Blue Guitar Highway

Cats Under the Stars

  CATS UNDER THE STARS I knew John Pasternacki since I moved to Horace Mann Grade School in the third grade. John was a year older than I. In Virginia to this day, people are referred to as Southsiders or Northsiders, depending on what side of town you live on. Johnny and I were Southsiders. We got to know each other a little better in high school. He was a superb athlete, lettering in both football and track. He still holds the Virginia Blue Devils record for longest touchdown run in a high school football game. His coach and teammates used to call him All the Way Pasternacki. Pasternacki and O’Keefe were both working construction in the summer of ’74 and met on a job site. When Tim found out John played guitar, he suggested he join us for a rehearsal, which at that time meant a couple of hours rehearsing at Tim’s parents’ house and a couple of hours getting greased and lathered at the Eldorado, a popular bar on Chestnut Street with lots of black leather booths, red carpet, and low lights, and one statue of a bullfighter. We developed empathically both as musicians and as friends. Pasty, as we called him, and I eventually developed a second sense of each other’s guitar playing, much as O’Keefe and I had with his harmonica and my guitar. We had listened to many of the same records and had similar styles. Like Tim and I, we were able to anticipate each other’s next musical move and provide a launching pad for the other’s flight of fancy. It was not uncommon for the three of us to turn a threeminute song into a thirty-minute ramble, exploring all the rhythmic and harmonic ideas available. It was like picking up a friendly hitchhiker and transporting him to his destination by way of the back roads. The first golden moment in time for any band is when they get together to just play, lock in on a song, listen to each other’s ideas, and coalesce them into a whole. Those exciting shared moments of discovery begin to define both the sound and the direction of the band. We cribbed from a wide variety of musical influences and, with open ears and minds, let our sound develop organically with no set boundaries. We’d know we had it when we heard it, and we were in no hurry and developed our repertoire, one stoned rehearsal at a time. CATS UNDER THE STARS   We were developing a rhythmic telepathy with each other and would work on playing the different grooves, grabbing them by the neck, and literally beating them into the ground. Instead of tapping of a foot, we would be pounding our boot heels into the floor, wrestling folk, blues, country, and bluegrass tunes to the mat. And though no one would have mistaken us for the Three Tenors, we started to develop three-part harmonies , singing like lumberjacks around a campfire. We were having a ball, while traveling back in time discovering the roots of American music. A few months later we added Skip Nelimark on banjo, and then we were four. We named ourselves Hot Walleye, a northern play on the popular acoustic blues band Hot Tuna, played a few weddings, and often shared the stage at parties with the Pike River Bottom Boys, an acoustic bluegrass and jug band from the area featuring Rodney Jackson, a colorful and charismatic character in farmer’s jeans with a Santa’s belly. Rodney would do a variety of loon, wolf, and moose calls that would bring down the house. While reading Crawdaddy music magazine one day in 1973, I read an article called “Cats Under the Stars.” It was written by Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. It was a stoner comedy article, had nothing to do with the Dead, and included grand metaphysical questions like, “What do you do with a pack of Lucky Strikes, and no matches?” and other meditations on the absurd. I thought it was a great name for a band, clipped it out, and put it in my wallet. I had it for more than two years when Hot Walleye got a call to play an outdoor gig at the gazebo in Northside Park, on August 17, 1975. We changed our name and debuted as Cats Under the Stars. With two acoustic guitars, a banjo and...