Rambling on about Rambling Jack

Yep, Ramblin Jack is still alive and well and living in West Marin. He may be pushing 88, but he’s not exactly pushing daisies just yet. He may also not have been a real cowboy by birth, but he is a cowboy of the heart. Still cruising the back backroads in his big blue Dodge truck, he takes it slow. I remember when he used to live in Forest Knolls. He wasn’t so much the country boy back then, but he sure liked girls on horseback. If he wasn’t half cocked, he was generally half-lit. Before I was working for Mimi Fariña at Bread & Roses, I ran into him at a concert, at San Francisco State, in 1974, where nobody showed up, so we all hung out in the cafeteria. Hoyt Axton was hunkered down, with his sledgehammer hands performing a strange CPR to the formica tabletop. I remember sitting at that circular coffee table on its singular iron leg, as they swapped yarns, their knees lifting the small table off the ground, as if it was levitating from the sheer exuberance of all the collective tall tales being told as they outdid themselves and each other. I was a fly on the wall mesmerized into muteness. That iron claw foot was scratching the floor, was screening, and wailing like a monster—tidal waves of coffee splashing in our cups. Their hands thrumming hoofbeats into the proverbial sunset. Move along, little dogies, move along.

UTAH HAS LEFT THE STAGE

Utah has left the stage

Some say Utah has caught the westbound
Some say that train never stops
it never pulls in at the station

they say the night Utah died
there was a huge freak thunderstorm
in the foothills of Nevada City
Some say they saw him ride out on a bolt of lightning

Utah was always ever the alchemist
he didn't die of congestive heart failure
his heart was too big for such trivial nonsense
There was room enough for all
in that great flophouse
of a heart that held the struggle forth
the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest spoke for all humanity.
No one went homeless in Utah's heart.

Ever the ecologist farmer,
when his heart failed he didn't ask for another
One heart was enough for him and the world
Utah has not left the stage
he is telling stories and unionizing the clouds in the skies above.

Go to sleep you weary hobos.
Can't you hear that whistle blowin'?
When the steel tracks hum like a wild harmonica
Utah is riding the ghost rails and
he is bound for glory on that Hallelujah Train.
Amen.