Welcome Home!

I hadn’t been in the Hawthorne Pub in many months, and things had changed. It was still tiny, the downstairs of what had once been an ordinary house, with a not-too-big room in the front with tables and a stage for performers. Further back was an even smaller room, called, for some reason, the Whistle Punk Tap Room, where there was a bar with taps and wines. No hard liquor at the Hawthorne.

The walls were still dark wood with random rock-and-roll art artifacts mounted on them, including a poster for Lost Dogma, the band where Ted, the owner, was the bass player. But the wall between the tap room and the performance room had in large part been removed and fixtures everywhere had been redone and spiffed up, the work of our soon-to-be good friend Kyle.

It was our second night in Snohomish County, the night of Bill’s gig that we had raced across the country to make. And the place was packed. “When Bill has a gig, everybody plays!” I’d once heard him tell some musician friends. And indeed, after he started out with his familiar tunes and “Gear Shift,” his signature tune that demonstrates his agility with a pick and a slide, he began inviting them onto the stage,  to join him.

I sat, spouse of the star, at a table right up front, jammed in with Joe, Bill’s new good friend, a keyboard, guitar player, and one of the few singers I’ve encountered on a par with Bill. Joe and Bill together are a duo called Cool & Groovy (Bill’s “Cool” and Joe’s “Groovy,” the theory goes). Bruce, ASJA’s webmaster and our first friend in Seattle sat on my other side with his friend. The stage got more and more crowded as musicians came and, less often, went. “Welcome home!” they told Bill, one after another. “Welcome home!”

I sat there smiling. He was so happy, and I was happy for him. But also a little envious. He was so at home here, and already had so many friends. When would I make my own friends? And when would this place start feeling like home?

Toward the end of the evening, Bill decided to try something out he’d been fooling with behind the wheel for the last couple of days of our trip, a jazzy little jingle he’d made up just for the Hawthorne:

Come to the Hawthorne if you like good music,

Come to the Hawthorne if you like good food.

Come to the Hawthorne for local beer, wine, and cider–

Nothing’s finer than a night out at the…Hawthorne!

There were two verses and a bridge and Bill had worked it all out while driving–vocally. Unfortunately, although he’s extraordinarily good at both driving and playing guitar, even Bill couldn’t do both those things at once so he hadn’t worked out the guitar part to go with it. This, from what I’ve observed, is the opposite of how he usually writes songs, which begin on the guitar and have a vocal line and lyrics added afterward.

But Bill is a fearless performer and lives (both musically and in life) by his ability to improvise. So he went for it. He summoned Rod, who plays bass for about half the bands in Snohomish to the stage. Now, Rod had never heard this little tune and he was about to provide its only accompaniment, but being another fearless performer, he was game.

Only now, where was the Hawthorne’s owner Ted? Tapping a keg, it turns out, an operation that takes a little while and can’t be stopped in the middle. There was a bit of awkward shuffling around but eventually Ted appeared, looking harried and carrying a very large wrench.

“We don’t got it,” Bill said. “But we’re going to do it anyway.” And he launched into “Come to the Hawthorne” with Rod following along pretty decently on his bass.

By the end of the evening, Bill was glowing and all his friends had crowded on and off the stage. Near the end, he played with Jeff, a sort of musical Swiss army knife who plays guitar, drums, and harmonica. They did Railroad Earth’s “Bird in a House,” a song that I love and didn’t know anyone else knew about. Then Bill finished off with a couple of his songs.

We climbed happily into our van bed with our cats that night. This was it. It was exactly what we’d come here for, ripping up our Woodstock life and driving more than 3,000 miles with our cats cooped up and our trailer in tow. Just this.