Welcome to Big Blend Radio, where we celebrate variety and how it adds spice to quality of life. Welcome everybody. You know, Joey Stucky, an amazing musician, singer, songwriter, composer, producer, TV and radio personality, music columnist, educator, and sound engineer, and award-winning Black guitarist, is on our show, our Big Daily Blend show every fourth Sunday. Well, today we got five Sundays in the month of September, and it happens to be Joey Stucky, a live day. And this is a very special day. We have two podcasts coming right after this one with panel discussions, with musicians talking about music, the power of music, the power of music community. But before we get to that, we want Joey to tell us a little bit about a live day and then why now it is so important to even be talking about this with the current situation, with Hurricane Helene and the devastation she has created and how we as a community can come together. So Joey, how are you doing and happy a live day? Oh, thank you, my friend. I'm doing well. We were so fortunate that our area was hit very lightly with the hurricane. So we lost power for a little while, but we've been doing well. So we feel very blessed and fortunate. And a live day every year is a day that I always feel thankful because a lot of people thought I wouldn't be here, that I wouldn't be alive. Or if I were, that I wouldn't be able to walk or talk, and I do all those things. And so I try to make every day a good day. It's difficult. Some days are harder than others. But I always try to stay in the place of gratitude as best I can. And I particularly think about it on September 29th. And that was the day that I had my brain tumor surgery. Again, my parents were told not to expect me to survive. And so of course, what they did on that day was really special because instead of it being a day of stress and anxiety and fear, they turned it around with a very simple technique, but one that was very profound. And they said, this is not the day you almost died. This is the day you lived. And that's a very powerful difference. And it's more than just words. And so every day as a child, I had a brain tumor. And it left me blind and it was out my sense of smell. So I'm down to two senses. It also took my entire injury system. So I don't make adrenaline. I don't make thyroid. There's lots of things that I don't make that I have to supplement. In other words, he doesn't have emotional problems. Like some of us going through midlife crisis. I'm just going to say, I can weep with the best of them. But in all seriousness, it's something that I have to regulate with lots of blood work every three months. And it's very challenging. I have to be very cognizant of my health and I have to protect it and protect my energy very vigorously. So, but I'm able to do everything that I want to do. And that's the theme. But when we went through this as a child, I almost died several times, spent a lot of time in the hospital, spent more time in the hospital than I am as a young child. And there were a lot of things that I just wasn't able to do. But as I got older and learned more about how to manage my different conditions, I was able to do that. And so, you know, now again, I know my limitations and I know how to manage them. And I do everything that I want to do to travel all over the world and speak and perform and record and do all these things. So, it's a day that I realized, you know, we always celebrated as the second sort of birthday. But then in 2017, it occurred to me that more people ought to experience a day where they took a moment to think about, you know, the good things and to reconnect as a community and to just visit with their neighbors and friends and family that they hadn't seen for a long time. And so, I came up with the idea of the Alive Day, Joey Stuckey, Alive Day Music Festival. And it's been a free family-friendly event since 2017. And it's taken a lot of different forms from big outdoor concerts to theater concerts to Facebook Live concerts and different things. And this year, the podcast that we're doing. So, it's taken lots of different forms, but we've done it every year since 2017. And the goal is to revel in the joy of life through music, which is what I know how to do. So, that's what we did. I love it. I love it. And, you know, it reminds us to, as our friend Johnny Shafer, who has a gratitude, Facebook group, right, to count our blessings. And you look at that, right? I always say that. William Nelson always says, "His day turned around. His life turned around the day he started counting his blessings." And there are really hard bumps in life and, you know, in the road that we go on. And when we recorded the two panel discussions with musicians, awesome. Everyone, we've got to hear who's coming on the show. Oh, my gosh. We've got Joey on both telling his story and having a discussion over that. We've got, on our second call, our second show, we have Pamela Bedwell. We had Johnny Shafer. We're talking about gratitude and amazing singer-songwriter Bill and John Storch from the Cravans out in Lake Worth area. And