music pals. I’d go up to his room to shoot the shit about music and play rhythm guitar at which he could throw lead figures. How many hours did I repeat the Em-A figure upon which “Cowgirl in the Sand” is based on my acoustic guitar while Ray peeled mighty notes out of his electric?

One time I was in his room, and he showed me a copy of a single, “Mind, Body and Soul,” by a group I had never heard of, Flaming Ember. It was on Hot Wax Records, a small Detroit label. And, Ray said in passing, he was co-writer and producer of the song. I looked at the single, and sure enough, there was a credit on the label as co-songwriter: “R. Dunbar/ E. Wayne, and a sole production credit for R. Dunbar.

I thought that was cool, and didn’t think much more about it.

Then something happened. The single, not surprisingly, since it is catchy beyond belief, became a hit on the national charts. “Mind, Body and Soul” was soul pop music that just totally knocked me out. “Are you digging ‘Mind, Body and Soul?’ Well, it’s #36 on the Billboard charts, and one of my best friends wrote and produced it,” I gushed to my friend Frank Kresen in a letter dated December 2, 1969. “This guy is a genius with music, beautiful lead guitar.”

“Mind, Body and Soul” eventually reached #26 on Billboard’s charts in November of 1969. And so it was that Ray Dunbar became a celebrity on the campus of Concordia Lutheran College. I was proud to be his friend and to be able to provide that Em-A so he could wail on his electric guitar for twenty minutes at a time.

Ray tried to play live in the Seward area, and he performed a couple of times down at Heumann's, the redneck bar that had become a college hangout in the months after I started working, and we drove to Lincoln one night to watch him play in a club there.

Not long after I bought a single by a group that called itself Chairmen of the Board. “Give Me Just a Little More Time” was another melodic soul-pop number with a stuttering singer named General Johnson. By this time, my habit was to read all the information on the label. One thing caught my attention immediately.

It was written by R. Dunbar/E. Wayne.

Equally curious and annoyed, but more the latter. I took the single up to his room, showed it to him and asked the obvious question.

“Did you write this one, too, Ray?”

He quickly fessed up. He found the single, he said, saw the name and brought it out to Seward with him. Who would know? Once the momentum began building, he said, he just couldn’t resist soaking up the adulation. It wasn't long before everyone on campus knew of the deception.

“‘Give Me Just a Little More Time’ was written by R. Dunbar and E. Wayne, the same team that wrote ‘Mind Body and Soul,’ I informed Frank a couple months later. "My friend, Ray Dunbar, confessed that he didn’t write it. It was a giant hoax. (This is hoax time, it seems.) But it’s still a good record.”

I have tried to ascertain who actually comprised the Dunbar/Wayne team, and there is still some confusion. R. Dunbar seems to have been Ronald Dunbar, and E. Wayne was Edith Wayne, a pseudonym for Lamont Dozier and Brian and Edward Holland, the talented writing/production team responsible for many Motown hits of the mid-1960s.

"Mind, Body and Soul" came out on Hot Wax Records, and "Give Me Just a Little More Time" on Invictus, two labels owned by the songwriters and producers, who had left Motown in a money dispute and likely had to use the fake names because they were involved in litigation with Berry Gordy over their departure.

Some question whether Ron Dunbar actually existed. Freda Payne, for whom the same team wrote "Band of Gold," claims he was real and contributed to the songs. Others claim both songs are the work of Holland/Dozier/Holland. Both have the sound and feel of HDH, and it's easy to question why they would let a staff producer helm their first singles after the break from Motown. But it is possible.

One message-board post said that there is an as-yet-unreleased version of "Give Me Just a Little More Time" by the Four Tops, who were produced by HDH. (Would I love to hear Levi sing that one.)

Whatever the reality of the credits, the two songs are still sterling examples of 1960s soul music.

This one was far enough away from either of those places to have much impact. And the residents of the island, apparently less than a dozen people, were plucked quickly from the island and moved to nearby Dutch Harbor.

A volcano blowing its top is another chance to learn a little geography, and my first choice to get beyond the news story, so to speak, is to do a little exploring on my own. My first destination is Google Earth, the software program that allows you to fly over the planet at any height and see geographical features three-dimensionally. I find it infinitely useful for many things: in this case, to get a closer look at the topography than I can get from the news story or photograph.

After reading the Associated Press story -- in my local hard-copy local newspaper by the way -- I fired up Google Earth and typed in "umnak island, ak." Actually, I misspelled it and the program asked me if I wanted the correct spelling. I clicked yes and soon was hovering over the island. Zooming to a lower altitude, I easily discerned a couple of volcanic peaks covered in snow at one end and a battered caldera at the other. By that time, I had the A.P. story in another window, and read that it was the Okmok Caldera that blew.

Google hasn't finished mapping the entire planet up close, though it updates the images as the satellite (it uses the Quickbird satellite owned by DigitalGlobe in nearby Longmont and is the same technology that gave us those clear images of Baghdad in the lead-up to the Iraq War). But the caldera has a newer image that allows me to fly right into it and hover just above the lake in the middle.

Remembering, of course, that the features I am seeing, high ridges and ash flows down one side, vegetation around the edges, are all now gone or altered forever in the blast, which apparently happened without warning soon after an earthquake hit the area.

A regular Google search gives me a page that says the caldera has erupted regularly in history since at least 1805, and the last one was in 1996. Most are ash emissions and some lava flows, which are easily visible in Google Earth from the top of the volcano to the ocean below.

