column 5 Deja Vu

 


"It increases my paranoia, like looking in my mirror and seeing a police car."
The whole audience went wild when David Crosby sang this line from 'Almost cut my hair' from the c.d. 'Deja vu' (1972). Truly a deja vu. Still topical and his voice with the same power as thirty-two years ago. He closed the last number with the words, "There are two reasons for playing this song; 1) We think it's a good number. 2) So that we won't ever forget it"
After that two screaming guitars began the intro to Neil Young's Ohio. The entire audience was turned upside down. Sixty-two or thirty-two, it didn't matter to anyone in the audience how old the Croz was. He himself has another view of the matter. "There are very few positive aspects to being over thirty. One of them is that you have a wide selection of songs to chose from. In his case it goes back to 1964.
At half past four we had wanted to collect the tickets we had ordered via the Internet, but the box office didn't open till after half past six. So we went to the back of the theatre to see if there were people on the stage yet. CPR appeared to be doing a sound check. Not completely unfamiliar with backstage I began taking photographs in the wings acting as if I were one of the crew. Afterwards this turned out to be the purest good fortune because it was forbidden to take pictures during the concert. So the success of the evening was already guaranteed for me even before the concert began.
But we almost missed this memorable day. When we noticed that I had left the camper's headlights on all night after we had got to Washington in too much of a hurry. First we asked in a sports school across from the parking lot if we could phone a garage.
"Wail and I'll give you a jump star,." said the girl at the cash desk. I told her it was a pretty heavy vehicle. "Doesn't matter because I've got a ?four wheel drive? Alas it didn't work because we used poor quality jumpleads. When I first laid eyes on the leads I had my doubts, but when someone is so helpful, it's difficult to say  no.
"There's another little garage three streets(Blocks?) further on. Perhaps they can tow you and have a look at what's wrong," suggested Talia from the sports school.
It was indeed a very small garage and the sole mechanic couldn't leave his post. We could buy a storage battery. A taxi driver overheard the conversation. He offered to help us for twenty dollars. We didn't have much choice but I said, "If it doesn't work, I'm only going to pay the fare."
"Sounds fair," he replied.
Amazingly we drove into Fredreick at one o'clock in the afternoon.