Can’t Find My Way Home
Longtime mountain resident and longtime friend Maureen Mann wrote me the other day to inform me that, while she was volunteering for the Lake Gregory Yacht Club’s recent end-of-season cleanup of the shoreline around Lake Gregory, she stumbled (not literally) upon a “throne” carved by an unknown woodsman from a recently felled tree on the east shore of the lake.
While I have yet to visit the site of this magnificently carved, eight-foot-high, so-called throne/chair, Maureen sent me a photo of it, in all of its splendor and majesty, surely fit for a king or queen of the lake.
I would go out there to check it out for myself, but I fear that I may be overcome with emotion, to the point of becoming so wasted that I may not be able to find my way home. In the meantime, I pray that nobody goes out there and messes with it or disfigures it. Go out there and see it for yourself, before someone does mess with it, which is probably inevitable.
“Come down off your throne and leave your body alone, somebody must change. You are the reason I’ve been waiting so long. Somebody holds the key. But I’m near the end and I just ain’t got the time, and I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home.” (“Can’t Find My Way Home” – Blind Faith, consisting of Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Rick Grech & Ginger Baker – 1969)
Steve Winwood is one of my all-time music heroes, right up there with Stephen Stills, Neil Young and John Stewart. While I’ve had the good fortune to have met and hung out with Stills and Stewart and to have seen Stephen Stills and Neil Young in concert dozens of times – and in the case of John Stewart, well over 100 times over the years – I was only able to capture Steve Winwood once, as a member of Traffic, which was an opening act for the Grateful Dead at the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl in Las Vegas back in June 1994.
Winwood joined the Spencer Davis Group in 1962 at age 14 and went on to pen and perform on a string of chart-topping hits, including “Keep on Running,” “Gimmee Some Lovin” and “I’m A Man,” before leaving the group in 1967. Next, he joined up with Traffic, where he again penned and co-penned another string of hits, including “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys’ and “John Barleycorn Must Die.”
OK, so that’s probably more than you wanted to know about Steve Winwood and my other musical heroes. But I do want to thank Maureen Mann for turning me onto the Lake Gregory throne, as well as her volunteer efforts to keep our beautiful Lake Gregory beautiful. Do go to visit the throne, but don’t get lost on your way home. “…Still I can’t find my way home, and I ain’t done nothing wrong, and I can’t find my way home.”
Keep it flyin’ Uncle Mott