60 Minutes on a Montana Creek
Flew to the homestate a couple weeks ago and my schedule was so tight I could only squeeze in 45 precious minutes to cast to Rocky Mountain trout. Fortunately, an interview appointment I had was bumped back 15 minutes. The extra time made the critical difference between my 7th and 8th trout.
Chronologically: First, little brown. 
Then after busting off a bruiser, I caught this beautiful, native Westslope cutthroat. Hello state fish! Don't see you back east!
Then another Westslope, a little bigger.
Then I lit into a run of rainbows; all good-sized, hard-fighting, and with beautiful crimson bands. 
I must've just been lucky enough to hit this stream during the one magic hour between when the water warmed enough for trout to be active, and the flood of spring runoff. The session came full circle with this leaping brown trout, my second, caught during my bonus 15 minutes. 
Fishing time in Montana is special.
Video Proof, Rough Audio, Approximate Setlist
From Monday's Last Call at the Lakeside Lounge. Rumor has it there are more official bootlegs of the night yet to come.
This is "$1,000 Car" by the Bottle Rockets. Mark Spencer, from the Blood Oranges, wears the white jacket and plays the white Telecaster. Roscoe is stage right with the Gibson. PA speaker is obviously directly in front of the video microphone.
Here's another website with some cool pictures from the show.
And here's the night's setlist, because a few folks asked me to share, and, what, some people are too cool to party with a steno notepad?
Roscoe Trio: Eric "Roscoe" Ambel, guitar; Chip Robinson, guitar; Phil Cimino, drums; Alison Jones on bass
1. Girl That I Ain't Got (Roscoe ) 2. Monkey With A Gun (Yayhoos) 3. Started (Chip Robinson) 4. Garbagehead (Roscoe) 5. $1,000 Car, Bad Actor (Roscoe -- written with Kasey Anderson, lyrics held up by Nancy Elgin) 6. "She Could Have Been A Diamond" (Jimbo Mathus) 7. I Don't Wanna' Hang Up My Rock 'n' Roll Shoes (written by Chuck Willis, dedicated to Levon, sung by Roscoe and Jimbo) 8. Tangled Up In Blue (Dylan, sung by Mary Lee Kortes) 8. Total Destruction to Your Mind (written by Swamp Dogg, sung by Roscoe with Andy York on gutiar) 9. I Wanna' Be Your Dog (by The Stooges, Charlene McPherson on vocals) 10. Gloria (written by Van Morrison, Lenny Kaye on vocals, Boo Reiners on guitar, Roscoe [!] on drums) 11. This Is Where I Belong (Kinks) 12. I and I (Dylan, Chip on vocals) 13. Workingman's Blues (Merle Haggard) 14. Raw Power (by The Stooges, Kenny Soule on drums, Erick Hartz on guitar) 15. Power Lounger Theme (Roscoe, instrumental) 16. Sway (by the Stones, Chip on vocals) 17. ???!!! tune I didn't recognize from the Lakeside Lounge jukebox!
(Postscript 5/4/12: Both Roscoe and Jay Sherman-Godfrey informed me that the last tune was "Cinderella" by The Sonics.)
Lakeside Lounge, 1996-2012
And as also seen in the New York Times.
ONE LAST PARTY BEFORE AN EAST VILLAGE BAR SHUT ITS DOORS
The Lakeside Lounge, an East Village rock ’n’ roll bar with a passionate following, went out on a high note early Tuesday morning when it ended its 16-year run following a raucous party and a spontaneous jam session.
So many well-wishers poured in to pay homage that around 70 revelers spilled out onto Avenue B, where they pooled around a stage-side window to watch the final show. Inside the dark, cozy dive, around 200 people punched their last requests on the jukebox, posed for a few takeaway pictures in the old-time photo booth and hollered at the band to play just one more encore.
“Thank you for 16 lovely years,” Eric Ambel, 54, one of the owners, shouted into a microphone before leading his band, the Roscoe Trio, through a set-closing number.
Jim Marshall, 52, the other owner, stood on a chair to see above a crowd packed so tight that hardly anyone could inch to the bar for a drink. “There are so many faces here that I haven’t seen in years,” he said. “It reminds me of the old days.”
Scores of musicians, most of whom had performed at Lakeside, crowded in front of the band, and many fought their way onstage. The guitarist Lenny Kaye, from Patti Smith’s band, sang Van Morrison’s “Gloria.”
“This bar is for musicians and the people who like to hang around them,” Mr. Kaye told the crowd. “We’re going to miss this joint.”
