It’s been a while. Life got complex. Let’s see… we finished (mastered) The Texas Sheiks album in January. It will be released this September. Notes by: Elijah Wald, T-Bone Burnett; cover art by Ed Ruscha. I wrote a little something for the album as well:
“Early in 2008, Roger Kasle and I decided to put together some recording sessions in Austin, Texas. Our friend, Stephen Bruton, was in a battle with cancer and we were looking to change the subject… let Stephen have a little fun picking some easy ones with his friends. We recorded in late-April and again in October of 2008 and the results are right here on this album. My sincere thanks to Roger Kasle for making this project happen and for giving Stephen and the rest of us the opportunity to have one of the most enjoyable times we have ever had in the recording studio.
Stephen Bruton – Martha’s Vineyard late ‘70s
Turner Stephen Bruton passed away on May 9, 2009. This album is lovingly dedicated to his memory.”
So, there you have it. That knucklehead, The Grim Reaper, paid a call on my friend and musical partner, Prince Out Of Sight and it went the way it always goes. You might have thought Angel of Death would have had something better to do, but he didn’t. Angels of Death have never been too bright… but immutably powerful.
This May I headed east; first, to Jorma Kaukonen’s Fur Peace Ranch, a guitar camp and concert site in southeast Ohio. I shared a very cool gig with my friend, Dave Alvin. I love Dave. Everyone loves Dave. “Oh I love Dave Alvin”…. “Oh, me too… I love Dave”. It’s really sickening, how many people love this guy. Dave is an LA guy, born and raised… through and through. Not the Tinsel Town type, but some other ‘real guy’ type. Anything west of downtown is suspect to Dave. I really think he should run for Mayor.
Fur Peace is a very hospitable place and very well run. There was a beautiful indigo bunting perched on a tree when I entered the place (maybe they lured it there for me, knowing my love of birds). The concert with Dave went real well, and the hang was high caliber. The food was better than good and the digs were nice. I highly recommend the place to budding pickers. These are nice folks and they know what they are doing.
From Fur Peace I headed to Charlottesville, VA. Shortly after hitting the highway heading east I saw a pileated woodpecker fly across my bow. (They couldn’t have set that one up)
In Charlottesville I stayed with good friend, Jim Quarles. Jim is an ex-pro bluegrass bass player and guitarist who still takes an interest in the sport. A few years back he opted for the business world and started a consulting firm specializing in environmental technologies. After first selling services to major corporations (scum of the earth), Jim came to his senses and started focusing on non-profits (good people), Native Americans, conservation groups, medical research centers and the like. This eventually morphed into his present endeavor, The Harvest Shelter Foundation. Here’s their mission statement:
“Harvest Shelter Foundation provides instruction for gardeners in the organic production of vegetables, fruits, flowers and herbs at various gardens and encourages the donation of surplus harvests to shelters, soup kitchens and food banks in their communities. Harvest Shelter is not just a place. It is a volunteer movement to promote and teach gardening techniques that are beneficial to the environment and motivate gardeners and farmers to share their surplus with those less fortunate. We actively campaign for the sustainable utilization and conservation of natural resources.”
Pretty nice thing to do I’d say.
Recently, the club scene in Charlottesville has been – to put it mildly – in transition. There’s really nothing happening. With Jim’s help we did a little improvising and put on a show at Pete Vigour’s Art Studio. Pete’s an old time banjo player sympathetic to the challenges of road musicians, so he opened up his place, let a few people know about it, and we filled the place with appreciative listeners. Hats off to Pete, Jim and all the folks in Charlottesville who helped with the show.
It was time to head North. I stopped first in D.C. to see an old friend from the Cambridge days, then headed on to Philadelphia… to play for The Lansdowne Folk Club. I had picked up the flu somewhere in my travels and it was kicking in. The aching had begun and, although I was headed north, my voice was heading south. Fortunately, The Folk Club had booked an opener. I did one long set and was forced to change keys and sing bass a lot of the time. It was excruciating, if not a little freaky to hear that strange, low voice coming out of me. I obviously could not hide my dilemma from the audience, so I brought them in on it and joked my way through the night. Interestingly, everybody enjoyed the show; “Honesty... meet Forgiveness.”
That night, I stayed at the home of John Green and Maura Cizzarelli. They made things so comfortable for me that I slept for ten much needed hours. In the morning, after coffee and some of Maura’s homemade bread I got back on the road, aching but grateful.
Late that afternoon I pulled into Saratoga, NY to play Caffé Lena. This is a wonderful little spot; one of the oldest folk clubs in America (I may have mentioned this place in earlier versions of “What’s Up”). Before arriving, I called ahead to David Greenberger. He’d be coming to the gig, so I asked him to bring along the words to “Froggie Went a Courting”. This he did.
