LETTERS FROM HOME: THE BLUES AND THE BARBECUE IN A KANSAS CITY STATE OF MIND

Jan. 21, 1999

Dear Julie,

Duke Robillard was the prototypical East Coast guitar-slinger the last time I saw him, black hair oiled back, have Stratocaster will travel, all swagger and slick fingers. Last weekend in Columbia, 10 more years on the road and maybe a bit too much barbecue had, shall we say, broadened him.

The club was squirming and the cigarette smoke was thick but the sound that once powered Roomful of Blues and the Fabulous Thunderbirds was mellower, jazzier, the swagger gone. I can live without the strut but yearned to feel the gut punch of full-out blues.

DC long ago had been escorted around the current incarnations of my old college haunts -- the Heidelberg restaurant (still there), Shakespeare's Pizza (still there), a club called Ford's Theatre (not there). She wanted to see the farmhouse my friend Chips shared with me in the summer of 1976 but I couldn't find it. It had been awhile.

Those days have been described to her as an idyll of riding horses bareback until the sun set and barbecuing chicken for dinner by firefly light. I think she wanted to see the place herself to more fully imagine my memories.

As fickle as memory seems, Colette right: We remember what is truly important to us.

I remember the freedom of sitting astride those horses, even though they galloped only when we turned them back toward the barn. Most of all I remember Chips' generous friendship. He was the guide on my first trip to California, where I kept saying, "Why didn't somebody tell me this was here?"

In Kansas City, our ultimate destination, DC guided me around the site of her own college memories. "I think I lived in that building," she'd say. It has been awhile for her, too.

We treated ourselves to a room on the 20th floor of an old downtown hotel with an Art Deco lobby presided over by a bronze Venus. The bellhop wore a uniform and a jazz band was checking in just as we were, the bass fiddle barely able to fit into the Lilliputian elevator.

We made messes of ourselves at the famous barbecue spots -- Arthur Bryant's and Gates -- where the high-stacked sandwiches are like edible sculptures.

I am a vegetarian who occasionally cannot resist barbecue. A vegebarbarian.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is a wonder. The stolid building could be transplanted to Russia but not the mammoth Claes Oldenburg badminton birdies on the lawn all the more startling.

DC thinks of her life in Kansas City as her "hippie days" but I suspect she and I were both poor excuses for hippies. When boycotts of classes were called at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, students taking pre-med classes had to attend or risk being expelled. So those students stood up in class and announced to their professors that they still were in solidarity with the boycott. Call it unclear on the civil disobedience concept.

But beneath my beads and shaggy hair beat the heart of an Eddie Bauer man, too.

There are ghosts in these cities for both of us, though none to fear. Just visions of people we knew or loved or were. In those mental pictures all of us look just as we did then, and those feelings are easily summoned but are no longer raw. It's as if those times still exist, hidden somewhere within and protected.

Somewhere, Duke Robillard is pinning people up against the wall.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.