Flying into San Francisco you can see the winding highway that connects Santa Rosa with the Bay Area. This December, Sonoma was glistening with the recent rain; the fields were green and flooding near the hills that lie at the edge of the cold Pacific Ocean. From up here, people looked innocent in their tiny cars, their little houses crouching between the hills. We seemed a happy people, harmonious with the earth, buzzing about purposefully. Everything we’d built looked new, our rivers of roadway like jewelry laid along a fold of green velvet. But in fact, I thought, we are often at odds with the world we live in. What conscious person hasn’t wondered if the path humanity has chosen and the path nature follows are at war? Who hasn’t worried that the way of humankind will bury the earth under the ashes of its passing?

This year, traveling with Groundation has been a colorful blur. Being on tour is like being on a long plane flight. You watch life pass by your window. You fall asleep, only to wake moments later to new clouds over a strange vista far below, some land whose name you don’t know. It’s amazing and terrifying, and very lonely sometimes. The only thing that is constant is the band itself. How many times have I awoken on the bus to see my friends look up and smile, or perhaps sleep on, dreaming of something I cannot guess? We are our own traveling nation.

But we’re not alone. We have the privilege to connect with other citizens of the world: people who recognize the power of music. I was pleased to meet Joshua Alo from O’ahu, Hawaii, whose experiences as an airman in Iraq have shown him the fragility of life and the preciousness of friends and family. He instantly recognized the stories I told of endless plane flights, bad food, boredom and homesickness. He would probably agree with the great advice I received from a San Juan cabbie: “In wartime, any hole is a foxhole”. Today, in Iraq, Joshua is playing acoustic reggae music to lift the spirits of the people struggling in that war-torn place. We will always have a community of spirit with people who love music.

I’m sure Joshua would recognize the camaraderie of bands on the road. I’m pretty sure it’s the same for soldiers, or circuses and sports teams, for that matter. I’ve worked in an office; it’s definitely not that kind of workplace, but it’s not like being at summer camp, either. We don’t have the life of soldiers, but somehow I suspect we share their experiences of loneliness, boredom, intense activity and stress, teamwork, satisfaction when things go right, worry when they don’t. Of course, these are feelings that everyone has, but we get them in a particular pattern. It’s a rhythm of feelings that are played out over the days and weeks as we travel from town to town.

In this band, people work really hard to pull their own weight. But even so, we all depend on each other on the road. There isn’t a single one of us who hasn’t had to rely on every one of the others when things get crazy. We all take turns, in a way. I think I have to nominate Hossein Attar, our U.S. road manager, for the “helping Dave out” award this year. One morning after a show I dragged my ass out of bed to go see the beaches with some friends from San Juan, Puerto Rico. I came out of the hotel blinking in the bright sun. Hossein took one look at me, turned me around, and sent me back to my hotel room. “You look terrible. Get some sleep,” he said. Damn, he was right, too. I slept all day and most of the night.

Another award has got to go to Mingo Lewis Jr. Sadly he’s left the band to pursue his music closer to home, playing with bands like Vinyl and Wisdom, and songwriting (he recently produced a song with Warrior King). Mingo was a great personality on the stage and on the bus. He’s a very youthful spirit who lifted my mood on many occasions. Thanks Ming, we miss you.

One of the most interesting people I met this year had to have been Horsemouth Wallace, who toured with us in our tribute to Bob Marley last February. He was a great addition to our band. Usually upbeat, always energetic and a focused musician, he was also a great source of knowledge about reggae music.

He grew up in Kingston and dropped out of school at a fairly young age. Like many aspiring musicians, he started hanging around the recording studios in town, climbing back over the fence when adults chased him away. It was at Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One that he had his first recording session. He said that the band had set up, but the drummer hadn’t arrived. Horsemouth snuck into the studio’s drum room. When the other guys heard the drums being played, they assumed the regular drummer had arrived, and they recorded the track. Sometimes it was easy to see the character from the movie Rockers in Leroy Wallace the person.

Eventually he became a member of the Studio One house band, recording with a list of reggae legends as long as a roll of paper towels. He remembered Bob Marley fondly. Bob was also a very active guy, and they used to play football together. Horsemouth cracked me up doing imitations of Bob’s raspy voice. He was skeptical about stories told about Marley’s death; too healthy to die like that from cancer, he said.

Horsemouth seemed very healthy for a man of any age, like a lot of Jamaican elders, and he loves to talk. He even talked when no one else was around. He was doing calisthenics at our first rehearsal, carrying on in heavy patois and teasing Kerri Ann and Ikesha, the background singers. On the long, chilly bus rides through the Northwestern US he slept sitting upright with a sheet draped over his head like a ghost.

It took me awhile to really understand his accent, but it was obvious right off that he loves music more than anything. He talked allot about ska and jazz: the co-evolution of the two styles, and their differences. He challenged us to tighten some our loose jazz edges into tighter ska-style corners. He explained how a ska beat is really jazz swing shifted to the side a bit, and showed me how reggae retained the basic elements of that development. Like a lot of musicians he can be opinionated. He certainly knows what he doesn’t like. He spoke dismissively of ‘uptown reggae’, but he didn’t really fault successful pop stars for selling out. In a place like Jamaica, people often have to do whatever they can to make money for themselves and their families. The money from one hit song can support a lot of people in a country like Jamaica. His attitude reminded me of that of Louis Armstrong, who had also grown up poor. His distaste for the songs “What a Wonderful World” and “Hello Dolly” was perfectly at ease with his joy at the huge royalty checks they earned him.

