Category Archives: My Back Pages

Memories of 1975…Tom Russell, Norman Blake and Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen 75

The horses are in the barn, the chickens in the coop, the cat is laying on my toes and the glow of the fireplace makes this room seem like an old time moving picture as the shadow of the flames dance across the walls and ceilings. While the talking heads spent the last several days whipping up everyone into a frenzy with their warnings of the impending blizzard, here in the Hudson Valley we awoke this morning to find maybe a foot of snow dusting the meadows…merely a freckle on the face of a red headed girl. Oh it’s indeed cold and windy as promised, which makes me feel not too guilty as I do some inside chores while listening to both old and new music, and taking the time to let my thoughts and memories spill out across this electric screen.

The year was 1975, and I was a twenty three year old purveyor of recorded music in the form of singles, albums and eight tracks. In my light blue VW Super Beetle I traversed the turnpikes and back roads throughout Eastern Pennsylvania, going from town to town with a thick binder of catalogs that offered for sale roughly thirty-five per cent of all recorded music. It was a time when independent distributors ruled the airwaves and sales charts, unknowingly just four years away from the shift to a corporate controlled American art form.

Allentown, Scranton, Williamsport, Lock Haven, Lancaster, Reading. These were coal and steel towns standing on the edge of the cliff, still surviving on their last gasp of breath. Tom Russell from California wrote a song about those days, and I often find myself listening to it at times like these.

In the little town of Bethlehem along the banks of Monocacy Creek in the Lehigh Valley, there was a record store called Renaissance Music and a fellow who ran it named John helped me get a handle on the Flying Fish and Rounder titles I was selling. Even forty years ago both of these labels offered a large repertoire of traditional American music and it was John who helped guide me through a world of great bluegrass and string bands, Delta blues musicians, the hammered dulcimer players and Welsh folk music. Being a guitar player transitioning from electric to acoustic music, John thought I might like this new fellow who had just released one or two albums by the name of Norman Blake.

If you’re reading this you probably don’t need me to tell you about Norman, nor his spouse and musical partner Nancy. If you’d like some education, just enter his name into “The Google” and you can spend a day or two reading his credits and sampling his work. I remember seeing these two perform at an outdoor venue in Ambler, and sitting on the lawn at his feet just staring at his left hand. With fingers that flew effortlessly across the fretboard, and vocals that took me back to some nineteenth century porch in Georgia, I thought he was the most amazing guitarist I’d ever seen.

In 2006 when he and Nancy released Back Home to Sulphur Springs a publicist whispered in my ear an ominous message that “this will be the last record they’ll ever make”. Hardly. At least five more have come out since then, and most recently Devon over at Hearth Music sent me Norman’s latest recording of all self-written songs. His first of such in thirty years.The voice has grown tired and at times a bit shaky, but the guitar playing is simply as traditionally-innovative as always. Guess I could drop in a sample here if I was trying to sell it to you, but frankly I’m partial to this older clip with Nancy.

Since it seems as if today I’m stuck in this time bubble of forty years ago, let us take a moment to talk about Bruce. There was a disc jockey back in Philadelphia by the name of Ed Sciaky who worked at a number of local radio stations, but is mostly known from his time (twice actually) at WMMR-FM. Along with promoting the hell out of Billy Joel’s Cold Spring Harbor album, his real legacy is the role he played in exposing Springsteen to an audience beyond just Freehold and Asbury.

A man schooled in mathematics and self taught in musicology, his shows were like doctoral thesis on the origin of the songs and artists we listened to back then. I can still hear his deep voice that he kept soft as it worked its way through the speakers of my car radio late at night. The sadness came when diabetes caused his right foot to be amputated in 2002. Two years later while in Manhattan with his wife, he collapsed while on the sidewalk outside Penn Station and died at age fifty-five from a massive heart attack.

He and Bruce come to mind because the other day I found myself in possession of a digitized soundboard recording (we used to call these bootlegs) from Philly’s Tower Theater on December 31, 1975. It was the last of a multi-night run, and although for decades the tapes have been reproduced, sold and traded among fans, a different mix from Sciaky’s collection is now in circulation. I like the name of this album…Last Tango in Philly…and you can find more than one version from start to finish on You Tube.

