So this Guitarist Walks into that Bar in 'Star Wars'...

I have a weakness for the formerly famous and/or washed-up rock bands of the 1960s and 70s. Musically, I was always out of sync with my own generation, writing my high school thesis on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and mooning over the likes of Todd Rundgren and Mike Love.

So naturally when I heard that Nokie Edwards -- a long-time Oregon resident soon moving to Arizona and hawking his motor home on his personal web site -- would be playing at Springfield’s Island Park on the Fourth of July, that’s where I headed. (You may not have heard of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, but thanks to a string of instrumental hits with The Ventures in the 1960s, including “Wipe Out,” “Walk Don’t Run” and Hawaii Five-O,” he’s sold over 100 million records.)

Anyway, I took a seat on an empty park bench next to a large, characteristically silent ex-marine and waited for the show to begin. First, we suffered through The Tones, who more appropriately might have been called the “Deaf Tones” – I wouldn’t have minded at all if the Feds had appropriated their vocal chords, locking them away in Gitmo as a public menace and throwing away the key. Yikes. (Apparently Chuck Berry, who the group once opened for, shared my opinion. They jokingly mentioned that he told them to “get a job” upon hearing their act. Ha.)

Springfield has always played the poor step-sister to Eugene, a role that only intensified after the mill closures in the 1980s. It’s economically depressed and about as hard-luck of place as you’ll find anywhere in America. The deprived and the debased -- everywhere you look. It was like being beamed into that crazy Star Wars’ bar scene. There were women wearing high-heeled satin hooker shoes despite the grassy park setting, teenage mothers oblivious to their bared butt cracks pushing baby carriages, tattooed shoeless men with shaved heads, grandmothers with cellulite-heavy legs in short shorts, women with massive behinds and small chests or massive chests and small behinds usually with some sort of patriotic face paint, men sporting red, white and blue casts, old ladies with stringy gray hair whizzing about on motorized chairs, toddlers with mohawks, even one elementary school-age cross-dresser. Lord knows what the tiny Mexicans in cowboy hats and boots -- by far the best-dressed people here – thought of the crowd.

Finally Nokie came on. He’s a quiet, understated man, who sat and played unassumingly music that is so much a part of the consciousness of being an American that you can feel it in your bones. I watched as a mentally challenged man grabbed his ass with one hand and waved his other about in the air, bopping to the beat. Meanwhile, the marine next to me proved something of a Nokie expert, giving me titles for all the tunes I knew but couldn’t put a name to.

Nearby, a pair of hippy Obama volunteers, likely from Eugene, vented their frustrations to each other, recalling an evening of futile attempts to register voters among this collection of Harley, hot rod and America-loving attendees.

Obama Volunteer: Are you registered to vote?

Overweight Concert Attendee: Nope.

OV: Can I ask you why not?

OCA: Waste of time.

Apparently, notions of civic duty did not extend beyond red, white and blue color schemes.