Fifty Years Entry #8

August 23, 2024

In July or August of 1974, my bluegrass buddy Peter Bachman asked if I wanted to go to the Tin Pan Alley, a little nightclub in downtown Wheeling, to see the Hutchison Brothers play. They had a reputation in the local bluegrass community, but I’d never met them. Onstage that night, John (JD) on guitar and Robert (Zeke) Hutchison on banjo, with brother-in-law Tim (Rock) Sparkman on upright bass, played two sets of fiery traditional bluegrass. I heard Bill Monroe and Stanley Brothers songs, trio and brother duet harmonies, and uptempo instrumentals. They were charmingly animated, sang on the same vocal mic, and stamped the music with their own personalities. Here were some Hip-billies from Belmont County Ohio, not much older than me, who really updated Bluegrass without losing a drop of its essence. Peter had brought his mandolin and I had my fiddle, and we were invited to sit in. I’d woodshedded with the fiddle for the past nine months and was able to keep up with them on a few tunes – I’m pretty sure we played “Turkey in the Straw” and “Sailors Hornpipe”. A week or so later, our mutual friends Tom White and Russ Shelton hosted a jam at a place they’d rented by the banks for Big Wheeling Creek. I brought my fiddle and guitar and when asked to sing a song, I sang the Jimmie Rodgers song “Peach Pickin’ Time In Georgia”, which I’d learned from Merle Haggard’s tribute to Rodgers “Same Train, a Different Time”. I got to know JD and Zeke a little more over the next few weeks and a lifelong friendship was born.

Before I left for Colorado in early September, I visited with JD at his parents’ house in Barnesville, Ohio several times. I met his mother Emma Jane, and his fiddling father JW, who JD and Zeke called “the Seed”. JD encouraged me to stay with the music, and we talked a lot about Clarence White, Django Reinhardt, and prewar guitars. I told JD that I was getting ready to relocate to Boulder, and he told me I needed to look up his friend Nugget who would be moving there soon as well. He said he was “a little gem” who was making mandolins. The Hutchisons and Sparkman had just returned from a short residency in San Francisco’s East Bay. JD, who the year before had convinced Michael Kemnizter that he should make mandolins and given him the nickname Nugget, invited him along on their California adventure.

At the time, Nugget lived with Zeke near Athens OH, and had signed on as an apprentice to luthier Bob White. (There are some great live recordings of the brothers with Bob on mandolin and tenor vocal.) A guy from Wheeling, Richard “Dancing Dean” Jarbo accompanied them. Jarbo was, in Nugget’s words, “smitten with the Hutchison aura”. He had some money and had “aspirations of making it in the music business”. Jarbo even rented a house for them all in Lafayette CA. Meant to be a base of operations for the band, Nugget set up his own shop there as best he could and finished one of the first of his many fine copies of the classic period Gibson F-5. Before Nugget had even applied lacquer to the instrument, JD showed it around to some of his bluegrass friends and found a buyer in Ed Neff. Howey Tarnower saw it too and soon got in line to buy a Nugget mandolin. Meanwhile John and Zeke played Paul’s Saloon and other bay area bars with Sandy Rothman on mandolin. Though they made a significant impression on the California Bluegrass scene, after three or four months, the Hutchisons headed back to Ohio with their tails between their legs, which is when I met them. Meanwhile Nugget had secured a job working for Ome Banjos in Boulder, and after he rebuilt the engine in his VW wagon, he packed up his wife and young son along with his tools and drove to Boulder in November of 1974.

