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Posted on August 2 at 2:10 p.m.

memories continued...

I remember taking William out to a Hobo Convention once. He bought a train whistle and chatted it up with the hobo enthusiasts. Then there was the time Al and I took him up in the single engine airplane with an ebullient William in the cockpit surveying the Stan Herd crop art below.

William used to really dig the Castle Tea Room and the old woman who ran the show, they were about the same age. That was an exquisite place to have dinners. The dinners at William’s house were always a family-affair ritual. It definitely helped keep me fed as a young broke musician.

I could go on and on, because I’ve so many great memories, but I’ll leave it to other folks to share theirs. I think my favorite times with William were when I’d go visit him around 3 pm after I got off work at CLO, which was down the block from his bungalow. He’d usually be reading or writing in his room with the window open and the fresh Kansas breezes moving through the room. He’d either have a joint ready, or I would roll one. We’d just sit there and talk about whatever was interesting. I liked to try and to get him to crack up. He was and still is an enormously positive influence on my life.

On Memories of Burroughs

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Posted on August 2 at 2:08 p.m.

I guess it was probably around 92’ that I first met William. Through unrelated circumstances, we were on the same record label, Tim Kerr out of Portland, Oregon. I recorded with Zoom and he and James had various projects. I knew James through the Lawrence music scene because he was such an essential part of why it was/is so fantastic.

At some point I was at out at Wayne Propst’s for one of the infamous “Bowling-Ball Cannon” productions. William and I ended up sitting next to each other in lawn chairs right above the cannon. Somehow or another we ended up having a lengthy banter about reptiles, which he and I had a lifelong fascination with. Every once in a while there’d be a gigantic earthshaking BOOM! When they’d launch the cannon, the whole mound of earth we were sitting on bulged out a few inches. I remember seeing William in his lawn chair, getting tossed up a bit from the vibrations, then cheering on the spectacle with his cane. It was priceless. Shortly after that I think James suggested I hang out with William because we got along well.

Simultaneously I was also helping George Kaul out in his sculpture studio. I was friends with his granddaughter Arianna and he needed some assistance, as it was getting harder for him do some of the things he used to accomplish by himself. Since George and William were such great friends I used to try and get them together as much as possible -they were quite a pair. We used to organize target shooting at various farms around Lawrence including Fred’s place, Steve Tubbart’s and the Lotuspool Estate. It seemed like everyone had a farm back then. We did a lot of straight-forward shooting, but we also tried to mix it up a bit to make it more interesting. One time Rich Rodriguez, Jeremy Sidener and myself bought about a thousand pounds of wet earthenware clay and brought it out to shoot. It was a complete success! The clay expanded to various proportions depending on the gun/bullet used. William loved that one. We fired all of the pieces we did at the KU ceramics facility and there were several pieces floating around Lawrence. For some reason I never got one?? It was a vigorous time to be alive, especially with all the wonderful folks in William’s circle like Al Levine, Jim & Sue McCrary, Jose Ferez, Wayne, David etc etc…

-continued in next post

On Memories of Burroughs