6. Spots On the Dice (2:51) Words & Music by Stuart Burns, Steve Gillette & Dan Paik

This song is a three way collaboration with Austin's Stuart Burns and my high school friend Dan Paik. Dan was a year younger, and yet already aware of the world of folk music and the social movements that were just beginning to gain momentum in the late fifties.

He took to a lesson with his guitar teacher, who turned out to be Bess Lomax Hawes, sister of Alan Lomax and wife of Butch Hawes. Bess and Butch were both members of the Almanac Singers along with Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie. The song explores the gambler's dilemma of hope versus self-delusion.

What is the role of chance in our lives? Give it a chance, one chance, one more chance, last chance, only chance, fat chance, take a chance, takin' a chance on love, perchance to dream... Chance was the name Jerzy Kosi&nacute:ski chose for the quixotic hero of his novel Being There which took up many of the same questions about just how much control we have over the events that shape our lives.

No getting around it, we're gamblers. Most of us don't bet the farm even if we have one. Most of us don't dabble in soy bean futures, but we are open to the benefit of some good luck. Who can deny that we've already been very lucky. It's amazing to me that those tiny little vessels in the brain chug along for decades without a single hiccup, and that the heart goes through all the yoga moves of excitement, ecstasy, terror, even heartbreak without a murmur.

Not any real difference that I can see between the guy whose house is hit by lightning, and the guy who wins the lottery — where the odds are pretty much the same whether you buy a ticket or not. “A tax on people who are not good at math,” as someone said. Ian Fleming wrote, “At gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck.”

(BMI)

Read more on my About the Song website here