Ten years ago, my wife's cousin Vanessa was killed in a car accident. She had a bunch of kids, many of whom were in her station wagon that night. She went the wrong way on a freeway entrance ramp. She was killed instantly, but the kids were OK.

We drove down to Iowa for the funeral. I spent much of the actual funeral driving around in our car with our months-old son sleeping in the back. When he awoke, I went into the basement of the church, where the parish was feasting and remembering.

Her kids were sitting around, dazed and confused. Quiet and bored. Un-kidlike. I rounded up a bunch of them, gave them some change, and taught them how to pitch coins. I'd done it growing up, and was intent on showing them the thrill of a deftly tossed coin leaning up against a wall or step.

I showed them technique, and explained that the winning pitch is the one that hits, and remains closest to, the wall. Winner take all. None of them had ever pitched coins before, so they were pretty psyched.

The group was small at first, but it grew in size and volume. At its peak, it was about 16 kids, the youngest of whom was Vanessa's four-year-old son, James. After about 20 minutes, some of the adults gathered around to watch. Some even reached into their pockets and provided spare change sustenance to the losers.

James got hot and won four or five in a row. At one point, all of the kids and many of the dead mother's friends, siblings, sons, daughters, aunts, and uncles were chanting, "James! James! James!" so loud you'd have thought you were at a Vegas craps table.

We drove home to Minneapolis the next day. It was around this time of year, with the cold wind howling, like it is tonight.

After my wife and son had fallen asleep, I spent the night reading Women and Ghosts, a collection of female-penned short stories about spirits, poltergeists, and the afterworld.

It was around midnight. Just like tonight. When I finished reading, I got up from my chair, turned off the light, and, as I made my way across the room, I felt a coin drop out of the front pocket of my jeans.

I turned the light back on and bent down to pick it up from where it had landed. It was a quarter -- leaning up against the base of the wall, a perfect winner.

Luna, "Slash Your Tires."

Haiku For The Tire-Slasher On Our Block

Dude and slash or dudette
Whatever is up with that?
Do you like Summit?

Haiku For super-chef Anthony Bourdain Who Told MPR's Kerri Miller He "doesn't like writers" Because They're "not working class" Or Some Shit

Cookie me thinketh you
Protesteth tooth mucheth
Ever heard o' Yeats?

God Johnson, "Life During Wartime" (live at the Cabooze, 10/28/06).

Something's happening. In his A-List for Michael Franti and Spearhead, Britt Robson wrote about it: "Watching Franti, a six-foot-six dreadlocked former b-baller, deliver the goods onstage is the perfect sustenance for door-knockers and cold-callers putting their shoulders to the tectonic plates to produce the lefty tsunami of Election 2006."

Franti and Robson and the door-knockers aren't alone. Above ground, as the pendulum swings and politicians like Keith Ellison talk about love, the underground is teeming with a movement of punks, hippies, and other uncategorizables, many of who were in costume last night at the Cabooze for the free love-in that is Wookiefoot.

Hugs between utter but not complete strangers abounded, and I am so tempted to invoke the '60s here, but I won't because this is a new generation of lovers, who have blitzed through their own cynicism to embrace, as Barack Obama has it, "the audacity of hope."

This Talking Heads tune, done by some squeaky-clean porn-star boy-angels in robes spoke to it, all of it. Sung by the "You Looked Better On Myspace" T-shirt-sporting keyboard player, the song lifted the room and turned it into, yes, a party, a disco, some foolin' around -- with a throbbing conscience and consciousness that will serve all concerned well over the next couple weeks and years.

In other words -- just one, actually -- what was it that V (Guy Fawkes) heard all night at the Cabooze? Over and over, from young and old, drunk and sober, high and grounded, coming up to him, dancing, clasping his hand, flashing him the V-peace-victory sign, showing him their coat-hangered V tattoos, giving him the light-dark love, asking him where he would be on November 5 and invoking the quote, "remember, remember the fifth of November"?

What was it?

What was it they said?

Oh, yeah:

"Revolution."

The Falls, "I Got The Darkness" (unreleased demo).

Tonight as the crescent moon rises, cock your ear toward Lake Nokomis. A garage band, in the garage, ripping it up like the bastard bloody stray cat ghoul nephews of Eddie Cochran. I'll be this guy:

I know you'll be there in spirit.

This time of year always reminds me of the chats I've had with First Ave. staffers about the First Avenue ghost. Here's a few testimonials.

