I’ve never been one to allow extra time at the airport. All my life, I’ve cut it as close as possible. Why waste time sitting at the airport?, I thought. In fact, the last time I SEE HAWKS IN L.A. took a flight back from the East Coast, we missed the flight due to our overly-chill attitude. It really was the fault of the Waffle House, and I don’t blame the Waffle House for much ever, but this time it was the Waffle House’s fault. No it wasn’t. It our fault for thinking we had the time to stop. But enough about that. Here I am, almost three hours early for my flight. Following the terrified post-9/11 mode of thinking that has seeped across the entire culture. Surprisingly, it’s not that bad. Being here early, that is. I’m well ahead of all the other rockers, with the exception, of course, of Paul Marshall. But he’s always ahead of schedule.

Now I’m sitting in the Travel Right Café across from Gate 43 (that’s right, good omens are flying). Drinking a glass of Pinot Grigio, typing at my laptop like all the orther business travelers. Am I a business traveler? Maybe so… And just then, PM wanders into the Travel Right Café ™. He’s got his cowboy hat on and he’s carrying a briefcase. My God, I am a business traveler. According to PM’s report all other L.A. country-rockers are present and accounted for.

Echo Park is the true geographical and spiritual home to I See Hawks in L.A. RW and PL were both bachelors living in the Echo Park hills when they began writing songs together at the turn of the millennium. And we feel that connection as we walk down the hot sidewalks by the lake behind the Angelus Temple. The smell of tacos is in the air. In the distance banda music plays loudly through a brightly lit juke box. Two cops question a woman out in front of the 99 cent store. Yes, this is it, familiar, homey Echo Park.

The Echo is at 1822 Sunset, just east of the newly gentrified Bright Spot cafe, in case you’ve given up on finding it. In classic L.A. slacker style, the owners haven’t put up an Echo sign out front. Instead there’s a faded neon sign: Nayarit. But it’s the Echo.Inside, the Echo is dressed up in its country best. Girls in flowery dresses and guys in western shirts and trucker/cowboy hats gather by the bar. Some may say L.A.’s country scene is phony, a put on. Well, we can tell you there are many other cities and states that have a much more damaged and damaging relationship with the cowboy hat. We’ve been there. We’ve suffered that injury.

And it just feels damn great to be here. The Horsepainters rock out hard. The Dime Box Band sings and looks beautiful. Triple Chicken Foot plucks it up on the patio beneath the bare bulbs strung above the black picnic tables and barbecue pit. We see friends and comrades from Coles to Burbank, Santa Monica to Covina, Long Beach to La Canada. Rick Shea joins us on pedal steel and we let the country rock fly. We’re in musical heaven, playing a damn good show if we say so ourselves. Rick’s sweet steel lines are perfection, weaving through our road hardened arrangements. It’s tough on the road sometimes, introducing yourself and your music to strangers. Tonight we play songs people know and sing along to. It’s a fine homecoming. We drink beer and smoke cigarettes and talk with friends out on the patio until they kick us out so the dance club can start. The air feels wonderful. Los Angeles is our home.

But it is only a short stop and early next morning (well, 11 a.m.) we’re back on the road, Rob, Paul M, and Shawn back in the Yukon flying up the I-5 to San Francisco. Shawn has the seat reclined and he’s trying out the rings on his cell phone. He’s chosen Ring One. This is how you kill time in the car after you’ve driven from L.A. to Vermont and back. Paul L and Victoria have left at about the same time in their humble Honda CRV, and challenge the Yukon to a race to the Bay Bridge.It’s a beautiful day on the Grapevine and down into the San Joaquin valley, drying up nicely in the last few weeks of inferno like weather. The mysterious marshes are prevailing through the heat, with big white migratory birds winging low over the tule grass and glassy water. Quite beautiful.

The 5 is a long haul with terrain that changes incrementally, a rise out of the fields into brown hills, a dip down and along the surreally uniform California Aqueduct, past more cotton fields, tomato fields with giant sorting machines, splotches of spilled tomatoes on the road from a caravan of open bed big rig trucks rolling north. Spillage is part of the process. Tomatoes unpicked by machines rot in the field. Agricultural water is used about as sparingly as by swimming pool owners or people hosing down their driveways in L.A. This is the land of more than plenty. So far.But we digress. Which you do on the long five drive. Five hours later, it’s 580 west, past the windmills, abrupt cultural shift into Hayward’s new highrise condos by the Lawrence Livermore nukeland, then the mellow and moist Bay Area. This is the first cool weather we’ve felt since Vermont, and it feels almost chilly.

