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Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – When you hear in the gossip winds around here about a party featuring a band called Nashville Honeymoon, you might think the Sierra mountain foothills are about to come alive with the sounds of Nashville country music. Especially when you find out the lead guitar player and one of the lead singers is named Hank, wears a cowboy hat and has a co-singer and wife named Lynne.
You would not be all wrong, but not all right either.
This band is mostly from Berkeley California, more known for hippie rock music from the 1960s and ’70s perhaps and people dancing around stoned with flowers in their hair. Although Counting Crows and Country Joe and the Fish claim Berkeley as home. So there.
This is more Americana Roots music than traditional pop radio country, although they have been dubbed by local journalists as a honky tonk band that plays their own special brand of “California country.” Tim Wagar on bass and Leor Beary on drums make quite a tight rhythm section for the band.
Like the flora and fauna on the Pacific Rim, many things are just different out here on the Left Coast. And from my perspective, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, I think being different is quite a good thing, both in terms of human evolution and the constant evolution of great music (more on that later on the radio).
The band’s playing reminded me a little of rock-a-billy, and Junior Brown came immediately to mind when I saw them start to play. I once saw Junior Brown play in an opera theater in Knoxville, Tennessee, and he was not your typical Grand Old Opry country music player either.
But when Margaret Belton sat in and started singing Patsy Cline, with a little buzz and the sun going down in the mountains, I almost thought I was back home in Appalachia there for a minute.
The setting was the Big Table Ranch just up Greeley Hill going toward Yosemite, and the hosts Kim Brisack and Dawn Huston are famous for cooking up good food and throwing great parties, even in San Francisco where Huston still has an interest in El Rio, a famous Latin restaurant and historic gay bar.
San Francisco Agency Buys Buildings Housing LGBT Bar El Rio
Many of my new friends from the Old Johnny Haigh Saloon in Coulterville were in attendance, and we reminisced about a movement that got started in California back in the 1960s and made it to the American South in the 1970s.
The Real Beginning of the 1960s: California On the Road
Like the PR posters often say, and I can’t emphasize enough in these trying times, take any opportunity you can get to tune the political noise out, and tune in on good food, good friends, great music and good times. We are not getting any younger, people.
We may not be able to party like we used to, friends. But we can still enjoy a good time with a Mountain View.
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