I click on a purple dot near the caldera and it brings up a Wikipedia page that says the caldera is at the top of a shield volcano and that it once was filled with a lake 500 feet deep which eventually drained out through a notch on the northeast rim. The notch is easily visible, and if you zoom in close you can see rapids flowing down the flanks.

Another purple dot near the caldera brings up a WP page that describes Cape Field at Ft. Glenn, aka Umnak Airport, a WWII historical site for "for providing defensive cover for the U.S, bases in Unalaska Bay." It is also described as the most intact WWII base in the Aleutian chain that, at one time, housed more than 10,000 people.

The base is about 12 or 13 miles from the caldera. It will be interesting to find out in coming days whether the base is still intact or now covered in ash. I'll put an RSS search on some keywords and see what I can find out.

At the top of the list would have to be Riccardo Ricco, a 24-year-old rider who took the peleton at the end of Stage 5 on Super Besse and again waited until just the right moment to strike (he is called the Cobra) as he outlegged the peleton over the second high mountain of the day and led the way into the finish line at Bagneres de Bigorre.

There were reports insinuating Ricco had been targeted by the drug squad. He also crashed hard at the end of Stage Eight, which left questions about his health.

He answered both today, Ricco was superb. He stayed with the main peleton, which included all the favorites playing their usual game of watching each other and staying together, went over the first climb, the Col de Peyresourde, without gathering attention to himself.

The riders dropped quickly off the first mountain and almost immediately hit the Col de Aspin, not quite as bad as the Peyresourde, but one in which the gradient becomes progressively steeper as it gets higher. Ricco waited patiently for the steepest part of the road to kick in – about three miles from the summit – and shot off the front of the pack like a rocket.

Accelerating at a pace I have rarely seen on a nine-degree slope, Ricco passed Sebastian Lang, who had led since near the beginning of the race, like he wasn't even moving, went over the top and was never again seen by the rest of the riders during the 16-mile descent to the finish line.

Ricco, in his second tour, said in an interview a couple of days ago that he was here to learn the tour, not to win. With one of the tour's most difficult stages tomorrow, we will see how this day affects his legs, but you have to think that Ricco is pretty darned close to being ready. He is still no threat to the leaders – he's moved up to 21st, 2:35 behind – but he's somebody to watch for.

Also impressive has been Stefan Schumacher, who lost the yellow jersey when he fell near the top of the climb to Super Besse and is currently standing 4th, 0:56 behind leader Kim Kirchen. Obviously still bothered by that incident, he ran another strong race today. He might not be as ready as the better-known riders, but he's definitely, for now, in the running.

All in all, there are 23 riders within two minutes of the leaders. Let's see whether the most difficult Pyrenean stage tomorrow will change those numbers while we watch somebody, anybody, attack in the high mountain passes.

The leaders play cat-and-mouse up mountains, while the rest of us beg for the leaders to challenge each other. So far, that hasn't happened. The only significant event today was when Cadel Evans, hands-down the favorite in the general classification, had an apparently ferocious crash halfway along the course that bounced his head on the pavement, cracking his helmet. Cameras didn't catch the incident, but later footage showed a huge gash down the back of his jersey and with many visible bruises and cuts. All indications from the team are that Evans, who finished the stage with the rest of the leaders, is all right. That could have implications with Monday's difficult Pyrenean stage looming, however.

Manuel Beltran was thrown off the tour and suspending from his team after testing positive after the first stage for EPO. While this actually put the tour on the front page of American newspapers, which generally ignore or give lip service to the race unless drugs are involved, there is a change in attitude this year.

One of the problems with cycling and doping is that riders have kept a code of silence in talking about other riders. This year the riders themselves are on record against dopers; the general attitude the next day in interviews was, "Fuck Beltran and his cheating ways." I might be wrong about this, but I think the tour has turned a corner in the fight against doping.

I am also reminded that the tour is one of the only sports that is actually trying to do something about drugs. No American major-league sport has taken the action cycling has taken, yet cycling is generally seen (if you read headlines) as a tawdry sport. As this year's version proves once again, the race is still a unique and amazing spectacle. Onward to Hautacam.

It's a powerful icon, and Take Back the Tour is most definitely the message of the 2008 race. It's the only time that Versus mentions doping in its coverage. There are no references to Ullrich, or Rasmussen or Landis in the telecasts, and it's obvious that everybody has their fingers crossed that no test comes up positive.

Except for dancing around the subject of doping, the tour has been splendid thus far. Tour officials change the rules and routes every year. Nearly every tour we have seen began with several days on flat roads, so this year the race started in Brittany along the west coast, and riders spent three days battling the wind, rain and elements as well as challenging courses that didn't necessarily set up well for sprinters. Thor Hushvov grabbed Stage Two, but there wasn't a pure sprint until Stage Five, when the whole pack thundered across the finish line on the wide streets of Chateauroux Wednesday.

One of my favorite things about the tour is watching individuals or small groups that beat the peleton across long stretches or attack on high mountains. Physics has proven that a large group of riders in formation can overcome large time gaps, and computers can calculate how long it will take the peleton to overtake attackers. So far at least, the computers can't judge the quirks or subtleties of humanity, so watching whether breakaways succeed can be the biggest thrill of many sprint stages.

Stage Three included a breakaway in the first couple of miles started by Will Frischkorn, a Boulder resident in his first tour, that actually defeated the peleton and successfully broke away, giving Samuel Dumoulin the stage win and Romain Feillu the yellow jersey in the general classification race. The trio beat the pack by more than two minutes! Frischkorn paid for his frivolity in the time trial the next day, but I can't imagine the thrill he had putting the pedal down on an angry peleton that blew it badly on his third tour stage.