While during this time frame Bruce was in the midst of his Born to Run tour, the track list includes a few oddities, including the oft-bootlegged “Mountain of Love” and “Does The Bus Stop At 82nd Street”. Seeing that it’s the official beginning of our New York winter, here’s a 1978 version of one of my favorite tracks, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out”. Until we meet again…

Amanda Petrusich and A 78RPM Groovy Kind of Love

This past Christmas I bought my oldest son a few books of the non-digital variety. One was a Johnny Carson biography, another was about a topless cellist I once saw perform in a Philadelphia park, and the third was Amanda Petrusich’s latest, “Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records”.

Although he thanked me, when I saw him slightly push Amanda’s book to the edge of the table I suspected he had already read it. And he had. Which was fine with me, since I was going to borrow it anyway. I loved her previous book, a road trip journal which obviously laid the groundwork for the author’s long- title fetish, “It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways and the Search for American Music”. It’s a great read for any roots music fan, and they are both available from Amazon, along with her first inappropriately short-titled Nick Drake book “Pink Moon”.

Yesterday I read the first chapter of Do Not Sell, and I’m already hooked on the storyline and her observations. A veteran music writer with an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia and currently a teacher at NYU’s Gallatin University, Amanda has a way of articulating feelings and thoughts on music that resonate with my own connection to consumption.

Like many people in the business of music, my own background in distribution, retail, working with labels and as a serial-blogger has allowed me virtually unlimited free music for most of my adult life. It’s been great to have access. But it also messes with your head. These days, with just a little skill in technology and web-surfing, everyone can find a song or album that can be “acquired and judged in the time it takes to eat a cheese sandwich”.

Amanda speaks to the acquisition of free music, in terms of the perception and value of it, like this:

“It’s reductive to suggest that the availability of free or nearly free music-and the concurrent switch, for most of the population, from music as object to music as code-has inexorably altered our relationship with sound, and I don’t actually believe that the emotional circuitry that allows us to love and require a bit of music is dependent on what it feels like in our hands. But I do think that the ways in which we attain art at least partially dictate the ways in which we ultimately allow ourselves to own it.”

With such unlimited and easy access to music, and especially with new releases flooding the marketplace (if you can still call it that) to the tune of well over 100,000 albums per year, I’ve experienced my own listening habits change from when I was a kid who visited ten record stores every Saturday and came home juggling bags of 45’s and albums. For the next week I’d sit alone in my bedroom and listen to everything, staring at the cover art and reading the liner notes…a term soon to be as extinct as a tyrannosaurus rex. And it took me someplace that I have long ago left. It was that obsessive compulsion to seek out and discover the new and unknown that gave me the passion to want more. Once I could just have it, I became a little bored, and jaded. Fast forward to 2015.

In describing her own transition from consumer-collector to critic, Amanda nails it:

“Unless I was being paid to professionally render my opinion, I listened to everything for three or seven or nine minutes and moved on. I was overwhelmed and underinvested. Some days, music itself seemed like a nasty postmodern experiment in which public discussion eclipsed everything else, and art was measured only by the amount of chatter it incited. Writing and publishing felt futile, like tossing a meticulously prepared pork chop to a bulldog, then watching him devour it, throw it up and start eating something else.”

Overwhelmed and underinvested. And this, my friends, is only page three. What follows is the story of those who still hunt, stalk and collect…in this case, the most elusive 78 rpm recordings ever released. Leafing through the pages, I can’t wait to read this book. And so I won’t.

Visit Amanda’s website for some great music and links to other writing.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com .

Poetry At The Intersection of Miller and Hank

As this year begins, America has lost Miller Williams. The husband of Jordan, and father to Karyn, Robert and Lucinda, he was a poet, editor, critic and translator with over thirty books to his credit. In his biography published on the Poetry Foundation website, they posted that his work was known ‘for its gritty realism as much as for its musicality. Equally comfortable in formal and free verse, Williams wrote poems grounded in the material of American life, frequently using dialogue and dramatic monologue to capture the pitch and tone of American voices.’

