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Show BOB GREENSPAN Pain in the ass. Slob. Sensitive Musician. Poet...or...T he Man Who Contains Multitudes By Jim Stiles About ten years ago, Bob Greenspan joined me on my annual hike to the top of my mother had a lot of allergies that she got from being married to my dad." favorite mountain. What passes for a road to the nearby pass is a rough and rocky two- Bob was born in Oak Park, Illinois during World War I but refuses to believe there is track, and my VW squareback lurched and heaved as we crept slowly forward. Greenspan decided to open a can of tuna. ; "What are you doing?" I complained as the tuna juice splattered against the dashboard any link between his birth and the world wide hostilities. He claims he "grew up with an attitude” because the nurses slapped him too hard at birth. "I wouldn’t cry when I came out and windshield and between Bob's legs onto the front seat upholstery. Bob took his greasy How he got through the next decade, no man can say, but in 1954, Bob’s life was changed forever. That summer his mother took Bob and his sister to a dude ranch in Colorado. They rode horses and once they took an overnight trail ride with a cowboy fingers and tried to “clean” the glass, but he only smeared the tuna nectar into a translucent visual nightmare. so they beat me.” : : "I was booed at my graduation...I guess they thought I was an outcast of sorts...1 wore blue suede shoes and taps on the bottom that made a lot of noise.” "Greenspan!" J shouted. "What are you doing to my car? You're making a goddamn mess!" Bob licked the tuna off his beard and leaned my way, his bushy head hitting the roof as I swerved to miss another rock. More projectile tuna juice, this time in my ear. "GREENSPAN! Bob leaned back, hunched up his big shoulders and burst into convulsive laughter. He couldn’t stop and for a moment I thought I’d killed him. Finally he gathered his hulking frame together and regained his composure. Greenspan offered me some words of advice... "You know Stiles, that’s the trouble with you." "What's that?" named Jack. A singing cowboy. : = That night they gathered around a roaring fire while Jack sang old cowboy tunes. Bob thought "that was pretty cool." And even then, Bob thought it might be a great way to meet girls. Two years later, he began to take lessons and learned fast. Because Bob lived in Chicago, he grew up with the Blues on the radio, but he also found himself in the middle of the rock n’ roll revolution. His heroes became Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. He grew a DA, but because he was too young to grow sideburns, he just pasted his hair down to look like ‘burns. He went to high school from 1957 to 1961, at a time when most of the students wore crewcut and listened to the Kingston Trio. "There were a few of us “greasers’ and we just screwed around with our DA‘s and Pompadoutrs...yeah...1 was booed at my graduation. A few of the parents booed but it was "You're too damn fastidious." But later that night, after the long climb to 12,000 feet and back down to the pass, after a great dinner and a campfire that had burned to red smoldering coals, and after yet another unforgettable sunset over our beloved canyons, Bob pulled Queenie from its battered case and strummed a few bars on the ancient guitar. "What do you think of this?" he asked. "T just wrote it last week...” . mostly the students. I guess they thoughtI was an outcast of sorts...1 wore blue suede shoes and taps on the bottom that made a lot of noise. Had the DA...you know. Stuff like that.” Greenspan didn’t seem particularly troubled by his outsider status, then or now. One classmate of his, Vince Viti, recruited Bob and another classmate, Mike Bloomfield, to form a band when Bob was just 15--they briefly became "Vince Viti & Them." After high school, he moved to Florida, started a band and kicked around Ft. Lauderdale for a year and in 1962, he played with some rockabilly bands in northern Illinois. The Midnight Moon is out tonight But even then, Greenspan was turned off by the lifestyle. "I started smoking pot in 1966 And I wonder... or ‘67, butI never got into the hard drugs...that just wasn’t my thing. I think that’s why my Are you watchin’ it too? Is it shinin’ on through musical career never really developed. I was in and out of it. I got a taste of that lifestyle, but what I really wanted for my life was to live.in the mountains and the deserts. I had To your heart? opportunities to do things but I guess I sort of threw them away. But then the musicians who made it big don’t know about this shit...1 couldn’t live without these mountains.” Many of Greenspan’s fellow musicians would die from drug abuse in the next two decades, including his good friend Bloomfield from a heroin overdose in 1981. ; Though you're so far away... Your light leads my way... I'm hummin’ a tune with the stars And the Midnight Moon. Headed West... Greenspan kept thinking about Jack the singing cowboy and the mountains of the West. In 1963, he headed for Jackson, Wyoming after he saw a photograph of the Grand Tetons I'm sleepin’ by my fire... Smoke is risin’ higher... It's a message to you in the light in his 1948 World Book Encyclopedia. Three years later, he made his first foray into the red rock canyons of southern Utah. Accompanying Bob on his wandering road trips was his Of the Midnight Moon. newly acquired dog, Queenie. (Whether the dog is named after the guitar or the guitar after the dog is unknown.) Bob Greenspan--Slob. Pain in the ass. Sensitive musician. Poet. Go figure. : In 1965 he drove all the way to Tucson, Arizona to meet the naturalist/ writer Joseph Wood Krutch. Krutch had written a biography of Henry David Thoreau and had an But that’s the way we've always known Bob; as Abbey once said, "He contains multitudes." Greenspan is fatalistic and angst-ridden, irreverent and goofy, crude and scatological, sensitive and gentle. When Bob was 27 years old, doctors discovered and removed pre-cancerous polyps from his colon--he’s been making polyp jokes ever since. It’s affiliation with Sonoran Desert Museum. Somehow Greenspan got Krutch’s address and knocked on his door. "I told him I was a fan, so his wife invited me in. Two years later, I went back, and this time Krutch told me about this great new book called Desert Solitaire Bob's way. by a guy named Edward Abbey. A few weeks later, I saw the book for sale at Death Valley : : ' The Early Years... "My mother was totally insane and I came out of her. I’ve had problems ever since. I was born with a terrible rash and when I came out I had scratches all over me. I think my and I bought it." In 1972, Greenspan was in Tucson again, at the defenders of Wildlife office, when Abbey’s name came up. Abbey was working as the custodian of a wildlife refuge and, somehow, Greenspan was mistaken for a "wolf biologist." The director of the office called |