I am iSam
It’s been a heck of a two weeks ! It started out driving to Byron Bay from Sydney (for the Blues Fest) and ended up in Seattle in the United States. That’s a total of about three thousand miles of driving, and fifteen thousand miles of flying and a whole slew of wonderful music en route ! It’s a fortunate life that I lead and I enjoy sharing it, so I guess I had better start this description at the beginning of my latest adventures, (the place from where all good writing is supposed to depart) and invite you all along for my ‘remembered ride’.
I headed for the Blues Festival (in Australia) in my bus with the dog and my girl friend aboard on the Thursday afternoon before Good Friday - probably one of the worst departure times one could ever chose to make when leaving Sydney. The long Easter weekend holiday was under way and at five p.m. on the Thursday the swarming vehicles headed north would have seemed like a million lemmings headed for self-destruction except that they were moving at the speed of snails rather than Lemmings. It would have been quicker to have walked to the Blues Festival, and for the first three hours of our journey we crawled at a pace that would have suited a three legged horse, or maybe even a rocking horse ! At times the pace would have suited a dead horse, but as the old (cruel) saying goes - you can’t flog a dead horse. So we reluctantly put on our ‘noble long-suffering and patient’ expressions and sat there with a million other muppetts waiting for the highway north to come into view - three hours later we were rewarded with the highway mercifully bereft of traffic and as I plunged the bus into third gear (it hadn’t been out of second for over an hour!) the old girl gave a sigh of relief and attacked the open road with gusto. We were on our way yet still less than twenty miles from the center of Sydney - it was time to make up time, and I detirmined to drive all night.
My girl friend soon tired of the dark highway and the monotony of the deisel engine’s vibrations lulled her into a welcoming torpor. In the rear of the bus a large double-bed beckoned, and muttering about having had a long week at the office she stumbled to the bed and within a few minutes was fast asleep. I could see her nose poking out from under the blankets in the rear-view mirror and Pablo the dog mimicking her serenity with his nose on her feet and his eyes closed fast. I was alone at the wheel and settled down for my driving-meditation with little but the headlights of a few cars and trucks for company. I had a thousand kilometers to go.
I love driving at night - to be alone with one’s thoughts is a great privilege. Time to think, to breathe in the endless space of the imagination. As I drove I wondered about the wisdom of releasing my book on both the i-phone app and as a regular book, simultaneously. Would the two distinctive forms co-exist in the world in comfortable simbiosys or would they struggle with one another, and the lesser manifestation be crushed by the stronger of the two ? As I drove through the night, I thought of America. Of that vast and exciting land where I had roamed with bands so many years ago. Where I had experienced the intense “love-affair” of the relationship a tour manager has with his artists - where he ‘cares for his charges’ in a way like an anglican minister cares for his flock - with that certain detached compassion that comes from years of experience of dealing with human beings and their little foibles. The road stretched before me, the endless road, through the black night of Australia and across the pacific to the land of dreams - America.
A land that was born of the white man’s dreams of equality, fraternity, and liberte which (of course) extended to neither the Native Amerian Indians nor the black slaves the white man brought in his stead. The poor old Native American got it from all sides just like the aborigines in Australia, and it is sometimes conveniently forgotten that black soldiers (the “Buffalo Soldiers” of Bob Marley’s song) hunted down the Indians with the same deadly efficiency as whites. These thoughts brewed in my brain as I drove down the midnight road in Australia to the Blues festival with my friend asleep in the bus and the dog asleep at her feet.
I have lived and dreamed on both sides of the Pacific. I have lived and dreamed on both sides of the Atlantic. In a bus in Australia driving at night I have dreamt of Seattle, and here I am in Seattle listening in the middle of the night to the high ol’ lonesome sound of the freight trains in the marshalling yards as they sound their calls out into the night, a sound that was made to accompany men’s dreams. I have dreamed in London of New York City, and in New York I have sighed and dreamed of the love I left in London. Wandering the world I have dreamed and still I dream.
Last year I read my book in a recording studio. The whole book from beginning to end. It took over two weeks and was like an extended dream. Four days ago the book was released as an i-phone/i-pad/i-tunes application and Reuters wrote a story about it which went out to their subscribing news organisations. The following day it had been picked up by over 100,000 sites - yesterday the figure stood at 600,000 ! A story about the story of my life, read by me, was being read by virtually millions of people ! It was all a dream ! And in a hotel room in Seattle I remembered a poem I had written long ago just after I parted ways with the Grateful Dead -
“Every day we murder our dreams then pick them up dust them down and adjust their silly hats upon their heads and tell them how glad we are that they are still alive”.
The dream lives ! Life continues ! Slowly I am driving down the West Coast of America towards San Francisco where long ago the Rolling Stones did the disastrous concert at Altamont, and there in that beautiful city I will re-unite with friends from long ago. Friends from the family of the Grateful Dead with whom I shared many dreams. On the way to the family re-union I am stopping in book shops and signing copies of my book. It all has an ethereal quality to it, this life of mine, and after sixty seven years I make no more sense of it today than I managed to achieve as a child. I’m not sure if this is a sad admission or a glad realisation ! What is one supposed to DO with a life I sometimes ask myself? And as I drive down the highway in the dark I amuse myself by replying to my own question - I’m buggered if I exactly know but I’m working on it !
© sam cutler 2010