on the first call, we had Tom Rule, your good friend, who knows all about Waffle House and space. And Kev and Sully from The Walkabout Band. And that gave us a little international flair with Sully coming from Australia. So, we did talk about wombats. It's a very fun. And, Kevin, they're both in New York now, somewhere in, somewhere upstate New York, I guess? Yes, New York City. Yeah. Yeah. There, there are hoots. So, we've got Florida. We've got Alabama with Pamela and Johnny's in California. Right. Tom is next to you and you can make in Georgia. And everyone, by the way, Joey is the music ambassador, official music ambassador of making Georgia, which is the Southern Rock Capitol. Right. And so, we had these amazing discussions, but we recorded them the day before the hurricane, Hurricane Helene happened. And, you know, we're all excited, happy thinking, okay, this hurricane's gonna come through and maybe do a little damage, but apparently Hurricane Helene is, you know, a force of nature that said, hello, y'all. I'm gonna really go up into the mountains. I'm gonna hit Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and some other outlying areas. And of course, Florida, which is where we're at right now, but we made it through as well. So many of, you know, a lot of you know, Nancy and I travel full-time documenting parks and public lands. And when you hear us recording podcasts, we're pet sitting through trusted house sitters. It's not a money-making thing. It's a, hey, we want to hang out with your animals, take care of them, take care of your plants, your home. And we were really glad to be here with these two sweet little dogs, Mr. Scout, the little man and sweet little skittles and, you know, we've been through hurricanes before actually as pet sitters and tornadoes. Nancy and I've also been through a number of natural disasters and human conflict disasters in regards to living in places where you've got riots going on in Africa and stuff like that. So we've been through bombs. We've been through being held at gunpoint. We've been through a lot in life and this hurricane is devastating. I'm going to tell you, I'm not feeling that happy because all I want to do is go and run out there to my friends and I can't even get there because the bridges are down, the roads are closed, and even I-40 is, you know, gone between Tennessee and North Carolina. Good friends, they're even on our shows that you know. So it's really hard to keep chin up. But I know like Joan Baez has one of my favorite quotes alongside the Willie Nelson one is, "Action is the antidote to despair." And that's what we can do. You know, this show, you know, celebrating Joey's alive day was a message for all of us to celebrate being alive and to always look on the bright side. Want to talk then, right? Keep looking at the bright side of life. But the important important thing is we talked about community and the power of community and music. So while Nancy and I, we evacuated from seven wildfires back in the 90s, sorry, 2003. I don't know why it went to the 90s. 2003, we were in the Cedar Fire in San Diego, which was, at that point, the largest wildfire. It was the final one that kind of drove us out of San Diego. And because a third of the homes in our little mountain community were burned down, and these are people needed homes because their kids had to go to school. And Nancy and I can live and work everywhere. Now we've really proven that, right? Now that we have the internet, this was back in dial-up days, y'all, and cell phones were just now coming out. And we, there were arsonists attacking our town at the time, lighting fires at the bases, the mountain on either side. There's one road in and out. And there was a lot of trauma, but what we did experience, just like in COVID, were communities coming together. The community coming together where people used to be competitive in their downtown stores, to the point of actually stealing each other's shop signs, turned around and realized that is not the way to live. The way to live is in harmony and in community and helping each other up. When they talk about where as strong as our weakest link, that sounds like a very negative thing, but that's the reality. If we all lift each other up, we don't have a weak link. I don't like the weak link terminology, but it is about where as strong as we want to be as a community. Music will get you through it in a lot of humor. When all this stuff goes down, allow yourself to laugh. Emotions are going to run high with everyone. The ones on the other side, like Nancy and I right now who are dying to get to our friends and know that they're okay or do whatever we possibly can, I want to be Superman right now, and I can't, and it sucks. Allow those emotions to be there, understand everyone's going to have a period of emotion. There's going to be grief because people are losing things. They've lost loved ones at this point as we record this over 50 people have passed. There's been so much trauma, so understand anger, understand people giggling at times that they never should. Nancy and I are