Some traveled from out of town to say goodbye to the venue. The guitarist Sam Madison, 47, and the singer Jeff Holshouser, 43, from the band Hank Sinatra, flew up from Raleigh, N.C., and said they had abstained from alcohol that weekend just to more heartily toast Lakeside all night Monday. “We came here to pay tribute,” Mr. Madison said. Troy Lavayen, 25, a medical transcriptionist from Paterson, N.J., said, “Nothing else feels like the Lakeside Lounge.”
As Mr. Ambel chipped the first chunky and mercurial licks from his guitar, Daisy Reinhardt, 44, a fashion designer, danced wildly in front of the band wearing a sparkling red blouse. “I can’t believe I won’t get to do this again,” she said. Beside her, Nancy Elgin, 48, a copy editor, sat on the concrete floor where she had staked out a spot early. “I’ve seen more shows here than anywhere else,” Ms. Elgin said.
Charlene McPherson, a New York singer, put fists into the air with her frenzied performance of “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog” by The Stooges. “This place closing is a big, fat drag,” she said. Jimbo Mathus, formerly of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, strummed a mandolin and sang harmony on Chuck Willis’s “I Don’t Wanna Hang Up My Rock ’n’ Roll Shoes.” Mr. Ambel dedicated the song to the drummer Levon Helm, of the Band, who died on April 19. Chip Robinson, a songwriter, who played guitar all night, sang “Started,” an original composition, as well as “Sway,” by the Rolling Stones.
“Musicians like us are going to scatter like rats when this place is gone,” said Jesse Bates, 49, a singer and a mover by day who said he would return with his truck later in the week to help empty the vacated Lakeside Lounge.
Outside on the sidewalk, fans smoked cigarettes, sipped from beer cans hidden in brown paper bags, and nipped whiskey from flasks. Deep into the morning, the Lakeside Lounge’s renowned jukebox played tracks by Little Richard, the Flamin’ Groovies, the Temptations, Doug Sahm and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Meanwhile the photo booth pulsed with light as a stream of people mugged for the camera and pocketed their picture-strip souvenirs.
Mary Lee Kortes performed Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” alongside her husband, Mr. Ambel. “Thanks for making Lakeside so great,” she said. Andy York, from John Mellencamp’s band, played guitar on an incendiary cover of “Total Destruction to Your Mind,” by the soul singer Swamp Dogg. This reporter sang “$1,000 Car” by the St. Louis band the Bottle Rockets, who performed at Lakeside’s opening celebration on April 4, 1996.
“Keep playing!” shouted Doug Arbesfeld, 56. “What are they going to do, shut the place down?”
Though Lakeside’s wake at times felt like an endless Saturday night, eventually it, and the bar, wound down. At a high point, Mr. Ambel performed “Garbagehead,” a song he wrote in the late 1990s about, and for, the Lakeside Lounge. Some, like Mr. Arbesfeld, climbed on their seats and yelled along with the tune’s ribald refrain whose first word is a profanity followed by “it’s all right!’’
For one last night, it was.
****
(11:37 a.m. This concludes my dream, two-week beat of writing about nothing but my favorite New York City bar, and Montana buffalo. If this blog reprints any more stories from the New York Times, people are going to think it's The Huffington Post.)
****
(3:28 p.m. Okay, no sooner had I made a crack about The Huffington Post than I saw I had my picture in The Huffington Post, singing at Lakeside last night. Remind me to make fun of them more often. They had a nice little story about the Lakeisde.)
As Bison Return to Montana Prairie, Some Rejoice, and Others Worry
As also seen in the New York Times. (The sixth most read and sixth most emailed story on nytimes.com on 4.27.12)
WOLF POINT, Mont. — Sioux and Assiniboine tribe members wailed a welcome song last month as around 60 bison from Yellowstone National Park stormed onto a prairie pasture that had not felt a bison’s hoof for almost 140 years.
That historic homecoming came just 11 days after 71 pureblood bison, descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds, were released nearby onto untilled grassland owned by a charity with a vision of building a haven for prairie wildlife. Some hunters and conservationists are now calling for bison to be reintroduced to a million-acre wildlife refuge spanning this remote region.
“Populations of all native Montana wildlife have been allowed to rebound except bison; it’s time to take care of them like they once took care of us,” said Robert Magnan, 58, director of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation’s Fish and Game Department, who will oversee the transplanted Yellowstone bison program.
But with several groups now navigating a complex and contentious path to return bison to these plains, agribusiness is fighting back. Many farmers and ranchers fear that bison, particularly those from Yellowstone, might be mismanaged and damage private property, and worry that they would compete for grass with their own herds.