For someone who spent his life in academia, teaching at several institutions before joining the faculty at the University of Arkansas in 1970, he seemed most comfortable writing in a style that was both accessible and captured a rhythmic quality. This unattributed quote about himself is one he seemed to enjoy: ‘Miller Williams is the Hank Williams of American poetry. While his poetry is taught at Princeton and Harvard, it’s read and understood by squirrel hunters and taxi drivers.’

Miller passed away on January 1. It was the same date that Hank died fifty-two years earlier, and what I find most interesting is the story of how the two men met. In March 2013, Oxford American published an interview with Miller by Jackson Meazle, and this is an excerpt:

Q: You have written somewhat extensively in argument for rhyme and meter in poetry. How has music informed your work? Arkansas, like many Southern states, has such a rich musical heritage. Has music always been of interest to you and your work?

MW: I do believe that poetry is more satisfying when it has a pattern similar to those of songs. I wish that I could sing well, as I’m sure you know my daughter Lucinda does, and writes her own songs. Hank Williams (no kinship there) told me that since he often wrote his lyrics months before he set them to music, they spent those months as sort-of poems. I think the kinship is real.

Q: Did you ever meet Hank Williams in person?

MW: Yes, [in 1952] I was on the faculty of McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he had a concert there. I stepped onstage when he and his band were putting their instruments away and when he glanced at me I said, “Mr. Williams, my name is Williams and I’d be honored to buy you a beer.”

To my surprise, he asked me where we could get one. I said there was a gas station about a block away where we could sit and drink a couple. (You may not be aware that gas stations used to have bars.) He asked me to tell his bus driver exactly where it was and then he joined me.

When he ordered his beer, I ordered a glass of wine, because this was my first year on a college faculty and it seemed the appropriate thing to do. We sat and chatted for a little over an hour. When he ordered another beer he asked me about my family. I told him that I was married and that we were looking forward to the birth of our first child in about a month.

He asked me what I did with my days and I told him that I taught biology at McNeese and that when I was home I wrote poems. He smiled and told me that he had written lots of poems. When I said, “Hey—you write songs!” he said, “Yeah, but it usually takes me a long time. I might write the words in January and the music six or eight months later; until I do, what I’ve got is a poem.”

Then his driver showed up, and as he stood up to leave he leaned over, put his palm on my shoulder, and said, “You ought to drink beer, Williams, ’cause you got a beer-drinkin’ soul.”

He died the first day of the following year. When Lucinda was born I wanted to tell her about our meeting, but I waited until she was onstage herself. Not very long ago, she was asked to set to music words that he had left to themselves when he died. This almost redefines coincidence.

“Compassion” is a poem by Miller that was published in 1997. Should the words be familiar, it might be from the song of the same name that Lucinda released this year. The poem is rather short, and the song speaks volumes.

Have compassion for everyone you meet,

even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,

bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign

of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.

You do not know what wars are going on

down there where the spirit meets the bone.

Don Julin: The Mandolin Master From Michigan

Don Julin

Earlier this year Devon Leger over at Hearth Music sent out an email blast touting a new release he was working. It was the debut album from an old-time music duo by the name of Billy Strings and Don Julin from somewhere other than Seattle, Austin or Brooklyn. I really liked the album, and was quite impressed with some of the videos I found on the internet. In fact, I ended up sharing one recently in my highly anticipated annual (ok…this was the first year) Lazy Man’s Guide to My Favorite Albums of 2014.

In early November I got a chance to see these guys open for David Grisman and Del McCoury at the City Winery in New York. From the opening notes, their set decimated the room and left the audience dazed and staggering. And not from over-consumption of the white Zinfandel. While many of their videos seem a bit laid back, in front of an audience Billy channels some alternative world version of Doc Watson and Don attacks his instrument like the fury unleashed from a metal band but with the delicate hand of a fine line artist.

The energy these two men bring to the stage, never mind the mastery of their craft and a catalog of songs that seems as if it comes up from a bottomless well, makes the heart race and the brain freeze. I think on several occasions I had to make a point to lift up my chin to shut my mouth, because it was a jaw dropping set. Although I knew Billy was young with Don being the older of the two, at times it was hard to tell which was which. I even developed this little theory that the duo was really a ‘put on’…that Don was really in his twenties but wearing makeup, fake beard and a costume, and Billy had one of those rubber masks to hide his true age and identity.

