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Updated July 15th 2008

  There’s a song’s been swirling in my head lately that could’ve been written right here at Chicks Beach. Kris Kristofferson actually wrote it though, when he’d turned his back on just about everything that’d mattered ‘til then, packed his bags and moved to Nashville. Followed his Muse…straight to Music Row. Kicked his English professorship at West Point to the curb, dumped his debutant wife (later married Rita Coolidge), to sweep and sleep nights at the proverbial studio, just like a couple other folks who took that cleaning job right to the top of the charts.
  He changed his major to smoke and Jack and kept a day job flying choppers through the haze. It was on one of those days he took this song he’d penned and landed on the front lawn of Johnny Cash’s Hickory home. As the story goes, Kris, who’d yet to meet the Folsom Prison crooner and later become a legendary Outlaw himself, apologized to Mr. Cash for “dropping in”. The Cash retreat was a really nice pad back then, but Kris Kristofferson was just desperado enough to be the only one to make it a helicopter pad. He accounted for the intrusion by telling Mr. Cash he’d just written a tune he thought was important enough to get it to The Man the best way he knew how.
  After Johnny recorded it and had a Number One, he went on to call it “a song that’d dropped right from the sky”. Since then a whole slew of artists have done it; Shawn Mullins does a particularly nice job on his Lullaby (Soul’s Core) c.d.

SUNDAY MORNIN’ COMIN’ DOWN

  Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty (Hawaiin) shirt.
An’ I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An’ stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.


  I’d smoked my brain the night before,
On cigarettes and songs I’d been pickin’ (at the Parrot)
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,
Cussin’ at a can (skateboard) that he was kickin.
Then I crossed the empty street (Lookout),
‘n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken (at the Jr. Market).
An it took me back to somethin’,
That I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way.


  On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
‘Cos there’s something in a Sunday (at Chicks Beach),
Makes a body feel alone.
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’,
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin’ city sidewalks;
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.


  In the park (On the beach) I saw a daddy,
With a laughin’ little girl who he was swingin’,
And I stopped beside a Sunday School,
And listened to a song they were singin’.
Then I headed back for home,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell (cell phone) was ringin’,
And it echoed (‘long the shoreline) through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.


  A couple years ago my sister sat next to Kris on a flight to Hawaii, where he has a house in Hana, on the island of Maui, and she told me until then she’d never seen a pair of boots more beat up than my own. These boot were made for surfin’

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Updated July 5th 2008

Some shots from July 4th...
First a stunning sunrise over the Bay.
click the image for a desktop size...

Followed by a July 4th sunset...
over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.
click the image for a desktop size...

A Patriotic evening on the Beach
Locals all over the beach in anticipation of fireworks to end the holiday evening.
click the image for a desktop size...

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Updated July 2nd 2008

  They say ignorance of the law’s no excuse, but lately I’ve become increasingly aware that can lead to some rude awakenings. And unfortunately, any attempt at raising the awareness levels around Chicks Beach appears to be cloaked in secrecy, with the “GOTCHA” factor proving embarrassing, intimidating, and downright costly.

  Private beach? Don’t count on it; it’s private when it comes to sand replenishment, but public on the spin of a dime.

  NO PARKING signs ought to be replaced by GO AHEAD, WE DARE YOU. Look around for anything that spells out when our gone to the dogs folks can or can’t bring Rover over. It seems some grinchly sadist’s plucked all the do’s and don’ts billboards from the neighborhood, leaving all the sun-thirsty girls and boys in the dark.... Ever heard of the mushroom theory?

  Trying to figure out how to quaff a beer on the beach is harder than solving a Rubik’s Cube, and more confusing than reading the Rosetta Stone. GO AHEAD, I DARE YOU.

  Next:
“Those look like fireworks, Pal…”

CLICK THESIGN IMAGE FOR THE LARGE READABLE VERSION.

