Considering it was the first day of the Open, the lineup was pretty sparse when I reached the outside break, which was barely crumbling at that point.  The forecast for the weekend was small, 2 to 3 feet waves, with some heavy surf picking up on Monday and lasting the rest of the week, thanks to Hurricane Frank, which was presently marauding past the Panama Canal. 

I picked out a bench on the north side of the pier and then reached for my ukulele, deciding not to get out my signs or postcards, or even attempt to sing any songs that first day.  Rather, I would sit there and quietly pluck the uke, a more fitting tribute, perhaps, to a record that had attracted almost no attention, as well as a life that had mostly been spent in the shadows.

It was hard to believe it had been twenty-five years since we’d driven up to downtown Los Angeles to record Ghost on the Roam.  Although the producer had been in my graduating class at El Rancho High, I hadn’t known him or anyone else back then, since my family had only recently moved to California from North Dakota.  I’d never met the musicians he’d recruited to play on my record either.  The bass player was in a punk band from Newport Beach and the drummer played in a surf band from Fullerton.

We’d only had a few days to lay down the basic tracks and then nothing happened on the record for a long, long time.  At one point I’d been so desperate to see it finished that I’d snuck into the producer’s apartment complex and cornered him in his laundry room.  When it came time to master the project we weren’t even speaking, so I got ahold of the DAT tapes and put the artwork together on my own.

El Rancho High School is in Costa Mesa, close to Newport Beach.  That’s where all the popular, preppy kids went to party and hang out.  Since I didn’t understand any of them, and was full of anger and depression, Huntington was always the beach I headed to when I was looking to escape for the day.  I’d load up a backpack with four or five warm beers, a can of Skoal, and a few cassettes to crank up on my Walkman.  Then I’d jump on my orange Schwinn and get on the bike trail at Moon Park, invariably heading straight into the wind, the whole five miles to the sea.

At the river jetty, I’d head north and pedal, somehow still straight into the wind, until I reached the pier.  I knew nothing about Huntington Beach and its importance to the world of surfing.  It just seemed like a mellow place to hang out, with an arcade under the pier and a scattering of vans in the parking lot, smoke billowing from their tinted windows.  I’d sit drinking my beer on the beach, a rebel among rebels, beginning to bask in defiance and grandiosity, then go whooping down to the ocean, regardless of the season, for an unhinged session of redneck wave-stomping.

When it came time to shoot the album art for Ghost on the Roam, my brother Luke was living in Huntington, with a couple buddies at a house on Twelfth and Olive.  I’d brought along a white sheet with eye holes cut out of it, as well as a cowboy hat and my guitar case.  We shot a few rolls of me, walking up and down the beach in the sheet, but when it came time to select a picture for the front of the album, I chose one without it, just a black profile in the cowboy hat, with the sea in the background.

Since the producer and I had fallen out, I had no idea what to do with the CDs once I’d ordered a thousand of them and went to pick them up in ten big, heavy boxes.  This was in the days before the internet.  The only contact information in the CD jacket was for a mailbox in Costa Mesa, across from the Mesa Verde Center.  My summer job back then was driving big rigs in the San Joaquin Valley, so before heading back to Yuba City, I embarked on a West Coast tour for my record.

I remember getting a ten-dollar tip in Portland and setting up to play on the street a few blocks from the Pike Street Market in Seattle, but without any contacts or real gigs I was lucky to even have a few postcards waiting for me when I went to check my mailbox after the trip. 

When the truck driving season was over, I returned to downtown Los Angeles and moved into a hotel above a bar called the Rock and Roll Hole that I never would’ve known about if we hadn’t cut the record across the street.   There I met a bunch of musicians and, like most of them, considered myself lucky to get any gig I could, even if it meant playing for free in front of nobody.

The most memorable performance during that time was probably the midnight slot at Banana Crushers on the Sunset Strip on a Sunday night.  The only ones left after a long night of singer/songwriters were the soundman and the bartender, and when I decided to wrap up my set after a few songs so we could all get out of there early, received the only standing ovation of the night.

The fact is I never made a dime off of the record or any of the gigs, and to add insult to injury, still had about 850 CDs of that unloved record to cart around with me wherever I went.  Eventually, most of them ended up in a landfill. 

I’d come up with the title Ghost on the Roam, based on the nomadic lifestyle I’d been living in the ten years leading up to it, just me and my guitar, driving off in search of freedom in a five-hundred-dollar pickup truck, roaming the pine forests of the northwest alone, riding trains and buses across the country, heading up to Alaska to work the salmon season, moving as much and as often as possible, and if not possible, just bouncing off the walls. 

I was hoping when I made the record that it would give me a license to roam.  My idea was to try to get on the folk music circuit where I could travel, meet people, and make music as a way of life.  Instead, the world ignored that record and all the ones that came after it.  My response was to travel and just keep traveling.  I tore down fences and escaped from cages.  I left Los Angeles.  I left the United States.  I spent years in foreign countries, crossing oceans, on distant mountaintops, in humid jungles, and dark hotel rooms, gathering my powers. 

Perhaps, music had never been my destiny, but no one could keep me from wandering.  By now I truly was that ghost on the roam I’d once only sung about, that was a fact, but it wasn’t until I’d been totally broken and humiliated to the core by the pandemic that I discovered I wasn’t quite as alone, or unique, as I’d always felt.