Silkworm had set out on another U.S. tour, and our van’s differential had just shit the bed outside of Butte, Montana. Had gotten it “fixed” before we left Seattle, but that is another story.
Our guitar player was moving to Chicago to go to law school. We were supposed to dump his stuff in Chicago on the way through. We had been towing a trailer with the van, which contained most of his possessions, and he was driving his 1966 Plymouth Valiant.
We were driving around Butte in the Valiant, five of us including our soundman, trying to figure out the best way out of this mess.
We’d been there for two days already. In Butte, you:
- putz around
- survey the beat-to-shit Victorian mansions
- eat crappy food in the casinos and at Taco John’s
- go see the Berkeley Pit and try not to breathe too much
We’d had to cancel two shows and stood to cancel more if we waited for our van to get fixed. It was Friday afternoon, and the parts hadn’t made it in. Best case, we’d lose the weekend plus drive time to the East Coast. The tour (with Dianogah) would move on without us, and it would be tough to catch up.
Driving around Butte. Ho hum. What to do. We passed by Pissers Palace, a semi-legendary biker bar where we would not be welcome. Which reminded me of Evel Knievel. Evel was the most famous Butte export of all-time.
I used to have an Evel Knievel doll. Or maybe it was my brother’s. Little polyester Fat Elvis jacket and bell-bottoms. We were obsessed with Evel for a year or so, which seems like forever when you’re a kid. Like lots of other kids, we made little ramps and shot our bikes off them as high and far as we could. I have a scar on the meaty part of my palm. Wipeout, sharp rock, four stitches. No comparison to Evel having broken every bone in his body but his malleus.
Evel was insane professionally and maybe not that great a guy personally. But he had icon status for a while in the 70s, and always in this town. The guys at the garage ran him down when I brought him up casually, but even they had a signed EK poster in the front of the shop.
Driving around Butte. Trying to figure it out. We took a road up around the top of a hill. We drove up over the crest, and we started to come down the other side.
Down the road a quarter of a mile was a truck with a film crew hanging out the back of it. We looked them over as we drove by, but they were focused on the top of the hill behind us.
Suddenly, the truck we had just passed moved by us and into our lane. They were tracking something coming up the road behind us. Everyone in the car turned to look back up the hill, and we saw a faint dot moving at some speed. The dot grew near. Motorcycle. A bit nearer, and a helmet came into view. Painted like an American flag.
“That’s not….” A couple of seconds later, Evel Knievel or someone dressed like him rode past us.
We took a right at the bottom of the hill and drove by Pissers Palace one more time. The camera truck was there, and a mildly chopped bike with a red, white, and blue gas tank was parked in the street, in front of maybe thirty other bikes. An old man stood on the sidewalk, among a bunch of other bikers, helmet off. Weathered, wizened, still pretty tough-looking. It was unmistakeably him.
We asked ourselves what Evel Knievel would do. The question was not hypothetical. It was a legitimate question born of circumstance. What would Evel do, in our position?
The consensus was that Evel would suck it up. He was a force of nature, not to be buffeted about fate, as we had allowed ourselves to be.
It was maybe seven o’clock in the evening. We drove to Wal-Mart and got a cartop carrier. We drove back to the garage. We unloaded as much of the van as we dared. We crammed as much of our shit as we could into the carrier and the trunk of the Valiant. We got all five of us in the car and put the guitars on the laps of the three people in the back seat. We gassed up, and we drove fifteen hundred miles to Chicago in twenty-four hours.