Deb’s Saturday Psychedelia – On Becoming a Hippie (#54) – The Next Phase

Once I settled into the apartment I was subletting, I started inviting friends over to jam. I was no longer living with a musician and was missing that sharing of music. I had also booked a gig for a month and a half away, knowing that although I was just learning to play the guitar, I needed to get out there and keep gigging. I enlisted the help of various friends and figure I would depend on my voice to get me through. General Eclectic had ended, but we were trying to start up a new band, One Psy Fits All. Paul was a master of puns and loved the potential plays on words that this new name offered. Bob continued to play with us, and we added new personnel. Paul was not encouraging me to learn an instrument and had refused to teach me anything. He also refused to write the chords for our originals. I’d always known he was jealous, but I never realized the extent of it. I decided to keep writing new songs and plugged away at guitar. Unfortunately, I never took it seriously enough. I always looked at guitar as just a means to an end. I just needed accompaniment for my voice.

Shortly after I moved to Albany, my grandson was born. Jes had a tough labor and delivery and ended up with a C-section. She didn’t want me there for the birth, so I drove out with Austin a few days later. They were staying at a lake house owned by Jack’s family. I was glad that she was in a better environment with enough room for me to stay with them. I fell in love with Taran immediately. He was a fussy baby though and demanded a lot of attention. Also, I was embarking on a new life as a single parent of a three-year-old. I now understood fully what my mom had gone through when becoming a grandmother. Having followed in my mother’s footsteps, there was more than a decade between my first round of children and the next. I couldn’t stay in Michigan for long. I had to get back to work and my new life. Also, as I’ve said before, Jes and I struggled with our relationship. She thought I was being bossy and interfering in their life while I felt as though I was only trying to help. I went back home feeling sad and a little lonely. It was hard to believe that I was a grandmother at forty years old with a three-year old of my own.

One day, I invited my old friend Leslie over to jam. She explained that she had invited a friend over that evening but would be happy to bring him along, if he agreed. After dinner, I settled Austin into bed and pulled out my guitar. Leslie arrived a little later with Dick. We had a great time singing and playing together, but I also felt a little uncomfortable. The friend she had brought with her looked vaguely familiar, and he stared at me constantly. I could feel his gaze following me everywhere. It wasn’t uncomfortable, it just made me feel awkward and shy. I felt drawn to him. When Leslie was ready to leave, Dick obviously wasn’t and kept putting her off. Finally, they did leave, but I was left thinking about him. I later found out that when she asked him if he wanted to go with her to jam with Deb Cavanaugh, he told her he didn’t want to make the long drive to Stephentown. She informed him that Paul and I had split up. I had moved out and was now living alone in Albany. He then confessed to her that he’d had a crush on me for years. He was now eager to come. I didn’t remember at the time that this was the same Dick Kavanaugh I had met on the Dutch Apple Cruise and had felt such a strong attraction for then. The attraction was still there, but the memory had faded with time. Leslie called me a few days later saying that Dick had asked for my phone number and asking if it was okay to give it to him. I figured there was no harm in that. I saw him a week later at another friend’s house and felt that same pull. Like I said earlier, I was naïve in matters of attraction and didn’t understand what was going on.

My time at LoAnne’s was coming to an end. I didn’t know where I was going and was starting to worry. Then, another good friend asked if I would like to rent a room in his new apartment. Phil had originally taken on this place planning to have another friend move in, but she had changed her mind. He offered me a deal that I couldn’t refuse. Phil had a daughter living with him half of the time and had promised her that she could have her own room. Austin and I moved into a large room with enough space to put our two dressers in the middle separating it into two separate sleeping areas for us. It was perfect. It was located in a residential neighborhood with not much traffic close to a park. I was only there a week or so when Dick asked me out on our first date.

He took me to The Eighth Step Coffee House on Willett Street in Albany, right by Washington Park. Afterwards we walked for hours and finally went back to my place. As we sat in the kitchen talking all night long, he reminded me of the first time we met. Wow! It all came back to me now. We had talked that evening about our attraction but also about my commitment to making my marriage work. He said that he had been attracted to me for a long time, going to our shows and sitting in the back watching me. He admitted that he didn’t really like our music, but he loved hearing me sing. After spending that evening together on the boat ride, he moved away to Massachusetts because we traveled in the same circles, and he couldn’t stand seeing me around. I wasn’t sure how much of this I believed, but I couldn’t deny the mutual attraction. As the sun rose that morning, I told him that I really needed to go to sleep, would really love to have him stay, but I was exhausted and wanted our first time together to be perfect. He lay down next to me and snuck out after I fell asleep, leaving his card behind with his phone number and a note on the back. My head was reeling the next day. I had determined to stay single, and now here was this wonderful man who had come into my life twice now. It felt like serendipity.