The day after the show I reached out to Don and asked if I he wouldn’t mind doing a new fangled type of interview. Meaning, we traded emails and finally settled on some questions that I’d be able to ask and he’d write a reply to. Cut and paste journalism. Below is the outcome, and I think the story of the two men coming together, along with Don’s personal journey, makes for a very interesting read.

Q. Far from Appalachia and based in upper-Michigan, how did you discover the mandolin and eventually get into the bluegrass/old-time world? Or less politely, where the hell did Don Julin come from? And were you able earn a living while raising a family by staying local, or did you need to get out on the road?

A: I started playing mandolin in 1979 at the age of 19 after hearing the first DGQ (David Grisman Quintet) album. I started playing a few open mics and coffee house type gigs and realized that I really liked playing live music in front of an audience. At the same time, I was enrolled in the local community college studying music theory. I became friends with a couple classmates and we started jamming a bit in our free time. In Traverse City Michigan we had, and still do have this great college radio station (WNMC) that at that time featured a variety of new music including reggae, ska, punk, avant-garde jazz, etc. We were all attracted to that sound so we started a band called the Microtones. It realized that my favorite instrument may not be well suited for this music so I went to the local music store and bought a Fender Stratocaster. We played some dances and benefits and eventually got good enough to record two 45’s and take the band on the road playing college bars around the Midwest for a few years.

Around 1988 I decided to settle down, get married, and start a family; which meant playing gigs close to home, running a small demo recording studio, doing some live mixing for other bands and any other form of music related activity that could generate some income. Remember, I was about to become a daddy and them diapers can be expensive. It was that same time, that I put down the Strat and picked the mandolin back up. I started gigging around town playing any type of music I could on the mandolin, eventually getting into electric mandolins so I could play with louder electric bands and jazz combos with drums and horns. I started giving mandolin lessons at a local music store to help make ends meet and found that I enjoyed it quite a bit. For the most part I stayed pretty close to home for 24 years while my kids were growing up.

A few years ago William Apostol (AKA Billy Strings) moved to Traverse City and started getting some attention. He has a large repertoire of traditional bluegrass songs and knows the Doc Watson style better than anyone I had ever played with. This gave me a chance to play some of the music that first attracted me to the mandolin. I have had a great time making the transformation from the eclectic mandolin guy that could be seen playing Bob Marley, Frank Zappa, Antonio Carlos Jobim or Miles Davis, to a bluegrass mandolin player trying to incorporate the styles of Bill Monroe, Frank Wakefield, David Grisman, and all of the great bluegrass mandolin players. What I found is that not only is the mandolin built for bluegrass, but bluegrass is built for the mandolin.

Q: When I plugged your name into a Google search, it came up with what seems like a million hits for a book called Mandolins for Dummies, which came out in 2012 and has great reviews. I also found a You Tube video shot at some festival of you performing with David Grisman, and the two of you together are pretty captivating. Had you met before that, and can you share about about your book?

A: The video of Dawg and I was actually shot at the 2011 Mandolin Symposium in Santa Cruz California. I first attended the Mandolin Symposium in 2009 as a student and was invited back in 2011 to assist by leading the swing/jazz jam sessions held nightly after the faculty concerts. That is where I became friends with many of my mandolin heroes including Dawg, Mike Marshall, Andy Statman, Don Stiernberg, and others.

In 2011 I was approached by Wiley publishing about the possibility of authoring Mandolin For Dummies. After a fairly long qualifying process they offered me a contract on the book. Apparently I had the skill set they were looking for. I could play a variety of music on the mandolin, had some teaching experience, could produce standard notation and tablature, had a small studio in my basement were the audio tracks could be recorded, and knew a lot of top level pros that I could go to for specific techniques or advice if needed. I actually ended up reaching out to many of the worlds best mandolin players for specific techniques.

There is a chapter on Dawg music which David personally proof read and approved, a chapter on blues mandolin which Rich DelGrosso contributed, a chapter on Irish mandolin which has some great tips and techniques as shown by Marla Fibish, and a bluegrass chapter with some exercises from Mike Compton. The book has been successful enough for Wiley to offer a contract on a second, book entitled Mandolin Exercises For Dummies, which was finished and released earlier this year.

