Thanks for posting. I finally got around to reading it this morning and felt like this needed to be pulled out of the article.
An extremely personal part of the night came after “Women Without Whiskey”. Jason just shook his head and looked over at Cooley with a sadness in his eyes. You could tell that it made him so happy to be playing that song with his old friend, but you could also see the nostalgia take over. At the end of “The Secret to a Happy Ending”, when it becomes evident that Jason can no longer continue on with the band, he says something about missing the songs. I think the quote is “I can always call the guys, but I can’t call the songs“. The reasons for his departure weren’t as clear back then as they are today, but now we know alcohol was a big part it. So when he looked over and thanked Cooley for playing that song, there was true gratitude mixed in with that sadness. Cooley had just let him take a walk with a ghost from his past.
“Thanks for playing that song. Man, that’s a good song. I could just sit and play it at my house, but it just wouldn’t be the same. I’d just be sitting there, playing that song. It would get real weird. My wife would be like ‘What the hell are you doing? Have you started drinking again?‘
Cooley agreed that it would be strange. Everybody laughed. And the night went on from there — through all the albums and up and down that mean highway outside — from Kendale to Space City to the Grand Canyon and beyond. But no matter where those songs took us, they always brought us back to the three singer-songwriters on the stage. The three southern men who ‘make better dads than they did sons‘ might have taken different paths once they passed that county line, but they are always ready to bring it back home when a friend is in need. On this particular Father’s Day, they did so for a friend named Terry Pace, and I’m sure they made their own father’s proud in the process.