From the Memoir: "Dave's Turn" (Patreon)

October 2000. Home in Portland, Dave and I busy in our respective workspaces. I was upstairs in the grey-bright master bedroom-turned-headquarters with the French doors to the deck open just a crack, letting in a whiff of the rain. Mapping tour dates, arranging travel, adding names to the mail list database—never a shortage of tasks to manage. Dave was in his tiny, dark bedroom office downstairs, where he kept his computer on a small wooden desk, and his single futon mattress laid out on the carpet behind his task chair, topped by a blue sleeping bag. He was usually either napping or typing, both of which were integral parts of his creative process. Occasionally, though, I’d catch him taking a break and messing around in an interactive website called Virtual Worlds, where he was building a little home for an avatar he named Krysalis.

Loaded, I know, given what we know now about Dave's trajectory of transformations -- realized and otherwise.

The phone rang and Dave picked it up. I cocked an ear. It was a long conversation. All the nervous laughing. He was talking to someone he didn’t know well, I could tell. It got me curious.

I bounced down the carpeted steps and peeked into Dave’s office and he waved his hand frantically for me to come in.

“Mm-hm,” he said. “… That’s great, Mark! … Really? She does? Oh man!”

Dave looked up at me and mouthed something I didn’t understand. Then he anchored the phone on his right shoulder and, with his left hand, scribbled the word, “Spector” on a scrap of paper.

I went wide-eyed with surprise.

Mark Spector. Joan Baez’s manager.

D&T Tanglewood Tree photo shoot. © Brent Hirak.

There was a rumor going around that Joan had started singing one of Dave’s songs in her live concerts. No one could say which song, though, and no bootlegs had popped up to prove it. If it were true, we couldn’t figure out how. Who sent her the music? How did she hear about us?

It certainly wasn’t our doing. We weren’t the type to pitch songs to other artists, mainly because Dave believed other artists wouldn’t take the time to learn them properly. “People think my songs are easy,” he’d say, “but they’re full of subtleties. You can’t just jam out on one of my songs.”

Maybe we should not have been so surprised. Our second album, Tanglewood Tree, had been doing well, sitting at number one on the folk radio charts every month since its February release, with the press having a field day dreaming up new superlatives to describe Dave’s writing. But still. This was folk music. You can be number one in folk music and still be completely unknown to the general public. It’s a pretty small pond.

Dave held the handset away from his ear so that I could listen in too. I leaned in but couldn’t decipher Mark’s side of the conversation at all, so I gave up and he turned away from me to avoid distraction. Ever fidgety, I picked up the wooden t’ai chi staff from the corner where Dave kept his collection of martial arts swords. The intention was to wave the staff around in a martial artsy way and make Dave laugh with my foolery but mid-spin, the end of the staff caught the inside of a little plastic black trash can and flung it sideways, spilling the contents. Dave spun around at the commotion and I attempted to save face with a wide warrior stance and a couple of random stabs at the escaped trash, but with his glazed-over phone eyes and his frozen smile, it was clear he didn’t even see me. I laid the staff to rest in the corner with Dave’s other swords and stood by, listening.

“Yes! Yes, I think we can do that,” Dave said. “I’ll have to talk to Tracy but I’m sure—Yeah. All right!” He nodded at me then, gave me a focused grin and an emphatic thumb’s up. I smiled and threw my hands in the air like, What?

Nick wandered into the room and threaded himself between my legs, his fur tipped with raindrops. Kooky cat. He was looking for a vigorous toweling-off, which was our custom, but I wasn’t about to leave the room. As a compromise, I picked him up, threw him over my shoulder the way he likes, and ran the sleeve of my sweatshirt down his sleek black fur, head to tail, till my cuff was saturated. But it wasn’t enough for my cantankerous boy. Nick hissed, sprang from my shoulder, and fled the room, leaving my sweatshirt dampened and Dave’s blue sleeping bag dotted with a couple of wet paw prints.

“Thanks a lot, Mark! No, really. This is the best thing ever.”

Dave nodded at his blank computer screen as if Mark were inside there somewhere, nodding back. He was having a hard time figuring out how to end the conversation.

“Welp,” he said, looking away from me. “Tell Joan we said hi.”

“Oh my god!” I blurted out.

Dave replaced the phone in its cradle so gently that it didn’t make a click. Then he hitched up his shoulders, puffed out his chest, and, with one elbow resting on his desk, turned around slowly in his chair. I started giggling, anticipating the skit. Thing about Dave—he was relentlessly creative, and full of characters. This one, known as Mr. Executive, had a way of showing up whenever Dave was paying bills or finishing phone calls at his desk. By the spark in his eye I could see this was going to be rich.

