A Strange Twist in the Lovesake Saga

One of the first shows I reported on in 1993 was Lovesake at the Flood Zone. It seemed like this was a big time band because an A&R rep was flying in to see them and they were pushed back on the bill when her plane was late just so she wouldn’t miss them. They were playing the Local Music Store Showcase. (The Local Music Store was a short lived regional cooperative that sold a city’s independently produced music for a cut of the action, a flawed business plan for many reasons.)

This wasn’t their first showcase. They had played the Columbia/Sony one at the Flood Zone as well in ‘93. (Do labels still sponsor local showcases? Or is it just cigarette manufacturers now?)

Lovesake was Shurd Rice on acoustic guitar, Nate Tabor on electric (played stick fashion), Brian Freeman on upright classical bass and Jennifer Dalmas from Fredericksburg on classical violin. The second two would soon be gone. They wore what I called at the time “Tom Jones-era garb,” but which can now be more easily described as the “puffy shirt” made famous by a Seinfeld episode. Their fans also dressed in Renaissance Fair outfits, kabuki white make-up, and danced “in a sort of Masque of the Red Death square dance at Night of the Living Dead speed.”

The band played in front of a three-screen, atmospheric slide show with fog machines (The music and stage show was different, but I didn’t care for it personally.)

I kept up with Nate off and on over the years. His very long wavy hair and lost boy demeanor made him a favorite of the young girls who wrote for me. He seemed to spend a lot of time sitting outside the coffee shop in Carytown, writing, waiting and doing odd little art projects. He was friendly and accessible. I last saw him, with very short hair, playing guitar for the raucous girl band, Ultra Bait, at a jello wrestling show at Cary Street Café a few years later. To this day, I don't know how that happened.

Shurd, who made my young girl reporters mad because he acted elitist and above them, had left town, leaving me disillusioned and suspicious. Before disappearing, he and a friend showed up to watch when my boyfriend was recording a demo for Ultra Bait and one of our mics disappeared. Shurd was on the top of my Person of Interest list for this crime, or at least his friend was, and the mystery of that missing mic has never been solved. They seemed to need a lot of pot, and a hot mic is a bartering commodity, as good as cash.

While searching the Internet for any evidence that Lovesake still existed to finish this story, I found a San Francisco Bay Guardian article on “Shurd Rice, the Unlikely Soldier.” This can’t be our Shurd, the puffy shirt guy. This guy, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Shurd Rice is on his first tour of duty in Afghanistan as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot.

Then I read, “Ten years ago, when Rice was a hippie musician living in San Francisco….” Wait for it, wait for it….I scroll down two pages to find it. “...In the early ‘90s, Rice played guitar in a band called Lovesake, which played the Café International weekly and regularly headlined at the Cannabis Buyers Club in San Francisco, where the band was paid in marijuana.”

Okay, right name, right band, right instrument, right time period, right drug, wrong city, unless you assume his sojourn in Richmond was part of his “human jukebox” years in the mid-90s, traveling through Asia, Europe and South Africa where he met his wife in 1997. She was working at a theme restaurant wearing a “big old 16th-century dress.” That makes sense. A puffy dress.

They settled back in San Francisco, only to find it had become a crystal meth scene. Not their style. Because he didn’t think he could “swing it in the civilian world,” he joined the Army in 1998 where he trained as a helicopter mechanic before being accepted to flight school. Last spring, the time of this newspaper article, he was in Iraq where his tour of duty keeps getting extended.

He’s not a supporter of the war, feeling 9/11 was an isolated incident involving a couple dozen extremists who are all dead now. If he survives, he plans to live on his 44-foot boat with his wife, surf, play music and smoke pot. I do more Internet namechecks and find he and his wife, Jane, have registered with marinas in Hawaii and San Francisco Bay over the years.

He seems to be doing a competent, even heroic, job overseas, flying dangerous missions and trying to keep himself and his men alive in a war they don’t believe in.

I think I’m going to have to give him a pass now, even if he was the one who stole the mic.

(See comments below. Shurd, still alive - go Shurd! - found this blog and says he did not steal the mic!)