February 6, 2012 - Last night, perhaps around 8 PM, Buddy Tabor quietly passed away. A singer/songwriter with a direct link to the soul. Alternately irreverent and loving, apolitical and revolutionary, album after album cut through to your heart and your head in simple tones and a gravel voice. Weary without giving in, spiritual without putting it on. Aware. Conscious. The words of a poet, the soul of a dreamer, the hands of a housepainter. Buddy Tabor was complex in his thoughts, simple in how he executed them. His body of work pearls worth holding and remembering, just as he is.
He came to stay at my house in late October and early November last year. He told me that his oncologist had told him that, if he liked smoking, it wouldn't hurt to keep it up. Buddy's way of saying the gig was up... but he kept playing. He'd wake up early and play a guitar of mine I'd bought in Mexico - in a town where he had bought one, built by the same man that had built mine - Digging deep for one more song, one more sound, one more expression of a life with an expiration date that was nearing.
He left in early November. The place was spotless. We hugged and said goodbye after I offered him the house again. "I don't think I'll be coming back up" he said, "but thank you." It was the last time I saw him.
We'd had a falling out at one point --neither of us fully sure why - and the years had calcified us a bit. But I always got a card at Christmas, in his wife Jeannette's hand, from both of them, and I listened to his music still. When I heard he was sick and in Anchorage, I got a hold of him and suggested we get together. I'm glad we did. We reaffirmed our friendship and talked late into the night a few times, as we had done in the past, though I was in and out those days. And, when he hesitantly asked me about staying at my place, I immediately said "yes" regretting that I had not offered it first. It was an easy "thank you" for years of knowing each other.
I first met Buddy in the mid-Eighties. I picked him up hitchhiking in Juneau and took him to Douglas. I was a kid really - a bit scared living in a new city without a clue of what a future might look like - torn between politics and music. Buddy even then, now more than 25 years ago, had a wizened edge that echoed Townes Van Zandt. He had a cassette tape with a hand printed cover that he might have given me or I might have bought that showed me the magic touch of a musician who was "doing it" - making music.
Our paths crossed from time to time after that. Usually in Juneau at first and then later other places as my own music began to grow. He offered comments and suggestions on my work, I complimented his, and we played a number of shows together starting in the late Nineties and ending around 2006 soon after we had played Folsom Prison.
I can't say much now about all that drove us apart. Though I recall it, its not important. It was just dumb. Stupid that we hadn't played together more. Stupid that we hadn't railed against the system late into the night, like we once had. Just plain dumb.
Why do we do it? Plant our foolish flags of pride in the sand? Damn our present over a past that is, quite literally, done? It is what we do though. And for me it has meant one less friend I might have known that much better. One more nearly-missed farewell.
So farewell Buddy. Just one more gig to play - and its bound to last forever.