David Greenberger is quite an accomplished something-or-other (please Google him). I first took an interest in his unique world in the eighties, when I was running Carthage and Hannibal records in Rocky Hill, NJ. He published a curious booklet called The Duplex Planet. It featured interviews with people living at a nursing home in the Boston area; a poet named Ernest Noyes Brooking, record reviews by Ken Eaglin (“Ken’s Corner”), and a sweet guy named Fergie. These were a few of my favorites, but there were many more wonderful characters that filled the pages of the Duplex Planet. David is an artist. He performs and records spoken words with music, creates visual art, contributes reviews and essays to NPR, and much more. The main thing that draws me to him is his dedication to his own personal vision at the expense of worldly reason.
The gig at Lena’s did very well. I lucked out again by the fact that there was an opener… and I had progressed from a bass to a sort of funky baritone. I also made the most out of “Froggie Went a Courting” (I had a built in croak, so why not). Yes, it was a cheap trick, but would you hold it against a guy with compromised bronchia?… no, of course not.
After Lena’s I spent two nights with David and his wife, Barbara, in their sweet little house in a sweet little village down the sweet little road from Saratoga. I must say, Barbara can really cook and I think she was putting it on pretty good for me. It worked. I swooned. David is quite smart and very affable but he can’t cook. The three of us conversed into the night about anything and everything. At one point, David described his criteria for allowing himself to comfortably enter into extended conversation with others. Let’s call it “The Greenberger Criteria"
1. Must have good manners.
2. Must be a curious person.
3. Must be interested in what I am doing.
If someone goes negative on two of the criteria there is no possibility for meaningful, continued, developing friendship. I think he has a very honest approach here. Of course, it goes both ways.
It was great to spend time with such an engaging couple. David and Barbara are ultra interesting folks. I’m sure I left there with a slightly higher IQ than I had before the stay. I also got plenty of rest, which I sorely needed if I were to return to tenor range for my next performance.
My next gig was in the Adirondacks on Saranac Lake. Linda Fahey set up this one up at a place called Bluseed Studios. Linda worked for Garrison Keilor as his associate producer on A Prairie Home Companion, which is where I met her. The gig was just terrific. The owner, Carol, and the entire bunch were very hospitable; real easy. I was put up in a ski lodge, wined and dined (or in my case as a teetotaler, dined and dined) and best yet, I was treated to a bird watching trip the day after the gig. BTW, I became a tenor again in Lake Saranac.
Lake Saranac, New York
Brian McAllister was our guide the next morning for bird watching (Borealis Nature Tours). He really knew his stuff… all the local haunts, and his hearing was extremely acute. I wanted to find a black-backed woodpecker. I’d made attempts over the years but had never seen one. So that was our target. We walked the forest trails with Brian calling out warblers and other birds by ear before we came upon them. It was a beautiful, sunny day with a slight breeze that kept the black flies away. Every time I would mention the lack of bugs, the other members of the party would say, “Shhussh! You’ll jinx us.” It was a very special day and we all knew it.
Eventually we got to a dead tree with a characteristic black-backed woodpecker nest hole. Brian had seen them there recently. But, alas, no action, so we hiked further up the trail for a while and met up with a couple of birders who everyone but me seemed to know. They traded stories and mentioned how ‘dead’ the birding was… which I guess it was. We all turned around and took another pass at the dead tree with woodpecker nest. No luck again, so we decided to head to another location…. and at just that moment, the male black-backed woodpecker swooped in and landed on the tree next the nest hole. The female had been inside all along. He was flying in for a shift change. The bird was much bigger and more vibrant in color than I thought it would be. The yellow crown was iridescent, something you cannot recreate in a bird book.
The Black-Backed Woodpecker
We finished the morning with some terrific birding in a marsh, the high point being the courtship displays and ‘booming’ of two male bitterns trying to get a little attention from a single, reluctant, female. The sound of the male bittern in this condition is a very loud, “oonck-a-tsoonck!”. At least that’s how my bird book describes it. You sort of have to be there.
I was off to Vermont the next day and across Lake Champlain on the Charlotte-Essex Ferry. From time to time play this little pizza joint in Hinesburg, VT called The Good Times Café. I love the gig… two nights playing and a room in a very nice B&B called “By The Old Mill Stream run by Michelle Fischer. There are huge locust trees on the edge of the property and that Old Mill Stream is right there with that calming sound of the water swooshing by over the rocks. When one lives in LA, one pines for deciduous trees… or is that an oxymoron?
After Vermont I drove to Cambridge to play Club Passim. The gig is very predictable. ‘Old people and their parents’ (M. Mull) come out to see me and we reminisce, but I love it every time.