the best people for that. Don't ever take us to a funeral, but it's a way of releasing. Music can help through all of this. Doing something as a community can help. If you're on the outside what can we all do? Think about it. Now, I can tell you this from the wildfires. I did so many fundraisers. The first thing I did when the beginning of the fires, the Cedar fire was the final big one that took us out, right? That's it, y'all. But the first one started was a blues bash. We were actually putting on a blues festival on our good friends, Johnny Masters, Mama's Boys, the Buy Your Brothers, came into town. Nancy and I were pouring beer at the Chamber of Commerce and Emergence Association. We were holding it at a winery. It was awesome and a fire started. It took down our friend's house. Got them to a place. They stayed with us. First thing I did is they needed clothes. They needed everything. Well, do I went to the local church and you know what? They gave us bags and bags of clothes and I don't even want to tell you what it was like to go through these donation bags of things that people truly discarded and didn't think about what they were giving. My good friend Teresa, who's been through all of these situations and also managed hurricane relief for Hurricane Katrina. First thing she told me to tell everybody you want to give directly to people, please look at doing gift cards. If they have to really establish their home or even get panties in a bra because y'all, that's true, then you need that. Red Cross is fantastic. They were great in the fires. I can personally attest that you will get toothbrushes. You'll get things that you really need to get going. I've got links in the episode notes of how you can help through Red Cross. There's already all these support systems coming in, but I'm going to tell you to give gift cards. Do not start sending what you don't care about in your house. I do not want to tell you what it was like for her kids to go through and see what people thought they were donating. It was kind of rude and I've got some funny stories about that, but I will not try and humor you with that today. But those are some tips. Be kind, compassionate, understand everyone's going to have an emotion that may not resonate with you at the time. Breathe in, breathe out, help where you can. If you do not hear from friends and you are not in a place to actually help them, understand they are in a time situation, probably a situation of not having electricity or signal and they need to use whatever they can get to actually help them. So if you are not there, you can send messages of support, but if they don't come back to you, understand they may not be able to and they need to use whatever they have to get to where they need to go out of actual safety and resources. Just some pointers and tips on that. Anything, Joey, on your side from what you can say for people to come together as a community, as the whole show is dedicated to that? Yeah, you know, the truth is that if I'm a very happy person, typically, but I'm not happy all the time, and if I were, you should worry about me, because being happy on the time is not reasonable. So to echo what you said, you know, it's perfectly fine to go through a period of grief, a period of anger. It's okay to say that things aren't fair. It's okay to say that you don't like the situation. The trick is you just can't live there. And so at some point, you have to get back into the action side of things and taking joy where you can find it. And so that can be very tough. And so we know that. And we want to think about the joy of life and the blessing of being alive. But we know that we can't stay in that mode of operation all the time either. So it's perfectly normal to have other feelings. But there is always, you know, I've always found that every time I thought there was some major disaster in my life, whether it was physical or whatever, I've always found that I've made it through it a better kind or wiser person. And so I'm not happy or looking forward to bad times. But as long as I come out of them on the other side, then I don't, I try not to fret over too much. So the big thing here that a live day means the situation that we're dealing with is this idea of community and making sure that everybody can come together to support one another, because we're all fellow travelers on spaceship Earth. And it's just, you know, it's important to think about yourself and take care of yourselves and then to take care of your neighbors and friends as best you can. And if you're not a position to do that at the moment, you know, that's okay too. But when you're able to do it, you know, there's a need because this has been such a horrible disaster. So it's all about love and healing. And I do believe that, you know, comedy and music are the two things that get me through all the difficult times. I mean, I remember, you know, I'm a blind guy and, you know, I remember when I had my shoulder surgery, I was very nervous about it for a lot of reasons. It was unexpected, latent issue from the brain tumor that we didn't expect