Q: When I got to see you onstage with Billy Strange, whom I believe is in his early twenties, the first thought I seriously had was that you both might be acting…or playing roles in a play. He sounds older than his age, and you seem younger than your bio. Can you clear that up…just how old are you guys and how did you hook up as a duo?

A: I am 54 years old and Billy is 22, which proves that music is really a global language that transcends things like age. We do have different interests off stage but we both share the same intense love of music. We met simply because we live in the same town. Billy is an amazing musician and can play many years beyond is age, but offstage he is clearly a young guy having all the fun that he should be having at that age. His youthful energy most likely does keep me a bit younger and maybe my experience mellows him out a bit. It seems to be a good match on and off the stage.

Q: Based on the audience reaction and some glowing reviews I’ve read for the album, it feels like the two of you are about to really take off. Is this something you guys did as a one-off project, or are you committed to riding it out as duo? I see you’ve signed with a booking agent, which indicates to me you’re in for the long haul. If so, is this the first time for you to commit to traveling on the circuit, or have you done it previously in another incarnation?

A: We are both committed to taking this as far as we can. We recently signed with a great booking agency and are currently talking to several managers. It started out as a local project to play a few gigs around town and has turned into a full time touring operation. Before I had kids I was traveling on the road with the Microtones but we stayed primarily in the Midwest. Now that my kids are grown, I am free to travel more so this opportunity came at the perfect time for me.

Q: From my observation sitting in the audience, you and Billy offered up energy and intensity that really connected from the first note. I love duos, and yours is one of the better I’ve come across. How has the reaction been on your other gigs?

A: You saw it! It is like that night after night. We feel very lucky and sometimes even question the enthusiasm. We just go up on stage and do what comes naturally.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Americana and Roots Music Videos: December 2014

Pixabay License

I was reminded this morning as I went out to shop at our local market that the year is winding down. How did I know? Because there was a lonely trombonist standing outside the door playing a dirge-like version of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in one/one time, and he managed to hit every single note about a half-tone flat. It made me want to write a check for a thousand dollars and drop it into the red kettle just to get him to stop.

The second thought I had was a reminder to myself…it is damn hard to make good music. I’ve not seen the stats from the past year but if they’re close to the year before, musicians have released about 120,000 albums….or about a million new songs. Only about a thousand albums will be heard (via stream or purchase) more than a thousand times, and with the exception of Taylor Swift and a handful of others who will get a couple million of listens, the rest will likely be distributed to friends and families and house concert attendes…making for a wonderful memory in a couple of decades.

I am not your everyday music consumer, and don’t pretend to be. I’ll rarely write a review, tend to wiggle-waggle back and forth between seeking out something new, or spending months pursuing 78s of long forgotten string bands or jazz bands that came and went in a blink of an eye. One night every two weeks I’ll Spotify a couple dozen new releases, maybe hop on over to You Tube, purchase and download something of interest or more likely than not, just go to sleep.

And so it is against that backdrop that I offer up my before-the-end-of-the-year fast and easy look at what albums caught my ears this year. There is no numerical list, no ranking, no convoluted point system nor any claim that this is any way or shape definitive. In fact, before I’ve even finished posting a track or video from each of the albums that struck something special inside me, I’m sure I’ll realize that I’ve forgotten one, or two, or three.

I’m going to kick it off with a duo from Traverse City Michigan who are getting ready to blow up in a huge way judging from a recent sighting I had of them opening for Del and Dawg. Billy Strings is only in his early twenties, and Don Julin is in his fifties. And we’re off…

Rosanne Cash’s album came out last January, and lets hope that is isn’t lost or forgotten to the real-deal reviewers’ lists. Here she is with her husband doing a ‘one mic, one take’ at the Capitol Record’s studio.

I know very little about the album that came out earlier in the year from the Abramson Singers, and this video was shot in 2013; but the song was on the disc and is one of my favorites.

A string band trio whom I’ve seen a few times now, that also are beginning to break big on the touring circuit. I love the Stray Birds.

