10 February 2013

Climbing Memories, Black Betty, and Mundee


My favorite Hard Rocking band in Bangkok is Mundee, who play at The Rock Pub. I see them every chance I get, usually at midnight on Wednesdays.  They play a fantastic cover of Black Betty, an American Southern folk-blues prison work song, plus they play amazing covers of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and many other great Rock bands.  They do rock.
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Black Betty was a radio hit by Ram Jam in 1977, and it seems that the song is always connected in my memory with my earliest climbing days since that year was my first for technical climbing.  Later, in 1980 or 1981, I was teaching climbing techniques to an adventure specialty group of teen Explorer Scouts; we focused on mountaineering, climbing rock, snow and ice.  The lyrics to Black Betty came into my mind spontaneously and mysteriously as we were climbing during a storm on one of our multi-pitch rock climbs in the Adirondack Mountains.  (This is a long story, but as we will see at its end, it was Mundee that helped me figure it all out.) 
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It was the middle of June, but on the day we hiked up to Mt. Rooster Comb with all of our gear, a cold storm was coming in.  We stashed our bivouac gear on the summit of the mountain, then carried our climbing gear down a trail around to the bottom of the South Face, and our objective was to climb the “Old Route,” an easy but long climb first pioneered by the great German-American climber Fritz Wiessner, one of my great climbing heroes.  (I had first free climbed it in September 1977 as my first major solo climb with minimal roped backup and poor equipment – all alone.) 
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As our Explorer team started this long climb – in a rope-team of five or so – it started raining on us.  I led the hardest pitches, being sure that solid anchors were in place to keep our team from falling all the way to the ground far below.  By the time we were getting to the highest parts of the climb, the weather got colder and turned from rain to hail.  When we looked up at the higher mountain peaks all around us, they were plastered with snow. 
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Our easy rock climb now became much more dangerous.  All of us were soaking wet from the rain, it was cold and hypothermia was a big threat – when hypothermic, a person’s judgment is greatly diminished, as well as his coordination.  And we were at the most exposed part of the face, near its top.  The hail-stones were slippery round balls of ice under our feet, and they covered the tilted rock ledge we had to traverse to our right.  This ledge slants/ tilts outward from the wall left-to-right, and it is scary – it seems like it wants to dump you off the cliff at its highest point.  It is scary to walk this ledge when the rock is dry and sunny, as it had been when I soloed it years before, but now it was horrifyingly dangerous with all of the ice under our feet. 
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But we were roped together as a team, and I was confident both that I could anchor all of us with “bomb-proof” rock anchor protection and that our team was well-trained.  But it is never easy to protect a rope-team on a traverse, so I had a reliable climber go ahead and clip into a solid anchor, in order to belay the team between us as they traversed, and I stationed myself at the most dangerous part of the ledge, to make sure that everyone who climbed up to me and then past me was clipped in correctly and well-protected.  What I was most afraid of was our hypothermia and the possibility of making simple mistakes at that critical spot.  
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I also wanted to show my cold, wet, shivering team that I was upbeat and confident in that exposed spot, so, from somewhere in my crazy mind I got the idea to start clapping my hands, stomping my feet, and singing “Whoa, Black Betty, bam-a-lam/ Whoa, Black Betty, bam-a-lam….”  As each team climber came up to me on the beginning of that high ledge, they looked at me like I was crazy as I sang those lyrics to them while grinning like a madman. 
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These guys had already known that I was nuts – I climbed mountains – but they were equally insane to follow me into such situations.  I was never able to explain to them the weird “Black Betty” lyrics that I sang to them on the most dangerous spot on that climb.  I was never even able to explain it to myself. 
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Only in 2011 in Bangkok did I discover why that song came into my head at that earlier specific time and place in 1980 or 1981.  In February 2011, I was at the Rock Pub on a Wednesday midnight, and Mundee sang Black Betty.  The song really rocked me, and it reminded me of that team rock climb.  So after I got home I looked up the song and its history. 
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I discovered that the song was a radio hit precisely in September 1977, and that explained everything.  1977 was my first year of technical rock climbing.  That year I was constantly on the road, driving to climbing areas with my car’s Rock n Roll radio as my only companion.  In September 1977 I did my first major solo climb – the “Old Route” on Mt. Rooster Comb – and the song on all radio stations at that time was Black Betty by Ram Jam.  (“Bam-a-lam!”) 
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That is the reason the song suddenly came into my head three or four years later on the second time I climbed it (this time with my Explorer team).  The song was embedded into my memory of that rock face from the first day I climbed it alone.  Music has that magical way of embedding itself into our life’s memories – into the soundtracks of our lives. 
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Thank you, Mundee, for refreshing my memories and for playing such great Rock n Roll.  I’m a fan.  (I also wrote about Mundee two years ago HERE.)
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-Zenwind. 
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