Mon, Aug 4th 7:56pm
My Story
I've never made my living by making music, but music has always been in my life. I grew up in Minneapolis, the oldest of four. My father listened to country western radio and he had taught himself how to play the guitar while serving in the Army Air Corps. After the war he bought a beautiful new Gretsch “Synchromatic” archtop guitar. He would play songs that my mom knew and they would sing and then the kids would learn the songs and soon we’d all be singing. Songs like “Shine on Harvest Moon” and “My Blue Heaven” were popular. We sang in the car when we went to the north side to see my cousins or on road trips to visit relatives in the Iron Range in northern Minnesota or in the southeastern area around Caledonia, where my Dad was born.
It seems like I was singing all the time as I grew up, not just at home but at church and then at kid talent shows and charity events. One Saturday morning I sang on the Jimmy Valentine show on KSTP Channel 5 and I won a bicycle. One day when I was 6 Dad came home with a small guitar and told me it was mine. We tuned up the strings and he showed me simple, one finger chords: C, F, G. Dad handed me some sheet music from songs I had heard on the radio. I already knew the tunes, so I just read the words and followed the chords above. It seemed so easy. I learned a bunch of songs that way and kept playing more. For a few years I performed all around the state with a show sponsored by a charity organization that my father belonged to, in hospitals and old folks homes, and the prisons at St. Cloud and Stillwater. The Boy’s Reformatory at Red Wing was an eye-opener as I was performing for a group of kids that were about my same age. They were like me, but they were different too: they were in reform school and I wasn’t.
I first heard Elvis Presley when I was in the fourth grade. I went to the record store at 66th and Penn and bought “Heartbreak Hotel” and “I Was the One”and played them over and over. The same with “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog”. I let my hair grow longer and combed it back in a pathetic Presley imitation. I wished I was old enough to produce sideburns. My parents curbed some of these instincts. Also, my Elvis and Gene Vincent songs were mostly kept at home as rock and roll was still considered low art and had not yet penetrated the rarified world of community fairs and charity shows where I performed. They liked “Cattle Call” and “I Really Don’t Want to Know.” “Davy Crockett” was big for awhile: I learned all 13 (or whatever) verses. I recall that I sneaked in a lesser known Elvis song, “Rip It Up,” into the repertoire and no one complained.
When I was about 12 I stopped doing the shows and became more interested in sports. One day a friend who had a sister at the University of Minnesota played the first Bob Dylan album for me. I listened carefully and found it exciting: so basic, gritty, unvarnished, with lyrics worth listening to, as opposed to the suburbanized country and Tin Pan Alley rock and roll we heard on the radio. I went to a little coffeehouse on Lake Street called Le Zou and I heard a few folk singers. One weekend I attended a church retreat for “youth” around the time of my confirmation, age 14, and there was a young (Lutheran) pastor who had brought a genuine folk-singer to lead a little hootenanny around the campfire (I think his name was John Ylvisaker). We were all sitting around singings songs that had come out of the civil rights movement in the South: “Kumbaya” and “We Shall Overcome,” etc. At some point they started passing around the guitar. When the guitar came to me, I played Dylan’s version of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” (which he acquired from Ric Von Schmidt) with its simple, but arresting little chord progression, moving an open D chord up and down the neck of the guitar. The response was positive and I came away more interested in the folk scene.
I was too young to drive so I hitchhiked across town to Dinkytown, by the University, to hear Koerner, Ray and Glover at the Scholar Coffeehouse. I listened to a lot of folk music, bought guitar strings, harps, and a harmonica holder at the Podium Tobacco shop in Dinkytown. I remembered the controversy when Dylan went electric. A lot of folks were upset, but not me. In one fell swoop Dylan had jolted the old folk scene out if the comfortable little compartment it had built for itself and, on the other hand, forced rock artists to consider the importance of good lyrics.
I went to the University of Minnesota for college and as the Vietnam war escalated, I became involved in the anti-war movement. This led me directly to protest songs by people like Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger. In graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin I worked as a teaching assistant and I got involved in organizing a union. Pretty soon I was doing old labor union songs and writing a few of my own. I worked for the AFL-CIO in Wisconsin and played in a few concerts with Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Joe Glazer, and a wonderful friend from Milwaukee, Larry Penn. I played at picket lines and rallies from one end of the state to the other.
When I moved to LA I began to move my music away from politics and toward what might be called more reflective songs with themes of love and loss, memory and imagination, humor and noir. I wrote about 40 songs over the course of several years. I taped them on my little cassette and then put them into a drawer. I started writing a song called “The Last Chorus of the Last Song” but I couldn’t finish it. I said to myself, “You wrote 40 songs that no one has ever heard. So why write any more?” I stopped writing for a few years.
Then I finally decided to take some of the best songs and make a CD. I met Ben Wendel and we hit it off well. He listened to about 20 of my songs and we selected the ones for the CD. Rehearsals at Local 47 were really fun for me because I had never heard any of my songs with anyone playing except me. The songs are like my little children and I could see them developing before my eyes (and my ears) under the direction of Ben and the skills of Tim, Nate, Billy, and later Greg, Nels, and Julia. Recording at Capitol Records in Hollywood was an experience to remember for me. As we neared the end of the recording sessions, I experienced this strange desire to write new songs. It was as if this first group of songs was going out the door and a new batch needed to be created. Out came “Don’t Touch My Chevy” and “Blues in Your Pocket” and we added them to the album. Now the songs are grown up and they go out in the world and they are on their own now.