to have happen. It was very difficult to find someone to do the surgery because my case was so complicated. Lots of difficult things and harder things happened during that surgery that ended giving me PCSD for a while. But one of the things I did to cope was when the doctor came in, I was in the OR and I looked at him and laughed and said, "Hey, you look different from this angle." And, you know, it's something stupid, you know, I was probably like, "I can't see him at all." And I'm laying there on the operating table. But just little take, take, take grace and little, little jokes like that, whatever it gets you through is totally okay. And so I've always coped with music and with, with some stupid joke. Yeah, you know, me too Nancy and I are both that way. You know, when we were going through the fires, I know I had PDSD from it afterwards and I didn't even know it until a friend said, "Hey, you're like wired, like you're..." Yeah, and that's not to be unexpected. I mean, it's, you know, it took me, there was a time that I was not rational about the hospital and that if you had said to me, "You got to go to the hospital or die." Now, keep in mind, I'm all about life affirming. I've worked really hard to stay alive. I've gone through a lot to be alive. So keep that in mind when I tell you that if you said you're going, if you don't go to the hospital, you're not going to make it. I was like, "Oh, well, I just won't make it." And I would have tried to fight you off taking me to the hospital. And so I realized that I had gone through something that made me a little irrational and I had to work really hard to get that back in check. And so now I can go to the hospital. Again, I'm a little nervous. I'm not going to lie about it. I'm a little more nervous than I used to be because I'm a pro. I've been in the hospitals a long time for a lot of different situations. But that's okay. I give myself grace and say, you know, it's okay. So, I mean, this is not to be unexpected when you go through something that's so traumatic like the storms. It's not unexpected to have a little bit of an issue afterwards and to be nervous. And that's all okay. But just know that there are people, there are strangers that care about you and there are friends that care about you. And there are people that will rise to the occasion of helping this work out. And so that's why Lisa and I both talk so much about community and how much community means. And we've just found that music is a great way to have a community and to reinforce that. Exactly. And humor. When we went through the fires, you know, I didn't sleep for a year and a half because there was always a fire somewhere and you're watching on the mountains. And the mountains, it's like freaky. You think it's right there and it's not. And we actually were on our way home after evacuating to our friends resort. And that also lost their house, right? And they were actually living next door and a vacation rental. It was crazy. But we lived in this beautiful, and this is how crazy it is. We actually rented two different places throughout this fire season, right? That was nonstop fires. And the big one was a different house, but this was this beautiful A-frame on the edge of a state park, or county park, excuse me, and all the deer would come in. We had a peacock that lived in the tree, the oak tree. And she was just there when we got there, you know? And we had turkeys that would come peck at the window during the winter for food. It was just this beautiful garden and it was just this magical place. And we'd evacuated again because everybody was shifting. We were moving from each other's homes as the fire was rotating the mountain and how others were being set. When we knew someone was actively playing arson. And so we were driving around all of us with shovels in our car to put out fires. And because if you see a fire, you get out of your car and you put soil on it and do whatever you can to get it out, call, obviously call for help. Anyway, so this is where PTSD comes in because you are always on alert. And most times people die in a fire from the smoke, not necessary the fire. Anyway, that's a whole other show. But anyway, we were actually going home and finally there was electricity for us to be able to get gas in the truck and all our stuff is in the truck. And we had a friend of ours, Josh come with us and he was going to offload the truck with us, you know, Nancy's artwork, her paintings, you know, she's an artist, our file cabinets, because that's what we had back in the day, y'all. Actual file cabinets, those steel ones, that when you pick them up, they scratch the hell out of you. Yep. And then we had our animals, you know, our cats and everything. And so we go back home and next to you know, they're saying, pine hills is on fire. And some cop came in from LA and told me not to go down our street and I'm like, you can, you know what? And off we go, because I could see it was by our house. And so we go and we see that it's close. And was it? We don't know. It didn't burn our house down, but we need to, all right, we're going