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Updated July 1st 2008

An image from the beach at Chicks Beach from the "Producer"

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Updated June 27th 2008

Dine N' Dash in Chicks Beach

OF ALL THE GIN JOINTS IN ALL THE WORLD,
THESE TWO BAGLEY BOYS PICKED THE PARROT TO BAIL
ON THEIR TAB

  Thursday afternoon, these guys plowed through the menu like it was their last meal, scarfing down three quarters of the fish that’d spent their own last hours swimming in the Chesapeake Bay, then washing ‘em down with beer and oyster shooters. 

  First mistake was telling everybody they’d taken a lunch break from their Bueller’s Day Off, down at the beach at the end of Seaview. 

  Second mistake wasn’t knowing the wait staff has to belly up for walk-outs’ intransigencies.  Little did they know how hard and swift the mallet was about to fall. 

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Updated June 24th 2008

  So much prose and poetry is left to rot like the buried trees sunken deep in the murky waters of the Great DismalSwamp, once stands of bald Cyprus, red maples, and the Atlantic white Cyprus, now compost and smoldering peat, that this pestering smoke of the fire of ’08 mightas well feed that flame and rekindle some of those words long forgotten,and bring them back to life for a new generation to read.
The first was written in 1803 by the English poet, Sir Thomas Moore.

A Ballad
 The Lake of the Dismal Swamp

“They tell of a young man, who lost his mind upon the death of a girl
He loved, and who, suddenly disappearing from his friends, was never afterwards heard of.  As he had frequently said in his ravings, that the girl was not dead, but gone to the Dismal Swamp, it is supposed he had wandered into that dreary wilderness, and had died of hunger, or been lost in some of its dreadful morasses.”—Anon.

-“La Poesie a ses monsters comme la nature.”-D’ALEMBERT.

They made her a grave, too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where, all night long, by a firefly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.

And her firefly lamp I soon shall see,
And her paddle I soon shall hear;
Long and loving our life shall be,
And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree,
When the footstep of death is near,

Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds-
His path rugged and sore,
Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds,
Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds,
And man never trod before.

And, when on the earth he sunk to sleep
If slumber his eyes knew,
He lay, where the deadly vine doth weep
Its venomous tear and nightly steep
The flesh with blistering dew!

And near him the she-wolf stirred the brake,
And the copper snake breathed in his ear,
Till he starting cried, from his dream awake,
“Oh!  When shall I see the dusky Lake,
And the white canoe of my dear?”

He saw the Lake, and a meteor bright
Quick over its surface played—
“Welcome,” he said, “my dear one’s light!”
And the dim shore echoed, for many a night,
The name of the death-cold maid.

Till he hollowed a boat of the birchen bark,
Which carried him off the shore;
Far, far he followed the meteor spark,
The wind was high and the clouds were dark,
And the boat returned no more.

But oft, from the Indian hunter’s camp
This lover and maid so true
Are seen at the hour of midnight damp
To cross the Lake by firefly lamp,
And paddle their white canoe”

  The second was written by Edgar Allen Poe in 1827, when he stayed at the Lake Drummond Hotel.  Its conjectured The Raven was written there too.

To: the Lake

In Spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less-
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock abound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody-
Then-ah, then, I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight-
A feeling not the jeweled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define-
Nor Love-although the love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining-
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

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Updated June 12th 2008

  When a new book from a first-time novelist comes out, its kind’a like a tree falling in a forest. But when the book’s about the Navy, it’s apt to have a more rippling effect in a neighborhood such as ours. When the Navy book’s author turns out to be one of our own salty dogs, though, it ought’a be launched to a broadside salvo of sixteen-inchers. Now this could just be a hypothetical story, and you’d have to admit since we might be talking about a hometown hero, it’d have an old time, feel good sort of curiosity about it. But if the book didn’t cut the mustard, it’d probably end up like all the rest of those pipe dreaming wanna-be writers’, whose vanity work just ends up floating like turds in a punch bowl.

  Not the case here, though. Nope! Or Yup! Jeff Huber just released Bathtub Admirals, and I got my copy at Barnes & Nobles. Naturally, amazon.com’s carrying it too, and you gotta believe all the five-star readers’ reviews, because he’s really done it here. It’d be simple to imagine a movie being made of this farcical yarn, but after seeing the Navy brass sliced and diced as surgically as Jeff does in these pages, I could just as easily hear the High Command that rolls out the big ships for the big cameras mega phoning Mr. Huber, squawking something about strawberries and “pounding sand”. Whatever…BRAVO ZULU, COMMANDER!