Molly McManus, bar manager, who first saw the ghost in the fifth stall of the women's room on a Tuesday night in 1991, around 2 a.m. as she was making the rounds after bar close: "I opened the door to that stall, and saw a woman hanging up there. She was wearing a green army jacket, and had long hair. It wasn't anything gory or anything, she was just hanging there with her neck to one side. What I thought was that it was a real tragic incident. I thought someone had hung themself. I thought, 'Oh, God, what am I gonna do here?' It was more that than anything. I was just freaking out. And then I looked back, and there was nothing there.

"I didn't run, but I was really shaking. I finished up as soon as I could, and got out. I didn't tell a lot of people about it right away, because it was so weird. But after that, I would never, ever be in the building alone. Daytime, nighttime, never.''

Valerie Cenedella, bar manager: "That is definitely a hot spot. Every night, the women's bathroom was just this huge challenge for me. You would walk through there, and with all the mirrors, you'd see things. Things would catch your eye, and if you ever were brave enough to stop and look, there would be nothing there.

"I'm not always susceptible to that kind of stuff, but there was something definitely there. It was physically tangible; you could just feel it. It was like, 'Okay, I'll be gone soon, just don't hurt me.'''

Matt Gerhard, longtime staffer: "There are millions of stories,'' like the time in 1983, when Gerhard and another employee were guarding the film equipment overnight for the production of "Purple Rain,'' and all the lights in the place went berserk for 30 minutes.

Oscar Arredondo, longtime staffer: "One night after close, this single balloon made it's way around the club, up from the dance floor and past the women's bathroom, and settled next to me at my table with this circular gust of icy air. It was like someone was leading it by a string. Normally, I was skeptical about most of the stories that other employees told me. But the weird thing about this was the cold air, because it was a warm summer night.''

Conrad Sverkerson, longtime stage manager: "I've been there some pretty odd hours, and I've never seen anything. But that doesn't mean anything. There have been some pretty credible people who have worked here over the years who have seen some pretty strange things. You wonder what's going on.''

Rod Smith, longtime deejay: "I've seen a couple of the manifestation things, and I've never seen it manifest as anything other than a woman.''

John Casey, bartender/musician, on the ghost of his friend Mark Sandman, leader of the Boston-based trio Morphine, who died of a heart attack onstage in Italy on July 4, 1999, but came back for an apparent encore on Aug. 27, the night after Morphine was to have performed at First Avenue:

"We (the John Casey Band) were finishing up our set in the Entry that night, around one o'clock, and I dedicated Blind Lemon Jefferson's 'See That My Grave Is Kept Clean' to Mark. Half way through the song, I saw something dripping from the microphone. At first, I just thought is was my sweat.

"It was just one of those nights where the words, and the music and the pacing were just seamless. All night long. Oh, it was a good night. It was one of those reasons why you do it. It was at another level, almost. I don't know what the deal was.

"Just as I saw the dripping coming off, (guitarist) Eric (Christopher) yelled over at me, 'John, are you bleeding?'

"I was like, 'What the hell are you talking about?' And Eric kind of gestures to the pool of blood - I hate to call it blood, I don't know what it was - but it was forming in front of the mic stand, and it was becoming about the size of my head. It had a pretty wide circumference. It was bizarro.

"I didn't get creeped out until I put two and two together and thought, 'Holy s—, it's Mark.' It was powerful. I felt it. It's hard to explain that feeling that I had, but at that moment, I thought I was going to start flopping around that stage like a crappie.

"I touched it at the end of the night. It was warm and red. We watched it coagulate on the mic and in front of the mic stand as we were tearing down. A lot of folks saw it. We were all freakin' on this. Right after the gig, we had floor guys with mag lights coming in, inspecting the walls and floor, trying to get to the bottom of it.

"It might have been something else. You know, something left over from a GWAR or Impaler show. But it just seems like too much of a coincidence. It was symbolic, if nothing else. I don't know. It was really creepy.

"I don't know who it was, or what it was, but I do know that there was some very mysterious mojo in the house that night ... First Avenue once had a seance, and the psychic reported that there are over 40 spirits living inside the club. Sometimes, when I look at the Entry stage, I think God, maybe Mark is still with us.''

Pigeon John, "Growin' Old" (from the new one Pigeon John and the Summertime Pool Party).

My boy Steve and I went to the Hold Steady the other night. He's in his late thirties, I'm in my late forties, and Craig Finn was up there rhyming/pining, "Oh, to be 17 forever... Oh, to be 33 forever."

On the way home, Steve and I talked about nostalgia, and about how everyone in that room had been personally transported by Finn's rich imagery of Minneapolis, the specifics of which aren't even necessary, for everyone had their own mind-movie accompanying the various streets, buildings, and characters that burst out of Finn the way they do from all great writers who have fallen in love with a place, and a sense of place.

