Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and who loaned Hobo his guitar when Hobo broke his own the night before, even all four
lumberjacks from the Scheer Lumberjack Show, who sang something about fifty cents. I
couldn't hear a word else (my ears were starting to ring) but they sure were cute. When
he's not getting people up on stage, Hobo's getting down on the dance floor, dancing and
picking for all he's worth, and if he's not on the dance floor he's on the tables, getting dol-
lar bills stuffed in the back pockets of his jeans. His appeal crosses every generation,
there's a old man with a cane dancing with a Gen-Xer, a howling bunch of Y Bothers on
my left. From babies to baby boomers we're all in love.
Hobo Jim has a special relationship with the Iditarod. Some years ago the Iditarod Race
committee asked him to write them a song. “I told them for months it was done,” he says,
and then it came time to sing it at the Iditarod Banquet in Anchorage, with an ABC film
crew in attendance. “That night I dreamed I had wrote the song, and the next morning I
wrote it down on a placemat at the Soldotna Inn. It was my first number one hit.” Pause.
“On
KNOM
, the radio station in Nome,” where the Iditarod Race ends. When Joe Reding-
ton died, Hobo wrote “Redington's Run” in honor of the father of the Iditarod, which song
never fails to bring his audience to tears.
His absolute favorite song is “Where Legends are Born,” written during a skydive into
the Alaska State Fair. Don't look at me, that's what he says. “About 15 years ago I sky-
dived from 13,500 feet, right over Pioneer Peak, into the fair. I saw this patchwork quilt of
farms, with the subdivisions moving in on them.” He didn't like it at first, and then he
thought maybe it was just the natural evolution of life, the farmers giving way to the
homes of their children. “I had a remote mike in my pocket which started working at a
thousand feet, and I sang that “Legends” at the show.” Not a lot time to rehearse, please
note.
“Wild and Free” is his second favorite song, an autobiographical account of leaving
home young and living it up. “It's my mother's and the ex-police chief of Homer's favor-
ite song,” he says. “I was pretty wild and free.”
There are the crowd favorites, like “Redneck Support Group” ('They always come
around / they won't ever let you down / Jack Daniels, George Dickel and Jim Beam'),
“Heave Away” (“songs like this one kept my album off the Sierra Club catalogue”), and
“The Rock,” which will debut as the title song on a George Jones album this September.
