Falling for Pat & Bonnie

Pat with her blue heeler Felix shortly before leaving the Santa Cruz Mountains.

When I moved to Iowa City in September 1975 to take classes at the University of Iowa, I also began a job at Stone Soup, a vegetarian cooperative restaurant located kitty-corner across from the Pentacrest.[1] I worked the bakery shift three or four nights a week, baking bread, granola, and soybean burgers for the restaurant and the New Pioneer Coop grocery store. I took the job not only to earn rent money for my room on Reno Street, but also to become part of a community of cool and fascinating people.[2]

One of those folks was Pat Schmid, who landed a bakery job the same time I did. Feisty and opinionated, free-spirited and hard-working, she had grown up in the Bay Area, but arrived in Iowa City that September after driving cross-country with her friend Paul and her Australian cattle dog GD, making one pit stop at a farm in western Nebraska, where she replaced her car’s brake pads.

Leaving her home in the redwood rainforest of the Santa Cruz Mountains for this college town on the prairie seemed a curious choice, but Pat had a couple of friends who had moved to Iowa City after living next door to her in a large communal house called Aircastle. More importantly, she was seeking to disentangle herself from a dysfunctional family scarred by drug addiction and sexual abuse. She was tired of California, felt stuck in her ways, and wanted a fresh start.

Working those night shifts together, from ten at night till five or six in the morning, Pat and I became close friends. We’d get enwrapped in long, deep discussions about our hopes and dreams, about what we valued and what we loved. Our commercial dough mixer took on most of the front-end bread-baking labor, but after that, we’d stand around the long kitchen counter island, conversing as we weighed the dough into one-pound loaves, kneaded them once more, folded them into a uniform shape, and laid them in loaf pans to rise one last time before being put into the oven. I worked with strong-willed women with strongly held opinions – Pat, Cheryl, Edith, Nancy – who were never shy about telling me what women think and want. I learned to stay as quiet as possible so as not to give away my nearly total ignorance on that topic.

From the left, Mary, Pat, Cheryl, and Yoli.

We listened to a lot of music while we baked. The kitchen was equipped with a portable record player and a small library of donated LPs, their edges crusty with dried bread dough, their grooves dusty with flour. Bonnie Raitt’s album Give It Up was often on the turntable. We loved the range of her voice – how it could stretch from sweet to soulful – and she was an excellent guitar player. When I heard Bonnie sing, “I come home sad and lonely/ Feel like I wanna cry/ I want a man to hold me/ Not some fool to ask me why,” I was beginning to understand what Pat and the other women were talking about.

Pat often danced while she worked. She would kick off her shoes, confident the Health Department wouldn’t be stopping by for a midnight inspection. Even though she’d made an effort to distance herself from California, in her T-shirt and hip-hugging jeans, with sun-bleached shoulder-length hair, she seemed to me the quintessential California girl. When she danced, she embodied the music, bringing it to life. I loved that she didn’t feel the need for a dancing partner. I’d watch her dance as we worked, trying to memorize her sinuous moves, but I could only dream of moving my hips and pelvis the way she did. 

Pat would sing along with Bonnie on songs such as “Love Me Like A Man,” which exemplified her in-your-face assertiveness: “They all want me to rock them/ Like my back ain't got no bone/ I want a man to rock me like my backbone was his own/ Darlin’, I know you can.” Drawn to that audacity, I was falling, at least, in lust with Pat. This was perhaps not the most obvious response to her. She could be prickly and stubborn – nobody’s “sweetie pie.” But despite that, or maybe because of that, I was attracted to her. We slept together that winter, but soon decided we each needed a good friend more than a lover.

When I found out Bonnie Raitt would be performing in Madison on the University of Wisconsin campus, I invited Pat to go with me. We both had cars at that time, but neither her Dodge Dart nor my Volkswagen Bug were in any condition to make the 350-mile round-trip drive, so I suggested we hitchhike. The fact that she said yes to the concert and didn’t flinch at my transportation plan was more evidence of how simpatico we were. I will always hold her fearlessness and spunk in the highest regard.

