In July 1981, my parents drove to New Jersey to visit my sister and her new husband. They left my 19-year-old brother, Bill, home alone on our family farm outside the small, rural town of Goodland, Indiana.
The result was Goodstock -- a party to end all parties, with live bands, kegs of beer, hot-air balloon rides, cars and pickup trucks parked for nearly a mile along both sides of the two-lane highway that ran past our farm, broken beer bottles jamming the garbage disposal, cigarette burns in the carpet, condoms in the showers, and enough sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll to still fuel the legendary stories of the townfolk old enough to have been there.
On the fourth anniversary of Bill's death from bile duct cancer on Aug. 9, 2010, I'm remembering my brother and his Goodstock extravaganza when an email arrives out of the blue with the subject line of "Goodstock." It's from Dillon Hall, the town marshal of Goodland, who's been my hometown's only police officer for 18 years. He's heard tell of my brother's Goodstock extravaganza, but he's too young to have attended, or to fully appreciate how I think it's funny to call him Marshal Dillon.
"On Sept. 27, I am putting on a Music Festival here in Goodland at the Town Park (Foster Park) to raise money for Mary T. Klinker Veterans Resource Center for homeless and veterans in need," writes Hall, who also is president of the Goodland park board. He tells me about his Facebook page called "Goodstock -- Operation Restoring Hope Music Festival" and his goodstockmusicfestival.com website, and asks if I can give it some publicity.
I'd love to, especially since one of the guest speakers at Goodstock is decorated Army veteran Jeff Hall, the new national employment director for the Disabled American Veterans, brother of Marshal Dillon, and a former player on the Goodland Little League team that I coached the summer before I went to college. I remember him as a scrappy 11-year-old who once drove himself to a game on a motorcycle.
But to write about Goodstock in the Daily Herald, I need the connection to the suburbs provided by the Twangdogs, a band with local musicians such as Wheaton's Dr. Jack Garon, former chairman of pathology and chief medical officer for Sinai Health System, and psychologist Janna Henning, a lawyer and professor at the Adler School of Professional Psychology, who grew up in Elk Grove Village.
The Twangdogs performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last summer in Scotland and they are playing at Americanafest in Nashville, Tennessee, the Saturday before they show up in Goodland. How do you lure band members to a farm town that would have to count dogs to push its population past 1,000, after they've seen Edinburgh and Nashville?
"I said, 'C'mon, it will really be fun. It's only 90 miles, and they'll feed us,'" remembers Henning, 52, who successfully coaxed her fellow band members to add Goodland to the concert tour. "I kind of sold them on the adventure."
Henning, who plays guitar, bass, fiddle and mandolin while lending her voice to the Twangdogs' rich harmonies, agreed to perform in Goodland because she was a college friend at Indiana University with the Hall boys' sister, Jacquie Carroll. The Hall boys' younger brother, Jason Hall, designed the Goodstock posters.
Twangdogs members say they are happy to make the trip and play for free to raise money for a veteran center in Lafayette, Indiana,
"The free beer is pretty important," adds Garon, 59, a 1973 graduate of Maine South High School in Park Ridge, where he once played bass for a summer production of "Bye, Bye, Birdie." With two physicians, a psychologist and a health care data expert in the band, the Twangdogs boast the best medical staff in my home county.
"It sounds like fun, and it's for a good cause," Garon says. A ticket for the all-day music fest costs $20, with discounts for students, children and veterans.
Henning, a 1979 graduate of Elk Grove High School, says she grew up in "a very service-focused community" where family and neighbors participated in efforts by churches or social clubs to help others.
"Veteran issues are important to me," says Henning, whose father fought in Korea and stepfather went to war in Vietnam. At Adler, the psychologist specializes in stress, trauma and death.
"A lot of my students are veterans who are training to work with VAs or about to be deployed," Henning says.
The only military veteran in the Twangdogs, guitarist and bassist Quincy Stringham was drafted into the Army in 1972 and served stateside as a chef. "If you need mashed potatoes or scrambled eggs for 350 people, I'm your guy," says Stringham, who built a career as a buyer for toy merchants. He also was at the original Woodstock, which took place on a farm about a 150-mile ride from his suburban home outside New York City.
"It rained, and it was hot, and it was sticky, and I had a duffle bag full of peanut better and jelly sandwiches I lived on because there were no food kiosks back then," says Stringham, 65, who lives in Chicago.
Goodstock could be hot, sticky and wet, but there will be plenty of food vendors and craft beers, promises Dillon Hall. He figures the one-day Goodstock will draw between 1,500 and 3,000 people.
"I wouldn't be surprised that this will be the biggest audience we've ever played for," says Twangdogs guitarist and bassist Rich Gordon, a journalism professor at Northwestern University who helped form Twangdogs in March 2012 by bringing together musicians taking classes at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music. "We have lives, and do music for fun."
Other Twangdogs include guitarist and keyboard-player Jenny Macagba, a book buyer and manager for Follett, which has headquarters in Westchester; guitarist Merrie Viscarra, a Chicago doctor specializing in rehab; and drummer Steve Alspach, a Chicago statistical programmer who works in health care, including stints with veterans groups. The Twangdogs play at 3 p.m. Sept. 27 in a lineup of eight bands that includes the Ag Tones, a Pink Floyd cover band called Forever Floyd, and Madison Rising, which bills itself as "America's most patriotic rock band."
This isn't Goodland's first shot at the big time. The Goodland Grand Prix, a sanctioned racing event featuring souped-up go-carts, draws about 8,000 fans to Goodland during four days of music, food and racing every summer. Bill Constable, a gifted musician and keyboard player, played that venue in 2010 just a couple of months before he died. Dillon Hall says he talked with my brother years ago about organizing a Goodstock, "and now it's finally happening."
Here's hoping it's as memorable as that first Goodstock. And offers an easier cleanup.