Spring, the blues and Dru Lombar

Spring is here. This evening after work, I sat out on the deck and watched the dogs chase each other around the newly green lawn, Claire with her long graceful lopes and Winston keeping up with her on his stubby Scottie legs. The azaleas which will eventually shock and awe with their beauty are beginning to bloom, bits of pink and red in the foliage. The dogwoods are threatening greeneyed flowers. The moths are back at night, entertaining the cats.The other night Dennis actually saw a bat at dusk although it seems much to early and chilly for bat walks. The robins are here all year, as are the cardinals and Canada geese, but they have seemed much more visible and vocal recently. And the real harbinger of spring: the impossibly loud hooting of an owl outside our open bedroom window. We were riding through Emerywood the other day, looking at houses we cannot afford, when D. slammed on the brakes, backed up and pointed to a HUGE owl sitting among the bare branches of a wooded lawn. It was awesome, in the true sense of the word: a large owl, brown and ominous, who slowly turned his face to us, and it was a strange face, like a barn owl, pale and unearthly. His eyes were yellow and staring, his beak was cruel, and rather than a symbol of wisdom, he looked to me like a cunning predator, slow and calculating. Still, we thought him beautiful and wondered later if the owl we heard outside our window was the same fellow.
So North Carolina is becoming greenly lush again, and I hope we escape the extreme drought of last summer. It is too hot here in summer, not like Florida where the sea breeze in the afternoon quells the heat. Here the air is dense and wet and algae and mildew are constantly winning the battle. Here the stillness of the heat defeats you, the sweat sitting idly on your skin. Like living on the Westside of Jacksonville instead of the annointed Southside. Which brings me of course, to Lynyrd Skynyrd. We all know the westside is not really the best side, unless you are a redneck Skynrd fan.
I was flipping through the channels one recent after work afternoon, when I came upon a VH1 channel which was airing a show from England called "The Old Grey Whistle Test", a title which I am sure has some meaning to the Brits but is just so fullsome in its obscurity to me. And the guest of this day's show, which seemed to have originated from the early seventies, was Lynyrd Skynyrd. The original band, Donnie Van Zant, et al. Before the Crash. Now I have never been a Skynyrd fan, despite having a deep appreciation of the Allman Brothers, despite having seen Marshall Tucker in concert, despite having grown up in Jacksonville. I know Freebird and Sweet Home and some other top forty hits, but I had never seen the band. I didn't even know which one was the vaunted Van Zant. I am ashamed to say they blew me away, playing that Southern brand of hard driving blues that you seem to only hear in Jacksonville. Which brings me to the Springing the Blues Festival held at Jax Beach every spring, before the beaches are even officially "open" although of course they never close. Back in the day when Jax Beach was a blighted area(that would be the early 90s), when Einstein's was in full flower for the goth kids and you could still ride your bike Eastward across Penman and Third street to the ocean without risking your life in tourist traffic, we would ride to the Blues Festival, to hear loud music, watch bizarre beach people with boa constrictors around their necks, maybe have a beer and flop on the grass in the hot April sun. One of the bands that played the festival every year was Dr. Hector and the Blues Injectors, a local group fronted by Dru Lombar, a local "boy" whom I had gone to Fletcher High School with in the sixties, only I didn't know this. I just knew Dru had been in a beach band called Magi in the early 70's when Southern rock was taking off. I knew Magi because I was going out with the bass player, the one who had a van and thus secured a place in the band. Magi played some gigs around the beach, at the Maikai and other grungy beach bars that were rife before gentrification ruined the area. Magi was only a middling band and soon broke up. Dru went on to form Grinderswitch and tour as an opening act with well known bands in the Southland. I decided to google Southern rock bands after watching Skynyrd on tv, feeling all nostalgic for my lost youth. Which leads to an obituary. During my google ramble, I learned that Dru Lombar had died of a massive heart attack in 2005, shortly after we had sold our beach house and moved. And in seeking more info on his demise, I learned that Dru had been the soul of the Soul Searchers, a band at Fletcher that had been fronted by a pretty boy lead singer that every girl in school had a crush on. The Soul Searchers had actually recorded a song which was played on local radio, the Big Ape, and I had recorded this song from the radio broadcast on the portable tape recorder I had received for Christmas. The song was "Can I Get a Witness." How perfect for Dru, the ultimate white bluesman, to have recorded this Motown tune in 1965. How shallow of me to never have bothered to know him, in the ninth grade or later as an adult, because he was not the pretty boy. He was just the one with the talent. Not that he knew me at all. I was just the girl with the bass player who couldn't play but had a van. At Fletcher in the sixties I was just a townie who rode for an hour on a school bus to rectify overcrowding at the in-town schools. So although our paths crossed, I can't say I knew the man. Still, like the Kevin Bacon game, I feel I am somehow connected to Dru and through him to the bands he toured with, including those redneck boys from the Westside, Lynyrd Skynyrd. I hope Neil Young will forgive me. My conscience does not bother me...does your conscience bother you?