All the way to Cassadaga

Music fans -- real music fans -- often make pilgrimages to important sites associated with their favorite artists.  (Witness all the sad-eyed pot-smokers hanging around Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris.)  I recently made an accidental pilgrimage to a place I’d never heard of before this year: Cassadaga, Florida.

My brother lives in Daytona Beach, and my family gathered there the week before Christmas for his college graduation.  We were all in the car together, headed to Blue Spring State Park, a gorgeous riverside park that used to be an orange grove and ferry landing, and is now mainly a winter refuge for manatees.  We passed a road sign with an arrow pointing the way to Cassadaga and I gasped.  The Bright Eyes album Cassadaga was one of my favorites of 2007, and I had no idea that the town it was named for was right down the road.

So after we said hello to the manatees, I convinced my family to take a detour through Cassadaga on our way back to Daytona.  As we drove down the two-lane highway, passing through scrubby flatlands, I told them about the album, and what I knew about the town: most of the inhabitants are psychics, and supposedly Conor Oberst spent some time there before making the album.  The region is said to be a center of psychic energy, so we were all curious to see if we “felt something.”

The center of town was small but bustling on that Saturday afternoon.  There’s a gracious hotel, a bookstore and a welcome center, a building that looks like a school but is called the Colby Memorial Temple, and signs outside of nearly every house offering psychic readings.

The whole town has a ramshackle, slightly worn feel, but friendly and warm.  It’s a huge contrast to the strip-mall-and-spring-break atmosphere of Daytona, just 20 minutes down the road.  According to the official town website, Cassadaga was settled in 1895, and the town still feels like a frontier in some ways -- when going to Florida and starting a new spiritual community in the wilderness was truly pioneering. 

We didn’t stop for a reading, but later we wished we had.  Every medium who works in Cassadaga is certified by the Spiritualist Camp, so quality is assured!  For my part, I kept hearing the words to “Four Winds,” the second track from the album, in my head:

Well, I went back to my rented Cadillac and company jet

Like a newly orphaned refugee, retracing my steps

All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead

They said, “You’d better look alive”

In the end, the visit to Cassadaga didn’t make the lyrics any less inscrutable (a quick web search shows that amateur interpretation of Bright Eyes lyrics is approaching Dylanological levels) but it was a fun interlude on a visit otherwise full of lousy fried-fish sandwiches and t-shirt shops half-closed in the off-season.  And I know that the next time I visit my brother, I’ll have to drag him back to Cassadaga and find out what the future holds.

Check out Rita Houston’s visit with Bright Eyes on Words & Music from Studio A, Thursday night at 9pm, or anytime in the WFUV Archives.  

Have you ever made a rock pilgrimage that actually illuminated an artist or a song?  Tell us about it in the comments!