In early September, when I arrived in Boulder to begin working in Ned and Laurel Alderman’s Folk Arts music store, I saw a bass and a banjo in their living room that the Hutchisons had sold to them on their way home to Ohio. Ned and Laurel and their friend Richie Mintz, who did instrument repair work for the store, had met JD, Zeke and Nugget when they stopped in Boulder on their way to California. I imagine that they went to Boulder specifically to meet the folks at Ome Banjos. Years before, Zeke’s dad JW, who knew about acoustic instruments, had purchased a high quality Ome banjo for him. Nugget had a partially completed mandolin with him and gained the respect of Ed Woodward at Ome, so when the California experiment went south, Nugget reached out and secured a job there. A mutual friend named Grady Poe informed me when Nugget arrived in Boulder, and within a week or two we met for lunch at Don’s Cheese and Sausage. Another lifelong friendship was born.

Ned Alderman and Richie Mintz had lured me to Boulder not only to work at the music store, but also to play guitar and fiddle in their bluegrass group, the Town and Country Review. The lead singer in the group was Keely Bruner, a mechanical engineer who knew about singing close harmony. One place we played fairly often was called The Colorado Coal Company. The owner, Dave Marquart, booked acoustic acts there and we may have had a weekly night there. Another guy I’d met the previous winter on my epic hitchhiking trip, Kelly McNish, worked behind the counter. He had a weekly gig at the Coal Company, performing folk and country blues as the Bluebirds along with Ray Bonneville on harmonica and Eric Johnson on bass. One day Kelly wrote out the words of “Eight More Miles to Louisville” for me on a sheet of paper. I had rented a basement apartment on the 400 block of West Pearl Street, and soon Kelly moved into an apartment on the second floor. The owner, Gewn Stevens was a friend to musicians and gave us friendly rates. I had hoped to get a gig as fiddler for the local Western Swing group Dusty Drapes and the Dusters, but when I arrived that September, they had just hired a fine player named Teddy Karr. I was giving lessons and also working behind the counter at Folk Arts. I’d practice scales on the guitar in idle hours. One day a tall skinny guy came in and tried out a guitar. He played some wonderful fingerstyle ragtime licks and got my attention. His name was Dan Sadowsky and he’d worked for a while at the same store before I got to town. We became friends and played two guitars for fun whenever we could. He had just formed a group he called the Ophelia Swing Band with bassist Duane Webster, fiddler Linda Joseph, and a vibraphone player Jane Reed. Soon I was playing lead guitar and second fiddle in the band, and we got our own residency at the Colorado Coal Company.

My favorite breakfast place in Boulder was Palmers on West Pearl Street. They had great buckwheat cakes. Another place was Fred’s, where sometimes Fred, the owner, sang and played standards on a big archtop guitar on a tiny little stage by the cash register. Sometimes Dan Sadowsky and Duane Webster and I would join in. One fixture at Fred’s was Mr. Lawry, who came in for lunch every day. He was a very small old man who lived a block away in the Boulderado Hotel. Rooms at the Boulderado were inexpensive in those days before it was renovated and gentrified. Fred’s original restaurant had been in the hotel, and he would see Mr. Lowry in the lobby reading the paper every day. He got to know him and learned he was a veteran of the Spanish American War, who lived frugally on his military pension. Fred offered Mr. Lawry perpetual free lunch at his new place on Pearl, and every morning about 11:45 you’d see Mr. Lawry making his way very slowly toward the restaurant. It took him four or five minutes to get from the door to his table, and sometimes he’d doze off before he finished his soup. Years after Pearl Street became pedestrian mall, the city named the alley behind Fred’s “Lawry Lane”.

Tim O’Brien 50 years Journal

Fifty Years
Entry # 5
TIM O'BRIEN
May 31, 2024

I’ve been a musician for 50 years. What has changed, and what has remained the same? What are the things I’ve learned, and what are the things I’ll never learn?

