incredible. See, I was always a huge fan of Mad River, which was a minor cult over here in Great Britain, and I actually heard MR's Rick Bockner play solo over on this side of the pond over a year ago. For some crazy reason, I was never really aware of Lawrence Hammond's solo stuff until quite recently when I scored a vinyl "Coyote's Dream" (mint copy still in plastic wrap with the lyrics on the record sleeve and all of the gorgeous lonesome-west photography). I paid a lot for it too! Although the studio quality was very much 1970's, the words really hit me--and I haven't been a huge fan of country. But, like the liner notes say "this is country music, and then it isn't. ". The instrumental playing on the album is top-notch, especially on "Trucker's Nightmare." And "Coyote's Dream" and "Pale-Eyed Companion" are just hugely memorable.

But...here is the incredible thing:

I worked in international relief projects for about 30 years and was involved in the Uganda refugee airlifts out of there during the Idi Amin rampage (have you seen "The Last King of Scotland?"). I am pretty sure I knew Secorra Plarres-Montes during that time, not positive, but she was fairly unmistakable. Think she was going by a different surname at the time though. Sad to think of that particular life cut so short, but what we did was often pretty risky. I contracted all kinds of crap, including malaria, in Africa. It would be an amazing coincidence, as I was already a fan of Mad River's two albums, which, by the way, seem to resist dying off. It would have been a kick to run into Hammond during that time. Is everyone aware of the extensive interviews with Hammond and MR on the web-archive about the San Francisco poet/novelist Richard Brautigan?