Viva Knievel!

Evel Knievel Days in Butte was a blast. Along with assorted motorcycle daredevilry, we were treated to an appearance by Evel himself. Well, he was on the other side of a big dirt landing ramp and we didn't actually see him... but we heard him over the PA system. I'm fairly convinced he's still alive.





Pictures can only do the event so much justice. Above is the freestyle flying-through-the-air event, and on the right is the amazing "Wall of Death." There was also the Globe of Death, and the crashing through the walls of fire of death, and plenty of other tomfoolery.













My friend Sam Louden contributed a poem for Evel Knievel days, which is below. And below that is a video that sums up the day better than I ever could. Check out how the teenage chick abandons her boyfriend for Sam!

The Last Weekend

Go to Butte on the Last Weekend
Of July to see the leather, see the hides
Revealed, tanned and inked and wrinkled
Before their times from radical hard
Living and liquor,
Tobacco and sun.
Crass and creed-less, the faithful gather to celebrate
dare-
Devilry—defying death by dying slow:
Melanoma, emphysema, hepatic cirrhosis,
Pulmonary fibrosis—the final wreck,
The tragically anti-climactic terminal crash
Of Evel Knievel. Betwixt choppers and scooters,
Kids do shooters in t-shirts from Hooters.

Evel Knievel Days! Hooray! Drink and smoke,
Dance through the crowd from spectacle to spectacle—
Jumps and bikes,
Fire and cleavage—
With the throng who is by far more spectacular
In and among America’s strength: the redneck liberal
Quaffing booze from a mason jar;
The conservative Democrat, loving guns
And sucking heavy metal water from a mason jar;
Hyped-up teens quick to mate and speed
To guzzle meth from a mason jar;
Hard-edge biker-woman—shameless
Rough and ready to drink blood from a mason jar,
Blood from a baby to preserve her youth;
A baby happy to drink her milk from a mason jar;
Everybody dehydrated and hyper from the complimentary
Energy-drink imbibed in or out of a mason jar.
Evel Knievel, chemical daze under wildfire haze;
Mullets and rattails amaze on those high holy days.

Something EVEL this way comes

by Ray Sikorski

(This article originally appeared in the July issue of the Tributary magazine.)

Ah, July in Montana. There's nothing like frolicking in meadows of beargrass beneath the purple peaks of Glacier, floating languidly down the Madison on a hot day, and watching maniacs on motorcycles crash into walls of fire in Butte.

Yes, Evel Knievel Days are back. Once again the Richest Hill on Earth will measure its wealth not in copper, zinc, and manganese, but with the mother of all mother lodes of vicarious thrills and adrenaline. This year's lineup, taking place in Uptown Butte July 26-28, boasts teams of Superbikers, Balls of Steel Stunts, a Wall of Death, world record attempts in the firewall crash and jumping motorcycles over cars, and it's all presided over by the red-white-and-bluest American icon of all time: Evel Knievel himself.

To those of us of the male gender brought up in the glorious 1970s, the mind has a hard time conceiving of a greater bacchanal. And yet, observant early visitors to the www.knieveldays.com website noticed one other event: Evel Knievel, the Rock Opera.

Whoa. The mere thought of it: Evel, resplendent in his leathers. Motorcycles flying through the air. Blazing electric guitars. The larger-than-life history of Butte's favorite son, world premiering in rock ‘n’ roll glory at the Mother Lode Theater.

Alas, it was not to be. Our Lady of the Rockies may bring miracles, but even this was out of her realm. Budgetary constraints have prevented the show from going on – in Butte, anyway. Jef Bek, founding member of Los Angeles' Zoo District Theatre Company and writer of the show, is forging ahead with the production of the rock opera, opting instead for a fall world premiere at the Bootleg Theater in L.A.

Like other boys of a certain era, Bek got bit by the Evel bug – hard.

“I remember getting big slats of wood and cinder blocks and riding my Schwinn and actually talking kids into laying down, and I was actually jumping people,” the 44-year-old composer relays via phone. “That was kind of fun.”

Later, a close encounter with a tree stump put the kibosh on plans for further gravity-defying glory, but the star-spangled superbiker was never far from Bek's mind. After successfully working as musical director for Chicago's New Crime Productions, Bek wanted to compose something of his own.