Touring:

Sleep and rest are more important now! On the run through the Midwest with the band in April, we had the choice: either play in a tiny venue for the door on a Friday night or take a night off and just drive toward the next show. The next show in this case was the Solar Strings festival in French Village MO, and we drove to an Airbnb close to the festival, slept in, and were able to hear Junior Sisk and Ramblers Choice play a set on Saturday afternoon at the same festival. In 1974, I know I would have voted to play the small venue. I tour more often these days in a duo setting with my wife Jan Fabricius, and we mostly fly somewhere on Southwest, then drive a rental car to two of three shows. For some band dates we can either drive a couple vehicles or fly and then rent a car and a minivan. Since Charlie Chadwick invented the folding upright bass, we sometimes stuff five of us in one minivan if the drives aren’t too long between shows.

In the mid 1970’s, Ophelia Swing Band played mostly in Colorado, with occasional forays to Wyoming, and once or twice to South Dakota. Bassist Duane Webster’s International truck – “crew cab” with four doors, a bench back seat, and a topper over the bed - was our vehicle, but mostly we used our own cars to get to shows along Colorado’s front range. In the summer of 1977, we scored a Chautauqua tour sponsored by the State Department of Humanities. We drove in a station wagon leased by the state, and played tent shows in small towns, performing two or three nights in each location along with other features: a modern dance company, a Shakespeare play, a comedian, and a stage band that played little bits throughout each evening.

Hot Rize started in 1978 with the original intention to promote solo records that Pete Wernick and I had made. Pete had a national reputation in the bluegrass world as did our guitarist Charles Sawtelle. While our means were modest, there seemed to be some good potential. Charles was the one who suggested we wear suits onstage like the old school bluegrass acts. He was always in favor of doing things in a professional way, and if that required an investment, he knew it would pay off in the long run. He owned a ’57 Cadillac, and he urged us to buy used 1969 Sedan De ‘Ville as a touring vehicle. Ours was black with a white vinyl top. We traveled around Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Kansas in that vehicle, but also drove it to the east coast a time or two.

We could fit the banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and electric bass, and garment bags in the trunk. Later when we traveled with a sound system, we added a trailer hitch and rented a 4’ by 6’ U-Haul trailer. After a year or so we bought a used trailer and Nick and I painted it with black spray paint, leaving the top silver, so it sorta matched the Caddy.

Someone at a festival had told Charles Sawtelle, “You guys need to get a hound”, meaning an old Greyhound bus. The Bluegrass Cardinals and the Del McCoury Band had GMC 4104’s and that’s what we eventually bought. It had already been customized for a touring band. There was a sign above the windshield that said “Lo-Rance Trio”. We removed that sign, so now the old Greyhound route destination sign was visible. There were two spools just inside that destination window, around which was a roll of fabric with various city names on it. Whatever had fastened the spools to show a particular destination no longer functioned, so you’d never know where it said we were heading. On one of the first trips with that bus, we were opening for John Hartford in Winona MN. When we greeted John that day, he said, “Oh, is that your bus? I was wondering who “Chattanooga” was.” Nick Forster had been the long-haul, late-night driver in the Cadillac, and now he and Frank Edmonson were the main drivers, with Charles filling in. Charles and Nick remodeled the inside to include five bunks. We kept most of the front lounge area the same – green shag carpet on the walls and ceiling, a butcher block table, chair and couch, and a refrigerator that came with the coach.

Having our own bus meant we could sleep in the bus. Nick and Frank would drive four or more hours, then pull into a truck stop. In the morning we’d use the trucker’s showers, eat breakfast in the café, then be our way. If we had a free night before playing a festival, we arrived the night before and just sleep on the bus. We might park in a motel lot, rent one motel room and take turns using the shower. At many venues, the bus served as our dressing room. In those days we were sowing as many seeds as we could, giving LPs to musician friends and DJ’s. Having a bus meant we were serious about our band. Sometimes we took friends like Nugget mandolin maker Michael Kemnnitzer or musicians like Jody Stecher or Fred Weiss along on tours.