We shared a bucket of naked chicken wings a few weeks ago and talked about Gene Autry. I’ve seen John perform five times in the last six months, and have taken to calling him (although not to his face) Billy Joel Elton John Fullbright. He is the New Piano Man.

Best blues album hands down from two brothers that used to be in a band called the Blasters. If you get a chance to see them live, they’ve got some great stories about growing up in Downey California and cruising over to Whittier Boulevard to hang with some of the old masters.

Somebody told me that this new double album from Lucinda somehow didn’t make the American Songwriter end of the year list. Really? This album is so rich and deep with amazing lyrics and music that I gotta put on one of those rubber overalls that fly fisherman wear just to listen to it.

In all candor, I have no idea who this next band is. But I sure liked their album. I Draw Slow. Like me. I Move Slow.

And finally, if either Scientology scared you off or you have some notion that Beck isn’t one of the best artists making music today, think again. “Morning Phase” is…get ready…I never admit to things like this…my favorite album of the year. And I’ve chosen the least Americana/roots song to share with you. Trust me…go listen to the whole enchilada.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Tryin’ to Find a Hero in a Haystack

Haystack_-_geograph.org.uk_-_462934 You should know that this first paragraph was written after I wrote what follows below. So that you don’t scratch your head and wonder what the hell I may be thinking about posting this on a website devoted to the topic of roots music, the idea for this piece actually began to germinate two weeks ago as I sat beside my ninety-three year old mother and watched a local bluegrass band perform. If you can just bare with me, I’ll get back to the topic of music shortly.

Growing old seems often be paired up with the notion of wisdom, as if simply making it through another day and another year will give you greater insight and context. Forgive me for not putting some of these quotations in quotes, or bothering to cite their source, but generally this is how it’s been described by those who have a way with words:

Wisdom begins at the end. He who devotes sixteen hours a day to hard study may become at sixty as wise as he thought himself at twenty. The years teach much which the days never knew. The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. How can you be a sage if you’re pretty? You can’t get your wizard papers without wrinkles.

For myself as the years have tumbled by, wisdom seems to have eluded me. In it’s place has crept cynicism. And it’s something that I work hard to chase away every single moment, because I don’t think it’s a very healthy state to live in. But truth be told, it’s hard to escape.

As I watched on my television the town of Ferguson Missouri begin to burn and saw the tear gas canisters being hurled back and forth between the crowd and the police as if they were simply having a friendly game of catch, my first thought was of a smiling Bill Cosby. Out of the headlines in time for the holidays, his past misdeeds slithering back under the rock that they had crawled out from the week before. Hey hey hey. Hello cynicism. Hello in there.

I’ve been thinking recently about this notion of heroes; a person who is admired for great or brave acts or fine qualities. Our initial thoughts when we talk about such people are often tied into some sort of celebrity or accomplishment. And when I was younger, it seemed that they were easier to find. Or at the very least, their status endured over time.

Today we are able to lift the veil in record time, discovering the lies and deception behind the myths we create. From Pee Wee Herman to Tiger Woods, OJ Simpson to Oscar Pistorius, Gary Hart to Larry Craig…and it’s not only people that have disappointed us. I used to trust the newsmen and the newspapers, like Walter Cronkite and the New York Times. But today we have Fox News, which has begat a new CNN…twenty four hours of non-stop babble from experts and pundits who know nothing more than you or me, but who are simply there to incite, titillate and entertain. After centuries, we seem no more wiser…the story of feeding lions (be it real or imagined) comes to mind.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, let me share a more upbeat thought I had recently.

When people grow older and become unable to take care of themselves for whatever the reasons, a nursing home (or some euphemism that seems much more palatable to their family) often becomes the last stop. My own mother is now living in such a place; a ‘home for the aged’ they call it. There are residents who are alert and active, and those who are not. It sits on the banks of the Hudson River, with a beautiful view of Manhattan to the south, and there is a huge lawn with benches that sits empty most of the year.

The minutes and hours and days roll along slowly. Meals seem to be the high points of the day. Much of the conversation centers around what was last eaten, and what will be served next. And there are activities for those who choose to partake. Bingo is the mainstay, but you can go to the library to hear a lecture, the art center to paint, make jewelery or do some sort of craft, check your email in the computer room, exercise or just watch television.