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Updated June 3rd 2008

Chicks Beach Blanket

click for the larger desktop version

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Updated May 21st 2008

  Anybody who likes Tom Petty, and that’s an awful lot of people, or the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, and that’s an awful lot of old hippies, is gonna love Mudcrutch.  They just came out with their first self-titled CD on Reprise, their first and only recording since a single, “Depot Street”, on Shelter Records in ’74.  Mudcrutch actually formed in 1970 in Gainesville, where they held out as the house band at Dub’s Diner, but haven’t been heard from ‘til now, while a couple of their players went elsewhere to become famous as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. 

  TP was the original bass player and continues to thump here, while Tom Leadon, whose older brother Bernie had moved from Florida to L.A. and gained his fame as an Eagles founding member, is sharing lead guitars with the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell.  They bring a tremendous mix of strat and telecaster sounds that take you right back to that old seventies hot country-rock sound, soft as early Dead and flirtsome as Sweethearts of the Rodeo.

  Maybe we can get Paul and Norma Dean to weave a couple of these fourteen immediate classics into The Chicks Beach Sound!

Pics from the Sunrise Chicks Beach 5-21-2008
Click for the larger versions
   

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I’m not sure exactly what kind of architecture this is, but it does have me wondering how long it’ll be before we’re bowing to the east.  At least it’s nice to finally see some progress on what’s been an eyesore for much too long next door to The Parrot. 

 On another front, over at Bayside Shopping Center Saturday, at the corner of Pleasure House, it looked like this Air Force F-16 had to have lit down on Shore Drive and taxied into the parking lot. 

Fact is, the fine folks over at Extreme Outfitters were putting some spit polish on their new digs. 

Turned out this weekend, I was a little premature in retiring the leather and snake skins.  Seems summer had just been teasing recently and we reverted back to our chilly, so-called spring.  In fact, for the whole last week a cold, cold wind’s been blowing through Chicks Beach.  Crazy…

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Updated May 9th 2008

Right here, Right now’s a peculiarly restive after work time-out on the deck, where I’m shifting gears and moving into Chapter two of today’s adventure.  Restive and peculiar on account of the sparseness of humanity and dogmanity sandbagging it up and down the beach.  Mysteriously, for such a fine day, there’s practically no one about and it’s almost like I’ve got the Chicks Beach shoreline to myself.  Robinson Crusoe on Thursday.  My view’s north and that’s fine, in fact downright sublime, with me.  Slipping into overdrive now, in tune with the waves, wind and water, feeling pretty special but getting dogged again by that same old question that’s been popping up for quite a while now…how’d I end up at Chicks Beach?  Right on the water?  Maybe Van Morrison sings the answer in “Into The Mystic”, but more likely Douglas Adams’ 42 better sums it up.  Fact is, It Is What It Is, and I’m good with that.  The sun’s starting to set and the surf’s as far out as it gets at this time of day, let alone year, the waves gently rolling in, softly as you could ever like.  To the east over Lessner Bridge, the western faces of the tall, whitish buildings lining Cape Henry are starting to magically glow as they do at this time of day, when they reflect the setting sun opposite them to the west, where it’s slipping away, firing up the sky.  Wow, a guy could get used to being here, but now it’s time to break up this reverie, and head up the block to say hey to Karl Werne at the Green Parrot.  Yup, THE Karl Werne, in all his songly shoelessness.  But I ain’t goin’ nowhere ‘til I’ve seen a dolphin!

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Updated May 5th 2008

  The padded leather went on the hanger about three weeks ago, and this weekend marked the official retirement of “Old Trusty”, the leather I always thought’d out-live me.  Yup…off with the boots and into the flip flops!  Friday afternoon looked like the kids from the Duck Inn finally found some shore line for their weekly frolic.  Must’ve been a hundred boys and girls lit up in a hormonal super nova, that landed in a group grope out front of our favorite diver’s house.  What a weird site, them all huddled up in a beer embrace, and if not for the bikinis, the bunch kind of resembled one of those flocks of penguins you see on TV.  To make a long story shorter, they could’ve found a better spot to continue their “tradition”…maybe down near Greenies.

