Monday of rain across the island. Blinking sleep from the long return drive from the coast of Oregon and playing at the Yachats Celtic Festival. This was my fifth journey to that town. And the first time since we recorded the Live In Yachats benefit album. I played Friday morning solo at an old log cabin of a church. It was eleven in the morning and I expected a really small crowd - but leave it to festival goers - it was packed. I opened the friday evening show followed by the great piper Michael Cooney from County Tipperary. We had met earlier in the afternoon at the hotel when he asked for chewing gum to fix a reed on his pipes. "Back to the grindstone" he said chewing away. We were friends after that. Michael was followed on stage by John Whelan and Jamie Laval following him. The green room was full of step-dancers going through their routines. Guitars, accordions, fiddles, empties, Scots pipes, dinner plates, leftover lasagna and corned beef. At eleven Jamie was still on stage when I met Michael Cooney at the back door and we left the hall for the Drift Inn down the street. The Drift Inn is one of those strange coastal bars with fishnets on the celling where loggers, hippies, white blues bands, and transvestites all seem to get along and not pay the other too much mind. Michael and I closed it. Two AM and the streets in Yachats are empty except for a couple of straggler musicians walking the graceful drunken zig-zags back to the hotel.
In the morning the surf was up and golden sun in the spray. Saw Casey and Hanz play a workshop in the same little log church as the morning before then split to the ocean to eat bread and cheese and listen to Joe Strummer.
The evening show was magic. Fiddlehead from Olympia opened followed by An Tua. An Tua is Hanz Araki's project and they are the best Irish band around right now. Hanz on flute and singing, Casey Neill on guitar and songs too, Dave Corey on tenor banjo, and his sister Sarah on fiddle and clogging. Tommy Creegan plays pipes. Their amazing. They have the perfect Bermuda Triangle of things going for them: their young, their amazingly talented, and they hate boring Irish music. After An tua (Irish for "The Tribe") Susan McKeown blew everybody's minds with the great Kevin Burke to follow who Tommy Creegan said was playing in fine form. But you could tell that for yourself. All you had to do was listen. Caught up with Casey in the pub at the festival which was wired with a feed from the stage. He's off to Japan with Hanz for three weeks of playing. He'll be taking some of Johnny Cunningham's ashes but I forget where he said they were meant to go.
The drive home passed without incident but I didn't know what to do with myself back at the house. Just sortive wandered around in some wired jet-lag state of mind. Went back to playing guitar but there wasn't too much there.