Beat Surrender

Kelly agrees: "I don't believe Jon would have cut himself off from the band. He had such a sense of loyalty. He would have given the Beat Angels his last dying breath." She pauses, then adds, "Obviously, they wouldn't have done the same, as they easily showed."

Smith says he understands such sentiments. He says he's received "an earful of shit" from a couple of Norwood's friends, to which he allows, "I can't blame 'em. He was one of my best friends. He was my pal. He was there when my marriage broke up, he took me into his house. And now I tell myself, 'You kicked the guy when he was down.' It was just utter childishness, and it's something I wish I could go back and change, but there's nothing I can fucking do to change it. I never got to make amends, I have to live with it, and I do live with it, every day."

Norwood eventually got a call from Beat Angels guitarist Keith Jackson, who officially confirmed what the ousted drummer had already heard. A few months later, the band sent a card to Norwood after he'd moved back to Oregon for good. Kelly remembers that by then Norwood was sick again, fighting another brain tumor, this one inoperable.

"Jon acknowledged the band's gesture," she says, adding that he showed little outward bitterness. "He was not an ugly person before the cancer, and he didn't get that way afterward. And, anyway, he'd been working with a healing woman who was helping his mind and spirit, so by the time the card came, he was clearly not of that world anymore."

Indeed, Norwood's last days were of a world dominated by the Eastern mysticism that so fascinated him. His sister, the one who drove him to Woodstock, is now a practicing Buddhist, and she helped enlist a gathering of monks to assemble in prayer at Norwood's bedside. A Tibetan lama visiting the area was also asked to stop by the hospice, and did, promising Norwood's name would be offered in prayer at an Ashram in India.

Jon Norwood died peacefully on December 19, four days before his 44th birthday.