Re: [Harp-L] Doug Randall



On first meeting Doug Randall, Bobbie G writes, "I thought he appeared maybe a little 'dangerous.'"

I thought so myself. Here is a picture:
http://www.dviews.com/images/bigg/20040403/slides/img_5720.html

I loved that about Doug. You could gaze along the line of faces at the blues jam thinking how everbody seems to fit into one of three or four categories, and then there was Doug Randall. Every night someone would tap my shoulder, point, and ask: "Who *is* that guy?"

The one person who could answer it best is gone now. He was Ken Kesey meets Damon Runyon meets Hunter Thompson. I would love to listen to him talk about his past, these tangled scarcely credible stories about odd jobs in odd places for odd people, with narcotics, Mexico, freighters, deception, narrow escapes. I would not have believed any of it except for the way he told it -- not for effect, the way you or I surely would, but almost bored, in that nasal, cynical, jaded way he had. If it was all Scheherezade it lost nothing by it. I envy, and mourn for, those who knew him well; we met only at the festivals. Year by year after Denver the extravagance seemed to ebb; the following year he'd stopped drinking, and in St. Louis he seemed almost to have collapsed to life size. It hurt even then. And I'd heard just a fraction of his story. I wished I could have recorded it, or that he would have. I wished it wasn't so late and that I could get it straight and remember it. For all his wild and by-his-wits past, he was gentle and generous and modest. He grabbed life by every available handhold, and it outrages and anguishes me that life has been taken from him.

My heart goes out to everyone who knew and loved him.





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