This is another from Bill Morrissey, written after he spent a summer working on a purse seiner out of Ketchikan, Alaska. That used to be a pretty common thing; I knew a bunch of musicians who went to Alaska to work the fishing and save some money to tide them over while they tried to get their performing careers going. When I met him back in the early 1980s, this was one of Bill’s strongest songs, introduced with stories of freezing, scuffling, and drinking during his time ashore at a place called the Shamrock Topless Bar and Laundromat.

I sang this a lot when I was touring — not as often as “Oil Money” or “My Baby and Me,” but more often than any  of Bill’s other songs. I even recorded a version for my LP, with Bill producing, but it seemed kind of silly for me to do it when it was also on Bill’s record, and one of his friends said I made it sound like a Leonard Cohen song, which I didn’t take that as a compliment. So it stayed in the can and I did “Soldier’s Pay” — which might also have sounded like Cohen, but Bill wasn’t recording it and someone had to.

This was a favorite of my friend Monte‘s, and it reminds me of him because he was from northern British Columbia, which is the closest I ever got to Alaska. That’s another story: when Bill was booked to play the Vancouver Folk Festival, I gave him Monte’s number. I thought they’d get along, but Bill came home kind of disgruntled, asking, “Who is that guy?”

Turned out that Monte had been giving him a tour of the local hang-outs and it started to rain; Monte didn’t want Bill to get wet, so insisted he wait in a bar; then Monte pulled up a few minutes later in a long black Chevrolet. He gestured for Bill to get in, but Bill knew Monte didn’t live nearby, so asked: “Where’d you get the car?”

Monte gestured again and said, “Don’t worry about it. Get in!”

Bill did worry about it, and didn’t get in.

I asked Monte about that story the next time I saw him, and he chuckled and explained, “It was raining.” He wanted to be a good host, he was going to return the car when they were done, and he hadn’t realized Bill was going to be twitchy about a little thing like “borrowing” a car, what with all the hardscrabble songs.

The only time Monte made it to the east coast was a year or so later, for our album release concert, when Bill and I had Reckless Records, producing our first albums and one from Dave Van Ronk. Monte played with Dave at the show, and he and Bill were polite to each other, but they couldn’t get over the car incident.