It was time to take a few days off on Martha’s Vineyard to visit with family and friends and check up on my grandson, Quinlan. 2+ years; such a good boy. On this visit I stayed with my friend, Philip Spalding, at his farm in West Tisbury. Philip and I go way back and we’re both lucky to be alive. The party scene on Martha’s Vineyard in the 60s and 70s was very intense. Oh well, we made it, and here we are. It was great to see him, chat it up and walk the property. The farm is on a peninsula jutting out into West Tisbury Pond, loaded with oysters and crabs and a prime spot for duck hunting in the winter. There is a hay field in the middle of all of this that reminds one of Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”. It’s truly a magnificent place.
The first night I ate dinner with my daughter Dardanella, her husband, Sean, Quinlan and Quinny’s great grandmother, Cecile. An extra treat was the appearance of my daughter, Jenni, up from New York City on a break from the David Byrne tour.
I also spent a little time with my sister, actress Diana Muldaur, who is now a full-time resident at her home in Edgartown. She took our simple family summer home and turned it into a beautiful compound of house and studio. It looks like something out of Better Homes and Gardens.
I also was lucky enough to go fishing with my buddy, Whit Griswold. We jumped in his boat in Menemsha, and headed to the fishing grounds off of the Gay Head cliffs….
The Gay Head Cliffs – Aquinnah, Massachusetts
There is a rip tide that forms off of Gay Head on the outgoing tide. But we missed that tide so we looked around for terns and seagulls working the bait anywhere in the vicinity. A ways off shore we spotted a little action and gunned it ‘til we came up to windward of a flock. Usually, in these cases, the bait is driven to the surface by larger fish feeding on them. We cut the engine and drifted through the feeding frenzy. On the first cast I got on a nice striped bass that I boated. It was 31” so it was a ‘keeper’ and I did just that. Whit caught a fish about the same time, but decided to give it back to the sea.
We ate the bass the next night at a dinner party at Whit Griswold and Laura Wainwright’s house. Dardanella and Sean brought along Quinny. He never stopped exploring the place and asking questions. This is a good sign. A few crazy old friends were added to the mix, and we had our selves a really nice evening. I’ll be returning next September on my way to Europe. Each trip to the Vineyard gets better and better, probably because I appreciate it all as never before.
I flew back to LA after The Vineyard and a few weeks later went up to the Northwest for a little more work. The first gig was in Port Townsend at a place called The Upstage Restaurant. This was a new one on me and it was a real good one too. The proprietor of the establishment, Mark, played the best music before, in between sets and after the show that I’ve ever heard. Man, it put me in the mood. Jimmy Reed…. lots of Jimmy Reed… truth with a backbeat. Muddy, Elmore, the greats.
The audience was hip. The food (salmon) was delicious. The pay was decent. I’ll be back.
The next night I played at a place called Wurlitzer Manor in Gig Harbor, WA. It sits on 13 acres overlooking The Tacoma Narrows on Puget Sound. What a spread. Barbara Hammerman, her husband, Raymond Lavine and her daughter, Amanda, put on concerts in the huge living room of the manor that houses a theatre organ, The Wurlitzer Brooklyn Fox Special… one of five custom built for Fox movie theatres in the 1920s. It has a large console and three sealed rooms which house 3000 pipes. This Baby is Big. It can be played manually, of course, but it can also be fired up with computer software, which is what they do in between sets.
This is the only gig at which a performer can say, “What a thrill this night is for all of us… those who are unfortunate not to have such a large organ.” Hey, it worked on the audience that night.
I played in Portland the next night and stayed at the house of my old buddy, Fritz Richmond. His wife, Cynda, and I have made a very pleasant routine of this since Fritz flew off to Jug Band Heaven. I’ve got the same little room I used to use when Fritz was alive and for some reason, I sleep like a log when I’m there.
The gig was at the newly renovated and enlarged Mississippi Studios. We had a real good crowd and all went just fine. Fritz’s brother, Shamus, and his wife, Robyn, did me the honor of selling my CDs. These guys sell more CDs than anybody I’ve ever seen. I wish I could take them on the road with me. The usual bit goes something like, “Well, if you’re going to buy that one, you’ve got to get this one too, or maybe these two right here to go along with it.” A couple o’ smooth operators.
The next day I flew home, and here I am about to take off again… this time for the East Coast and then off to Germany and Hungary. There should be some good tales to tell when I return. I’ll take along a camera in case I run into any scenes like this in Hungary…
Hungarian Gulash (Gulyásleves) Restaurant
Okay, that’s all for now. Hopefully I’ll do another write up in August before heading back to Europe in September and October. Onward.
Best wishes,
Geoff