  Aside from the sheer pleasure of eyeing so much fresh flesh during both days, was the musical delight of Billy Thompson and Chicks Beach’s own Octopus Five.  Friday night at HK and Saturday night at The Green Parrot we were jumpin’ like a slew of crazy Cajuns down on the Bayou.  Billy borrows a bit of Aaron Neville’s warble and Rob and the guys pound it out like The Meters.  Et Touffe!

  Along that note, Tab Benoit’s latest hit the shelves last week, and once again features Louisiana’s LeRoux.  Recorded live down in Nashville, it’s also got Wet Willie’s Jimmy Hall and The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ Kim Wilson chiming in.  It’s titled Last Train to Nashville and the boys all pitch in to revive LeRoux’ classic, “New Orleans Ladies”…Delta blues at their finest!

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Updated May 1st 2008

This May 1st Sunrise is Dedicated to Dan De Wolf’s son Eric who passed
suddenly and sadly Sunday April 27th.

Click for the Larger Desktop Version


This is a heartbreaker to everybody who knew him and his family.
  The viewing will be May 2nd from 6:00 until 8:00 at H.D. Oliver, next to Gus & George’s on Laskin Rd., with a wake service at 6:30.
  A funeral Mass will be held Saturday at 10:00 in St John The Apostle Catholic Church, 1968 Sandbridge Rd.
  Eric will be interred following the Mass in Colonial Grove Memorial Park.

  The family has requested that in lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to Hope Haven Children’s Home, 3000 N. Landing Rd., Virginia Beach 23456

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Updated April 30th 2008

A Photo of the sunset from Chicks Beach thanks to the "Producer"

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Updated April 18th 2008

I think it was in ’73 I first heard of Bruce Springsteen and The E-Street Band.  They were playing in D.C. at the Childe Harolde, a great club that was like the downtown version of Bethesda’s Psychedelly, both places you could always count on hearing the best of the best. 

Sunrise APRIL 18 2008 click for the Desktop Version

The Twist And Shout grew out of the Psychedelly when Joe Lee sold it.  Back then HFS was the radio home to Cerphe, Damian, Weasel, and the rest of the jocks who were setting the kids on their ear, playing The Dead, Little Feat, Dylan, Marley, Springsteen and doing it like they owned the station and didn’t give a damn about whatever the boss man might have to say about all this rock ‘n roll…aural anarchy…but, man, was it great! 

Pretty neat when a radio station and the clubs that put the artists on the stage all grooved and created a scene that made a whole new kind of fun.  I was working with a couple guys promoting concerts, a business that was just crawling out of its shell itself, and since I’d already gotten a lot of the necessary experience working with The Cherry People, I was the operations manager.  So that was what was happening when Bruce was holding out at the ‘Harolde for a couple days. 

Only a couple weeks after that, I was on the other end of the phone when my main partner Steve Talbert was shopping availabilities from one of the New York talent agencies and the booking agent said we could have Bruce for $3,500.  I’ll never forget scribbling down on a piece of paper that he was nuts…these guys from Jersey had just been playing a CLUB AND WEREN”T READY TO HEADLINE A CONCERT HALL…hello?

So everybody knows the rest of the story now and Danny Federici’s left the hall and Rosalita’ll never be the same.

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Updated April 16th 2008

One Last Photo from The Old Cafe
Click the image for the larger desktop version.

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A Word of Wisdom From the Producer....

THE WONDERFUL LOVE
OF A BEAUTIFUL MAIDEN,
AND THE LOVE OF A STAUNCH TRUE MAN,
AND THE LOVE OF A BABY UNAFRAID
HAVE EXISTED SINCE LIFE BEGAN;

BUT THE GREATEST LOVE,
THE LOVE OF LOVE,
EVEN GREATER THAN THAT
OF A MOTHER

IS THE TENDER, PASSIONATE,
INFINITE LOVE

OF ONE DRUNKEN SOT FOR ANOTHER!