It seems like I was singing all the time as I grew up, not just at home but at church and then at kid talent shows and charity events. One Saturday morning I sang on the Jimmy Valentine show on KSTP Channel 5 and I won a bicycle. One day when I was 6 Dad came home with a small guitar and told me it was mine. We tuned up the strings and he showed me simple, one finger chords: C, F, G. Dad handed me some sheet music from songs I had heard on the radio. I already knew the tunes, so I just read the words and followed the chords above. It seemed so easy. I learned a bunch of songs that way and kept playing more. For a few years I performed all around the state with a show sponsored by a charity organization that my father belonged to, in hospitals and old folks homes, and the prisons at St. Cloud and Stillwater. The Boy’s Reformatory at Red Wing was an eye-opener as I was performing for a group of kids that were about my same age. They were like me, but they were different too: they were in reform school and I wasn’t.
I first heard Elvis Presley when I was in the fourth grade. I went to the record store at 66th and Penn and bought “Heartbreak Hotel” and “I Was the One”and played them over and over. The same with “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog”. I let my hair grow longer and combed it back in a pathetic Presley imitation. I wished I was old enough to produce sideburns. My parents curbed some of these instincts. Also, my Elvis and Gene Vincent songs were mostly kept at home as rock and roll was still considered low art and had not yet penetrated the rarified world of community fairs and charity shows where I performed. They liked “Cattle Call” and “I Really Don’t Want to Know.” “Davy Crockett” was big for awhile: I learned all 13 (or whatever) verses. I recall that I sneaked in a lesser known Elvis song, “Rip It Up,” into the repertoire and no one complained.
When I was about 12 I stopped doing the shows and became more interested in sports. One day a friend who had a sister at the University of Minnesota played the first Bob Dylan album for me. I listened carefully and found it exciting: so basic, gritty, unvarnished, with lyrics worth listening to, as opposed to the suburbanized country and Tin Pan Alley rock and roll we heard on the radio. I went to a little coffeehouse on Lake Street called Le Zou and I heard a few folk singers. One weekend I attended a church retreat for “youth” around the time of my confirmation, age 14, and there was a young (Lutheran) pastor who had brought a genuine folk-singer to lead a little hootenanny around the campfire (I think his name was John Ylvisaker). We were all sitting around singings songs that had come out of the civil rights movement in the South: “Kumbaya” and “We Shall Overcome,” etc. At some point they started passing around the guitar. When the guitar came to me, I played Dylan’s version of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” (which he acquired from Ric Von Schmidt) with its simple, but arresting little chord progression, moving an open D chord up and down the neck of the guitar. The response was positive and I came away more interested in the folk scene.
I was too young to drive so I hitchhiked across town to Dinkytown, by the University, to hear Koerner, Ray and Glover at the Scholar Coffeehouse. I listened to a lot of folk music, bought guitar strings, harps, and a harmonica holder at the Podium Tobacco shop in Dinkytown. I remembered the controversy when Dylan went electric. A lot of folks were upset, but not me. In one fell swoop Dylan had jolted the old folk scene out if the comfortable little compartment it had built for itself and, on the other hand, forced rock artists to consider the importance of good lyrics.
I went to the University of Minnesota for college and as the Vietnam war escalated, I became involved in the anti-war movement. This led me directly to protest songs by people like Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger. In graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin I worked as a teaching assistant and I got involved in organizing a union. Pretty soon I was doing old labor union songs and writing a few of my own. I worked for the AFL-CIO in Wisconsin and played in a few concerts with Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Joe Glazer, and a wonderful friend from Milwaukee, Larry Penn. I played at picket lines and rallies from one end of the state to the other.
When I moved to LA I began to move my music away from politics and toward what might be called more reflective songs with themes of love and loss, memory and imagination, humor and noir. I wrote about 40 songs over the course of several years. I taped them on my little cassette and then put them into a drawer. I started writing a song called “The Last Chorus of the Last Song” but I couldn’t finish it. I said to myself, “You wrote 40 songs that no one has ever heard. So why write any more?” I stopped writing for a few years.
Then I finally decided to take some of the best songs and make a CD. I met Ben Wendel and we hit it off well. He listened to about 20 of my songs and we selected the ones for the CD. Rehearsals at Local 47 were really fun for me because I had never heard any of my songs with anyone playing except me. The songs are like my little children and I could see them developing before my eyes (and my ears) under the direction of Ben and the skills of Tim, Nate, Billy, and later Greg, Nels, and Julia. Recording at Capitol Records in Hollywood was an experience to remember for me. As we neared the end of the recording sessions, I experienced this strange desire to write new songs. It was as if this first group of songs was going out the door and a new batch needed to be created. Out came “Don’t Touch My Chevy” and “Blues in Your Pocket” and we added them to the album. Now the songs are grown up and they go out in the world and they are on their own now.