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Getting my goat: when an old friend and street preacher from New Orleans called just before Hurricane Katrina hit, I offered to help in any way I could. I let him live on my ranch, wear my clothes, drink my beer, and yap endlessly on my phone. But after two years of hospitality, I did what any other gracious host would do; I tried to get rid of him.

Article Excerpt
The Reverend Goat Carson claims to have been the last man ever to dance with Judy Garland. The place was the Salvation club, in New York City. The time was late November 1968. The Reverend Goat Carson, of course, was not a reverend back then. He wasn't even a Native American yet. He described the Judy Garland encounter as "dancing with a soft little marshmallow with legs." Very soon thereafter she flew to London, last stop before booking a package tour with a chirpy group of bluebirds over the rainbow.

Unfortunately, Goat saved a dance for me. We first met in 1976 in L.A., where Goat got his name. It had been given to him a few years earlier, along with adult-size portions of smoke and mushrooms, by a medicine man named Yippee!, a Yaqui Indian from Acapulco. Yippee! took the then-21-year-old David Carson on a "vision quest" to show him that music was the power that would change the world. "You're a Native American," said Yippee!, and Goat told him truthfully that he was part Cherokee. That was good enough for Yippee! apparently, who then led the young Goat to the Sunset Strip, where he introduced him to the members of a band called the Doors and one called Iron Butterfly, plied him with more marijuana and mushrooms, and then took him down to South Central to see Hugh Masekela.

Somewhere in the middle of this vision quest, everything seemed to stop. Goat saw a light pulsating in his chest and realized that he was outside of time and body, watching himself in a movie. "I feel like I have the power to do anything," he said.

"Then go on and try," said Yippee!. "Your name will be Goat, and that will stand for 'Go on and try.'" With varying degrees of success, Goat has ever since.

I had drifted out to L.A. myself trying to get a record deal peddling a quasi-legendary living room tape of the Texas Jewboys. Goat was living out of his car, parking it at night at Errol Flynn's house. We met as a result of both of us hanging out with Bob Dylan. Half the free world was hanging out with Bob Dylan at that time; the other half, of course, was trying to understand his lyrics.

The first time Goat met Bob was at a semi-exclusive Hollywood after-party at which Goat performed upon his homemade instrument of choice, a three-stringed jawbone of an ass, his own version of Bob's popular song "Sara," an elegant, poetical ode to his wife of many years. Few in the room knew that Bob and his wife would soon be going through divorce...

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