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MY FLYING STORIES

ME AND MY OLD STEARMAN... (I'm the one with the big ears) "The First Time That I Saw Him".. I probably started writing the song when I eighteen years old. I was living behind the hanger at Waco. The Air Force had hired me to be a flight instructor for a new program that they were trying out. I was working air shows and trying to get into crop dusting. Some nights I would get on my Harley and ride all night with my motorcycle buddies. By morning I would be kind of fuzzy so I would open the monstrous hanger doors, get my guitar and sit in the cool pre-dawn air making up songs until my first student showed up. Then it was back to the skies over Valley Mills.

 




"Black Magick Woman" .. Sitting on the flight line at midnight, cross legged, strumming my guitar with a full moon over head I would occasionally think of tropical islands, palm trees, a well founded schooner under me and…. Well you get the idea…. Years later I did sail to those islands and wrote an album about my adventures. Did I find my BMW ??? Maybe.

"Black Ship" .. People ask me if this is a space ship. Others think it is the spirit coming back to help mortals and to guide them when they are in need. I woke up one morning to find parts of this scrawled in my hand writing on a brown paper bag with an empty bottle inside and put the pain in my eye aside long enough to stuff it in my pocket before shuffling off to a full day of chandelles and lazy eight’s. Crop duster, air show, and instructor pilots are just natural philosophers so there is much speculation and argument about the deep meaning of this song when I play it , jammin at the back of the hanger on a rainy day.
 		I LOVED TO FLY THIS OLD MYERS OTW..... SO SWEET



"Words of a Song" .. A wall of boiling dust forty thousand feet high and a hundred miles long rolls out of the western desert toward the old abandoned Air Corps training field with it’s one remaining hanger. We hurriedly cram all the dusters that we can inside and close the doors. They don’t work good any more and stick. It takes us too long and the brown wall of the storm is just reaching the edge of the field. It is eerily quiet as we double tie and chock the planes we couldn’t get inside. The hanger doors are about forty feet high and nearly as wide. They are heavy. It takes several men to move one when they are in good shape. These doors were ancient relics and seldom used. There is a little door just big enough for a person to go through in one of the big doors. We stand at this door and watch the storm envelop the sun and bear down on us. When the sand starts tO blast us in the face we take one last apprehensive look at the planes tied down outside and close the little door. We find a spot at the back of the hanger that’s not directly under one of the missing boards in the roof sixty feet overhead. As the first sand balls find their way through the holes in the roof and splat against the taught fabric of the dusters I unwrap my guitar from its blanket and start noodling on a song I’m trying to get together. After going over the same verse a few times the pilots gather around like old cowboys around the campfire and join in with a sort of "loose" harmony. The storm blasts the old hanger one more time ripping off another board or peeling back another piece of corrugated metal. It gets as dark as night as we sit on the tires of our dusters and pass the time.


The picture is kinda dark but i'm sitting on the cowl of this fine old Great Lakes stunt plane.
"Mason Jar".. Little towns and pueblos dot the desert along both sides of the Rio Grande. Some are on a map but many are not. They all have names but the really interesting ones are known only to local residents. Some of these places consist of little more that a cantina and are inaccessible by paved roads. These are the ones I like best. Some people would swim or wade the river to get to their favorite watering hole. Some would even set their dusters down on a more or less level spot close by. You could sure get snake bit walking from the cantina to your plane after dark… but that’s another song…