In a footnote, the end of Stage Five showed what a bitter poison the tour can be for those who challenge the peleton. A three-man breakaway early on proved troublesome, and the peleton didn't catch Agritubel's Nicolas Vogondy until just meters from the finish. After leading for more than 200 kilometers, his legs gave out ten seconds before he might have grabbed the stage victory.

Today's stage brought the first drama in the race for the yellow jersey. It was a half-mountain stage that wound first through fields and among ancient volcanoes now covered with grass and ended with two second-category climbs, first up the Col de La Croix Morande and then almost straight up a two-kilometer 10-percent gradient to the ski village of Super Besse.

Attacks began early on the last 2K climb, which just kept getting steeper the higher the riders went, began early. This kept the pace high, although every attacker was hauled in. Versus announcers Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen kept saying that the leaders were watching CSC's Alejandro Valverde, who was bandaged up after a fall Wednesday and needs to catch up some time on favorite Cadel Evans. But as it turned out, all the favorites stayed bunched together and Valverde and Evans came in second and third, strong races for both.

Stefan Schumacher, the man wearing the yellow jersey for the second day today, lost it, in another ironic twist, after he claimed he hit the rear wheel of Kim Kirchen just below the finish line. When all was said and done, Kirchen, who didn't fall, wound up wearing the yellow on the podium. Schumacher now is in third, 16 seconds behind Kirchen.

Welk came out afterwards and called the song "a modern spiritual," which was enough to make me guffaw even harder. I couldn't believe it. Aunt Nez, our guardian, used to make us watch Lawrence Welk while scoffing at our predilection for rock'n'roll. This was fair retribution.

Brewer & Shipley were based in Kansas City when they had their day. I was pretty proud that two local long hairs had the biggest doper hit of the period. One summer I worked for a farmer's co-op near the tiny village of Staplehurst, Nebraska, where Tom Shipley grew up. I talked often with his mother, who ran the general store in Staplehurst in 1970.

The Welk Show memory became the basis for one of my favorite "strange juxtaposition" stories: an obvious drug song misread as a spiritual on the Welk show, of all places. Welk's people, in a sincere attempt to hook with the younger audience, might have passed over "toke," but they sure as hell knew what "sweet Jesus" meant.

I told lots of friends the story. After awhile, I began to wonder if it were true or if I had been toking myself and perhaps just imagined it. Michael Brewer, who co-wrote the song with Shipley, confirmed it during an interview for the Kansas City Times in the early 1980s.

And there it stood until last week. I was catching up on the latest posts on my friend David Menconi's weblog at the Raleigh News & Observer, and I found this.

Good old Youtube. Thanks for the memory, dude. "Uh-one and uh-two."

While we're at it, check out Welk in another episode spoofing Sonny Bono.

Excited, and deservedly so, Bennett sent an email blast to his mailing list. Like me, he is a fan of Bob Dylan. Though we have never met, we have been exchanging emails for five years now, dating back to when I was a disc jockey on KCUV-AM and we were Colorado's Underground Voice!

Bennett had misunderstood and thought the call was from Theme Time Radio Hour, the XM satellite program hosted by Bob Dylan. Which is understandable and which is what he said in his email.

Bennett is still waiting to hear if "Let Me Die in My Footsteps" or his cover of Dylan's "Shooting Star" will be heard on the Sirius show.

But it was the mass email about being on Dylan's program that brought on a heavy case of déjà vu.

It all started when I got a phone call the first week of April, 1980, from Rose Ricciardella, managing editor, pop product, for CBS Records editorial services. She told me that Bob Dylan wanted to print five reviews, including one I had written, on the inside sleeve of his new album, due in the late spring. Would I be interested?

At the time I was working at The Kansas City Times, as a news clerk who also wrote about music (this was just before most newspapers began employing full-time rockcrits). I had reviewed the first show of Dylan's three-night stand at the Uptown Theater in late January. The dates were part of a tour of small theaters in support of his divisive Slow Train Coming album. He had sold more than 10,000 tickets in Kemper Arena not two years before, and this time he couldn't sell half that number for the three nights.

Dylan played no songs except from the gospel bookends Slow Train Coming and Saved. There was no "Like a Rolling Stone," no "Masters of War," not even in encore. To say many paying customers were disappointed would be putting it mildly. Some fans I knew were heartbroken.

His excellent band of southern soul veterans and gospel singers took these songs, pardon the pun, to a higher level. I had never seen a performer of his stature play a concert that the audience, to put it mildly, wasn't expecting. It was a full-blown gospel show, and easily the gutsiest performance I had ever seen, in my mind comparable to the then-bootleg recording I had of a 1966 English audience taunting him for doing what came natural to him, in that case switching to electric guitar.

But I digress. Would I want my work on the cover of a Dylan record? Does the pope … ? All I asked Ricciardella was where I needed to sign. Dazed, I checked the legalities with the attorney at The Kansas City Times, who gave his approval. Ricciardella sent a letter a couple days later that gave CBS “permission to reprint the article on Bob Dylan” and promised two copies of the album when it was released. I sent it back.

Between then and June 20, when the album eventually titled Saved was released, I told every one of my friends and relatives to go out and buy the new Dylan album and see a big surprise on the inside cover.

The big surprise came, when the album came out sans the review, or any review, for that matter. Instead, the sleeve contained a line drawing of Dylan playing harmonica onstage. Everybody hated the album.

Visibly upset, I called Ricciardella. “Bob changed his mind.” Sigh. I didn’t get two copies of the record, either.

Answering the inevitable phone calls from my friends who bought Saved was as humiliating as it sounds, my first real taste of crow – and certainly not the last.

