Prose Elegy for LE
(week of May 28th, 2007)Laura Ellen Hopper, veteran of KFAT Gilroy in the 70s, and presiding genius at KPIG Santa Cruz died after a brief but catastrophic illness on Memorial Day 2007
Striking, to say the least, is the insistence among all the emails read on the air earlier this week, to say nothing of the phone calls from people like Robert Earl Keen, Todd Snider, and Antsy McClain, to name only three I actually heard, that Laura changed people’s lives.
I hear this so clearly because she certainly changed mine. Not in an earthshaking religious conversion sort of way, more like a chiropractor is supposed to adjust your spine, except in Laura’s case, it was my mind.
Sometime late in the 90’s my friend Tom “Stormy” Weathered played Joe Ely in his car while we were traveling. I had settled into a comfortable musical middle age, listening again and again to my favorite Dylan, Dead, Springsteen, and, oh yes, Warren Zevon albums.
Joe Ely was a bolt out of an unimagined blue, in the same way Zevon was when someone played him for me 20 years before that. But there was, in my universe, no known way to connect with everybody else, either artist or listener, who was drawing energy off those basic texts. I had pretty much given up on radio, sometimes listening to that San Francisco station that plays the artists mentioned above, while I worked in the garden, but that was about it.
A few weeks after first hearing Joe Ely, I was on my own (on Sabbatical!) and on the road, celebrating my 50th year and the new millineum. Among my customary tapes I had added some Joe. (Live from Antoine’s, by the way.) Crossing back across the awful continent I picked up Wyoming Public Radio, which not only played Joe, but some music that sounded like it came from the same place. A week later back in the Bay Area, there was something on television about KPIG. Eventually, I figured out that I could listen to it on the net at work.
My first exchange with Laura was when she played Ely’s cover of “When Kindness Fails.” I emailed her breathlessly that that was my favorite Joe Ely song. Included was my signature identifying me as Development Director for a national child advocacy organization. Laura replied, “What? In your line of work?” Only after I replied that I fully understood the irony of the lyrics, which someone with an ear for that kind of thing who had lived in Wyoming might be able to, did she inform me that it wasn’t Joe’s song at all, but one of REK’s.
That began a correspondence that went on until the last week or so she was on the air. Me commenting from time to time on whatever she had played last, and her salty and always gratifying replies.
The immediate upshot of Laura's programming at KPIG was that I started listening to, and then finding the shows of, a whole host of singer-songwriters who opened my ears and mind. Most of them are Texans, with one notable exception . . . A Canadian rebel-poet subjected to an upbringing related to my own, in a part of the world near to mine, who created a way to get way past it.
That of course was Fred Eaglesmith, nee Elgersma, whose family is actually connected to family or friends of my family and friends, among them a former wife. My now wife and I have been on a couple of Charlie Hunter’s Fredtrains, and the extended family of Fredheads is a major life reward of a sort I had no idea was even available.
And that doesn’t begin to take into account the artists I never would have heard of without Laura’s direction. Joe Ely’s compadres Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Paul Thorn, Mary Gauthier, Todd Snider, of course, Tom Russell, and one of my very favorites who just threw a great small festival in Texas (my first time in Texas), Hayes Carll. Mainly, they are too many to name. And those artists and their festivals introduced me to a whole ‘nuther tier of singer/song-writers Laura never played, but to whom I listen now with enormous pleasure.
The poet Charles Olson, in one of the works people who read him remember best, wrote
But the known?
This I have had to be given,
a life, love, and from one man
the world.
The one man was Robert Creeley, whom Olson barely knew at the time in vivid life, but with whom he was engaged (in writing) in an intense writers’ conversation.
That’s where Laura lines up for me. She gave me a world.
