No. 731 – The Cruel Sea

Performer: California Guitar Trio

Songwriter: Mike Maxfield

Original Release: Echoes

Year: 2008

Definitive Version: None

With Song No. 731 occurring today, that means that we are exactly two years away from Song No. 1—and more important I didn’t screw up the dates so I ended up posting it after my 50th birthday. That would be a bit of a let-down, right?

Anyway, if California Guitar Trio isn’t the most obscure name on my list, it has to be in the top three—no question.

I found these guys by accident around the start of 2008 while I was trolling YouTube for Yes music. In my search, a version of Heart of the Sunrise popped up that CGT did in what appears to be a Panera or a Starbucks that included Tony Levin on stick bass and, to the surprise of the dozens of people in the audience, Jon Anderson himself on vocals.

It’s a soaring, lighter-than-air unplugged version of that song, and I started looking for other things that CGT did. I next found a shortened unplugged version of Tubular Bells that blew me away. I couldn’t believe that three guys on acoustic guitars could sound like that. I was sold.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, however, given their backgrounds. You can look them up online if you want (and you should definitely check them out), but they’ve been at this for 20 years and were trained by Robert Fripp of King Crimson, so that’s a pretty decent pedigree there. They do a lot of covers and some original tunes, too.

I bought Echoes at the end of 2008, solely for the title track—yes, it’s an unplugged version of the Pink Floyd song, if you can imagine such a thing. By the time I bought this album and found this song (the lead track on the album), Laurie and I had started to once again attend yoga classes.

Although I had been introduced to the practice in February of that year (and Jin gets props for having me attend my first yoga class ever in LA in 2001), it wasn’t until late 2008 and really 2009 when I fully committed to it. My overweight body—up past 205 pounds at the time—needed it, and my overtaxed psyche definitely craved it.

I had the CD in my car stereo a lot during that time while we drove to and from the yoga studio, and this acoustic surf rave-up was the perfect mood-lifter for what unquestionably was (so far) the most difficult year of my life. I’ll get into the particulars in the not-too-distant future.

That epic must be told in chronological order, and I don’t want to start it with this song. The good news is it has a happy ending, and this song represents something of a celebration of that.