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April 6th, 2005

Welcome to Rik’s Cyber-Campfire

Dear friends,

There has been many a time that I have sat around the warmth of a night time campfire. I have been with Native Americans out in South Dakota, Cowboys up in the Saw Tooth Mountains of Idaho, in Hobo Jungles and train yards in the mid-west, with Mountaineers in the high Tatra’s of Southern Poland and with clusters of musicians from all over the world.

Somehow campfires just seem to bring out the best in people.

That is why I’m proposing this Cyber Campfire .

It’s a place where you can come to relax in the camaraderie of your friends, enjoy the warmth of community spirit and also share your own stories.

We often under-estimate the value of personal and family stories. But the truth is, long after we are gone, our stories live on.

How many times have you told a story about a relative who has long passed on? Sometimes it’s someone you never even met, yet their story has a life of it’s own as it drifts from one generation to the next.

So here is your chance to tell a story. It could be a real story, a piece of family folklore or even a story that you just want to share. All stories, songs and poems are welcome. As I’m the one starting this cyber campfire, I’m going to tell the first story. But after that it’s up to you to keep our story circle going.

Now you don’t have to be a good writer to join in the fun, hell you don’t even have to have good grammar, all you need is a little of life’s experience and have a story to tell.

See You Around The Camp Fire

Keeper Of Flame

“Totem Pole” Rik

Posted by Rik in General, Announcements

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 at 8:54 pm and is filed under General, Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

10 Responses to “Welcome to Rik’s Cyber-Campfire”

  1. Mike Farber says:

    Hi Rik,
    Good luck with the trip to Alaska. Should be a beautiful time of year there.
    Judya nd I had a great time at Godfrey Daniels and catching up with you.
    This weekend we are heading down to West Virginia, specifically Leron, WV to pick up a new puppy.
    We had 2 German Shepherds. Unfortunately the male, Shane passed away 2 days after his 12th birthday. He was a great friend. I know you can relate from your stories on the road with Koza.
    Well, at first we were not sure if we wanted another Shepherd, but alas, we love the vreed. So after a long search we found a breeder of Long Coat German Shepherds in WV. Soooo, we are heading out tomorrow and going to spend the nite at Pipestem National Park. The park looks magnificent and our room over looks a gorge. We should have a neat time exploring that part of the world. Hey, I am even gonna bring the guitar, ya never know who I may run in to.
    Have a safe trip my friend and remember, when passing this way, our door is always open.

    April 7th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
  2. Rik says:

    Hi Mike,
    Glad to see you here at the camp fire.
    I am glad to hear that you are getting a new puppy, Little Arnika is not Koza but she has brought us so much joy and love that it has made it a bit easier for us.
    I am sure that your new puppy will help you folks
    too.

    Yes it always good to have the guitar along for the ride. Music has a great way of bringing all
    kinds of people together.

    I will also keep your offer in mind the next time
    i come through your area.

    Best Wishes,
    Your Banjo Picking Pal
    “Totem Pole ” Rik

    April 7th, 2005 at 8:40 pm
  3. Mike Meade says:

    The other day my brother called. He asked me if I remembered the Good Humor Trucks. Seems that he was alone in his house and he heard a sound that reminded him of the sound that was made when the door on the freezer compartment on those old trucks closed.
    Now we lived in Maryland as youngsters, so your trucks may have been different. They are certainly different around here today. They were more like a pickup truck with a freezer compartment on the back. The cab was open and sometimes we could ride along on the door step as he drove around. The driver had a strip of bells that he would jingle as he drove by pulling on a string. Once in a while I rode with him and got to jingle the bells. You could hear those bells from a long way off as the truck neared your area, as well as the call of kids yelling “Wait a minute!” as they ran to beg and plead for a nickle to get a popsickle.
    The popsickle had two sticks and the flavored ice was formed so that you could crack the package over your knee and break it into two. Then you would share with a friend, sitting on the front porch. Sometimes the summer heat would melt the popsickle faster than you could finish it, and it would drip and leave pink or blue stains on the concrete.
    It’s a memory that my kids will never have. If we see an icecream truck in our neighborhood twice a year, it’s a lot. And the trucks play that awful midi music that is more annoying than inviting. Still on the rare occasion that they have come around, I’ve heard the kids yell that imploring call “Wait a minute!” and it makes me smile.
    I guess as I approach the big five-oh, I’m becoming a sentamental old sot. But isn’t that what life is all about? Making memories?