According to Horse, each instrument in the band has its unique function. In this, he reminded me of Apple Gabriel, who was also very focused on finding the proper role for each player. Horsemouth told me that the roles of the drums and the bass are to shake the walls of Babylon to the ground; they are the sound of destruction, raw power. Horsemouth had a mischievous gleam in his eye when he told me that with an amplifier large enough, he could destroy buildings with his bass drum. The piano and guitar, which dominate the offbeats, play a simple rhythm known by many names: the skank, the chuck, or the bang. That part of the music is like stitching, holding the rhythm tightly together.

One reason I liked Horse so much was that he loves horns. He usually just called me ‘trumpeter’ and Kelsey ‘trombonist’ instead of using our names. For him, the sound of the horns in Jamaican music is the voice of revelation, of truth itself. Horns are loud, undeniable. When the power goes out on stage, (which has happened numerous times to Groundation), we’re the loudest things on stage. Drummers and brass players have similar personalities. Noisy and flashy, those are the things we’re attracted to as children. For Horsemouth, the drums and bass hit first, then the horns, in kind of a one-two punch, while the chuck keeps the whole song together.

Horsemouth deeply loves all Jamaican music, but he seemed to save his deepest praise for ska trombone legend Don Drummond. As an artist he was sublime in tone, in expressiveness, and in musicianship. According to Horsemouth, he was a kind, sensitive person, irresistible to women in particular, who was ultimately undone not only by jealous people around him, but by his own tempestuous heart.

I only had a few weeks to get to know Horsemouth. We worked hard together on tour playing the songs of Bob Marley and others. Horsemouth was the original drummer on some of the recordings every member of Groundation has committed to memory. I wish I could have known him better, and encourage everyone reading this to check out his music. Most reggae fans will have heard dozens of his tracks, even though they might not know it. His discography can be found at http://www.roots-archives.com/artist/350.

There were some small, magical moments on the road this year. I was walking on the Avenue Hoche near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. I saw an old woman bend down to pick up something glistening on the sidewalk. She showed it to me. It was a gold ring, stamped 18k. “Pour vous, monsieur, mon mari est mort,” she said, pressing the ring into my hand. Of course I refused, but in the end I gave her all the money I had (about 4 euros) and took the ring. A couple of hours later my finger was green, but I’m pretty sure it’s a magical ring, because it brought me wonderful fortune during my “lune de miel” (that is, “honeymoon”) in France with my beautiful wife, Gillian.

Once, at the Skabazac Reggae Festival, we were eating diner at a cafeteria before the show. There was a different band at every table, all speaking different languages, all trying to be cool. One of the chefs was having trouble with a huge meat-slicing machine in the kitchen. It was rocking back and forth, slicing, humming. And after a few seconds, everyone in the whole room had caught onto the rhythm it was making. They were clapping, banging on the table, rapping. There’s an extraordinarily talented laundry machine near my apartment in San Francisco. People put money in just to listen. Keep your ears open, that’s the first rule of music.

I saw the sunset from Corcovado and from Haleakala, climbed the Eiffel Tower, and set foot in Africa for the first time. I got to know Leroy ‘Horsemouth’ Wallace, and I got to see Harrison perform onstage with Gentleman. I met Winston Rodney and the late Joseph Hill. On more than one occasion I said to myself: I have everything I’ve ever wanted. On more than one occasion I thought: I’m about to die. There have been bad times and good.

The best times, for me, are when the lights from the stage shine on the people’s faces while the music is ringing through the hall, when it feels like the place is going to catch fire. Those moments are the only reason anyone would endure this work for long, so far from home. There are hard, hard times sometimes, on the road. Falling asleep at a table full of food and people, just because you’ve only slept 4 hours of the last 48. Car crashes, riots, tearful arguments, angry words. Cold getting in your collar on a draughty bus. Everybody coughing or just quiet, looking through the foggy windows. People from all over the world worked with us, in the rain, and in suffocating heat: in the chaos. Roadies, stagehands, sound engineers, street soldiers by the hundreds. For us, they are sometimes a part of the blur, but I must extend our deepest gratitude to all of them, and all those who came just for the music.

This year brings much joy and suffering, birth and death and everything in between. Sometimes, home at my desk alone as I am now, I feel the pain of loss more than I do the joy or satisfaction of this dream-come-true. I feel sad for the loss of artists great and small who are gone. I feel sadness for the poor people of Sao Paolo and Paris and cold Seattle. I feel sadness for the people of Iraq, and the soldiers, and the oppressed people everywhere whose homes have become places of uncertainty and fear. Another year has passed: another year to mourn or eulogize, or forget as we choose. And even as I write this we are weaving another. Another chapter is written in the history of our peoples, to be told to the generations that will follow us. What will we bestow upon our children? I hope it’s not like what was bequeathed to us, or to our parents or our grandparents. Let it be kinder, more patient and compassionate. Let it be hilarious and solemn and please let it be more free of war and violence. Let us hope to tell our grandchildren how we built a world of peace in their name. Blessings in the new year.

“Diesel” Dave Chachere
Groundation

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