November 28
“Whoa, this one takes me back”
Saul Williams – Saul Williams
This album will never not remind me of a mall parking lot in San Diego.
Let's take it back to 2004... later in the road trip mentioned on Day 2. After the DMB show my friends and I made our way up to Laytonville for the Earthdance festival (where my biggest regret was going too hard too early on the day Ozomatli was playing and sleeping through their set!) As things began to wind down my friends and I started to figure out our next moves - they wanted to head down the Baja and do some surfing, while I was thinking about scurrying back to Canada since I was nearly out of money. I'd gone so far as to secure a ride with a dude on his motorcycle headed up to southern Washington, so long as I was willing to camp an extra night or two in the Redwoods (I most certainly was!) but ultimately decided I should go with my friends, despite being on the verge of being broke. Surely they'd make sure I didn't die!
A couple of months earlier I met Saul Williams for the first time after his set at the Calgary Folk Festival. I was unusually starstruck (especially odd since I'd been unfazed meeting people who were way more famous!), had borderline sunstroke, and was getting my ass righteously kicked by a much stronger-than-anticipated pot brownie. Saul was very gracious, but I feel like I made a bit of an ass of myself. I asked him about his forthcoming album, which had recently been announced, and he mentioned it would be quite different than
Amethyst Rock Star but entirely self-produced and more indicative of what he wanted to do. I told him I was very excited about it and walked away completely forgetting to ask him to sign my copy of
, said the shotgun to the head until after I'd started walking away and realized he'd been looking at it anticipating my asking him to do so - I was too self-conscious to walk back!
After Laytonville, we headed to Big Sur and then meandered down the coast to San Diego, where would do a final supply run and deal with insurance before heading down the Baja. I talked my friends into timing our night in San Diego with a performance by Alfred Howard & The K23 Orchestra, after seeing Al do some spoken word as a 'tweener before Michael Franti & Spearhead at Earthdance, then bonding with him over Saul Williams and spoken word when we met later in the weekend. We got to the city a few hours before the show and hit up a mall in the meantime, beginning with Best Buy. Despite being on the verge of being broke, this album had just been released and I wanted to see if they had a copy, which they did. I told my friends I'd wait for them in the van and played my new CD two times, back to back, on my Discman - just chilling alone in a van in the parking lot, absolutely mesmerized.
I listened to this album a LOT during our nearly two months down in the Baja. I also filled 2 full notebooks with writing, wrote a couple dozen letters, and read 23 books. I'd already spent much of the year committing myself to poetry being something I wanted to do, but this album in that parking lot was a bit of a gateway into poetry becoming THE thing I wanted to do. 8 years, less a week, after this album was released I shared a stage with Saul Williams in Victoria (where I had decided to move during my time in the Baja) - I was still a bit more starstruck than is reasonable, but a lot less awkward than the first time I met him! Despite all the time, growth and evolution since, this album still takes me back to that 1985 Toyota van in the parking lot of whatever mall that was in San Diego when I was a super hippie babypoet hurling myself toward the unknown!