I have tried to stay true to the second thing I learned, with varying degrees of success: Keep your yap shut until after the album comes out.

Only later did it really dawn on me that Dylan, probably sitting there in the dumpy, old President Hotel in downtown Kansas City, where he stayed those nights, had actually read and liked the review that I wrote in 35 minutes on a typewriter for the next morning's edition. Somehow, today, that's more than enough.

Oh, and I need to mention that Bennett's new album, Slow It Down, Take a Step Back, which is well-titled and which he says is about "rain, fog, love, the first hundred miles, too much paperwork, being a daddy and shooting stars," comes highly recommended, too.

Here's the image that replaced the reviews on the inside cover of Saved.

And just for kicks, here's the review:

Dylan Uptown Theater 1.28.80
Published: KC Times 1.29.80

By Leland Rucker
A Member of the Staff

There have been a lot of questions concerning Bob Dylan’s state of mind the past couple of years. Stories have appeared that he is now a “born again” Christian, and his latest LP release, Slow Train Coming, confirmed that suspicion. But a record is only a piece of vinyl; it’s the live presence that shows what a performer is all about.

For those expecting a run-through of old hits, there might have been disappointment. Likewise, those thinking he would try to convert the audience Billy Graham style might have been disillusioned. But for those interested in a magical musical experience, the results were spectacular.

The tone of the show was gospel and blues, from the black female vocal quartet that opened the show to the last inspirational rock song. As in the past, when Dylan gets involved in an idea or concept, he does so with complete abandon.

Regina McCreary began by telling a story about a woman trying to ride the train to see her son one more time, which became an analogy for the whole show. This led into a soulful rendition — complete with letter-perfect harmonies — of a song with a chorus that went: “If I’ve got my ticket can I ride/Ride up to heaven in the morning.”

The foursome, in sequined outfits that sparkled in the spotlights against the sides of the theater, proceeded to do a six-song gospel set accompanied only by their tambourines and pianist Terry Young. Their final number, the well-known folk song “This Train” served as an apt introduction for the main event.

Dylan began with “Serve Somebody,” also the opening cut on Slow Train Coming. Dressed in a black leather jacket, white shirt and black pants, with his tousled curls and wispy thin beard encircling his face, he looked no different than he did ten years ago.

As expected, he performed all the songs from Slow Train Coming, plus several new ones. There were a few calls for oldies, and it takes a rare performer not to fall back on familiar melodies in concert. For me, this was a wise move; Dylan has performed and recorded his older songs enough times by now to not continue to have to rely on them.

In a sense, Slow Train Coming is not really that distant from Highway 61 Revisited or The Times They Are a Changing. There is the same reliance on apocalyptic ideas, though they are now flavored with more Old and New Testament images instead of the street-wise lines that characterizes his older material.

Besides, everyone looks upon Dylan as more than just another musician anyway. Slow Train is actually “Desolation Row” tempered with experience and faith instead of youth and chaos.

The railroad image works for the music as well. Dylan’s musicians this time are the cream of the studio crop, and they make music that thunders like shiny wheels on steel tracks. Jim Keltner and Tim Drummond provide the bottom end, while Spooner Oldham, Fred Tackett and the girls’ pinpoint harmonies produce the frills behind Dylan’s sometimes petulant, often whining nasal drawl.

At its strongest moments, during “When You Gonna Wake Up,” “Precious Angel,” “Slow Train” and a few of the new numbers, it was as turbulent and moving as anything Dylan has ever produced. Only on the silly reggae number, “God Gave Names to All the Animals,” did the set lose its spirit. The rest had all the qualities of a gospel revival tent show. Dylan even got into the spirit of things by dancing, playing harmonica and clapping his hands.

Actually all the mention of Dylan’s conversion and/or personal beliefs is purely academic. Put quite simply, he is making some of the best music of his entire career. Judging from the abundance of new material, he is obviously enjoying it, and the enthusiasm is contagious. The audience cheered wildly from beginning to end, especially at the recognizable cuts from Slow Train, and I heard no boos or catcalls throughout the more-than-two-hour performance.

As he says, “there’s either faith or unbelief, there’s no middle ground.” Dylan has found his ticket to heaven, and his slow train this night was a sight to behold.

Songwriter Joe Ely and accordionist Joel Guzman are no strangers. They have played together on many stages in different configurations for many years. Recently, they have teamed up for a series of duets in concert halls around the country. It's an interesting concept: Ely's plaintive songs, shorn of all instrumentation beyond an acoustic guitar strum, joined by perhaps the most lyrical accordion player in Texas. There isn't a note of lead guitar or a bass run to be heard in the entire set.

They recorded one night in 2007. It isn't that you haven't heard these songs before. If you're an Ely fan, you probably have; four of the 13 songs were included on 2000's Live at Antone's. But there is no "Dallas," no "Must Notta Gotta Lotta," no "Everybody Got Hammered" here.

This is more reflective material, an hour's worth of poems of the west Texas prairie. Lyrically, the elements are up front; several prominently employ the wind as a metaphor. "Because of the Wind," "Winds Gonna Blow You Away," "Up on the Ridge," "Ranches and Rivers" and "I'm a Thousand Miles From Home" connote wide-open spaces and roads that go on forever even in their titles.

And here is where the magic happens. Those seemingly lonely, empty landscapes seem to give flight to Guzman's creativity, and it is a joy to hear his poetic squeezebox dance around Ely's simple, insistent, ever-so-slightly-shifting rhythms like wind devils skittering across the dusty fields. "Slow You Down," "All That You Need" and "Letter to Laredo," favorites all for Ely fans, have never sounded lovelier.