“If I were to write my own musical, what subject would I write about?” Bek asked himself. He wanted something to take place in the early '70s, as an excuse to write the kind of classic rock that he loved, and he wanted a subject that hadn't already been overdone. “It just kind of hit me: Evel Knievel. He's dramatic, he's rock 'n' roll, crazy... I just thought, man, that would be brilliant.”

The idea got put on the back burner once Bek moved to L.A., but it was always simmering back there. The events of September 11, 2001 brought it back to the fore. Bek saw people becoming more and more divided along political lines as the prospect of war became more ominous, but he remembered things being different back in his youth.

“I want to write this show about an American icon, that reflects a time when you could be rebellious yet proud to say you were an American,” Bek recalls thinking. “You say Evel Knievel to the farthest left-thinking person and the farthest right-thinking person, and you get the same response: 'Evel Knievel, wow!'”

Bek went to work on the music and lyrics for the rock opera. Of course, he still needed official authorization from the man himself. Demo CD in hand, Bek flew to Florida, hoping for the green light. Knievel and his wife, Krystal, picked Bek up at the airport in Knievel's red-white-and-blue pickup. “I'm happy to report that yeah, he was driving pretty aggressively,” Bek says.

The aggressive driving may have made him happy, but it didn't relieve Bek of his apprehension. After all, he had painted an unapologetic portrait of the man, pulling no punches with Knievel's well-documented taste for booze, women, and violence.

“I go into some dark areas, because if it's just a fluff piece where every song is just about how wonderful Evel is, it's not very compelling.”

Knievel, now in his 60s and ailing from his numerous injuries and illnesses, popped Bek's CD into the truck's player. He seemed to like the music, Bek reports. For one song, in which Linda, Knievel's first wife, sings a bittersweet love ballad, Knievel pulled his truck into a convenience store and parked. He paused, listening to the music, then turned to Bek and said, “Jef, you nailed it.”

The show was on.

Production has been going on ever since. The show will include a live band with two guitars, a bass, drums, and keyboards, 16 singers, including eight principles and eight background vocalists (“I like a lot of voices,” Bek says), and a rear-projection video screen onstage to simulate the motion of speeding motorcycles.

“You picture Evel Knievel center-stage on a motorcycle singing a song, and behind him is this video screen that shows road movement, but going the other way so it kind of gives the impression that he's riding.”

While the world premiere is now slated for L.A. in the fall, Bek hopes the show will make it to points beyond – including Vegas.

And what about Butte, the town that inspired Evel to jump his way to glory?

The production may not arrive any time soon – but Bek might. Despite not taking the show with him for Evel Knievel Days, he just might make a trip up on his own.

“To be honest with you, I've never seen a motorcycle jumping a bunch of stuff,” he says. “I may come. I'm thinking that's a good idea.”

Hopefully he’ll remember to bring his Schwinn.



“Evel Knievel, red, white, and blue/ Evel Knievel, we wanna ride with you!” Crank the tunage from “Evel Knievel, The Rock Opera” by clicking here.

Fool for thought

Last night (April Fool's Day) several Bozeman writers, myself included, performed the fourth annual "Foolish Words," a story we all conspired to write. Well, not conspired, exactly. Poet Sam Louden started it, he passed it along to the next person, and so on, and so on... Fifteen writers and 8,524 words later, the beast was cooked.

I'd love to show you my entry, but it wouldn't make much sense without the rest of it. Actually, it doesn't make much sense WITH the rest of it... which is sort of the nature of the game. I ran into former Foolish Wordster Paul Groueff today, who said it's liking taking the old axiom "too many cooks spoil the broth" and turning it on its ear. Like, spoiling the broth so incredibly that it's actually kinda interesting.

Instead of posting my part, I'll let you see the whole dang thing. My part is at the very end -- I was once again given the role of anchor-man, in which I had to tie together the myriad twists and turns and characters that everyone else had created.

The thing is full of Bozeman (and Butte) specific jokes that not everyone will get, but that's part of the fun. Really, we do it each year primarily to entertain ourselves... although a few spectators did show up, on their own accord, at the Leaf and Bean coffeehouse. Plus, I'm editing it somehow so that it will once again be published over several issues of the Tributary magazine.