Every Sunday at two there is a concert.

Recently while visiting, I tagged along downstairs with my mom to see a local bluegrass band. They were probably about my age, and I’d venture to guess that they don’t have a record deal, aren’t heard on the radio and rarely perform outside of venues such as this. But they were talented and entertaining, and it made me wonder. How many musicians are there who live in our communities do this sort of thing? The answer is…more than I could ever have imagined.

I plugged this into a Google search: ‘local musicians who play at nursing homes’...and got 31,300,000 results. Sifting though the pages, I found news stories and profiles of so many musicians that I was astounded. Many are people you might know of, having seen them perform or heard them on records from another time. Most are unknown; from that local bluegrass band I enjoyed to wannabe rock n’ rollers, jazz players, dinner theater singers, symphonic and classical musicians. And there is a common theme among all of them.

Meet Barry Dye from Bowling Green Kentucky.

Out in California, there is a fellow by the name of Gary Gamponia who heads up a group of musicians under the name of Pay It Forward Volunteer Band. They’ve been around almost five years, playing exclusively in skilled nursing homes. With a rotating roster of 140 musicians in Los Angeles alone, they’ve got branches in other cities as well.

In an article I found on a website called McKnight’s, Gamponia told the reporter that ‘We’re out there for that 90-year-old lady who’s been living there for three years, whose husband is dead and has very little to live for. These are people who built this country after the Great Depression, the people who defeated fascism and kept this country a democracy. When we do a show, we say that this is our way of saying thank you to that generation. We want to thank all the people who came before us.’

Keeping that in mind, this particular organization focuses their music on the thirties through the fifties. For the ‘younger residents’, maybe they’ll throw in a Sinatra classic. In twenty years, if you or I are the ones sitting there on a Sunday afternoon, wonder what we’ll want to hear?

Should you be a musician yourself, and think that maybe you’d like to donate some time to play for a nursing home or hospital, there is no shortage of groups that can help you connect. Musicians On Call has branches in fifteen cities, many of the websites that hook people up for jams feature a volunteer section, and local musician unions often are involved within the community.

In a world where it’s easy to become enveloped in cynicism, and where heroes seem hard to find, I’m glad to have discovered something I didn’t know about, or maybe just took for granted. To the thousands of musicians out there who take the time to share their talents to those who are easily forgotten…you are all heroes in my book.

To close it out, the Merry Musicians of Caloundra in Queensland are an amazing group of talented older Australians with an average age of 79. They play at nursing homes, retirement villages, and seniors events. They are “young at heart” and they will perform wherever there is a “free cup of tea and a willing audience.” Stella, the leader of the group is nearing 90 and as piano player Ted says “we’re just spring chickens”.

That Garth Brooks’ Video

GARTH On the cell phone video, shot in Minneapolis and seen by over five million people in just five days, you first get a glimpse of the woman holding up the sign projected on a huge screen behind the drummer. It can be seen exactly at the 1:16 mark, and the words are written all in upper case letters. The crowd cheers. At 1:55 she is seen standing at the edge of the stage. After that…well…I posted it at the bottom. You can go watch it to see what happens.

Her name is Teresa Shaw. She has stage three breast cancer.

‘CHEMO THIS MORNING. GARTH TONIGHT. ENJOYING THE DANCE.’

I first met Garth Brooks in a nondescript three-story glass office building in Burbank California, maybe eight or nine months after his first album had been released in April 1989. Outside of the fact he was wearing Wranglers instead of Levis, he looked and talked like any other twenty nine year old musician trying to to catch a break in the music business. But from that first meeting, you knew he was different.

Very interested in what we did in that office, he wandered around, introduced himself to everybody and asked a lot of questions. We were the unit of Capitol-EMI Music that made sure his albums were on the shelves, displayed, advertised, promoted and available for purchase. For most musicians, this part of the music industry was a drag, best left to the bean counters. But not for this marketing major from Oklahoma. He soaked it up.