    April 9th, 2005 at 9:08 am
  4. Ron Parsons says:

    Hello Rik
    Glad to see you’ve grown into your own cyber entity. Remember my first e-mail to you back in ‘99? I expressed the sense of forboding I felt over times to come…
    Pretty accurate intuition eh? If you’ll have me I’d like to visit again and please visit my fledgeling family of sites and forums especially LeGrange Cafe, a forum styled after our Grange Hall Coffeehouse experience and my Central Jersey Guitarists Forum at Delphi too. Perhaps we can rekindle a bit of the good that was going on until the war started
    Still Love Ya
    Ron

    September 14th, 2005 at 6:59 am
  5. Rik Palieri says:

    Hi Ron,
    I just caught up with my e-mail while on tour.
    Right now I am in Marfa Texas doing a few shows around my book.
    It is good to see that some of my friends are starting to come round the old cyber-camp fire.
    It has been such a busy year that it is hard for me to keep up with this blog but I hope to better in the future.
    what I would like to know from other bloggers is
    what are you folks interested in ? I can talk about all kinds of things like music and travel
    festivals, hobos, my other music making pals and even my little TV show The Song Writer’s Notebook. So if some of you can tell me what to talk about then I just might be able to really get this blog off the ground.
    So go ahead throw another log on the fire and check in and say howdy!

    Best Wishes,
    The Keeper Of The Flame

    Old Totem Pole Rik

    September 16th, 2005 at 1:28 pm
  6. Ron Parsons says:

    Hi Rik
    You just be Rik and I’ll just be Ron and we’ll do great.
    Ron

    September 19th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
  7. The Texas Madman says:

    Thought I’d leave a RIDE STORY and see how well it’s taken.

    Reflections on a 5-mile Ride

    As the pig train trundled by, I cautiously touched its side. My hand came flying back toward my face. Yeah, the train was probably going too fast. I was in Hyattsville, Maryland, a few miles north of D.C., in order to take a short freight ride. It didn’t seem right to end 2002 with only one trip dating back to May; I simply wanted to enjoy the sensations of gripping a ladder, smelling diesel, and feeling rather than hearing the nearly subsonic rumble of the kinetic monsters pulling the train. But, since CSX fixed the tracks in Hyattsville, catching a freight at the wye was no longer a given. At least there was a good place to wait. You can sit and read on a pleasant, grassy slope over a bike trail paralleling the Anacostia River. Across the river lie autumn-splashed woods. Nobody suspects that you are contemplating criminal trespassing, theft of services, and tampering with interstate commerce. After a few hours, though, of basking in the dry air and sunshine, I took my leave. The post-track repair trains ran too fast for my liking, so I strode down U.S. 1 beside the straightaway tracks, where a coal train pointed north toward Baltimore was awaiting clearance. Here, at last, was something that I could catch standing still. I climbed up the track embankment, staying out of the sight of local workmen. When the train finally got dispatcher permission and crept to life, I dropped into a bed of black coal. The car was not absolutely topped off, so I had space for concealment. Slowly, the cargo began to work its way into my shoes and down my collar. I thought with regret of failing to score the fragrant sawdust rides in Washington State. This was my first coal train in many years; in the summer of 1996, I, at a friends advice, decided to jump a southbound from Colorado Springs to Pueblo, along the Front Range. Some of you fellow HoboTramps may remember how we streamed into Pueblo throughout 1996 and 1997 to catch the Royal Gorge before the bean counters shut it down. We were all a lot younger then, and life still made sense.

