Stories From the Silver Moon Cafe-A Comment From the opening eight syllables that Mickey Newbury sings on The Silver Moon Cafe, I immediately felt relief and exhilaration....Quite a lot for eight syllables...Here's the deal...Sometimes we put our heroes on such high pedestals, all they can do is fall,or if they don't fall all the way, sometimes they slip....C'mon, everybody gets older, everybody gets tired, everybody at some point has given everything they had to give and just plumb run out, both of energy to do it, and of something to say.... I can remember watching Mickey Mantle in his final year of 1968, sometimes wanting Not to watch or to turn my head away...The higher the pedestal we put em on.....Well, in those first eight syllables, singing, "There's a blue moon in Kentucky", I knew I had not lost another hero; I knew the pedestal still stood, tall and proud....For I heard That Voice, with all it's world weary pain, all it's beauty and joy, and all it's unmistakable dedication and energy to perform the task at hand....Mickey begins, then, another series of Stories of America, stories of the back roads and the trains, the bedrooms and the roads....; filled with unforgettable characters that sometimes don't even care where they go, as long as it's somewhere...People that find truth in their lies, love in their shadows, and anger in their sadness....People that "have a longing for a pure and simple time when all we had between us was a dream and one thin dime." People that cannot even turn in the direction of their memories, let alone face them....All are Real people, but some are even ones that we know; Louis Armstrong, Lefty Frizzel, and Hank Williams become brushstrokes in the artists palette....Mickey talks about a storm comin that he can feel in his belly and in his gut, a storm that will eventually lead to a brighter day, but in the meantime we better "gather up the children and head for higher ground." He leaves us with a father praying for his son and his woman, that they may find truth and love, and eventually peace....Mickey Newbury has shown up, here in the year 2000, with all of his skills intact; his voice, angelic and ethereal at times, raw and gritty at others; his music, possibly prettier and lovelier and sweeter than ever before; and of course, his stories, his paintings, his photographs of you and me and the people we would be or could be or sometimes would never want to be; they're all here in these thirteen Stories of America....but what is also here is the story of Mickey Newbury, a hero that never wanted to be, an idol that just wanted to write and sing, a man with all of everything he ever brought to the game still evident and still as vital as when we first Came To Hear The Music those thirty some years ago....Stories From The Silver Moon Cafe will stand forever as a testament to the man that formed it, and shaped it, and to those of us who, in finding our heroes, find ourselves.... Hank Beukema-July,2000 -----------------------------------Visit Camp Buckman http://members.tripod.com/buckmaniac/index.htm