The rental car has a global positioning gizmo that we’re endlessly fascinated by. We put in Debbie’s friend Kerry’s address. She lives on a lake in Massachusetts, on a street with no name, so we’re sure the GPS will direct us into the lake but it takes us right to her front door. We enter destinations as far away as California, and fuck me if it doesn’t come up with a route. We try to enter a location in Guam, but the GPS demands a specific address and we can’t luck into one, i.e. 14 Main Street, Guam.

We find a Boston newspaper and lo and behold, Ed is playing that night at Passim in Cambridge. We’re middle-class Americans with time on our hands, a yen for the rock & roll, and a rental car with a global positioning system – we head east.

It’s late afternoon, around soundcheck time, when we get to Passim but Ed’s not around. We buy tickets for the show, go out and have a leisurely dinner, head back to the club just as the doors are opening, grab great seats and settle in.

I talk to the soundman and Ed’s still not there. I think that’s a little strange, but I don’t pursue it. The opening act, a local Boston folkie, is pleasant enough, but as he finishes his set and starts to say goodnight, he looks over our heads and says, "Oh, it looks like I have time for a couple more."

The soundman is giving him the universal showbiz "stretch" signal and suddenly the kid’s set almost doubles in length. I walk back and say to the soundman, "Hamell’s not even here yet, is he?" He says, "No," not meeting my eyes. "But he’s coming, right?" I press, and the soundman says, "Oh yeah, he’s on his way," still not meeting my eyes.

The opening kid presses on, runs out of originals, starts sprinkling in covers, and just when he’s starting to develop a kind of deer-in-the-headlights-I’m running-out-of-songs-to-play stage demeanor, he glances back at the soundbooth, brightens immensely, announces relievedly, "Hamell On Trial will be right up. Goodnight." and bolts from the stage.

I find out later that Ed was stuck for 4 hours in a massive traffic jam between Brooklyn and Boston. He rushes in, sets up quickly and launches into the set. Three songs in, he breaks a string. At this point in our fledgling friendship, I’ve helped out with broken strings and such when Ed played in Ohio (see Introductions 1996). In those few shows I have never seen a string break less than 35 minutes into a set, certainly not after just three songs.

As Ed is walking over to his backup guitar, shaking his head in a it’s-way-too-early-for-this-broken-string-stuff manner, I walk up to the stage and say brightly, "Could I help you with that, Mr. Hamell?" Ed looks down at me, stares, blinks and says, "Ricki C.? Where am I? How close to Ohio is this?"

Over the next 90 minutes, Ed breaks a total of seven strings on the two guitars. There’s no backstage area at Passim, consequently I spend more time in the lobby restringing guitars than I do in the club. It’s a one-off gig, Ed has only 3 sets of strings in his case, so at one point I have to take the 5th string off one guitar and put it on the other guitar just to have one fully strung instrument.

As I hand "Chatty" to Ed for the encores I tell him, "If you break the 5th string on this, don’t bother handing it to me, there’s no more spares, you’re on your own." There are no more mishaps, the show ends blazing. Later we’re hanging out and hearing about the traffic jam and Ed thanks me profusely for helping out.

When the first Ani Difranco gigs came up that autumn (see Gettysburg, Pa. 1999) and Ed and his manager sat down to come up with a guitar tech to take on the road I wonder if it was that gig that got me a tryout.