Here, Pigeon John raps about living in L.A. and listening to the Beasties and KRS-One and other hip-hop pioneers. It's part lament, but mostly celebration, and I'm usually fiercely anti-nostalgia and live-in-the-moment, but sometimes it feels good to wallow in what is sold as, like the knick-knack shoppe at the Mall Of America has it, A Simpler Time.

Yeah. I don't think about age most of the time. I don't feel too strange about being interested in music and art made by people decades younger or older than me. It still feeds me. So the issue of growing older doesn't haunt, unless it comes up like it did a few weeks ago, when I moved two friends out of their apartments.

One is a beautiful 25-year-old woman. Her new apartment has an array of built-in mirrors that came with the place, at which she made a crack about being a vain silent movie star. The other is a dying 87-year-old woman. She asked me not to put up any mirrors in her new place so she doesn't have to look at the haggard face staring back at her.

You and I are somewhere in between.

Ol' Yeller, "Jean Jacket Weather" (from their latest, Good Luck).

Around this time of year, on a typical Minneapolis weekend in the '60s, citizens and wiccans alike would take to raking their lawns. If they cocked their ears and imaginations to the wind, they could hear the crowds of Memorial or Metropolitan stadiums, roaring for their tribes and gladiator heroes battling in the great outdoors. If their ears and imaginations failed them, they could always stop what they were raking and hear the sound of WCCO-AM on transistor radios, incanting across the zephyr.

Autumn is here, and a young man's thoughts turn to these things. Perhaps because raking is the dullest and most fruitless of all of Satan's chores, for it only accomplishes a chump's clarity: Would it be so bad to leave unmade the bed of dead leaves and dirty grass? Would it be such a disaster if it all simply rested beneath the snow, snuggling as one big slop trough, for six months?

Once upon a time, though, there was a pay-off. A ceremony. Incense. Ritual. To be sure, when it comes to olfactory orgasms, there is nothing like fall. Nothing -- not the lilacs of spring, the bouys of summer, the brace of winter -- delivers the same bittersweet symphony. Fall is the time of year when the dark night of the soul whispers "something's missing," and harks to a time of rustling school corduroys, and the perfume of burning leaves.

It is no myth. It was everywhere. It was pure pagan celebration, sanctioned by the city fathers. We would rake and rake and rake, and then pile scratchy brown-and-orange effigy-ready piles on the lawn, street, curb, or gutter. Some would jump into the veiny mounds, but that was kids' stuff. Most raked only to torch a pile or two as the sun went down.

They were smoke signals, nothing less. And in the lighting of a pile of leaves in the middle of the city, there was some serious black magic being played out; a communing with other smokers down the block, across the river, and through the woods. It was a connection to something ancient, something mystical, and a way to live out what a brick in front of the Writers Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland says: "Go back far enough and all humankind are cousins -- Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999)."

Go back far enough in this city's history, and you will discover a flamin' groovy time before 1971. That was the year the outdoor burning ban went into effect. Some tree-huggers got their undies in a bundle about the ozone and dioxins, and pushed through a measure to stop the fires and turn leaves into compost and mulch for the sake of future generations.

And now here we are--safe and sound and fireless. "I miss burning leaves," said my friend Shawn, an expatriate Minnesotan living in Hollywood. "We lived in the country and would burn the 'brush pile' that had accumulated over the summer. Dead branches, dead mice, dead birds, dead leaves, dead grass. We would dump a few gallons of used car oil on it and light her up. Then we would be out there 'til midnight waiting for it to die down."

"My father had a leaf-burner next to the garage by the alley," said my friend Erik, an expat from Seattle who recently returned to Minneapolis. "It had holes in the sides where fire had burned through over the years. It made raking leaves much more fun, and it smelled and felt good to be next to the fire. When my parents told me we couldn't do it anymore and why-- 'Because it was bad for the environment'-- I felt bad that I had enjoyed it before."

Oh, but it was good. So good. Never mind global warming, the pagans contend that "burning oak leaves purifies the atmosphere," not to mention serving as "doorways to the mysteries, health, money, healing, potency, fertility, strength, endurance, good luck, longevity, primeval strength, and to preserve youthfulness."

I can't get enough of that stuff, so I summoned the Minneapolis fire marshal, Dave Dewall, to see if he'd give my bursting-at-the-sternum inner pagan a permit to burn leaves. He was a total puritan wet blanket. He said there's a city ordinance against burning leaves for good reason, but that fires can be had on private property with "cord wood, no branches, leaves, or debris, and the pit must be no more than three feet in diameter."