When Paul returned Austin to me later that day, I told him that I had met someone. He wanted to know who it was, but I wasn’t ready to reveal that, yet. I could see that he was jealous, but I’d felt it only fair to let him know. Although he wasn’t happy about it, like so many other times, he shrugged it off. Dick and I started seeing each other regularly, and I tried to keep it fairly casual. I have to admit that I was enjoying our time together. He was encouraging me musically. He played the fiddle and was teaching me to play back up guitar for the Old Time and Irish tunes he loved to play. I learned so quickly with that approach. The Irish tunes in particular had fast chord changes and unusual rhythms. I had grown up with Big Band, blues and jazz, had studied classical music, had been playing rock and roll in a band and was now learning all about folk music. I loved growing as a musician and dove right into this new world. Dick had been immersed in it for most of his life. He’d been going to folk festivals and had been a regular at Caffe Lena. He was even a companion of Lena Spenser’s for a while and was president of the first board of directors for the café after she died. He was introducing me to new songs and new people, and I was ready for a change.

Once again, many of the friends that Paul and I had together decided to take sides. Not many of them had seen Paul’s dark side, and I was always seen as being a snob due to my extreme social anxiety. Band practices were getting more tense since our breakup as well. I was focusing more and more on my songwriting and learning to play guitar. I had no patience for pettiness and jealousies. Paul and I had decided to try to remain friends. We still loved each other very much but just couldn’t live together anymore. Once we got over the initial adjustment, we became better friends than we had been spouses. But the music between us started to die. Although, most of our interactions at the end were in the form of arguing, I often wonder if it was that passion that kept the music alive. Regardless, making music together had stopped being fun. Even at jams that we both attended, he was often critical or just stopped playing and walked away.

Every once in a while, Paul would ask me again about the man I was seeing. He was even quizzing Austin about him. At that point, I didn’t see him when Justin was there. I thought it might be too hard on my fourteen-year-old son to be around my new boyfriend. Then, one day we were all at a party together. I told Dick that I didn’t want Paul to know I was seeing him, so we separated at the door, but somehow, Paul figured it out. He came up to me laughing and shaking his head. “Seriously? Another Kavanaugh,” he said. I explained that I hadn’t planned it that way but, after all, he had introduced us originally. We left the party shortly afterwards because the vibes started getting weird. People had a lot of opinions about this relationship. Some people tried to warn me not to jump into another relationship while I was rebounding. There were even some friends who wanted to warn me that Dick was a bit of a womanizer. Others made remarks about our similar names saying that it seemed a little incestuous. The name thing was a bigger deal to others than it was to us. We saw it as a funny coincidence and nothing more, though it was a little awkward at times.

One time, Dick took me to a party that his friends were hosting. I had Austin that weekend and brought him along. The hosts greeted us at the door. Austin walked in boldly saying, “Hi, I’m Austin Cavanaugh.” The whole place got silent as everyone turned to look at Dick. He had only recently come back on the scene after being away for a few years. He hastily explained that this was not his son, and everyone had a good laugh about it, except Dick. He had been clear from the beginning that he wasn’t interested in a committed relationship. We had even agreed to an open relationship. But things were moving fast. Dick, who was living with his brother in Saratoga Springs at that time, started staying at my apartment nearly every night. This enraged Paul for a variety of reasons. One day, we had a huge fight outside of The Free School just as school was letting out. He was standing in the middle of the street screaming at me, oblivious even to the fact that he was blocking traffic until someone started leaning on their horn. That was the last straw. Except for transferring Austin from one of us to the other, we stopped having contact with each other. It was still too raw for both of us. This also meant the end of the band.

I’ve often said that being in a band is like being in a family. When you share music with the same people for so long, you create a unique bond. Good music comes from the soul. Just like in a love relationship, you have to reach inside and share your most intimate self with your fellow musicians, and an audience feels that when they listen. I know that playing music with others is the best high I’ve ever had. But now Paul and I were not only ending our twenty-year relationship, but also ending our twenty-year music relationship. Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out how to untangle the two. The music had woven itself into everything, all of our shared adventures, the births of our children and all of the relationships along the way. We were incredible music partners, working well together and balancing each other as both songwriters and performers. We did manage to maintain a friendship eventually, and I was grateful for that. But the music didn’t recover. I’ve always regretted that loss the most.

Although I have often wished that Paul and I could have salvaged our shared music, my own music only grew from there as I started taking myself more seriously. I had spent four decades being criticized and stifled. Now I was being encouraged and appreciated. When I was frustrated about not learning the guitar quickly enough, Dick pointed out the steps I’d made. He pushed me to book solo gigs and taught me traditional folk music. I was also starting to focus more on songwriting. I’d always had to fight for the songs I wrote by myself. With Dick Kavanaugh’s help, I started growing as an individual rather than one half of a whole.