He leaned back till the chair creaked, cocked his head to one side, and spoke in an offhanded way, like a guy who just closed a huge deal but doesn’t want you to know it matters. Or, maybe more accurately, like a guy whose dad just closed a huge deal and thinks he’s entitled to some of the credit, either by way of genetics or proximity or—let’s admit it—simply because he’s him.

“Yep,” he said, sighing loud and long, jerking his chin at the phone. “That was Baez’s people.”

“Yes…” I said formally, playing along. “And?”

“Oh, uh, I’m sorry,” he said, feigning impatience. He lurched forward and raised his voice. “Joan. Baez? You’ve heard of her? Yeah, well…” He relaxed again, examined his fingernails, fogged them up and then polished them on his imaginary lapel. Then he snapped his arms over his head, folded his clasped hands behind his head, and looked me in the eye.

“She’s singing ‘The Mountain’.”

“Yes!!” I dove at him and threw my arms around his neck, kissing him five or six times on the freckle on his cheek, the one that matches the freckle on my cheek.

He hugged me hard but then waved his arms like regular Dave again, like he was being attacked either by a swarm of killer bees or somebody who loved him altogether too much. I could be both.

“Are you happy?” I said, wriggling out of my sweatshirt, tying it around my waist.

He laughed and clutched at his chest and seemed to find the question hilarious.

“Of course I’m happy!” he said. But I’d asked the wrong question. What I really wanted to know was whether he was prepared to accept Joan’s interpretation of his song. In a flash, I realized I couldn’t picture her getting it just right. I couldn’t picture him pleased. And I didn’t know whether that was a reflection on him, or on me.

“How did she hear of us?” I asked. “Who sent her the song? Was it Jim Olsen? Biff?” They were our record company owner and manager, respectively.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but Mark says she really wants to meet us.”

“She wants to meet you,” I said, correcting him. “Nobody cares about me.” It sounds like a pitiful thing to say but it didn’t feel that way. I simply figured she was interested in the songwriter. Everybody was. Frankly, that’s how I liked it. My personal mission was to get Dave’s music heard in the world. Period. It was never about me. It didn’t care about being noticed, being center stage, or being any kind of so-called star except to the extent that it might further the mission. And anyway, I was very sensitive to efforts to include me that felt forced or obligatory. This wasn’t the first. I could think of no reason Joan Baez would want to speak to me. She only wanted to meet Dave. I knew that in my gut.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “Of course she wants to meet you. It’s your voice singing the song on the record. You’re the one she learned it from. Did you think about that?”

Well, no. I hadn’t.

“Anyway,” he said, “they’re gonna put us up in a hotel and get us into the show with VIP passes and then I think the plan is to hang out with her the next day. They looked at the calendar on our website and figured it out already.”

He reached down toward the beat-up briefcase standing open on the floor next to his desk. He ran his fingers through the papers till he found his dog-eared monthly planner. He flipped to November, grabbed a pen, and wrote as he spoke.

“November first, Columbia, Missouri, Baez.” He underlined her name with a flourish and held the pen in the air for a moment before letting it free fall onto the planner, which he then snapped shut with both hands and chucked toward his briefcase.

I was itching to go upstairs to check out the road atlas. I knew we were in the Midwest then but I wasn’t sure where Columbia, Missouri sat in the routing, and whether it made sense to take a side trip there. My brain got snagged on that detail for a few minutes, until I was able to reason it out. It really didn’t matter where Columbia, Missouri fell in the grand scheme of things. It was Joan Baez. And when Joan calls, you go.

Dave rose abruptly, went to the closet, and knelt in front of his big blue trunk. He pressed a button and the metal latch sprung open. I'd known Dave a few years and for some reason, I’d never asked what was inside that trunk; all I knew was that men were required to lift it because it was impossibly heavy. I knelt alongside as he threw back the lid.

LPs. Dozens of LPs. “Treasures,” he called them. He flipped through slowly, his long fingers lingering now and then on favorites, or at albums he thought I’d find amusing. Emmylou Harris. Judy Collins. Bob Dylan. Joni Mitchell. Mozart. Vintage psychedelia.

Then he found what he’d been looking for: the faded jacket for Diamonds and Rust. So faded he might’ve bought it in 1975, the year it came out. He rocked back and landed cross-legged on his sleeping bag, the LP on his lap. He studied her face on the cover for a moment, then tilted the album toward me.

“You know,” he said, his voice light. “She made Dylan famous.”

Neither of us said it out loud. We didn’t want to jinx anything. But we were both thinking it—

Dave’s turn.

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I hope you enjoyed this little story of a very special day in D&T history.

Thanks to all my friends, family, and fans for walking this long road with me and for sponsoring my work. You bless me with your presence and support. xotg