“Hey,” Tim said on the phone by way of introduction.  “Pat says you can play drums.”

That definitely got my attention.  Pat was a fellow pitcher on my Babe Ruth 15-year old baseball team.  He knew I had borrowed my dad’s big old Leedys to play with a few kids’ bands and sat in with some old folks when my dad couldn’t make a gig.  Tim needed a substitute for his drummer who was not available for a show.

So off I went to play drums for a high school gig with Tim’s band in Choteau, a small town 25 miles away from my even-smaller-town of Augusta in the mountains of nowhere Montana.  We got in one practice before our gig, and at that practice I grabbed a guitar and riffed a little bit.  See, I had made a trip to the big city (Great Falls) and bought a Decca guitar and Teisco amp at Valu-Mart for $75.  I didn’t have the $125 retail price for the guitar and amp, and I am to this day grateful to the department manager who let me skate.  I had been practicing at night in my bedroom, laying in bed with a guitar across my belly, learning to play Beatles and Stones songs along with my record player.

A few weeks later my phone rang again and Tim offered me a slot playing guitar in his high-school band, “Defiance”.

At our first practice Tim and the guys were struggling with “Magic Carpet Ride”.  It was 1968 and the movie “Easy Rider” was the hottest thing, with John Kay and Steppenwolf laying down the sound track.  Tim knew the three chords but couldn’t quite figure out the odd rhythm to the song.  Being a drummer, the rhythm was easy for me.  Add the chords, and I was guitar hero for a day.  Tim got us gigs at the local high schools after basketball games.  We were always too loud.

In the psychedelic late sixties every band had to have a “light show”.  Tim invented a contraption that, looking back, was pretty incredible.  He put a metal disc on an electric motor and connected it to two boxes, each with four colored flood lights.  The motor would spin the disc, which would send a charge to the light bulbs like the distributor of a car engine, making them flash in rotation.  Pretty good engineering for a high school kid.

After practice one night we were cruising around out in the country grooving to Grand Funk Railroad on Tim’s eight-track player and knocking back a few beers (under-age of course).  I started to feel awful.  Really sick, and it wasn’t the beers.  Tim insisted that I come home with him because his town had a small hospital, and my home town didn’t.  Hours later I was in surgery for acute appendicitis.  Good call, Tim.

One time we were booked to play after a basketball game at the high school on the Blackfoot Reservation in Browning.  It was crazy cold – twenty below zero – and a flat-out Montana blizzard, but off we went in Tim’s old restored Air Force bus.  We bucked snow drifts all the way and got to the high school gym in time to unload our equipment and set up for our gig.  Tim had just bought a blonde Fender Telecaster guitar and it had been packed in the back of the bus, the coldest spot – we were all huddled up front near the single heater under the dash.   When we unloaded our musical gear inside, and we opened our guitar cases, the temperature change was just too much for Tim’s beautiful Fender – the finish cracked like a spider web.  Tim didn’t whine.  He played the cracked guitar through the gig, and when he got home he stripped it down to its raw ash wood and put a clear poly coat on it.  His Tele was prettier than ever (see the photo above).

Four years later we were actually becoming passable musicians.  I was in college and Tim worked in construction.  He was the best man at my wedding.  Linda and I were totally broke and just scraping by, working any jobs we could get to pay the rent and tuition.

One day Tim called and said, “We need to go to Seattle and buy a decent p.a. system.”  It would be a group purchase so he wanted us to all be in on the decision.  I knew he was right, but I didn’t even have ten dollars for gas money and burgers.  He convinced me to make the trip anyway, and I went along,  knowing it threatened my fledgling marriage.  Tim fronted the cash for our new Peavey p.a. system, and we paid him back with half the proceeds from each of the next several gigs.  What a trip!  It was during the Jimmy Carter gas crisis and there was no gasoline to be had anywhere near Seattle.  Fortunately, Tim had the foresight to pack several jerry cans of gas in his Corvair van just in case.

We played together for a few more years and eventually went our separate ways.  We tried to keep in touch, but I went off to teach school and then joined the corporate world.  Tim moved to California and after a while we just didn’t have much in common.  He had kids and grandkids, was a computer guru, and as far as we know never played music after leaving Montana.

A few months ago our bass player Dennis sent me a note that Tim’s obituary had appeared in the Choteau newspaper.  It brought back a flood of fond memories.

Here’s to you, Tim Cook.  Rest in peace.