September 2019 – My Take on Whatever

CDC: A Lifetime in the Making

While trudging – and I do mean trudging – through a Florida airport, I took a tumble.

The fall was a hard one, hard enough to tear a couple of tendons in my bicep as well as my rotator cuff.

The date is easy enough to run down. I know it was Sunday, Oct. 16, 2016 the morning after I had watched Wake Forest lose at Florida State for the 14^th time out of the 16 football trips I made to Florida’s state capital as the Deacons’ beat reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal. This time I was flying out of Jacksonville because the Tallahassee airport had left me stranded too many times and the Tallahassee hotels always shook you down so bad on football weekends.

Going on three years later, I can see what a fortuitous fall it turned out to be. I was 64 at the time, and, though I tried hard not to let it affect my performance, I was done with being a sportswriter. The industry was imploding under my trudging feet and I was so dog tired of the travel. And since my junior year of college, 1973, writing sports was all I had ever done for gainful employment.

Workman’s Comp handled the bills, and for all the pain of the resulting surgery, it was probably less than what I would have endured covering another season of Danny Manning coaching Wake’s basketball team.

Here’s where the hero of the story emerges. After I had recovered enough to return to work, my brother Joe asked if Workman’s Comp had settled my claim. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Joe just happens to be a lawyer well-versed in Workman’s Comp litigation. And without his expertise, I wouldn’t have realized that I had money coming in the form of what is called a Clincher Agreement – struck to prevent any further claims on my part should the surgery not be successful.

Like manna from heaven, I received a goodly chunk of change I never even knew I had coming.

So lo and behold, I finally had the kind of money (and eventually, upon retirement in August of 2017, the time) needed to fulfill a lifelong dream. Since taking up guitar at age 16, I have written songs. In fact I learned guitar so I could write songs. Here was my opportunity to get in a studio and record my original songs, and do it right.

The key was finding the right studio and right engineer, and through the sage advice of my long-time buddy and bassist John “Hootie” Hoots, I was led to Geoff Weber.

Geoff, a fairly recent Wake grad who works at Salem Music, turned out to be the next hero of the story. Not only is he a sharp, even-keeled guy who knows his stuff, he also happens to be an ace musician (bass, keyboards) who plays in a hot-as-fire local band, Bad Cameo.

He even enlisted his band mates, Will Huesman (guitar), Lando Pieroni (guitar and banjo) and Dan Mead (drums), to contribute their considerable skills to the project.

It all took about a year. There was no deadline, and I wasn’t paying Geoff the entire amount of my insurance claim. I am, after all, married with bills to pay. And there was also so much I had to learn about the recording process besides just showing up at the studio with songs written and arranged.

For one, I had to learn to play with a metronome to make sure we were on time. On time and in turn became our motto.

Along the way, other buddies rallied to my cause. Jeff Shu, long-time member of the par excellence Honky Tonk band, The Bo-Stevens, brought his pedal steel to the studio. Bubba Spear, a pal I’ve played music with for years, brought his harmonica. And Hootie, of course, brought his bass. We weren’t doing this without Hootie.

By the time we got down to production, I needed a cover. I had this wonderful photo taken by a good friend named Mike Anderson from a gig I did at Second and Green, and my daughter Rebecca took time from her day job with Eversource Energy in Boston to handle the graphics and design.

So it’s with great pride that I announce the result, titled CDC: A Lifetime in the Making. As of yesterday, it became available on Spotify, Itunes, Apple Music, and pretty much all the other streaming sites I never even knew existed.

Feeling really good about what we got down. And we’re putting together a band called the Whippersnappers (because the members of Bad Cameo who will be included are all young enough to be my sons, if not grandsons).

And on Sunday, Nov. 3, at 5 p.m., Country Dan Collins and the Whippersnappers will play the CD front to back at the CD Release Show scheduled for my favorite haunt in its final days, the Muddy Creek Music Hall. Hope you circle the date on your calendar because I know it’s going to be worth the trip to Bethania and the $10 cover.