Not exactly the sort of thing that inspires whooping and getting naked around the circle of life. Dude had nearly doused my inner flame, until I realized I don't need a watered-down version of my flaming youth. I've got my memories to keep me warm. To wit:

When I was a lad growing up in this bastard burg, one of my household chores was to take out the trash and burn it. After dinner and dishes, I'd haul out a paper bag of tin cans, dirty diapers, plastic cartons, and the like, and toss it into a metal trashcan near the alley. Then I'd light a match. If it didn't catch, I'd sprinkle in some lighter fluid and watch the smoke and flames lap the stars.

Same thing with leaves. One night, during a particularly high bonfire in the alley, my brother found a crippled bat. He picked it up and tossed it on the pyre. We cackled as the heat immolated the fur and wings, setting into motion an entire chain of events that brought all who were present that night blessings and curses that the pagans say come from standing around cauldrons and candles and burning leaves, not bending and bagging and tying.

Mason Jennings, "The Ballad of Paul and Sheila."

Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 4:31 PM
Subject: Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day

An E-Proposal From Me to You

By Jim Walsh

I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, in front of a silver monument that looks like a heart, a broken heart really, and I am thinking about how wrong the world has gone, how Minnesota Mean it all feels. I'm thinking about how much everyone I know misses the man I've come to visit, how sick I am of sitting around waiting for change, and about what might happen if I ask you to do something, which is what I'll do in a minute.

Like most Minnesotans, I met Paul Wellstone once. It was at the Loring Playhouse after the opening night of a friend's play. He and Sheila were there, offering encouragement to the show's director, Casey Stangl, and quietly validating the post-production festivities with his presence: The Junior Senator from Minnesota and his wife are here; we must be doing something right.

The year before (1990), I'd written a column for City Pages encouraging all local musicians and local music fans to go vote for this mad professor the following Tuesday. He won, and, as many have said since, for the first time in my life I felt like we were part of something that had roots in Stuff The Suits Don’t Give A Shit About. That is, we felt like we had a voice, like were getting somewhere, or like Janeane Garofalo's villain-whupping character in "Mystery Men," who memorably proclaimed, "I would like to dedicate my victory to the supporters of local music and those who seek out independent films."

After the election, Wellstone's aide Bill Hillsman told me he believed my column had reached a segment of the voting populace that they were having trouble reaching, and that it may have helped put him over the top. I put aside my bullshit detector for the moment and chose to believe him, just as I choose at this moment to believe that music and the written word can still help change the world.

When I introduced myself to Wellstone that night as "Jim Walsh from City Pages," he broke into that sexy gap-toothed grin, clasped my hand and forearm and said, with a warm laugh, "Jiiiiim," like we were a couple of thieves getting together for the first time since the big haul. I can still feel his hand squeezing my forearm. I can still feel his fighter's strength.

For those of you who never had the pleasure, that is what Paul Wellstone was -- a fighter -- despite the fact that the first president Bush said upon their first encounter, "who is this chickenshit?" He fought corporate America, the FCC, injustice, his own government. He fought for the voiceless, the homeless, the poor, the little guy -- in this country and beyond. He was a politician but not a robot; an idealist, but not a sap, and if his legacy has already morphed into myth, it's because there were/are so few like him. He was passionate, and compassionate. He had a huge heart, a rigorous mind, a steely soul and conscience, and now he is dead and buried in a plot that looks out over the joggers, bikers, rollerbladers, and motorists who parade around Lake Calhoun daily.

Paul and Sheila Wellstone and six others, including their daughter Marcia, were killed in a plane crash on October 25, 2002. I remember where I was that day, just as you do, and I don't want to forget it, but what I want to remember even more is October 25, 2003. So here's what we're going to do.

We're going to start something right here, right now, and we're going to call it Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. It will happen on Saturday, Oct. 25th. On that day, every piece of music, from orchestras to shower singers, superstars to buskers, will be an expression of that loss and a celebration of that life. It will be one day, where music��"which, to my way of thinking, is still the best way to fill in the gray areas that the blacks and whites of everyday life leave us with��"rises up in all sorts of clubs, cars, concerts, and living rooms, all in the name of peace and love and joy and all that good stuff that gets snickered at by Them.

Now. This is no corporate flim-flam or media boondoggle. This is me talking to you, and you and I deciding to do something about the place we live in when it feels like all the exits are blocked. So: First of all, clip or forward this to anyone you know who still cares about grass roots, community, music, reading, writing, love, the world, and how the world sees America. If you’ve got a blog or web site, post it.

