Traveling to the before time

We took a trip back to the before times Wednesday, visiting Nickel City Sessions with Davey O. at The Cave in Buffalo.

I say “the before time” because in 2017, Davey, (Dave Ostrowski) began hosting the musical series at Nickel City Frets in Akron, N.Y.

Davey is a dedicated troubadour and singer/songwriter who plies his craft with the workaday ethic of so many who came before us making sure every single day, the work gets done.

Before Covid, we almost never missed a session – four talented musicians playing in the round, some we knew, some we didn’t more often excellent than not.

We heard “I deal with crazy all day long” from Dan Weber. We heard Pierce Pettis explain he was the “white guy from Muscle Shoals”, Courtney Yasmineh and Laura Herscovitch from Connecticut, the first musician I ever saw use technology to record her own guitar mid song and play it back as accompaniment.

Today I saw Herscovitch on an NPR Tiny Desk Concert.

That’s the thing, because Ostrowski travels far and supports other singer/songwriters, they travel for him.

Yasmineh came from Minnesota, Weber came from Washington State. That vibe and energy made a thing that was real, palpable, authentic and died, perhaps with covid or maybe when when Buell relocated to Lubec, Maine. (A great place, you should visit sometime).

After Covid, Davey got back to traveling. Other musicians, respecting his craft, and support, are still willing to drive great distances for the privilege of singing 5 songs for 20 people on a Wednesday night.

We’ve been healing for a few years now but Davey brought us another step forward with Nickel City Sessions Part Deux Wednesday.

He was joined by Buck Quigley, Jacklords and Steam Donkeys Legend; Phil Henry, who came from Vermont and Tom Stahl, who is coping the political crisis of 2025 with a mite of sarcasm.

Davey O’s teen poison was Boone’s Farm Under the Texaco Sign. For me, it was Mayor Brother’s hard cider by the plastic gallon. Quigley brought us back to 1993 which seems like it was Just a Dream before Henry reminded us that story about Phineas Gage with a hole in his head was true.

Stahl then kicked us in the teeth.

“What if Hitler didn’t know that he was Hitler but he thought he was a savior, that would certainly explain a lot of Donald Trump’s behavior.”

Davey followed with “Flowers for the House” about friends hospitable to traveling musicians. Henry sang about “Green Mountain Roads. I missed one from Buck in my notes but
Stahl brought us more catharsis with an old German drinking song he wrote in the 1930s, “the picture they paint makes you see things that ain’t Sieg Heil. . . the picture the paint could make Hitler a Saint Sieg Heil.”

He had the crowd poised to sing the chorus when he abruptly stopped. That was the point. Henry sat next to him, staring, enraptured.

Asked when he wrote the song, Stahl said “I think it was 2006. I’m not songwrite. I am a prophet.”

Davey followed with Heartbreak Down before hit us with a song about coalminers legislated out of the only job they knew. Henry’s song could just as easily have been about Adirondack loggers.

I digress, but in 1987, on a Tuesday night in a bar in Edinboro, Saratoga County, after a Town Board meeting about a proposed zoning ordinance, a logger got in my face.

“How much education do you have?” he asked. “I just earned my bachelor’s” I answered proudly.

“Let me tell you something” he said. “I left school at 14 to work in the woods with my daddy, just like he did and my son did. Every day I learn more than you will ever know.”

He had a right to cut trees, live in a trailer and do whatever he wanted. No zoning code could tell him his boy couldn’t put a trailer next door either.

On a backroad in the ADK lives poverty. You see it with 3 junk cars and a clothesline filled with wash next to a tarpaper platform when you realize there are people living there – they poured a foundation, covered it with a subfloor and tarpaper and never finished the house.

Anyway, as Buck sang it, “everything she does she does it fine” Phil is still playing with his “Etch-a-Sketch” and Tom reminded us “everything you need to know to get through life you can learn from Sheriff Andy Taylor and Barney Fife.”

The series will continue every third Wednesday into summer. Admission is $15 or $10 with a canned good. Being there on Wednesday made me feel like covid never happened. Healing has take that long.