urban bicycle journeys

I have a weakness for all-female rock and roll bands. During the 1980’s the Go Go’s were certainly the best of the lot but I also listened to the Bangles. (Walk Like an Egyptian!) Tootie and I saw the Bangles once, at the outdoor Audubon Zoo venue in New Orleans about 1988. They broke up soon after although they have reunited a few times since. Their lead guitar player is/was Vicki Peterson. In the late 1990’s in Los Angeles she helped found the barely famous and not all female Continental Drifters. A few members of that band were originally from New Orleans and the whole band lived in New Orleans from about 1998 to 2010. Also in the Continental Drifters was Susan Cowsill who as a little girl was part of the 1960’s family band The Cowsills. Susan and Vicki became close friends and enjoyed making music together. In 2003 Vicki married Susan’s brother John. John was not a Continental Drifter but had a steady gig in Mike Love’s version of The Beach Boys.

It’s creepy what Facebook can find out about your interests. Facebook has been sending me Vicki Peterson / John Cowsill updates. More recently for some reason John lost the Beach Boys job but he and Vicki in 2025, now that both are in their sixties, made an album together of country-ish songs composed by deceased Cowsill siblings. They are touring to support that album. While driving the other day I even heard one of their songs randomly play on Sirius XM’s Outlaw Country channel. It sounded fun, very mainstream.

I doubt the duo of Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill are all that famous. Last week I learned that they were scheduled to play in Dunn NC, of all places, the next day, on November 6. While I have heard of Dunn, it seemed remote, about seventy miles southeast of my home in Chapel Hill, on the other side of Raleigh. I had never been to this, to me, nondescript town. The show cost forty dollars, which seemed a lot, and was scheduled to start at 7:00 PM on Thursday night.

I am part of a group of guys who meet for conversation every Thursday at 5:15 PM here in Carrboro NC, next to Chapel Hill. To make it to the Vicki & John show I would have had to skip most of the Thursday Club. Also, Tootie had no interest in driving an hour and a half each way to see these people in a tiny club in a tiny town. I would have had to go alone. I blew the whole thing off. I guess I will never see them play. Oh well.

The bright side is that while researching Dunn NC on Google Maps I learned that there is a six mile rail-trail from Dunn NC to Erwin NC. This sounded like a bike ride! Two days after the missed Vicki and John show, on a sunny Saturday morning I drove down there with the Bike Friday in the back of our Ford Escape Hybrid. I parked at a public playground on the outskirts of Erwin NC, population 5,200. Dunn was less than ten miles away.

I had no idea that up to the year 2000 Erwin NC was the home of the world’s largest denim mill. They are touting now it as a development site for smaller companies. The mostly empty complex dominates the downtown.

A gravel bike path on a former rail line starts in downtown Erwin and peacefully threads to central Dunn.

Dunn, population 8,500 is a grid of streets set out on the flat coastal plain of what North Carolinians call Down East.

There is a modernist municipal building and an apartment house from that same era.

The Raleigh / Durham area has been developing rapidly for years. I don’t think of Dunn as part of that, but it is only forty miles southeast of downtown Raleigh. The prosperity seems to have rubbed off a little. Why else would there be an organic butcher shop in downtown Dunn?

Dunn has at least one coffee shop. I stopped for an oat milk latte, one pack sugar and sat in the sun out front on a bench, continuing my read of Christian Wolmar’s history of railroads in America.

Just down the street is the Bird’s Nest Listening Room. The poster was still up for the show two days earlier of Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill.

I noodled by bicycle around Dunn for quite a while, then turned back the way I came and cycled back to my car in Erwin NC.