An amazing journey

They say ev’ry man needs protection,
They say ev’ry man must fall.
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Some place so high above this wall.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.

Bob Dylan’s words—sung by John LaPado, indie rock legend Barbara Manning and many of the musicians, music lovers and friends of LaPado who filled up Duffy’s Tavern on a Sunday evening—had a poignancy and spiritual implication that gave the moment a goosebump-inducing, spine-tingling significance.

LaPado, strumming a six-string and singing in a fine, strong voice, had the gaunt but somehow peaceful face of a terminally ill man whose passage through this life has been filled with rare experiences, deep relationships and personal insights all leading to this ephemeral shared moment poised on the lyric of one of his favorite songwriters.

As his late friend, musical partner and traveling companion Danny West would have said with bulging eyes and a beatific ear-to-ear grin, “It was HUGE.”

Booked as the John LaPado Variety Show & Singalong, the Sunday night get-together was the latest in a string of benefits and concerts that have been staged as a show of love and support by the vast extended family of Chico artists, musicians and working stiffs that LaPado is a founding member of. And with each show it becomes more and more obvious that the family will do everything it can to spend as much time as possible in LaPado’s company, sharing music, laughter, food, drink and mutual affection.

A couple of evenings later at the modest bungalow LaPado shares with his wife, Christine, and five-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lydia, I arrived just as longtime friend John Glick was setting out a dinner of barbecued chicken supplemented with homegrown, roasted baby potatoes and a colorful salad.

Filling up plates of food, we sat down to begin our “interview,” which started with my compliments on the greatness of the Sunday show and the question, “Think you’ll do it again next week?”

The soon-to-be-60-year-old LaPado looked annoyed with the limitations of stamina imposed by his body’s battle with abdominal cancer. “Probably not. Right now, it’s a struggle just to get from one chair to the next.”

Yet over the course of our three-hour talk he was up and down a dozen or more times, fetching photos and artwork from assorted well-organized caches and portfolios stashed around his home.

Eventually we moved a chair into the bedroom, where LaPado could spread photos and art out on the bedspread while we talked. Guitars and ukuleles hung on the walls along with dozens of snapshots, drawings, posters and cartoons. Bookshelves crammed with musical references, curios and mementos attested to an inquisitive spirit.

“So,” I said, asking what was essentially my only question of the night, “how did you wind up in Chico?”

LaPado’s answer, which took about three hours and many tangents to relate, provided an epic novel’s scope with cinematic scenarios galore.

“I was in the first graduating class from Homestead High School in Cupertino, and in high school me and my friends were sort of nerdy and into hot rods and motorcycles. When I graduated in 1964 we were all sort of wondering what to do, and since I couldn’t afford a hot rod, I got a motorcycle and started racing it. But in 1966, about two months after I turned pro, I got drafted, because I wasn’t carrying enough units at the local junior college.”

Army life got LaPado out of California, first to Fort Lewis, near Seattle, and later to Fort Sam Houston, in Texas, where he underwent medic training and was sent to work in a draft induction center assisting inductees going through the pre-induction physical examination: “My introduction to showbiz, in a way, talking to these rooms full of guys who’d been drafted. I helped a lot of guys get out of the draft [whispers]: ‘Just check the box that says you’re a homosexual.’ “

Eventually LaPado was stationed in Florida, where he became the “sidekick” and lifelong friend of Phil O’Neill, a disabled veteran with a penchant for travel, who would also later settle in Chico, playing woodwinds for many of the same bands LaPado played in or founded.

“We took a 32-day road trip from Miami to Puerto Vallarta, and I bought my first guitar from a guy on the beach for $15. A handmade Mexican guitar. That was the first of many epic road trips with O’Neill.”

After his discharge from the Army, LaPado continued his adventures with O’Neill.

“I was always the sidekick, never the mover and shaker, but I was always game to go along if somebody wanted to go.”

The urge to go soon took the pair to Copenhagen, Denmark, where fellow Army buddy Bill Dalton was attending school on the G.I. Bill. Dalton would later base his travel-book publishing company, Moon Publications, in Chico after stopping here for a visit with LaPado.

In 1969, the European sojourn mutated into an overland driving trip that started in Bremen, Germany, with LaPado, O’Neill, “a crazy Dutch couple” and LaPado’s Danish girlfriend, Jytte (pronounced Uta), all crammed into a used Mercedes. The trip culminated in Kathmandu, Nepal, by way of Istanbul, Turkey, and over the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and included time spent living on one of the fabled houseboats of Kashmir, and a visit to the Taj Mahal.

“Everybody else was freaking on acid, but I was just eating a little opium. The Taj Mahal was totally mind-blowing, and I got to play my harmonica in a part of the building where the echo would last for like half an hour. O’Neill was freaking, and he said when he heard me playing it made him feel better.”

Eventually dysentery and depletion of funds forced an end to the trip, and LaPado and his Danish girlfriend/ traveling companion parted ways with O’Neill in Kathmandu and ended up catching rides on trucks and trains back to Istanbul, then “hitchhiked across Europe in the middle of winter.” Back in Denmark, LaPado spent three weeks recuperating in a hospital before flying back to California for an unsuccessful attempt at joining the straight world, working in a medical facility in Sunnyvale that “wanted me to shave off my beard.”

Deciding to stick with the beard and change his residence, LaPado followed the advice of a friend and moved to Chico in June 1970. He attended Butte College on the G.I. Bill, earning an associate’s degree in art and communication before attending Chico State. There he became staff illustrator for the Wildcat, the Chico State newspaper that became the CN&R when it moved off campus due to differences of opinion with the college adminstrators.

He also became the sidekick of another charismatic personality, Michael Cannon, with whom he started the Butte Creek Family Band, which evolved into the Spark ‘n’ Cinder East-West Transcendental Band.

Even a few months back, while in New York undergoing an experimental—and unsuccessful—cancer treatment program, LaPado continued to interact with the musical community at large, sitting in to blow harp with Norah Jones and her semi-underground country trio the Sloppy Joannes, and striking up a friendship with Sloppy Joannes’ bassist Daru Odu and songwriter, Sasha Dobson, who ended up hiring LaPado to fill in for Jones on a night that Norah couldn’t make it to the gig.

“Yeah. At the end of the night Sasha handed me a twenty dollar bill and said, ‘Take it. Norah does.'”

Back in Chico, LaPado continues, with the aid of Hospice care medications, to get out and play whenever possible, even stopping by the Towne Lounge on a recent Saturday to add harmonica embellishment to a song being performed at a benefit to raise funds for recently hospitalized fellow musician Tom Garron.

In fact, during the 36 years of his residency in Chico, the music has never stopped flowing from this humble, lovable, bespectacled, redheaded sage. Aside from his own bands, his input has aided artists as diverse as rockabilly-bluesman Danny West, outré songwriter Danny Cohen, Bob Howard’s honky-tonk heroes the Asskickers and Tom Haithcock’s country-folkish Wounded Pickup.

This drummer/writer has played some of my most cherished gigs with LaPado as bandmate: New Year’s Eve at the Bambi Inn, the Do-It Leisure dance for the Work Training Center and a private party high on the rim of Butte Creek Canyon among them.

As John Glick said over our chicken dinner, “John LaPado is the glue that holds this community together.”

And like LaPado put it as our talk was winding down, “Most of my life I was always the sidekick, going on these epic journeys; well, I’m nobody’s sidekick now.”

But he’s certainly not alone on the journey.