    Inwardly, I groaned when my train, rather than proceed up to Baltimore, hung a right over the Anacostia River and U-turned toward D.C. But the disappointment was minor; all I wanted was a short ride. From time to time, I peered over the wall of the car at the passing Hyattsville rooftops, the tree-lined riverbank, and the shabby row houses of Anacostia. It was startling how dense and plentiful the woods were within D.C., a sign of how poverty can actually be good for the environment. Nobody was out to build Wal-Mart City in these parts. Then the train halted and, with a lurch, began backing up. I wasn’t even going to make it to L’Enfant Plaza, my planned jumping-off point. Since there were several idle strings of coal cars beside us, we were clearly about to be dumped, until some later delivery to a power plant. The units decoupled with their characteristic explosive hiss, and I was stranded in Northeast. The brush and trees grew right up to trackside here. If I’d timed my jump wrong, I probably would have been suspended in them like Velcro Man until the friendly locals perforated me with bullets. At least I knew where I was: RFK Stadium and the Armory were on my left, and the elevated Metro track curved off toward the Minnesota Ave. station. I scaled the fence - one of the benefits of hoboing for 30+ - and sootily rode the predictable, comfortable Metro. It had been a simple maintenance ride, 5 miles and maybe a half-hour, to store up the sensations for the winter to come, a winter where we can contemplate, post-September 11, preparing to live like Europeans of the 1970’s or Israelis of any decade. In the much smaller scheme of things, we can also reflect on how those who still jump freight trains have been forced to mutate from nearly open practitioners to commandos. A biographer of John Ford once said that his characters knowingly sacrifice for a secure, organized future that can never match their own rough and hearty good times. For those of us who knew and loved the same mythic landscapes, who rode across them on freights rather than on horseback, I wonder if something like the old times can ever return.

    October 19th, 2005 at 4:28 pm
  8. "Totem Pole" Rik says:

    Hey Tex,
    Glad to read your wonderful story. I just came back from a 6 week tour that covered 25 states and about 10,000 miles. I hope you feel free to share more of your “Box car Wisdom” here at the cyber camp fire.

    As I said before . I need to post more often and I plan to. But all of you who have a story to share you can just jump right in.

    I will write a few stories from my long road in the next few days.

    See you around the camp fire

    “Totem Pole” Rik

    October 19th, 2005 at 4:43 pm
  9. Totem Pole Rik says:

    The Grand Tour around America - Six Weeks , through twenty five States and over 10,000 miles
    by Totem Pole Rik

    I left for the open road on September 6th. I had just come back from a week of shows in Germany. I was still not over my jet lag when I went to pack up my truck- camper “apache” full of my instruments ,clothes books and cds.

    The plan was to drive down to Nashville TN, with my dog “Arnika” and my co producer Rebecca Padula (who also works in community TV) and do some video work for The Americana Convention then drop Rebecca off at the Airport and continuing driving a grand loop across the USA.

    I found out from last year that It was too hard for me to do both the interviews and also try and run the camera , so this time around I asked if Rebecca could come and help. As we had both worked in the studio on last years editing for the events PR video it seemed right to ask her along.
    Rebecca was also very keen on experiencing the convention that she had spent so many hours only seeing on her computer and was ready to go.
    When I was planning out the tour I wanted to return and check in with many of my old friends in some of the towns I wrote about in my last book, and also do a few shows in places that I had never played.
    To make the tour a bit more fun ,I also planned that my wife Marianna , would join me for the last two weeks making it not just a long tour but a bit of a vacation too.

    So with my truck finally ready to go I picked Rebecca and we started the trip.
    The first stop would be at my sister’s house , Lisa who lives in New Jersey. I knew that if we can stay the night there it would get us off to a good start and would be able to drive all the way to Nashville in just one day.
    My calculations were correct and with the help of Rebecca and her driving skills ,we did make the trip in one long run.

