Patrick Neil Barber's Gas Free USA Tour
Bio: Pat started his "Tour Less Traveled" as a Colorado Stone Mason.
He played a song once, someone clapped so he moved to Nashville. The song was Tears and Boogars. It put him on the 1990 Telluride Bluegrass Town Park stage as a Troubadour finalist singing to the weekend's biggest crowd in the festival's history, even to this day!
Pat's son, Ben hung out back stage with the man credited with creating the Bluegrass Genre,
BIll Monroe.
The Rockies in his rear view and a few nights at songwriter venues showed him he had a LOT to learn about songwriting. Music City is a garden with rich soil for a music industry wanna-be. The patch Pat landed in was Bluebird Cafe, "center of the songwriting universe" as Vince Gill put it. Barber and his pearl inlaid Tree of Life guitar in jumped behind the wheel of a taxi in order to finance his writing education. In between runs he wrote and played his new songs in ITRs (In the Round) at the Bird and other open mics, opening shows for Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Wynona Judd, Clint Black, Aaron Tippin, Gillian Welch, Jack Sundrud, learning from each of them.
Songs written in Music City Taxi #8, The Day You Arrived and Dawn on Dickerson Rd. earned him the 1991 TSA Horizon award. He lost a cab driving customer and friend, Dawn, to the Disease of Addiction and for several years invested his spare time for solutions to Alcoholism and homelessness, helped build AA clubhouses and start up halfway houses around town.
Working with festivals and venues like Bluebird Cafe and playing gigs with Country Music artists helped him get some of his songs cut with Irish diva, Karen Flynn. A couple of them shared top ten charts in Europe with George Jones and Steve Earle.
Bluebird Cafe owner, Amy Kurland (far left), got Pat some work in the movies. He had a speaking part in Lori Morgan's Proud Heart and a songwriter "real" in Peter Bogdonovich's The Thing Called Love. It was River Phoenix's last completed picture and the movie that gave Sandra Bullock speed.
Pat's story is featured in a recent Country Music History text, The Bluebird Cafe Scrapbook, but it ain't over yet. Along with being the first to stream live music (Nashville Singer Songwriters) on the Internet, Pat is also going to be the first Singer Songwriter to do a 100% Solar Powered, gasoline free coast to coast tour in his 34 Foot Chevy 454 Tour Bus. Yes, this means NO GASOLINE. Sun splits water into Hydrogen fuel for his motor, stove and furnace. Sun powers his fridge and lights. Absolutely NO harmful emissions!
