Colin Spring Biography:

My parents met at Harvard.  Not in attendance of course but as suburban hipsters who who would come to hang out on the lawns and in the Cambridge coffee shops.  Rumor has it some suburban hipsters would train into the city in their prep school wear and change into their fringe that they kept stashed in the terminal lockers.  My parents weren't like that.

My mother was a disenfranchised bookworm particularly taken with Russian literature and Bob Dylan.  She would smoke cigarettes in the shadowy corners of Belmont Massachusetts, a mid to upper class bus ride from Boston and birthplace to the John Birch society.

My father Elliot was the son of Dorchester working class.  He was a cabbie, an Amway salesman, a barber and a man given to spontaneous passions.  Imagined windstorms would have him grasping for parking meters.  Once a band of Hare Krishna's danced by and Elliot attached himself to the end of the line like a goofball caboose, dancing and chanting down the street. He made my mother laugh.

Boston at the time was a hotbed of folk and blues.  Elliot was a connoisseur of two things; Red Sox history and music. He did not play an instrument but found himself through fanaticism well attached to the local scene.  Judy Collins came over to the house.

Gordon Lightfoot played coffeehouses. Ian and Sylvia. Once later when they moved to San Francisco, while my mother and father sat in attendance at the Filmore, Muddy Waters publicly congratulated their recent marriage.  That night they drank gin together.  Another rumor is that Elliot introduced Muddy to John Hammond.  My mother once threw up on Doug Kershaw's shoes. This is all the stuff of legends. Elliot kind of vanished once we made it to the southwest.  He was in Albuquerque for awhile and then a used car salesman in San Diego. He died instantly in a single car accident sometime in the eighties while commuting to Rosarita in Mexico.

In the interim my mother had met another man on another campus. Jimmy was wild and smart but reckless to a fault.  My mother and I were living in Flagstaff, where our car had broken down halting the original designs to relocate from Santa Fe to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jimmy grew up in Tucson, a bit of a delinquent and we eventually moved with him back there. Jimmy had a friend who ran dope across the border.  He was slick and charming and professional and his name will not be mentioned here.  This is the past after all and there is no need to assault the present.

Anyhow he took Jimmy on a couple runs and it went smoothly enough that Jim saw a future without 50/50 splits.  His first solo run was his last.  He took my mother and I along reassuring that our presence would make it a slam dunk.  The federales would hardly disturb a family man.  However, whereas Jimmy's unnamed mentor had always secured a clean close shave and traveled in spotless rental cars, Jimmy's attitude was more lax.  My first memories are literally the armed men circling our van with drug sniffing dogs.  We were released as innocent accomplices.  Jim spent a year and half in a prison in Culiacan.

Jimmy's own parents had long since given up hope on him and my mother begged and pleaded her own parents to bail him out which they eventually did.  We moved back to Flagstaff.  We were dirt poor.  My parents were enrolled as philosophy students.  We lived in college dormitories, in warehouses of friends of friends.  We spent a summer living in a teepee on forest service land.  Our family car was a 57' bug converted into a dune buggy.  Flagstaff is in the mountains and it often dips into the negatives during the snowy winters.  It was a logging town then and Jimmy eventually began milling his own wood on a portable mill. 

That was after my mother, sick of his refusal to find stable employment and sick of instability in general divorced him and raised me on her own.  We lived in low income housing moving around frequently but always upgrading, trying to find that picture of normality.  It was a relatively small town.  There was certainly not the  big money you see thrown around in the cities with the exception of a few prominent families who seemed to own everything.

For most of my young years I kept my life an ambiguous mystery.  Often I would would bypass a ride from a little league coach or a parent so that they would not see how un-middle class we lived.  I was embarrassed of "funky" houses.  I wanted a formica and comfortable couches and central heating and a stay at home mom with a bouffant hairdo.  My friends were poor.  They lived in trailer parks and were the sons of single mothers.  During the summers I would go back east to my grandparents and the picture of reality I wanted so badly. In retrospect of course I can see why that life drove my mother out west and why I would not trade any of those boring comforts for the teepee or the Goodwill's or the random hodge podge of drinking mugs in the kitchen cabinets.

I finished college in Flagstaff.  It was and is for me a melancholy town where memories flood on every corner.  I skip ahead here over the darkness and the joy,  for they do little good now but to serve one's own reflections.  There were suicides and murders, first loves, broken hearts, warm bars off snow covered streets.  There were drugs and crime and fitful nights of doubt. And of course music. There was some rambling in between, Austin, California, Colorado but I always came back.  I have been a dishwasher, a line cook and an assistant to a biologist.  I have combed the desert floor for desert tortoises in the outskirts of Las Vegas, I have been a disc jockey in a strip club, an office assistant in an insurance company.

Then there was the time I packed up with a stripper in a Pontiac Le Mans and headed to the northwest knowing that the fading lights of Northern Arizona were never to be revisited but for holidays.

It is not my intention to go on like this like some sort of sentimental jerk, for most of it is met with a cool indifference now.  It's just that people like to know where you get your stuff.  Is it real?  Is it fiction?  Well it's a little of everything.  When you write, some of it is you and some of it is others or stories you have heard that are 3 or 4 times removed, like distant cousins. But they could be your own stories if circumstances were altered.  If your car had not broken down on the way to a job interview.  If your neighbor had taken the apartment across town.  If your girlfriend hadn't gone out for a drink at your local bar that Friday night. Everyone has these and as much as you'll hear folks oversimplify the power of choice, so much is out of our hands and is dictated solely by how you choose to roll with the punches.

Sweet Jesus, I've been depressed before but life has never been better than it is now and maybe ya gotta get kicked around a little to really see what you have, why you don't need much more and why so many others deserve happiness.

Anyway, I guess for the benefit of brevity, I guess that's where the music comes from.

Colin Spring

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