Please also note that during the performance I not only read my own part, I also read the part written by Equinox Theatre director Soren Kisiel, who was unable to make it. Which meant I spent a good deal of the evening faking an Irish accent - and, scarily enough, I think I actually did a halfway decent job. I can jest pull the Blarney out of me arse, I tell ye.

The Urban Forest Initiative

Hare-brained scheme number one

Ah, the ideas that have been bandying about in my head — if only people would heed my advice! Of course, I haven’t told anyone my advice, so I can’t really blame people for being idiots. After this blog, they'll have no excuse.

First, a little background. I grew up on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York City. Within the years of my adolescence I saw the number of farms in Nassau County dwindle to zero. Yes, zero — a sobering thought now that I live in a place with a seemingless endless number of farms, but that number seems to be quickly dwindling, too.

I’ve lived in several places, including Sonoma, California, that never seem to have a shortage of pilgrims willing to set up stakes. And with these pilgrims come problems: We’re growing too fast! We’ve got rich outsiders coming in, and they’re changing things! Real estate values are skyrocketing!

Don’t get me wrong — these are all real issues that I often complain about myself. But there are parts of this country that would love to have these problems. Outsourcing and the global marketplace have shut down factories in the Midwest. In Montana, we’re all familiar with the played-out mining towns, of which Butte is the most notorious example. It always amazes me that the house Bob Dylan grew up in recently sold for the princely sum of $60,000. That’s in Hibbing, Minnesota, which was a mining town way back when, but isn’t much of anything now. And big agribusiness has shuttered small farm towns across the nation. Go to any rural area, from sea to shining sea, that doesn’t benefit from either tourism or a not-too-far metropolis, and you’ll see empty storefronts and empty houses. Those of us who live in places where too many people are moving in don’t have it so bad after all.

My co-worker Tim Omarzu was from Detroit, which is surely America’s most egregious example of a city gone south. Tim would share tales of Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween, in which people would go around Detroit torching abandoned homes. Hundreds would burn each year. The city that once was the greatest testament to American manufacturing might now has abandoned neighborhoods with pheasants and packs of wild dogs roaming free.

Which is horrible in some ways, but full of potential in others. Growing up, I always took solace in that one lone patch of open space, the woods at the bottom of my street, that somehow had escaped the backhoe. It has since been developed, and I look at that with sadness, as if my special place is gone forever. But is it? Is any of it?

Civilizations come and civilizations go. Some cities have been around for thousands of years, but there are plenty of once-great cities that have diminished to near nothing. Wars, disease, famine, floods, progress, open markets, and bad juju all take their toll. A historian might say it’s part of the natural ebb and flow of civilization. The hardest part is the transition from urbane vibrancy to urban blight, suffering through mass unemployment and plunging real estate values, seeing people’s hopes and dreams take off in a moving van.

I know that most of the city fathers and mothers hope and pray that one day the city will return to its former glory. And in some cases they’re right. I know that Cleveland and Pittsburgh have undergone renaissances of sorts, rebuilding themselves from the shells of their former soot-covered selves. But in other places…

Is it really so bad that a place become as wild as it had been a hundred years earlier? That is the dream many of us hold for our new hometowns — that they retain open-space, trees, and maybe even wilderness. We don’t want the builders to come and ruin what we love. But what if they’ve already come, and they’re long gone? Can we get it back?

In the grand scheme of the earth’s history, homo sapiens are but a wink. We have come, and, most agree, we will go. The earth will carry on, with us or without us. All our cities will eventually succumb to the oceans or the forest or the dust. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it just is. And, as nationwide open-space initiatives suggest, we all could do with a little more wilderness in our lives. So why not help the inevitable along a little?

This is what I propose: the Urban Forests Initiative. Basically, cordoning off plots of land — or even entire neighborhoods — that have been abandoned, and planting native trees to make them into forest once again. Not preserving open space, but building it from the ground up. Trails could be built connecting the plots, using right-of-ways through private property of people who continue to live there.

I’ve got a vision for many of the details of this plan, but that’s the crux of it: just helping along what’s already going on. Detroit and other cities can still survive; it’s just a matter of rethinking them as smaller places. It’s time to rethink how we use land.