Over the bridge, and the two Hawks vehicles are within a half mile of each other heading into San Francisco. Paul L gets lost, winds up in what might be Daly City. We’ll never know. Paul L’s greatest phobia is getting lost in San Francisco. Despite a thousand family and band visits to this fair city by the bay, he couldn’t possibly find his way around without a map and a cell phone call. It’s a psychic block that will likely never dissolve. The San Francisco Bay Area contains more Hawks’ relatives per capita than another other U.S metropolitan region. And thank god for them. The Lacques Clan alone can nearly fill most a mid-size club. The only problem, of course, how to squeeze as many as possible onto the guest list.

The Independent is a great music room on Divisadero in the heart of SF. This classic SF venue has had many names over the years. When RW lived around the corner on Grove Street in the mid-nineties it was known as the Justice League and served up a mix of dance, hip-hop, and reggae most nights with the occasional kick ass rock show and from the looks of the calendar the new management is keeping up a similar mix. These folks know about how to do a show. They’ve saved two parking spaces for us, in front of the huge gleaming white Cross Canadian Ragweed Prevost tour bus. The CCR guys are traveling in big American rock style. Inside the club is an almost perfect cube, cool, dark, intimate but spacious. We quickly unload with our 7 weeks on the road brutal efficiency, load into the Independent. We stack our amps and drums up next to the stage. Next to CCR’s mountain of gear, our little pile looks modest, almost ecological in it’s limited scope. When you have a big tour bus, massive road cases, ten guitars on the rack, and a full on road crew, you take a very long time to do a sound check. Which CCR has and does.

So the Hawks and Victoria repair to a nearby excellent Thai restaurant, dining and answering many cell phone calls from our NorCal loved ones coming to the show. We walk back through chilly teeming city blocks, just in time, crowd our gear onto the Independent stage, a quick sound check, this is going to sound good, greet the family streaming in early to the room, retreat to the dressing room, goof around, make set list, blog, a headset wearing Independent guy gives us the call, exit dressing room.The club is packed with Cross Canadian Ragweed fanatics and hardened Hawks fans. Young girls hugging the stage clutch hand written valentine placards for the headliners. Us less famous Hawks are bemused, perhaps a little envious of CCR tour bus level success, as we plug in guitars and adjust drums. On stage right is pedal steeler Dave Zirbel, whose virtuosity graces our new CD “California Country,” and who has graciously driven down from Santa Rosa. Dave is unflappable and terminally affable, as far as we can tell. Hire this man. He’s a badass player and a virtuoso human being.

It’s great to play a big time stage. This place is bigger than its dimensions. The sound coming back at us off the back wall is thunderous. The lights are heroic, arena like, and we are country rock gods. The Hawks fans cheer, and best of all, the CCR fans are transformed before our eyes from tolerant to enthused. We close out with “Humboldt,” and the young valentine girls are flashing the heavy metal horns, and the crowd roars. Thank you, Independent.We change into our identically dressed twin brother roadie personalities and haul our gear offstage, dump it in the Yukon out front. Shawn has an 11 a.m. gig the next day, and Paul M has a Barndance show that night. The twin country rock heroes drive off into the night.

Rob and Paul L are immersed in family and friends, and new fans. There’s a love fest party out on Divisadero Street. This is great. Farewell, Dave Zirbel. We catch a bit of Cross Canadian Ragweed, earnest rock with some country thrown in, mysterious mainstream appeal that the Hawks will never be. We exit. Paul L and Victoria join their ultra cool 21 year old nephew Gabriel and his perhaps even cooler girlfriend at a nearby hookah parlor. Gabriel is a master of the rules of human relations, and has showed up unannounced at the Independent and scammed his way in. Now he reclines at a parlor table puffing on jasmine scented Turkish tobacco. Paul and Victoria join in the hookah toking, and are soon buzzed on potent nicotine. Ah, they grow up so fast.

Morning. Hot. Shades drawn. Where are we? A squinting glance outside reveals a hilltop vista, St. George, Utah; off to the right below, amidst trees is a large and eerily white 19th century temple, first big Mormon edifice in Utah. We are lords of all we survey. Alas, it’s not enough. We pack up, drive off without Paul M, come back and get him, make a beeline for the nearby Starbucks, obviously a critical stop.

This Starbucks, tucked into a maxi mini mall, has the innocence and high energy of the first Starbucks openings in California, pardon our indulgence in 1990’s nostalgia. The place is packed. The Utahans are excited to be here, and we groggy Angelenos are not. We are here to inject awareness into our spent neurons. The thrill is gone. To go, please. Oh, that’s right. It’s all to go. We drive. Utah is perhaps the most beautiful state in the country, if your tastes lean to the desert end of the spectrum. I-15 south disputes the notion that there’s nothing to see on the Interstate system. The road plunges through spectacular sedimentary rock formations, some twisted into steep angles, and we watch the Yukon’s outdoor temperature gauge climb from 108 to 114 as we hit the lower upper desert floor. We’re crossing a vast desert plateau.