It's a good time for Ely to look over his canon and revisit his songs with fresh eyes and ears. In this context – guitar, accordion, two voices -- understatement becomes a virtue.

(This review appeared in Stereophile magazine, April 2008.)

"Colorado Daily to Move Into Camera's Building," read the headline in the April 24 Daily Camera. Prairie Mountain Publishing, which owns both papers, is selling off the Daily's building on east Pearl street and consolidating both staffs into the Camera building at 11th and Pearl streets.

Camera Publisher Al Manzi says that the move "allows us to realize some operation synergies that were not possible in their current location." Which means that the parent company will make some money off the real estate and that the Daily staff will take up a few of the many empty desks left in the Camera building.

The story followed by only two weeks the departure of Camera Editorial Page Editor Clint Talbott, who left for a position in the publications department at CU. This was a particularly rich irony, as anybody who has read local newspapers the last couple of decades well knows. Talbott had kept CU on his editorial hot seat during that time, roughly half with the Daily and half with the Camera, for the institution's haughty lack of transparency and basic fiscal irresponsibility, especially in the athletic department.

But I'm guessing that more just this reader laughed out loud remembering the days when Talbott was editor of the Daily and we had such fun mocking the Camera as Brand X Newspaper. The Daily's dissolution and Talbott's departure are significant, like tacking a big -30- at the end of the story of a distinct period of newspapering in Boulder.

More than a century old and for many decades the official campus newspaper, the Daily kept its offices on campus but split from CU under the leadership of Tim Lange beginning, I think, around 1971, and he led the paper, more or less, until he left Boulder for Los Angeles in 1985. The Daily didn't make a dime, but under Lange, it was an offbeat, gleefully pro-Sandinista, anti-Reagan newspaper. That era would be a great tale in itself.

The period of which I speak began in the 1980s and ended with the current decline in newsprint readership and revenues as newspapers migrate to the Internet. It was a spurt of growth responsible for USA Today and color weather pages and free-standing sections for business and celebrity gossip into your daily newspaper.

Boulder in the early 1980s was a two-newspaper town. The Camera was a powerhouse, profitable and bursting with staff writers. The features section was heavy with critics in full-time positions, the sports section the envy of every other small paper in the state. There was a Sunday features magazine. The comics pages could be read without magnification.

After Lange's departure in 1986, the Daily was reeling. Audience, its weekly arts and entertainment magazine (which had given me my first local writing gig), had been shuttered, and the Daily itself came dangerously close that summer to closing itself. Publisher Dennis Dube hired Talbott as editor, who in turn hired Paul Danish as layout editor and me as Means & Media editor/news copy editor.

As we assembled the first of many Back-to-School issues, we wondered aloud just what we would be covering and held our breath and waited for the students to return in August. Soon, our reporters were in the middle of student protests that turned violent over CIA recruitment on campus and, as they say, we were off.

Like all papers, the Daily moved into the computer age in the late 1980s. Our city coverage was enough that the sales staff was able to sell the paper as "your campus paper" to Hill businesses and "your alternative to the Camera" to businesses on Pearl Street.

Under Talbott, it was a great time to work at the Daily. We weren't bound by the family-newspaper constrictions of the Camera, revenues grew and we delighted in skewering our much larger competitor two blocks east of us whenever possible.

By the early 1990s the Daily faced more competition for ad dollars, first from the Onion and then the Boulder Weekly. Talbott moved to the Camera's op/ed pages. I didn't always agree with his opinions, but I appreciated his arguments and admired his spare, efficient prose.

The Daily was almost sunk by a felonious employee in the 1990s, but was bought by Randy Miller, who sold it to the Camera's owners last year. This spring it will be dissolved into the bowels of the Camera. Daily editors will claim autonomy, but it just won't be the same.

Perhaps it deserves no more than this, a fond memory on an old journalist's webblog. This is the way an era ends – not with a bang but a whimper.

P.S. Here's the view from the Means and Media editor's desk at the Colorado Daily offices at 9th and Pearl streets circa 1990. That's ace reporter Ron Baird on the left and Mike Sandrock in the center (I can still smell Hannah's hummus on his desk).

The sad story of the ivory bill's slide into extinction is a distasteful tale that dates to humans' first contact. The birds' colorful, characteristic plumage and eggs were plundered by Native Americans and early explorers for trinkets and food. But it was pure human greed (this time for wood) and industrial-age weapons of mass destruction that clear-cut the swamps of the Southeastern United States. The ivory bill was lost along with one of the largest forests on the planet. If you have an old Singer sewing machine from the early 1920s in the attic, the wood in it was part of that senseless destruction. To add insult to injury, ornithologists killed the last ivory bill colonies for their own collections, crying crocodile tears at its demise while mounting their iconic specimens for a waiting laboratory drawer.

Though sightings have been sporadically reported since the 1940s, the ornithologist community stopped taking any seriously. Then in 2004, two birders, one an editor at the prestigious Cornell School of Ornithology doing a book on ivory bills, following a tip, spotted what they determined was an ivory bill in Arkansas. A short film taken from a boat in the same area a couple of months later led Cornell to recognize the finds as authentic. After a period of euphoria, many in the birding community began questioning the official Cornell video findings. Today, after three years of fruitless, expensive searches, there is serious skepticism that the Arkansas sightings are really proof of the ivory bills' escape from the noose of extinction.

