What a fine night that was. All the hardcore greaser crew showed up at Rockefeller Center for the taping. My friend Pete and a few others of us went over to the Green Room Bar to get properly prepared for the show, over the insistence of the girls that we would lose our spot in the line and end up not getting in at all. We got in, got seated, and waited squirming in our seats for the Blonde Bomber to rock the house. And boy, did he. Towards the end of the song ("Monkey Beat," an infectious, rolling, rollicking slice of pure musical joy that was always one of my favorites), Ronnie waved his arms wildly, beckoning our crew down front to be with him in his moment of triumph on national TV. We were all standing up on the seats and hooting for all we were worth, but we didn't manage to get to the front - the song ended just as a few of us were making the move. Conan watched the whole thing with a sort of half-frightened smile on his face, as if he feared an imminent break in the fragile sluice-gate that was all that stood between his nice, neat set and a raucous flood of raw rockabilly madness.

And I have to say this, though it might sound like some sort of monstrous ego-trip to some of you: I have had Little Richard praise my singing voice ("It's so powerful, like my friend Gene Vincent"); I have been told by Johnny Cash that "You guys sound real good, son, just like we did forty years ago"; I have had my guitar playing complimented by Dick Dale and Link Wray; I have been so extremely fortunate as to have met many of my idols, and had respect and admiration for my own ability expressed by them in terms that make me blush even now. But I don't know that any of it will ever mean as much to me as that moment, right before Conan came back from commercial to introduce Ronnie, when he looked right at me and mouthed "This one's for you!" with a big smile on his face. It was beautiful, and I'll never, ever forget it.

After the show, we all went back to the Paramount hotel to pick up Ronnie and High Noon, then went out bopping around the West Side. We hit Coyote Kate's, which was having an open-mic night, and took over the stage completely for a couple of hours. The handful of folks there didn't have any idea what was going down or who any of us were, but they witnessed a pricelessly rare jam session that night. About midnight or so, we started ambling down 8th Avenue trying to find a bar with a TV not tuned to a hockey game so we could watch the broadcast of the Conan show. After failing utterly at that, it was decided that the whole lot of us, about 20 left by then, would adjourn to my apartment on East Broadway with a Great Lake of beer and bourbon to watch Ronnie's first national TV appearance. My friend Pete, who died a little over a year later at 22 when he was hit by a car at the intersection of 1st and 1st, was nearly in shock. He simply couldn't believe he was hanging out all night with Ronnie Freakin' Dawson, as he frequently put it in little muttered asides to me throughout the course of the evening.