In my dreams, the CD will launch a new career as America’s next great songwriter. But, truth be told, I’ve already thanked my lucky stars so many times over for the opportunity to spend a year doing what I’ve always wanted to do.

And if the CD doesn’t sell anymore than my last great dream gone poof – The ACC Basketball Book of Fame published by Blair Publishing in Winston to far less-than-overwhelming reward – then that won’t hurt my feelings a bit.

Because, thanks to a fall, and the advice of a brother who happens to be a lawyer, it’s already been paid for.

Music

One Door Closes. . .

About a month or so ago I was swamped with sympathy.

The sentiment was appreciated, as misplaced as it might have been.

News broke that the Bethania Mill and annex housing Muddy Creek Cafe and Music Hall had been sold, spelling the impending end of the Open Mics we’ve been staging there since our launch in June 2014. And indeed the five-plus years we’ve spent in Bethania making music the way it’s meant to be made among fast friends has been one of the favorite chapters of my life.

But it got so I couldn’t show my old bearded face anywhere in this town that someone didn’t say “Oh sorry to hear about Muddy Creek. What a shame. I know how much it means to you. How you holding up?’’

Truth is, strange as it might seem, I was holding up right well. The news hadn’t really rocked me the way most folks seemed to think it would, for at least two reasons.

The first is that everything in life runs its course. Everything begins and everything ends. I felt the same way when the first bar where I began to play music, The Rubber Soul on Burke Street, closed its doors around 2005. And I felt that way when our run of 4 ½ years of Open Mic at the late, great Garage finally wound down to a close in early 2014.

I’ve been told five years is an eternity for an Open Mic scene, and I can testify that’s true. There have been signs that we’d done what we set out to do in Bethania and, in fact, had done it over and over again. We’re still filling up the sign-up sheet and we’re still having great fun, but I’ve played more than 200 three-song sets at the Cafe and all the regulars who have made the scene what it is have pretty much heard all I had to say or sing.

The other reason I didn’t despair over the news was that I suspected Shana Whitehead, the owner of Muddy Creek Cafe, and Bill Heath, the musical mover and shaker of the operation, would have something else in mind to move the kind of energy around this town it takes to get folks up off their behinds and out the door.. Bill had been giving me hints that another idea or 20 were bouncing around their fertile imaginations.

And sure enough, just last week the glad news broke that the Muddy Creek is moving its scene to another Moravian site in Forsyth County, venerable Old Salem. Come late November a new Muddy Creek scene will be up and running in the space formerly occupied by Flour Box Tea Room and Cafe, beneath T. Bagge Merchant at 626 South Main.

Bill, knowing a good thing when he builds one, has been adamant from the start that he wants a Thursday night Open Mic to anchor their weekly schedule, and I’m proud to say he wants this old boy to do in Salem what we’ve been doing these past five years in Bethania.

So I’ll be ram-rodding the Open Mics at Old Salem, and I could hardly be more excited.

It’ll be a new scene, a new chapter, a new canvas on which to paint. There will be new ears to play to, and hopefully catch.

My great hope is that we can coerce all the regulars who have kept Bethania roaring down to Old Salem to continue doing what they’ve been doing so well. And I also suspect that we’ll get the influx of a new and more diverse crowd, it being a downtown venue more accustomed to a younger and slightly more, shall we say, energetic clientele.

Salem College is down there, and The School of the Arts is a spud’s throw away. I love old folks. I should, being one myself. But it’s the young folks who can turn a scene into a happening, and it’s the young folks who, with the right breaks and right ability, might even turn what we all love doing at a Thursday night Open Mic into a bonafide career.

So look out downtown, Country Dan’s Open Mic at Muddy Creek is headed your way.

And I’m bringing reinforcements.

Uncategorized

Look Who’s Back

Every day for the past few months I’ve awakened to the thought “You know I really should get back to my blog.’’

But then it didn’t take me all of my 67 years to realize that one of the most pointless words of the English language is should.

It’s at best a half-promise that may or may not be honored, at worst a reminder of what we really wanted to do but, for whatever reason, never got around to.