Now, Geoff Hill, an ornithologist at Auburn University, enters the fray with a new book, Ivorybill Hunters: The Search for Proof in a Flooded Wilderness. Hill and several of his graduate students spent several months in a western-Florida swampland and came back with photos of woodpecker bark scaling and recordings of bird calls and woodpecking in the remote swamps of the Choctawhatchee River in the Florida panhandle near the Georgia border. Some team members recorded multiple sightings of what they identified as ivory bills. They came back, however, with no photos, just two blurry videos that, even Hill admits, are inconclusive.

When I first read of Hill's low-budget study on the website, I didn't put much faith in it, especially after reading some of the web posts by those involved. I'm not sure I believe him after reading the book, but that said, he makes a good argument for further research into the area where they made their discoveries.

Hill, an academic ornithologist and lifetime birder, draws a careful distinction between the two to criticize the science behind Cornell's analysis of the Arkansas sighting and video and build the case for his own study.

It's unfortunate that they didn't get a clear shot; in fact, no researcher ever reported observing a perched bird. The photos of the wood shavings are most intriguing, showing patterns of ivory-bill beakwork. I am less enthusiastic about the recordings they made of the bird's distinctive kent call or the double-knock rapping sound on the web, but that could be because there aren't enough authentic ivory-bill recordings to match them up against. Hill concedes that his study won't pass scientific scrutiny.

I find no reason to disbelieve Hill's sincerity or his confidence in his evidence. If anything, he has too much faith in his own team. But he makes a good case that many western-Florida river systems haven't been explored, few humans enter those waters and most folks wouldn't recognize an ivory bill if they saw it – pileated woodpeckers are plentiful and often mistaken for ivory bills. Jerome Jackson, the noted ivory-bill author and researcher who is among those who question the Arkansas findings, wrote in his book that he believed the Florida swamps might still harbor isolated groups of ivory bills.

That is perhaps encouraging. I once felt it was important to find out if these birds are truly extinct. But remembering our lethal history, I think that we should just let them be, in their isolated swamps, far from our deadly grasp.

Today was the annual 4/20 Pot Smoke-Out at Farrand Field. This year it got preempted by a real fire in West Boulder. Billie and I were running errands and driving around town when we ran into our old friends Charlie and Janice, who live at Fourth and Pearl streets. We parked and were catching up, when we began noticing the smell of smoke. It was about 2:30.

Somebody must be burning leaves, I thought, and looked to the west. Everybody thought that, too, but within just a couple of minutes, we saw puffs of smoke coming over the ridge of the Red Rocks foothill above Settler's Park. We had just driven east on Canyon, turned onto Pearl at Settler's Park and noticed nothing ten minutes earlier.

The puffs were becoming more intense, and soon smoke spread out over us heading east. I got out the iPhone and started taking pictures at 2:36. Though it is in the 70s, it has been a gusty, windy day. I was finally driven back home on a bike ride by heavy gusts in south Boulder earlier. You could see the gusts blowing the fire higher up toward the ridge.

I'm looking at Google Earth images of the area, and I'm guessing that the fire began in a huge grove of trees above Settler's Park and just a little east of the two buildings west of the park. Perhaps along one of the trails that go up to the Red Rocks formation from Settler's Park.

We moved to the corner of Fourth and Pearl, where we got a better view. The smoke became orange colored as the gusts continued. Finally, we could see flames at the foot of the pine trees at the top of the ridge east of the Red Rocks formations.

There are homes at the bottom of the east side of Red Rocks hill, and there is an old orchard-turned condos east of the Silver Lake Ditch, which winds around the east side of the hill.

It hasn't been ten minutes, but people are biking, walking and driving down Pearl Street. For every person leaving the area, there are cars, bikes and people heading toward the area. I'm guessing this is due to the ubiquity of cell phones: "Dude, I'm on the roof of the Foundry, and fire is shooting out of the foothills").

By the time we got home, we could see smoke from Martin Acres.

Here's the update. No really bad news this time.

But it isn't difficult to see why people are fed up and looking to other sources for news, too. The Smoking Gun, a website that publishes public documents not found elsewhere, recently caught The Los Angeles Times publishing a bombshell story based on forged documents. And just this week it looked into the history of Akon, a rapper who has peddled stories about growing up gangster to reporters for years, and found that his tales were lies and exaggerations. Read my entire rant at my other blog, NewsGator Daily News.

I walked off the porch, still watching the birds, who were settling into a tall tree fifty feet away, three front-yards over. That's when I noticed the visitors. Two birds about four or five times the size of the ravens perched on the same branch.

Turkey vultures. I had seen ten of them circling above the CU property south of town Tuesday morning while walking up to the bus stop. The vultures are a part of the springtime experience in Boulder and other areas along the Front Range at this time of year.

I grabbed the binoculars and headed up the street, where I finally got a view of what turned out to be seven vultures in the tree. One seemed to be lying on the limb rather than standing. They were about forty or fifty feet from the ground.

Went back to get Billie, and there we both were, in our jammies, running up the street for the cheapest of thrills. A neighbor bringing out her trash saw us, and looked a bit askance at our attire. I pointed up to the birds. She knew them from living in Ontario. Not exactly fashionable-looking birds, we agreed. But magnificent nonetheless.

Took a shower, and I heard the sounds of our trash hauler coming down the street, sounding like a combat battalion, metal against metal. I ran back out after the truck passed, and though a couple had changed positions, all seven were still there. I saw one flapping huge wings circling for another perch.

I walked beneath them on the way to the bus stop and then caught a last glimpse as the bus took off on Table Mesa. I wondered how many times I had walked beneath them and never even knew they were there.

I was up early Saturday again, but no vultures. Kept watching all weekend, but they never came back. A temporary roost.

