After my post last week about The Ventures and their music, etc., I received a really cool email from a fan who wanted to tell me a story. I thought it was so great I asked Gareth’s permission to share it with you, and he kindly agreed.
“I used to work on a grounds crew at the University I live by and during the winter, the only thing we could do was shovel snow. The area I had at the time had no gardener’s box, so I shared the box of the area next to mine. The regular gardener of that area was a plow driver, so they had a temporary employee shovel the area. He was an older gentleman named Earl.
“One day another gardener friend of mine asked me if I knew that Earl used to be the bass player for The Ventures!
“I’m like, uh, no, he’s never mentioned it. My friend then told me [Earl] was playing in a duo with one of the mechanics named Jerry, who I knew well. So that morning, on the way to our toolbox, I asked Earl about it, saying I didn’t want to bring up any bad memories or anything, but I was a musician as well, and I was just really excited about the whole thing.
“He was really nice about it, and said yes, he was the original bassist for The Ventures. I told him my dad bought me a 45 of the song Perfidia, and he talked about how the song came about and recording it and stuff. A couple days later, I was at a used record store, so I looked for an old Ventures album, and there was a younger version of my friend Earl, smiling back at me. I looked on the back cover for the credits and it listed [Nokie] Edwards as the bassist. But I knew that the guy on the album cover was unmistakably him.
“So, the next day, I asked Earl who [Nokie] Edwards was. And he said that was a name the guys in the band made up for him because he was always asking what key the song they were playing was in. [He always knew the key.]
“So, I asked him if he’d like to jam with me sometime. cause I lived right off campus. He said, sure. So a couple of days later, he shows up with his electric guitar (not bass, 6-string electric) and we go down to my place and I had the time of my life playing with this guy! I just basically played the songs I knew and he was all over that 6-string. He made me sound incredible!
“I never pressured him again and eventually he and Jerry had a falling out and he quit the job, and I never saw him again, except for maybe once. I was up on the highway at the bus stop and a familiar-looking white van with a thin green stripe down the center flies by. I recognized it just as it passed and I couldn’t see the driver but I yelled his name and waved anyway. I’ve never seen another van that looked like that before or since.”
Something I think about often is what happens when an artist’s star fades. Musicians, movie stars, celebrities whose fifteen minutes of fame is long since over, all those one-hit-wonders, even the ones that had great careers and then just seemed to fade away. I’m sure you can think of any number of singers and bands, from whatever decade you grew up in, who simply disappeared from the charts, from the radio, from public life, and you sometimes wonder what happened to them.
How does one sustain a lifelong career in an artistic field?
How do you get up in the morning and keep going at the only thing you’re put on this planet to do if you’re pretty sure your career has had its zenith? That you’ve done your best work.
I think the answer lies in the joy of doing the “thing”, whatever that thing is.
But joy doesn’t pay the mortgage. How do you make ends meet?
For Nokie Edwards, apparently, he made ends meet as a temporary groundskeeper. Unfortunately he passed away in 2018 at the age of 82. Something I discovered during my discussion with Gareth was that Nokie Edwards also sidelined as an actor, appearing on HBO’s Deadwood as a friend of Wild Bill Hickok.
The Ventures were still touring Japan in the ’00s, as you can find YouTube videos to attest, but maybe that ran out, too.
An artistic career doesn’t have a 401k or a pension plan.
My First Bestseller!
Last week, perhaps you heard my yelp of joy in the distance.
Junk Magic and Guitar Dreams hit as high as #4 on the Amazon Teen Music Fiction Category, #2 in Hot New Releases.
“Logan is a captivating storyteller from word one. Junk Magic and Guitar Dreams is a YA novel full of hope, adventure, grief, first love, self-doubt, self-discovery, triumph, and magic—everything I love in a book.”—Rebecca Moesta, New York Times bestselling coauthor of the Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights series
“Love, loss, music, and magic, woven into an intricate pattern that smells like teen spirit. You don’t want to miss this heart-wrenching, atmospheric, gripping tale of grit, friendship, and a mystical family legacy that might be more of a curse than a gift. And did I mention music?” – Chris Mandeville, Author of the In Real Time YA time travel adventure series
“The chapter titles! *chef’s kiss.” – Goodreads reviewer
