Guardians on the Rocky Road
I believe that the unseen world often plays a part in our lives, and who’s to say it didn’t here?
Most people probably don’t associate angels with rock and roll. I do, and although I can’t prove it, I have always suspected some heavenly guardians were pretty busy back in the days I was singing with rock bands on the road.
I’ll never forget drowsily driving from Texas to a gig in Georgia, my eyes heavy from highway hypnosis. Judging from the number of times I suddenly jolted awake, I’m convinced an angel was riding shotgun, slapping me every time I started to doze off. Then there was the time the band bus’s engine caught fire, and though the vehicle was left inoperable, no one got hurt. On another trip I was a front-seat passenger in the equipment van when the driver ran off the road and hit a ditch, sending all the equipment forward and jamming us against the dash. I still remember the first thing I said afterward, words I had never before uttered and have never since, “Get this piano off my head!” I’m guessing some alert angels were involved, because the only injury was a nasty but temporary bruise.
Those incidents on the rocky road to “stardom” were small potatoes compared with the granddaddy of our probable angel interventions, one that happened early in my short musical career. The year was 1973 and I was 20 years old. My eight-piece dance band had just finished a six-week-long gig at a hotel in a small town near the Texas-New Mexico border. Our agent’s purpose was to have us shelter from distractions, live together, play together, fight together, and thus become a tight-knit musical fraternity that could outperform most other kids our age. The little hotel was the perfect place to hide and develop.
Time went by quickly, and eventually our month-and-a-half boot camp was over. Late on a Saturday night, after the last note of Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher” faded and the last patron vacated the tiny dance floor, we began packing for home. During our stay we had designed and assembled a new 18-foot trailer to take the place of the expensive U-Haul trucks we had been renting. Into our brand new sheet metal monster we stuffed our instruments, amplifiers and luggage. Then five members of our octet hopped into trumpet player Larry’s Ford LTD to tow our half-ton of gear across the wind-swept plains of West Texas. The rest of us waved goodbye, as the trailer sailed away on its maiden voyage into the rising sun.
My remaining band mates and I headed to our hotel rooms, taking advantage of the final pre-paid night for a few hours in dreamland before starting the journey ourselves. We didn’t sleep long.
No more than an hour later, my bedside phone rang. The dad of our trombone player Jerry told me there had been an accident. He also awakened Tony our guitarist, and we hurriedly dressed, then raced to the wreckage. We found a surreal scenario: the Ford LTD was upside down, its roof caved in and windshield shattered. The trailer was in tatters, its contents scattered over four otherwise lonely lanes of highway. Miraculously, all five of the car’s occupants were alive and upright. My only explanation was that angels had stepped in and had decided, at least for the time being, not to take anyone higher.
“I was driving,” said David our saxophonist. “A strong crosswind blew the trailer sideways. When I braked, the trailer kept going. It actually passed us on the right, then rolled over in slow motion, taking us with it.”
Slow motion. Those heavenly beings sure have some creative life-saving strategies.
Chuck our bass player added, “Even upside down, the momentum of the car and trailer continued to propel us down the road. I was lying inside on the car’s roof, feeling it get warm due to the friction with the asphalt. When it came to a halt I asked if everyone was okay. We were.”
A couple of my companions headed back to town to rent a U-Haul (always the faithful stand-by), and a tow truck took the mutilated Ford away. Another wrecker hauled off what was left of the trailer after its less-than-an-hour of usefulness.
As we re-loaded our equipment, this time into a sturdy and decidedly non-homemade vehicle, we were amazed to find that nearly everything had come through the ordeal with only minor scrapes. It seemed our angelic protection had extended to instruments and speakers as well as humans. Once back home, we unloaded the gear in our drummer Scott’s garage, turned the truck in, and dragged ourselves to bed.
The next morning the eight of us gathered to lick our wounds and take inventory. When Chuck arrived, he told us, “I just got a call from a night club in Houston. They want us there tomorrow night.”
We stared at him.
“I told them okay.”
Suddenly energetic, we plugged everything in to make sure the circuits and wires were still intact. They were. Obviously some angels were moonlighting as electronics repairmen.
“I’ll call U-Haul and reserve a truck,” someone said.
The next day we were bound for H-Town, re-energized and too preoccupied to check the weather. Halfway to Houston it started raining, and as we neared our destination the rain became torrential, blowing sideways in the accelerating wind. We turned on the radio to discover we were driving into a tropical storm.
Time for the angels to huddle up.
Through the blinding deluge, our keyboard player Robin struggled to control his Volkswagen Beetle, but it was no match for the storm’s horizontal rain and fifty mile-per-hour gusts. A few miles outside of town, the car hydroplaned and ended up over a roadside embankment, but amazingly, its driver and occupants escaped unscathed. After passers-by helped push the pint-sized car back onto the road, our entourage finally limped into the nightclub, soaked and shaken.
We were late getting the music started, but the dance floor quickly filled as we kicked off our up-tempo opener, a tune by the Ides of March, singing, “I’m your vehicle baby, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” How ironic, I thought. After the song, I introduced the band with the standard phrase, “We’re happy to be here tonight,” and then somberly added, “in fact, we’re happy to be anywhere tonight.”
Thanks to a few overworked helpers from the unseen world.
Some might simply call it “luck,” but there were enough near misses and near miracles over our two years of road trips to convince me otherwise. And though eventually we decided to give our guardian angels a break and close the dance band chapter of our lives, I have great memories. I have questions too, such as, “Why would angels care about the livelihoods of eight young guys from Texas in a traveling rock band?” I don’t have satisfactory answers. My guess is that it had little to do with guarding the band or the music, but everything to do with guarding the individuals—lives whose purposes on Earth had not yet been fulfilled, guys whose existence needed to continue a little longer in order to produce something significant or decisive, men whose influence would be missed if they had departed sooner. I hope to find out for sure someday; that is, when I reach the other side and get a chance to make some heavenly and eternal music.
I wonder if angels like to dance?
© Nick Walker 2020
After the accident, hauling our equipment to the side of the road.