Not surprisingly, this has caused some consternation amongst those who write about music professionally. One of the hallmarks of the rock era (at least up until now) is that critics get CDs early so their reviews can appear on or before the day of release. Some writers fear that this will somehow surrender a valuable source of marketing for releases.

What a load. And I say this as someone who wrote professionally about music for a quarter century. It was hard to imagine that our readers took us critics seriously fifteen years ago; to imagine they do so today is laughable. We find out about new music now through friends, blogs, B2B networks, ripped CDs, television commercials, Rhapsody, XM, mp3s, MySpace and yes, perhaps sometimes from critics. But consider that when you buy a CD at Amazon.com, it offers you other, similar titles to the one you just added to your virtual shopping cart. The critic has been replaced with an algorithm. Ouch.

During the blockbuster era, new releases would sell millions of copies during its first week of release amidst a blitz of hype from advertising and reviews. Critics' reviews were cogs in that concentrated marketing drive. Musicians, no longer dependent on that first week’s sales, marketing and press hype, hardly need to suck up to critics anymore.

I always disliked the old approach. Faced with reviewing an album in two days, you listen, hoping to find something to write about, any hook to hang a review upon. Quite often, that first review doesn’t really express how you feel about an album once you have lived with it for a couple of weeks and let the songs come to you on their own terms, not as a deadline. It isn't really helpful or even say how you really feel, but there it is.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for good criticism and considered commentary. But a review should be a beginning point for a discussion, not the final word on the subject. Wouldn’t you rather read a review after you have listened to an album and formed an opinion rather than read it to find out if your favorite critic liked it or not? Who really cares? Powers, a good critic, appreciates this, remembering how many times she has deemed an album a reject before she really had the chance to live with it.

Andrew Sarris, a New York film reviewer who wrote many years for the Village Voice and now for the New York Observer, always suggested reading his reviews after you saw the picture, not before. That way, the reader has the same context and, hopefully, a conversation begins.

Truth is, as music is becoming more decentralized, I have more conversations with more people about music than anytime in my life, including my rockcritter days. Today we're all critics, and we are all the better for it.

It is the day after the equinox, Good Friday to boot, and I suppose this is our celebration, since watching wildlife is as close as we get to spirituality. We are in the viewing area about quarter to seven this morning. There are three or four cars and a few people with cameras and scopes already set up in the pull-out. The sun is still behind the Sangre de Christos, but it is light enough to see the birds roosting. Steam rises around them.

Most aren’t moving yet, or if they are, just beginning to stir or preen. (Click on the photo at the top to get the idea. La Veta Pass is between the two ranges, Mt. Blanca on the left.) But as the minutes wear on, they begin to move around more freely. From the further reaches of the refuge, cranes begin to rise. A few from in front of us join them. Others are jumping in anticipation. The energy level rises with the sound of their cries, and soon it is as if the ones in the air are screaming at the others to get off their cartilages and join them.

About 7:15 we drive over to Eight Mile Road, pull off the side of the road and just let the birds waft over us. This is the greatest thrill, to see the birds honking overhead, getting into formation, occasionally running into each other as they head off. They rarely fly directly overhead, but sometimes they are low and close enough that you can hear the quiet, almost mechanical whoosh-whoosh of their wings beating. Wow.

Our friend Kathy, who first turned us on to the crane phenomenon, had suggested driving farther south on Gunbarrel Road. We took off, passing more small farms and ranches. Behind one ranch house, there are literally thousands of cranes standing out there amongst the cattle – a real sight. The pavement ends. The ranches disappear. A sign offered lots two miles off a dirt road near the foothills. We wind up next to a field with junked cars lined up to the horizon. In front of the trailer home where, I assume, the owner lives, there are some metal crane art pieces. I didn't get a very good photo with the iPhone.

I really had fun with the iPhone camera app, though. It is desperately simple, takes excellent photos, and I found it an invaluable device for recording a trip like this. The photos came out better than I expected, and for someone who likes to document travel, this is as easy as it gets.

After breakfast at the Mountain View Restaurant, we head back out to the refuge. Last year we found a large group of birds along a road in a field and watched them during the day as they mingled, ate and danced in the high grain. But today there is no high grass and no birds, either, on the eastern road inside the refuge.

It was top for a nap, but soon, after stopping for some coffee and a donut at Don Thomas Bakery, we were back in the refuge. Arriving about four p.m. at the circle area on the south end on Eight Mile Road, we set up and get more than an hour's worth of intense crane interaction. Birds are flying in and out all over the place; it kinda reminds me of a SXSW afternoon schmoozing session for cranes.

We get ample opportunity to watch the birds take off and land. It seems so effortless. Some glide in from high above, falling out of the sky, dropping their legs as they get closer to the ground to slow their descent. Just before they hit, they flop their wings a couple of times and land in a quiet flutter. Some glide in like bullets on a straight line across the field not fifteen feet off the ground before the characteristic leg dropping, fluttering and landing.

Taking off seems just as easy. A couple of hops and they are airborne, and those flapping engines take them easily into the air and upward. They bark at each other as they organize their formations. Sometimes one bird, sometimes two, often many more, head off together. Apparently, cranes, who mate for life, also travel in family groups.

Far above us, another group of maybe 50 cranes are circling. They are up high enough that they are difficult to spot with the naked eye unless the sun is just right. With the binocs, you can watch them speeding up, gliding and slowing down so each can maintain his/her position in the circle. It's mesmerizing to watch, a crane merry-go-round in the sky.