    We arrived in Nashville by late evening and stayed over at my old high school pals home. Bruce Michael Miller. Bruce was a great musician when we were kids . Now he has turned his hand to the craft of song writing and is trying his luck in the Nashville music scene. His wife Patrica also works in the music BIZ in a publishing house along the famed 16th avenue. They live together with their son “Forest” a very inquisitive a talented young fellow and their dog Phoebe in a happy little house just outside of the main part of town.

    After spending the night at Bruce’s ( I slept in my camper , which is my custom) we headed off to Nashville to check into the
    Convention. We had arranged for press passes before we left so there was no problem getting our badges and big packets from the friendly reception desk greeters.

    Now of course the big question is , What exactly is Americana ? Well that is a tough one to answer but I will give it a try.
    According to legendary steel guitar picker Junior Brown, Long ago when Ernest Tubb was asked to describe his music he dubbed it Americana as he felt his songs spoke the music of our land. Later like many others he accepted the new label of Country &Western and the label seemed to almost disappear.Then a new croup of roots inspired musicians like , Steve Earl, Jim Lauderdale, Randy Foster , Cowboy Jack Clemments and many others started to wave the Americana banner again and now the label is alive a kicking again.

    Today Americana is a warehouse of some of the most exciting music being created from the roots of Country, Rock, Blues and Folk. As you can tell I am also a fan of Americana ,so last year when the opportunity came to do some video for them I jumped at the chance. This time around with Rebecca’s help I knew I could get even more work done and we were both up to the challenge. Once we got our badges we went right to work doing interviews with just about every one ; Performers, agents, managers, radio DJs , panelist and volunteers. Some of the highlights were interviewing Country Song Writer and guitar wizard Marty Stuart, CD Baby’s Derek Silvers, CMT, Country TV , along with short clips by singers “Cowboy” Jack Clemmens, Babby Bare.We also attended many of the panels and parties and met a lot of new and old friends along the way.The days just flew bye and ended in a grand Awards ceremony at the old Ryman Auditorium, with guest such as
    Steve Earl, Jim Lauderdale, Judy Collins, Marty Stuart, Guy Clark, Solomon Burke, The Duhks, Radney Foster , Emmylou Hariss, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Raul Malo, Mindy Smith, Billy Bob Thorton,Arlo Guthrie ,just to name a few. Needles to say to was a packed house a fun show with some folks dressed in their Stetsons and boots. It was a good chance for both Bruce and I to wear our fancy “Manuel ” shirts and jackets and even Manuel himself showed up ,so you know it was the place to be !

    After the convention we also spent some time with Bruce and the band he plays with called
    The Delicious Blues Stew. We went with them and their families to one of their fun gigs at the state fair. It proved to be a great night for not only music, but death defying danger and stupendous feats of bravery as between the “Stew’s” groove, there was an amazing show where this carnival act entertained the crowds with stunts on high poles , wild rides in the air on a spinning whirling metal cage and best of all two motorcycles doing flips inside a cage while this young woman stood and touched their hands while they were inches from her head ! Lucky for us , Rebecca got it on tape or no one would ever believe it.
    The next morning it was time to bring Rebecca to the airport and then prepare for my own show

    To be continued ………..

    “Totem Pole” Rik
    www.banjo.net

    Rik Palieri
    Koza Productions
    66 Koza’s Run
    Hinesburg, VT 05461
    802 482-3185

    October 19th, 2005 at 8:09 pm
  10. The Texas Madman says:

    Hey Rik, if you’re interested - Tourist Union #63, The OLDEST Hobo Union In America will be coming out with “Hobo Music Videos”. We will have them for sale sometime around the middle of April 2006 on a per order basis. These will be Blues, Southern Rock, or Folk Music MP3’s dubbed over a slide show of Hobo Pictures.

    The debut of this item will be shown at the 2006 Amory Mississippi Railroad/Hobo Festival!

    February 27th, 2006 at 6:20 pm