“Bison are a romantic notion, but they don’t belong today,” said Curt McCann, 46, a Chinook rancher who this month drove four hours to a public meeting in Jordan to speak against bison reintroduction.
When the explorer Meriwether Lewis followed the Missouri River through this region in 1805, he came across bison herds he described as “innumerable.” Just eight decades later, a young Theodore Roosevelt noted that all that remained were “countless” bleached skulls covering the Montana badlands.
Scientists estimate that tens of millions of bison once roamed America, but by 1902 there were only 23 known survivors in the wild, all hiding from poachers in a remote Yellowstone valley. For decades, attempts to transplant bison from the rebounding Yellowstone herd were thwarted, despite requests from tribes to steward some of the animals.
“I call them my brothers and sisters because they are a genetic link to the same ones my ancestors hunted,” said Tote Gray Hawk, 54, a Sioux who has brought the Fort Peck bison hay and water each day since their arrival. Their meat, lower in cholesterol than beef, will feed elderly tribe members and their skulls will be used in traditional sun dance ceremonies, he said.
The last hunt for indigenous bison on the Fort Peck reservation happened in 1873. In the 1880s, hundreds of tribe members starved to death on the barren land. Around them homesteaders from Europe began wresting an agricultural living from this windswept expanse of rolling amber in northeast Montana. Most of the neighboring farmers and ranchers today are descendants of those pioneers, and they safeguard their traditions with generational grit.
“Bison is a big issue that could really impact our livelihood,” said Brett Dailey, 52, who ranches near Jordan.
Today there are three million cattle in Montana and agribusiness is the state’s biggest industry, but not a single bison roams free. A 2011 survey commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation showed that a majority of state residents support reintroducing huntable bison to the vast Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, similar to a Utah herd created in 1941 from the last few bison allowed out of Yellowstone.
“Within this sea of agriculture there is room for small islands of conservation,” said Sean Gerrity, president of the American Prairie Reserve, the charity that brought the group of genetically pure bison back to a pasture just north of the refuge.
The arrival of Yellowstone bison was welcome news around the troubled Fort Peck reservation. When the first calf was born on Sunday, a rust-colored baby bull, tribal flags still hung at half-staff for a teenage boy who had committed suicide days earlier. Rates of poverty, unemployment, disease and addiction hover stubbornly above national averages here.
Census data shows that around northeast Montana, a prairie expanse almost the size of Indiana, most county populations peaked in the early 1900s and have since dropped by almost half.
The region’s fastest growing economic engine, oil production, is proving a mixed blessing. In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency reported that toxic chemicals from nearby drilling contaminated drinking water supplies for Poplar, a reservation town of around 3,000. This year a schoolteacher from Sidney, near the North Dakota border, was kidnapped during her morning jog and murdered. The suspects are two Colorado roughnecks.
“These bison represent healing,” said Iris Greybull, 62, of Poplar.
The bison debate has dredged up old tensions between tribes and their neighbors. Before Ms. Greybull, a Sioux, spoke in favor of the animals last fall at a fractious meeting in Glasgow, dozens of farmers and ranchers walked out in protest.
She and other tribe members say they see an ugly double standard in the fact that there are more than 130 private bison ranches in the state, including one belonging to the mogul Ted Turner housing dozens of controversial Yellowstone bison, and yet only the Fort Peck herd has been visited by protesters.
But some say the bison on the ranches do not pose the threat that the wild ones do.
“Unless they have the German wall and a moat with a bunch of crocodiles and piranhas, they’re not going to contain those woolly tanks,” said State Senator John Brenden of nearby Scobey, who has long done battle on the bison issue in the state Legislature.
Around a century ago some Yellowstone bison contracted disease from domestic livestock and in recent decades thousands have been slaughtered in an effort to protect ranchers’ herds. At the direction of Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a few of these bison were quarantined for years and certified healthy. Some may soon go to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, about 170 miles west of Fort Peck, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by opponents.
“I took a lot of arrows for this, but it was the right thing to do,” Mr. Schweitzer said. “If you want to get into a fistfight in Montana, go into a bar and share your opinion about bison or wolves.”
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- Plugging Away
- 60 Minutes on a Montana Creek
- Video Proof, Rough Audio, Approximate Setlist
- Lakeside Lounge, 1996-2012
- As Bison Return to Montana Prairie, Some Rejoice, and Others Worry
- ‘This Reporter’ Spent a Lot of Great Nights at the Lakeside Lounge
- Email Subject Line: “Remember This Prick?”
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