Re: [Harp-L] Doug Randall

[Ben Nathanson <bjnath@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.