Well, today, Sept. 17, 2019, is the day that boredom finally drove me back to my laptop to pick up where I left off back in March, when insanity did indeed prevail and Danny Manning was retained to coach a sixth season at Wake Forest.

If anyone other than the man who made the announcement has publicly endorsed that decision, would someone please direct me to the statement or quote I obviously missed. And in that the man who did make the announcement, Ron Wellman, has now, like me, retired, the absence of any such bravery would mean that there’s no one currently at Wake Forest – other than maybe members of the basketball staff itself — who has voiced support for Manning remaining as head basketball coach.

The only conclusion I can reach is that no one wants to take the heat emitting from the dumpster fire Manning has kept ablaze. I wish Wellman’s successor, John Currie, luck. Even with Dave Clawson’s football team off to a 3-0 start replete with a stirring victory over arch-rival North Carolina , Currie is going to need all the luck he can get to survive the basketball season unscathed.

But I didn’t pick the blog back up to use as a cudgel to whack Wellman and Manning again, and I didn’t go on my hiatus simply because Wake didn’t heed my advice (as well as that of the rest of the known world) and hire a basketball coach who could possibly win in the ACC.

I feel good about myself, but not that good.

The prevailing reason I took a break is that this became a little bit too much like work. I got to feeling a bit compelled to keep the blog current, and I didn’t retire from 45 years spent as a working sportswriter (I know, I know, a contradiction of terms) just to chain myself to a commitment I wasn’t even getting paid to fulfill.

But I did miss it some because I do love to write. And I did really get off on the connection I made to many of you who found your way to My Take on Whatever.

So MTOW is back to catch everyone up on what’s been going on these past six months and alert folks to what’s in store for the foreseeable future.

The big news at the Collins Hacienda is that my bride, Tybee Leigh Terry Collins, finally in June joined her slug-a-bed husband in retirement. Guilt only begins to describe how I felt when she was still working after I wasn’t. An elementary school teacher these past 40 years, she was as done with what she had been doing as I was when I turned in my laptop to the Winston-Salem Journal in August of 2017. And dragging herself out of bed at 5:15 and out the door at 6:30 while her husband just snored away had to be purgatory.

We’ve made up for lost time, though, by reveling in retirement, enjoying our Thursday nights at Open Mic at Muddy Creek, taking afternoon naps when the mood arises, and getting the hacienda in at least some semblance of order. Then, a couple of weeks ago, we embarked with Tybee’s irrepressible sister Kim Hawks on an odyssey that included a memorable day spent in Memphis (Sun Studio, Stax Studio, Beale Street for drinks and dinner) and four unforgettable days in Dallas with our son Nate, his bride Laura and our three-and-a-half year-old angel of a grand-daughter, Isla.

We rented a car and I drove the entire two-thousand (and then some) miles. But I would – and will – do it again in a heartbeat to be able to reconnect with Nate and get to know better his beautiful (in every way) family.

My family.

Our family.

All that said, most of my last six months have been spent in a recording studio FINALLY putting down some of the songs I have spent a half-century writing. As I mentioned last spring, I’ve been working with a young (to me, almost everyone is young) Wake graduate named Geoff Weber arranging and recording 12 original songs for a CD to be titled CDC: A Lifetime in the Making.

Not only is Geoff a supremely talented engineer and musician, he plays in a band, Bad Cameo with some of the most talented musicians I’ve ever had the good fortune to know. So I enlisted guitarists Will Huesman and Lando Pieroni and drumer Dan Mead to back me on this project, while also drafting fast friends Jeff Shu (pedal steel), Dennis “Bubba” Speer (harmonica) and John “Hootie” Hoots (bass) to contribute their considerable talents to the project.

The CD should (there’s that word again) be out in early October, in plenty of time for the CD Release Show we have tentatively set for Sunday, Nov. 3, at the Muddy Creek Music Hall.

I’ll keep everyone apprised.

Thanks for remembering My Take on Whatever. The only thing worse than being gone is being forgotten.