Although his first single had landed in the top ten on the country charts, and another was making it’s way to number one, we’re talking about country music twenty-five years ago. Which is to say, outside of certain pockets in the South and Texas, and small rural towns where a discount retailer named Walmart was starting to build these giant buildings that would soon devastate Main Street, country music was small potatoes. Except for a few cowboys like George Strait and mostly crossover pop artists, country meant low sales and little interest.

‘CHEMO THIS MORNING. GARTH TONIGHT. ENJOYING THE DANCE.’

By the Spring of 1990, Garth was riding high on country radio with his third charting single and in the midst of it all, Capitol-Nashville fired all of their executives and replaced them with the team who had run MCA Records. I don’t know whether or not it was already in the works or if it was the new folks’ idea, but someone decided to put out a fourth single accompanied by a video. It was called “The Dance”.

The last track on the album, Garth had heard it sung by the co-author, Tony Arcata at an open mic a year or so earlier in Nashville. He told Tony that if he ever got a label deal, he’d record it. Garth was working at a store selling boots at the time, and Tony loaded trucks for UPS.

Inspired by the movie Peggy Sue Gets Married…yeah, really…I’ve always thought it is a beautifully crafted song…but it was the video featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, the astronauts from the space shuttle Challenger , John Wayne and others who lost their lives that broke it wide open and propelled Garth and as a by-product, modern country music itself, to where it is today. For better or worse.

‘CHEMO THIS MORNING. GARTH TONIGHT. ENJOYING THE DANCE.’

For a moment, let’s put aside all the negative feelings that the entire Nashville corporate music machine stirs up, especially for people like us who prefer something we call roots music. But there is truth in that for almost everything wrong with country music today, you can point the finger at Garth Brooks.

He replaced the importance of recorded music with grand scripted and choreographed concert performances on a scale not ever seen by country music fans. (Not surprising, his favorite band growing up was Kiss.) The sales and marketing of his music are tied deeply with the growth of Walmart, up to the point where eventually they became the only place you could buy his music. And as he developed into a shrewd businessman, he became a ruthless negotiator that caused many to bristle, and others to lose their jobs.

Yet…and always…there is another side.

‘CHEMO THIS MORNING. GARTH TONIGHT. ENJOYING THE DANCE.’

Throughout my time when I would get to work with and see him on occasion, which stretched into 1996 and was prior to the infamous Chris Gaines experiment, I got to know a man of extraordinary talent and generosity who genuinely cared for people. Not just limited to those who could help him climb the ladder, but he’d talk to people….fans, friends, business folks, everyone…for hours and hours about themselves, their dreams, their families, fears and love. Looking into their eyes and connecting on a human level? It’s a quality that rarely will accompany celebrity and fame.

For me, it wasn’t very surprising when he decided to pack up the tent and move back to Oklahoma in order to spend time raising his kids. I’d been with him in the days right after the birth of his first and second daughters, and there was a sense of love and pride and responsibility that just seemed to pour out of him. People change, but core values are ingrained. And such has been the way I’ve tried to see Garth. The man retired for a dozen years, and now he’s back; embarking on a world tour and ready to release new music.

‘CHEMO THIS MORNING. GARTH TONIGHT. ENJOYING THE DANCE.’

I cry easily. Seriously, it doesn’t take very much for me to choke up. It could be the ending of a film, a song lyric, a passage in a book, a news story on television, old memories, thoughts about the future or even something as crazy as a scene from a reality show like Dog the Bounty Hunter or Jerseylicious. The lyrics to “The Dance” have always made me cry. Just the opening piano piece is enough to get my body to shake…but it’s the chorus that gets me every time:

And now I’m glad I didn’t know

The way it all would end, the way it all would go.

Our lives are better left to chance

I could have missed the pain, but I’d have had to miss the dance.

‘CHEMO THIS MORNING. GARTH TONIGHT. ENJOYING THE DANCE.’

Go ahead….if you haven’t yet, just do it. Make it full-screen so you can see what happens as he sits down on the edge of the stage. Hear what he says as he gets ready to leave the hall. Just so you know, Garth lost his mother and sister to cancer. As he pointed to and screamed at Teresa Shaw in front of the thousands of people…‘you go and kick cancer’s ass.”

I’ve cried every time I watch this. Maybe you will too. Maybe not.