Re: [Harp-L] Doug Randall

[michael harp <diachrome@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ben,
Thanks for the photo. I had trouble putting a face to the name but I can't
forget the face now. Doug was one of the unforgetable faces at harp fests.
Too young to die.

mike

on 4/30/05 12:03 PM, Ben Nathanson at bjnath@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> 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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