It all began in 1990 during a marathon music party out in the Mojave desert.

The party was thrown at Mad Jack's ranch/junkyard where Mad Jack maintained a bunkhouse nicely equipped with drum sets, a Hammond B3, bunches of amps and a PA. All this stuff was hobbled together from leftovers by Mad Jack and his late night technical associates. But everything worked, more or less, so we just kept playing for 3 days.

The party went on day and night, for about 54 hours, from Friday evening through Oh-dark thirty Monday morning. Afterward, my friend T-Berd and I drove a few miles across the desert along with about a dozen other spent musicians to fall out at her High Desert Retreat for Wayward Musicians. We distributed ourselves from livingroom floors to garage rooftops and various out buildings, and crashed into the arms of Morpheus snoring in fourteen part cacophony.

When consciousness returned to me, it was on low.

Half a dozen of us were stretched out all over Ms.T-Berd's front room. I could see, but that was as far as it went. As a matter of fact, it was quite a while before I tumbled to the idea that there might be an "I" attached to my eye, so to speak. Anyway, what my eyeball was pointed at for about ten or fifteen minutes was the bottomside view of a geegaw cabinet with glass shelves where Ms. T-Berd kept her various treasures, desert-found harmonicas, lizard bones and antique pliers. What my eye was focused on, though, was a clear plastic, heart-shaped bud vase with a dried up rose in it.

Since I couldn't move my eyes, or anything else, for a real long time I lay there looking at this bud vase with no more thoughts than a surveillance camera at a 7-11.

After a few minutes an idea drifted up against my mind like a row boat bumping up against a pier piling. The thought was, "You know, that bud vase might make an interesting guitar slide." Nothing else was going on inside my brain for many minutes so when I finally attained full access to my body I disengaged myself from T-Berd's carpet of musicians, opened the geegaw cabinet, grabbed the bud vase and took it out to the garage.

I picked up a saw from the tool heap and hacked off both ends of the bud vase and reamed out the sharp edge inside. Then I grabbed a guitar, tuned it to G and played "Rollin' and Tumblin'" 'til the whole house woke up.

I used that bud vase for a couple of years. What I really liked about it was the fat sound I got when I used the wide arc of the heart. I could get as good a sound with that plastic slide as my friends were able to get using metal or glass and lots better than the Pyrex tubes that were available at the time.