Gas in Mesquite, NV, our 30th state of the tour. The plan was to stake Paul M to $100 and set him loose at the poker tables, but home beckons. Maybe we’ll stop in Las Vegas.A while later, we murmur, sighting the hazy distant skyline of Sin City. This is our last chance. Much debate as we approach, pulled by the attraction between the fabricated gravitas of Gomorrah and our own gambling lust. Paul L suggests putting the cash box on red on the roulette table and letting it ride. We could double our money, then double it again. Naturally, objections are raised to this simple plan.

Now we’re approaching. Now we’re in the city limits. Now we’re considering offramps. Rob, perhaps the most deeply conflicted, is at the wheel. Is he going to pull off? Shawn urges no. Tortured ambivalence from the two Pauls. What’s going to happen?Rob lurches off the freeway. This is no surprise to anyone. He proposes a faux sensible plan for breakfast at the Golden Nugget. Then we’ll see what happens. The weak willed Hawks assent. We circle downtown. There’s no parking. It’s blazing hot. We get back on the freeway. Oddly enough, the freeway entrance is not as well marked as the offramp. But we find it.

We’ve done it. We’ve resisted Las Vegas, for the first time in the Hawks tour history. It feels okay. Not great. Sober, sensible, not great.There’s a last exit before the open desert heading southward to L.A., and we take it, get adequate breakfast at an adequate restaurant. Paul L loses a nickel in a video poker game. We drive.

This trip has been memorable as always, but we feel we’ve struggled against a wind of mildly bad luck. Many little incidents have dogged our path across this vast land. Probably wise not to further test the spirits in Las Vegas. But we’ve prevailed, with our spirits and beings intact. Big thunderheads flank our corridor through the Mojave desert. We’re in heavy Sunday afternoon traffic. It’s amazing how many people drive to Las Vegas on the weekend. Somewhere before Baker a miraculous rain falls upon us and our fellow travelers.Traffic opens up. We stop at an apocalyptic gas station just outside Victorville. Mad Max was a prophetic vision. Shawn Nourse threatens Victorvillean Neil Morrow, a ’50’s oldies singer he works with, with a visit, then lets him off the hook. We drop down the Cajon pass, make it through the Inland Empire on the 210 in record time. L.A. looks balmy, a more muted and soiled green than the mountain and midwest green we’ve been immersed in for weeks.

Suddenly we’re at Chez Nourse. We open the Yukon doors. Surprise. It’s very hot and humid, like Chicago was. This is not regular L.A. weather. These are strange times. Strange and good to be home.

Late night. Darkness on the I-15, our spaceship hurtling southward.

We have a plan. It’s a good one. And it’s based upon a newly coined Hawks philosophy: Gamble to Win. We’re not just driving mindlessly to Las Vegas to be ushered in and out of a money siphoning mega-casino. No, we’re stopping in Mesquite, NV, where Paul M recently spent two weeks playing country music and Texas Hold ‘Em. He knows the town, he knows the tables, he knows Hold ‘Em.This is not gambling. It’s science. We’re going to stake Paul Marshall, and he is going to multiply our investment by a factor of–?? This is where science yields to fate, spirits, even random chance. But our foundation is science. SCIENCE!

The Mangy Moose is a very large bar in the Teton Village complex, with posters in the band room letting you know that Charlie Musselwhite, Burning Spear, Yellowman, and the North Mississippi Allstars play here regularly. We sound check, check into nearby condo rooms, very deluxe, and the Moose witty waitress Casey feeds us out on the deck as the sun goes down. The Hawks make a wager on how soon the sun goes down. Paul L’s the clear winner, until a 13 year old kid at the next table gets in on a last minute wager, makes the winning bet as his mom and dad, in big cowboy hat from Montana, laugh. Rob wins the Hawks pot back by guessing the state the family is from. Montana.

Two sets for a sleepy summer crowd, highlighted by many friends of Paul L’s sister Mary showing up as well as a surprise visit from the Sharborough’s of Rochester, MN. It’s great to have a roomful of beautiful women filling the dance floor. Life on the road.A Maker’s Mark end of tour celebration back at our condo: we make it through most of Dazed and Confused (brilliant movie), crash out, a deep drool filled sleep for the weary Hawks. We’ve been through 28 states on this summer tour, played 37 shows if you include radio appearances. It’s time to go home.

Next day, pack up the faithful Yukon, breakfast at our favorite hipster cafe in Wilson, WY, over the Tetons to green, green Idaho.