If you're a musician, book a gig now for Oct. 25th. Tell them you want it to be advertised as part of Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. If you're a shower singer, lift your voice that day and tell yourself the same thing. If you're a club owner, promoter, or scene fiend, put together a multi-act benefit for Wellstone Action! (www.wellstone.org). If you're a newspaper person, tell your readers. If you're a radio person, tell your listeners. Everybody talk about what you remember about Wellstone, what he tried to do, what you plan to do for Wellstone World Music Day. Then tell me at the email address below, and I'll write another column like this the week of Oct. 25th, with your and others' comments and plans.

This isn't exactly an original idea. Earlier this year, I sat in a room at Stanford University with Judea and Michelle Pearl, the father and daughter of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by members of a radical Islamic group in Pakistan in February of last year. After much talk about their son and brother's life and murder, I asked them about Danny's love of music. He was a big music fan, and an accomplished violinist who played with all sorts of bands all over the world. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Pearl was also a member of the Atlanta band the Ottoman Empire, and his fiddle levitates one of my all-time favorite Irish jigs, "This Is It," which I found myself singing one night last fall in a Sonoma Valley bar with a bunch of journalists from Paraguay, Texas, Mexico, Jerusalem, Italy, and Korea.

The Pearls talked with amazement about the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day (www.danielpearl.org), the second of which happens this October 10th, which would have been Pearl's 40th birthday. I told them about attending one of the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day activities at Stanford Memorial Church, where a lone violinist silently strolled away from her chamber group at the end, signaling to me and my gathered colleagues that we were to remember that moment and continue to ask questions, continue to push for the dialogue that their son and brother lived for. I vowed that day to tell anybody within earshot about Daniel Pearl World Music Day, and later figured he wouldn't mind a similar elegy for Wellstone, who shared Pearl's battle against hate and cynicism.

Wellstone didn't lead any bands, but he led as musical a life as they come. He lived to bring people together, to mend fences: Music. When he died, musicians and artists were some of the most devastated, as Leslie Ball's crest-fallen-but-somehow-still-beaming face on CSPAN from Williams Arena illustrated. Everyone from Mason Jennings to Larry Long wrote Wellstone tribute songs in the aftermath, and everyone had a story, including the one Wendy Lewis told me about the genuine exuberance with which Wellstone once introduced her band, Rhea Valentine, to a crowd at the Lyn-Lake Festival. Imagine that, today.

So ignore this or do whatever you do when your "We Are The World" hackles go up. I’d be disappointed, and I suppose I wouldn't blame you; in these times of terror alerts and media celebrity, I'm suspicious of everything, too. But I freely admit that the idea of a Wellstone World Music Day is selfish. That day was beyond dark, and to have another like it, a litany of hang-dog tributes and rehashes of The Partisan Speech and How It All Went Wrong, would be painful, not to mention disrespectful to everything those lives stood for and against.

No, I don't want anyone telling me what to think or feel that day, or any day, anymore. I want music that day. I want to wake up hearing it, go to bed singing it. I want banners, church choirs, live feeds, hip-hop, headlines, punk rock, field reports, arias, laughter. I want to remember October 25, 2002 as the day the music died, and October 25, 2003 as the day when people who've spent their lives attending anti-war rallies and teaching kids and championing local music and independent films got together via the great big antennae of music and took another shot.

I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. In front of the silver broken heart, three workers stab the fresh sod with shovels and fumble with a tape measurer. Flowers dot the dirt surrounding the statue base. I pick up a rock and put it in my pocket.

The sprinklers are on, hissing impatiently at the still-stunned-by-last-autumn citizens who work and hope and wait and watch beyond the cemetery gates. The sprinklers shoot horizontal water geysers this way and that. They are replenishing patches of grass that have been browned by the sun. They are telling every burned-out blade to keep growing, and trying to coax life out of death.

Ghostland Observatory, "Sad Sad City."

This Austin, Texas duo positively slayed a room of 200 in the Entry last night, with a test-tube baby of '70s rock and techno that played the Stooges to Melodious Owl's Stones. Heavy beats, hooks, and humor (more Ween-sly than Tenacious D-duh), and a version of dance music that transcends time, space, and war. Call it Pre-Funk.

That this space-kronk issues from the capital of twang would be suprising were it not for that city's deep history ("Keep Austin Weird," goes the saying/music festival, which reminds me: Keep Minneapolis Weird), and these guys are as rooted in Gibby Haynes (who coined the term "Weirdo-American community") and the Butthole Surfers as they are Prince and Bootsy.

This tune was a highlight among many, the chorus of which could be the most basic sentiment on the planet at the moment; a shout-out to lovers and leaders alike:

I need you to want me
To hold me
To tell me the truth