On the morning of May 7th, we packed our knapsacks with sleeping bags, snacks, and extra clothes for an overnight stay and headed out as the temps warmed into the fifties. We walked along North Governor Street with our thumbs sticking out till we passed the Hilltop Tavern. It didn’t take long for folks to stop, but they were mostly short hops from town to town, northeast on Highway 1 through Solon and Mount Vernon till we hit U.S. Highway 151 in Anamosa. While waiting for rides, Pat and I shared stories. Hers were about growing up in a broken home in the Santa Clara Valley; mine were about growing up in a big Catholic family in an Akron suburb. As often happens when two people commit to an adventure together, we were forging a set of shared memories.

We caught a ride that took us through the old mill town and shipping port of Dubuque and across the Mississippi River, at which point the landscape begins to morph into the steep hills and forested ridges of the Driftless Area, its rolling pastures dotted with grazing dairy cattle. That afternoon we made our way through Platteville, Mineral Point, and Dodgeville to Madison, arriving on campus early enough to buy general admission tickets just as the doors were opening.

The concert was held at the Stock Pavilion, built in 1908 to exhibit University of Wisconsin livestock and also serve as a venue for major lectures and concerts. It was a simple setup of folding chairs on the main floor in front of an elevated stage. But when Bonnie and her band came on stage, we weren’t in those seats for long, moving out into the aisles and then up near the stage to groove to her music. Pat and I both had a thing for Bonnie – who couldn’t love a woman in her mid-twenties fronting a touring band with that easy-going style and those long coppery waves of hair?

Bonnie Raitt in 1976.

The concert was worth the journey. Bonnie’s rich mezzo soprano adjusted to fit the folk ballads she sang and the blues she belted out. She primarily played acoustic guitar, but on songs like Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “Kokomo Blues,” she showed off her considerable skills on electric slide guitar. She was backed by a four-piece band of “the finest gentlemen I know.” As I’ve often noticed among the front women of bands over the years,[3] Raitt knew how to massage the egos of her backup band, giving them room to stand out, never forgetting she was not only playing for her audience but also playing with her band. If she was covering someone’s song, she introduced it by giving that songwriter due credit and encouraging us to get to know their music better.

Near the end of the concert, she sang Sippie Wallace’s ”You Gotta Know How,” her voice taking on a little extra gravel: “You got to take your time/ You know it ain’t no crime/ If it lasts all night.” Pat and I sighed and selfishly asked, “Couldn’t this concert, at least, last all night?” The best we could do was beg for two encores.

After the concert, a twenty-minute walk across campus to Lake Street took us to a large fraternity house converted into communal lodgings. During my travels the previous summer, my friend Alan had mentioned that his brother lived there, and I could always crash in an empty room by using his name as a reference. We walked in and politely asked if someone could direct us to an unoccupied room. It lacked a bed, but we laid our sleeping bags on the floor close to each other, Bonnie’s music still echoing in our heads, and talked about the concert. It had been a long day, and even though the house was filled with the laughter and howls of students on a Friday night in May, they felt like soothing background sounds, like a trilling chorus of spring peepers, and we soon fell asleep.

Pat with the Governor Street dogs, GD on the far right.

A month later, Pat moved into a big house on South Governor Street whose occupants were graduating and moving out. I was the first person to respond to her invitation to join the household, my answer an emphatic Hell yeah! My first evening there, I sat down with my housemates to a dinner salad harvested primarily from the backyard garden. Although I never would’ve guessed it at the time, in that moment Pat’s life and mine were becoming irrevocably intertwined.

Footnotes

[1] A four-block green with five buildings that serves as the functional center of both the campus and the city.

[2] Applying the terminology of the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, Stone Soup was, for me, a second place (workplace) and a third place.

[3] Off the top of my head, Patti Smith, Lucinda Williams, Neko Case, Rhiannon Giddens, and Adrianne Lenker.