Another excellent adventure II

Continuing where I left off in my last column, my son Michael picked me up at Tulsa International Airport and we headed for Arkansas. The drive is a little under three hours and it went by pretty quickly because we had a lot of things to talk about. Linda, my ex, had KFC and all the fixings waiting on us when we got there and after dinner and a couple of glasses of wine, I turned in after a long, somewhat harrowing, day.

The next morning broke bright and clear and I was pretty excited that this was the day I was finally going to get to see Joe Cocker, a singer I have admired since I first heard him perform at Woodstock in 1969. Linda had a teacher's test at 10:30 that should take only an hour and then we would hit the road for the Winstar Casino in tiny Thackerville, Okla. Of course, time estimates never work out the way they are planned and we weren't able to leave Russellville until 1:15. With a drive ahead of us of five to six hours, we were now in danger of actually missing the concert we both wanted to see.

Since neither one of us had ever been to Thackerville before and we didn't want to waste any time, we used Michael and his fiancé's GPS car navigation system and his pickup truck. Linda didn't want to drive her black Mazda RX convertible because storms were in the forecast and she doesn't like the way it performs on wet highways. The first part of the trip was simple because we just drove Interstate 40 west into Oklahoma. I had the honor of driving because, as Linda put it, "You always drive." That wasn't necessarily a good thing because Linda had always been one of the more accomplished back-seat drivers around and it didn't take long for me to discover that she had not yet relinquished her title. She likes to drive really fast whereas I've been setting the cruise control five miles over the highway speed limit my whole life so my "slow" driving was the general topic of discussion as we made our journey. We bantered back and forth, like we always have, in ways that a stranger would surely mistake for arguing but it has never been arguing to us. It's just the way we've always been and almost all of it consists of good-natured jabs and barbs between the two of us rather than mean-spirited attacks. We reached the point on the Interstate where the GPS directed us to exit and we did. Some thirty miles later, the GPS quit working and we were on our own. We coordinated the rest of the drive through cell-phone calls to Michael and the people we were meeting in Thackerville and eventually arrived just an hour or so before the show was to begin.

Our friends, Carnell and Marlene Carter, originally from McCook, but now living south of Thackerville, met us at our hotel. They're both employees at the Casino and after a couple of cocktails in the room, we went over to the concert hall. I've been to many casinos around the country, especially in Las Vegas and Reno, and I was not prepared for what Winstar turned out to be. Many people from this area go to the Rosebud Casino in southern South Dakota and this was no Rosebud. Our drive eventually took us over to Interstate 35 south and as we were driving through the non-descript plains of southern Oklahoma, we crested a small hill and there it was to our left. It was a sprawling, beautiful casino; large enough and modern enough to compete with most casinos in Las Vegas. It was like a Phoenix rising out of the Oklahoma red-clay soil and Linda and I were both duly impressed. The concert hall itself was a majestic showroom and we were fortunate enough to have seats only six rows back from the stage. What made it even better was the five seats directly in front of us were unoccupied so we had a totally unobstructed view.

After an opening band and an hour intermission so that everyone could buy plenty of over-priced cocktails, the show began. Cocker was backed by a 10-piece band that included guitars, drums, keyboard, Hammond organ, horns, and back-up singers. When he walked out on stage, I was absolutely amazed. He wasn't the Joe Cocker I remembered from my youth. In fact, Linda whispered "What a shame." He was dressed in a suit without a tie and looked exactly like Burl Ives or someone's sweet grandfather. When you see things like that, it truly reminds you of your mortality and how life on this planet affects everyone essentially the same way. I felt a deep sense of regret and angst while the band played, leading up to his vocals, knowing this was not going to be the Joe Cocker I had listened to and loved for the past forty years. But I only felt that way until he opened his mouth. He was STILL Joe Cocker and he proceeded to give, over the next hour and a half, one of the best live rock performances I've ever heard anywhere.

He sang all of his hit songs, did all of the machinations with his hands and fingers that helped make him famous to begin with, and followed it up with two encores, demanded by standing ovations from the crowd. It was truly an inspired performance and it proved once again to me that we only get old if we want to.

I'll write the conclusion to Another Excellent Adventure in next week's column.