to hose down the roof. And they say, don't, that doesn't do anything. Well, bull, I know people save their houses over it. So sometimes you got to do what you want to do. But sometimes you need to get the hell out too. So Josh, Nancy and I, and when I went in the gas station, I was like, Oh my gosh, there's beer. We could buy beer. I bought a six pack of beer because he was helping us and I thought, okay, you know, at least give the guy some beer, you know, I don't know because he's got a really funny personality. Like Josh, Nancy and I actually got into wedding dresses at a wedding once. So anyway, and did like it. Anyway, so I'm just trying to tell you this is the personality. We're like on high alert, knowing the fire is moving in. We're worried about the peacock who we never saw again, sadly. And we know we're going to hose down everything just in case to help, right? We all just got out of the car or the truck, opened a beer and went take time for a cool one. And we started doing beer commercials. It's like insanity. You need to get the hell out. You need to evacuate again and do what you need to do for this house. And here we were doing beer commercials. It was not even, I don't even think we really spent two minutes, but those two minutes felt like a half hour of slow down, calm, think it through. Yeah. It's like the humor allows you just for those few minutes and do not feel guilty about it. It's not like you're being stupid. You're processing. Your body is processing when you're doing it. So humor is your way. It is a key and music. Heck, yes. When we had to come back home after the fires to our other house, we drove through the forest that Nancy and I hiked in that morning looking at, oh, look, the azaleas in the forest are in bloom. La la la, the fall azaleas, all this beautiful stuff. And we saw our beloved forest had burned down. There was smoke coming up from the ground, smoke everywhere, trees felt. And we were like, it wasn't, this was not home. This was not anything we knew. It was, all our markers were gone. It felt like we were in Vietnam. I was telling Joey before we started recording. And you know what? Weirdly, I just put on Jimi Hendrix, man, and it felt like, all right, people. See how I watch my language there, Joey? And by the way, you're allowed to use your language in these situations, too. Absolutely. And we just blared it because it just felt like we were in a war. Yeah. And if you're going to be in a war, purple haze needs to come on, man. I'm just saying. So play that music. In fact, I think we have to add that to your big, alive day music playlist, y'all. 290 songs on this music playlist that Joey and I started last Sunday on his big daily blend episode, talking about music that makes you feel good, inspires, motivates, rockets, you know, you go down, you go up, it takes you everywhere. We've got musicians that have sent us their songs for Joey specifically for this playlist. We've got music from musicians that have been on our shows over the last time. I don't know how many years we've been doing this anymore. 16 years? Oh, I don't know, Joey. I don't know how old we are. 16 or 17 years. We've of course got all the famous musicians, you know, on there, too. But we've got a lot of great independence that you're going to want to know about. We've got the music from everyone that's been on their shows. So music is there. Plus, and we're allowed to rock out. We can put purple haze on there, right? Purple haze. Yeah, purple haze has to be on there. The other song, not song, but the thing I wanted to bring up is these podcasts are on blendradio and tv.com. And just type in Joey Stucky, a live day in the search box. And this page will come up. And it has an awesome jigsaw puzzle that is music and fun. And you can do the online jigsaw puzzle while you listen to the podcast and or listen to the music playlist, right? So it's all there on one page for you to enjoy. So I think, you know, it's not downtown Macon, Georgia, but this is national and international community coming together, Joey. I think we've accomplished that with these podcasts. And again, happy a live day in our hearts, everyone in the Southeast going through this hurricane and the loved ones on the other side, feeling just as anxious as I am wanting to get in there and just fix things. Yeah, our hearts are with you too, because you've got loved ones and so many people have passed. And here, y'all, you never know what's going to happen the day you wake up. So we need to really enjoy every precious moment that we can. Very true. Thank you, Joey, anything else? No, I think we covered it. And we're just just the same from me and my family to all of those listening and all those affected by the storms we are thanking of you. And we are going to do our part to donate to the Red Cross and encourage everybody to do that and just to try and help people get what they need. So blessings to everybody and appreciate you listening. Yeah, thank you all. Stay safe and hug your loved one. Thank you for listening to Big Blend Radio. Keep up with our shows at bigblendradio.com.