We’re motivated now. We’re on a deadline, far more serious than making soundcheck: dinner at the beloved Red Iguana Cafe in Salt Lake. The Hawks have managed to eat here several times on our way to and from mountain states gigs, and the Cafe even put Paul M’s review from this very tour diary on their website. So we power through beautiful Farm Idaho, honk the horn at the Utah border, and by late afternoon on I-15 we espy that beacon of food and Mormonism, the Wasatch Range. We’re on time. The sun sets on our anticipation as we park in the still baking parking lot. Not too bad of a wait. We’re in.

Delicious. Words fail us. We stagger out into twilight, back in the Yukon, south towards unknown night lodging.

As always, we’re getting to the gig with little time to spare. We motor through steadily rising mountains and see our first forests, our minds elevating with the elevation. A river leads the way. Exit Bozeman, drive down the main drag, stop in at Cactus Records to say hi, race south on the 191 into a narrow canyon dug by a beautiful fly fisherman filled river. Right into Big Sky, a huge ski resort. Look for the white pavilion, Ron Craighead, KGLT pioneer DJ, had told us, and there it was, in a dramatic wide green field in the shadow of a scrub and then pine covered mountain.

Big Sky puts on a weekly outdoor concert, and tonight it’s us, and it’s good to be here. The view from the stage is breathtaking, to the towering mountains, and the sound crew is great, Brian and his boys get the sound dialed in.Families, hippies, local mountain people, and vacationers with picnic baskets filter in, pay their $10 and find a spot in the grass. We play into sunset, and twilight, and night, two long sets. The crowd at the end gives us a big encore, and it’s a good, good thing. We do an encore that turns into a mini-set and the hard core of the crowd step out of the dark field to the edge of the stage and dance wildly. A cinematic end to an outdoor paradise show.

Besides DJ Ron, the other pillar of support for the Hawks in the Mountains is Jenny, another KGLT DJ and a wild free spirit of music and kindness. Today you find your tribe across interstate lines, and we are grateful for ours.Next morning we’re back on the 191 south. We find ourselves trapped in a slow moving line towards a $25 entry fee at the Yellowstone Park entrance. Dom, our man at the Mangy Moose in Jackson Hole, next stop, calls us, says abort, abort! Our journey through Yellowstone would have been torturous, slowed by ambulances hauling off tourists mauled by bears they were attempting to photograph or just collapsing in National Park heat. We turn around, take a long loop into Idaho and then back east over a pass in the Tetons into Wilson, WY, then north through meadows and aspens to Teton Village, another massive ski resort carved into a beautiful mountainside.

I SEE HAWKS IN L.A. needs a ride from Lousiville, KY to Chicago, IL on Saturday morning, Sept.30th. We’ll be four guys and some gear. Can you take us in your van? If so, email us and lets know to: rideshare@iseehawks.com

Sure, we could afford the one way rent a car (although rental represents half our guarantee in Louisville). But we want to shatter the alienation that’s keeping hitchhikers off America’s onramps. On our entire 6 week, 10,500 mile tour we’ve seen exactly one hitcher. To a veteran of the glory days, when Santa Barbara would be clogged with 500 long haired adventurers thumbing to San Francisco and Seattle, seeking or offering weed and love, this vanishing is on the scale of the buffalo or passenger pigeon.

Let’s bring back the free ride, America. Let’s spread the love. Help out a brother, a sister, a country rock band. Let’s make this country great again.

We’ve just crossed the raging wide Yellowstone River, which flows north under the bridge into Billings. To the right is a massive Conoco refinery with cracking towers and huge tanks, smells just like Long Beach. A cluster of radio towers on the high river bluffs where Indians watched the approaching feds. Does anyone mourn Custer? This town is sprawling, under construction and decay. Every Product Your Horse Needs. Montana Women’s prison. Poker and Keno in a nearby bar. Anti-meth graffiti scrawled on abandoned shacks.

We reach respectable downtown Billings, new five story buildings, with new pedestrian bridges at its showcase intersection. We’re seeking Stella’s, a café featured in Road Food, a thick guide to off the beaten path American eateries, present from the saintly Charles and Gina in NYC. We’ve managed to hit three of these places so far, a minor miracle. Stella’s is a large and anonymous modern restaurant, with nothing very distinctive except a giant pancake that overflows the banks of its plate. You could make one at home. Stella’s receives a Hawks Adequacy Award. As does Billings.

When we get back to the Yukon, we realize we’ve taken out quite a few bugs on this tour through (so far) 28 states. That’s a lot of karma, in thousands of tiny doses. Perhaps a car wash will unburden us of this cosmic debt.