I felt like a stranger in a strange land when I drove into Rio Dell in March of 1975 to play a six-month job with a country band.  Fortuna native Jerry Cooper, a musician I’d played with in San Francisco, had moved back home. He called me in San Francisco and offered six months of guaranteed gigs every Friday and Saturday for $50 a night at the Rendezvous Lounge in downtown Rio Dell. I was 24. I’d be playing with Jerry and his wife Karen in The Coopers. That’s the place I began my 50-year journey playing drums in Humboldt County.  Fifty dollars a night was good money in those days so I said yes. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, $50 in 1975 would be equivalent to $295 today. (Many of the music gigs around the county now are still $50 per night.) I never imagined when I dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in Madison at 21 to learn to play the drums that I’d wind up three years later playing country music in Rio Dell.  It seemed like it rained hard every day for the entire month of March. I rented a small house in Rio Dell close to the Eel River for $125 a month. The Coopers played songs like “Silver Wings” and “Working Man’s Blues” by Merle Haggard, “Bony Fingers” by Hoyt Axton, “I Fall to Pieces” by Patsy Cline and other country favorites of the day. The polite crowd drank and danced.  On weeknights, I’d drive to Eureka and Arcata to check out the music scene. Excellent jazz, blues and R&B, rock ‘n’ roll and country bands played at the numerous venues. Unlike the one-and-done nights most bands do these days, groups would play, two, three, four or five nights a week at one club. In Eureka in the mid-1970s, people flocked to the Vance Log Cabin, Fog’s Fish and Chips, the Old Town Bar and Grill, the Captain’s Galley, the Ritz, the Den, JR’s, Fat Albert’s and more.    Blue Lake rocked with the Mad River Rose and Walt’s Friendly Tavern. Arcatans danced at The Keg, The Phoenix, Flynn’s Inn, Bret Harte’s and the Jambalaya Club, started in 1973 by Joyce Hough and Fred Neighbor. The Jambalaya had an open jam session every Sunday night. I played drums there sometimes and met Hough and Neighbor. A few years later I formed a popular dance band Caledonia…