After asking a guy to move his car and stop approaching the birds with his camera, a ranger walks over and watches the high flyers with us for a few minutes. Nobody really knows what they are doing up there, but his theory is that the birds are circling to check the winds, and if they find a good thermal going in the right direction and the time is right, some might take off for the north, toward their breeding grounds.

Dinner tonight is at Baldo's, the Mexican restaurant Kathy suggested. It was great. And then back out to the refuge for the fourth time today. It is still warm as the sun pokes in and out of clouds above the peaks before setting, and again we get to watch waves of cranes taking off and dispersing into the night. You can't ask more; the cranes have behaved perfectly all day.

March 21, 2008
Monte Vista, Colorado

South Park was a big bowl of white. A huge snowdrift that sometimes towered over the car stretched for miles from the bottom of Kenosha Pass all the way to Red Hill Pass. Wind blowing from the north across the top of that drift made the road wet and sometimes a little icy, but once I got around a big truck splashing water everywhere, we didn’t have any problem navigating it. We stopped in Fairplay to take photos of the burro memorial and pick up coffees and pastries at a shop across the street. The owner says that hers was the first coffee place in town. Today she shares the Fairplay caffeination business with three other shops. No Starbucks.

There are two roads down to Monte Vista once you get in the San Luis Valley. Today we took the eastern road, Colorado 17, to Alamosa and then over to Monte Vista on Colorado 160. North of Alamosa we stopped at the Colorado Alligator Farm, near Mosca. I have always wanted to go there, having only been to an alligator farm once, in Florida during a spring-break trip back in the '60s. Just the idea of alligators at 7500 feet has kept my interest high.

The secret is that the farm sits on a thermal vent that keeps the area and water warm, even during the cold, snowy winters. Underground water is one of the things that makes the San Luis Valley distinct. At an average of 7,500 square feet, boxed in on three sides by mountain ranges, the San Luis is a desert, with about eight inches of precipitation per annum. The largest sand dunes in the United States are piled up just east of us.

Two aquifers beneath the valley, augmented by careful diversion of snow melt-off, several water storage areas and the Rio Grande and Conejos rivers, make the valley, since the 1850s, an agricultural desert, with substantial crops of alfalfa hay, wheat, barley and potatoes. If you're interested, you can read about how it works here here.

That water is a fragile commodity in the valley is apparent this weekend. The city of Alamosa, the valley's largest, is in a water crisis. The town suspects that more than 100 reported cases of salmonella poisoning by residents came from its water system, which it believes is tainted with the bacteria, which is usually carried by food. We usually stop for coffee and/or a meal in Alamosa, only 16 miles from Monte Vista, but not this time.

The owners of the alligator farm began, and remain, tilapia fish farmers. Tilapia are listed as noxious pests in certain areas of Australia, but they have become an important aquaculture fish in the United States. According to the American Tilapia Association, the perch-like fish are the fifth-most popular seafood in the United States. I don't know about you, but I have never willingly or knowingly ordered, bought or eaten tilapia. Have you?

The gators were first brought in about twenty years ago to eat the leftovers and garbage, and now four hundred gators, crocs and cayman sprawl around the farm’s acreage and lake. The fish farm is still the business, but the gators are the attraction, along with some big birds, emus, ostriches and rheas that reside there.

Morris, an American alligator that has appeared in many television series and films – a sign in front says he once trashed a Cheers set – has his own pen, and female partner. The rest have to share the lakes with the other gators. The owners also care for iguanas, snakes and assorted other turtles and reptiles, most abandoned after the owners found they got more than they bargained for in a pet viper.

A friendly hippie kid has us pose with Little Bob, a small but well-equipped two-and-a-half foot American gator who reluctantly lets us pose with him. The 8X10 we purchase sucks, but the fourteen dollars we paid for it seems to be going to a good cause. I console myself with the fact that Little Bob left his sharp alligator teeth marks on the certificate.

We’re staying in the Gary Cooper room this time in the Movie Manor Motel. With no films showing, the motel is fairly empty this time of year; the rooms are large, the beds nice, the showers wonderful, and we wouldn't stay willingly anywhere else – it's part of the visit. And it's only about twelve minutes from the refuge where we set up to watch birds.

We had sandwiches at Kelloff's, the restaurant at the motel, before heading out to see the birds this evening. Driving down to the refuge on Gunbarrel Road, we pass fields of standing water and/or sheets of ice. Small farmhouses line the road, and all except one were above the waterline, surrounded on three sides by lakes of ice and water. Cattle and horses are stranded on patches of higher, muddy islands where ranchers have left bales of hay.

The refuge is a flat world, an immensely complicated ecosystem of fields of grain, lakes, ponds, wetlands, swamps, ditches, sluices, locks, gates, meadows and even a few trees. It could be in the middle of Kansas. But then you look east, and there is Blanca Peak and the Sangre de Christos. Turn around and there are smaller ridges that lead into the largest wilderness area in Colorado.

We were at the turn-out on Eight Mile Road at the south end of the refuge proper about 6:30. South of the road are a large number of cranes scattered out at least a quarter mile – it's hard to judge distance. Inside the refuge are at least another thousand more scattered out northward.

They are making a big racket that continues to get louder as the darkness spreads. Sunset is around 7:15, and for fifteen minutes we stand in shock and awe as these ancient birds take off for their roosts, rising into the night skies for places unknown. The energy of the birds permeates the ground and the purple sky. In the morning, they will leave their roosts for the fields once again, in the same crescendo of pure abandonment. It is a ritual that has been happening longer than humans have trod the earth. We can just stand there dumbly and smile.

Monte Vista, CO
3-20-08