After a few years and a few record releases, we started getting better fees, and could afford to fly somewhere from Denver on a Thursday, rent vehicles and play three or four dates and then fly home on a Monday. We invested in flight cases for our instruments and gear. We had cases for t-shirts and records, and three rolling cases for amplifiers (for the bass, for Wendell Mercantile’s guitar and for Waldo Otto’s steel). Later we had a custom case made to check wardrobe items including Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers’ cowboy hats. It’s hard to imagine doing today what we did then. Denver was a United airlines hub, and Hot Rize road manager Frank Edmonson cultivated a relationship with a United Skycap named Chuck Davis. He was our best friend! We’d show up with over 20 pieces of luggage and give Chuck a 20-dollar bill and he’d somehow get them all on the plane. Chuck worked that gig longer than most, and there’s a plaque with his name on it by the United curbside check in now.

T-shirts brought in as much money as did record sales and Nick Forster was merch manager. We’d often meet mid-week before leaving home to pack LP’s and t-shirts for whatever run were about to do. After four or five years, we were using the bus less and less, so we sold it to a new group called the Subdudes. They quickly learned like we did that old buses can break down when you least expect it, and you seem to paying the bus more than you pay yourselves. By this time, we would occasionally hire a modern tour bus with a professional driver for short runs east of the Mississippi.

After leaving Hot Rize in 1990, my touring fees shrunk some, but by now airfares had been deregulated, and I could afford to fly myself and up to three others somewhere, then rent vehicles to get to shows. That same gameplan still works for me today. If the show is less than eight hours drive away, you might as well drive. If it’s farther away than that, fly to the closest airport, rent the vehicles you need and go from there. Sometime after I moved to Nashville in 1996, Southwest became the airline of choice. There are lots of nonstop flights from Nashville, you can check two bags free, and there’s no charge if you change your itinerary. Southwest isn’t as cheap as it used to be, but the other advantages remain. It’s bluegrass musicians’ favorite airline.

Live sound:

Ophelia Swing Band bought a used PA system about a year after we started. It had large speaker cabinets for mains and smaller ones for monitors, and we controlled the mix from the stage.

Charles Sawtelle had a sound company in the mid 1970’s, and he still owned much of the gear when Hot Rize started, and we eventually bought part of the system from him. It was a good sounding rig with a Macintosh power amp, Malachi mixer, and Klipsch speakers. Charles also mixed the sound from the stage, but hiring a full-time soundman Frank Edmonson was another stretch that really paid off. After we bought our bus, we added to the PA that we carried underneath in the service bays. Once we started flying to more shows, the PA would lay idle and we eventually sold it, but we still flew with a rack in a flight case that included outboard equalizers and compressors to interface with house sound systems, and we carried our own higher end microphones.

Hot Rize generally resisted using pickups on our acoustic instruments, but when I started on my own in 1990, I caved to the modern trend, but with a difference. Following the example of the members of Newgrass Revival, I set up each of my instruments with both a pickup and a miniature condenser mic, and bought a special preamp made by Newgrass’s soundman Richard Battaglia. Both signals came out of one stereo output jack on the instrument, which gave the house sound and the monitor sound more flexibility. Playing on bigger festival stages or in loud clubs, you could send the better sounding microphone signal to the audience, and use the pickup side for monitor sound with much less feedback problems. A great many current day bluegrass acts now use in-ear monitors (earphones) instead of monitor speakers, which makes for even more flexibility, and the ability to reach higher sound pressure levels without causing feedback. I’ve used in ear monitors when playing with Mark Knopfler and it’s really the only way to go when you’re mixing solid body guitars played through big amplifiers with acoustic mandolins and guitars. However, I’ve resisted using in ear monitors for my own shows, and in recent years, I’ve gone back to playing into a good old microphone.

Making records:

Ophelia Swing Band recorded for a folk label called Biscuit City that owned the studio, which was in a funny triangle shaped building near the intersection of Park and 17th Avenue in Denver. The main floor was occupied by a business that advertised itself as “Colorado’s only Venetian Blind Laundry”. The studio and the record company offices were up a steep staircase. Several of the local folk acts that could draw a crowd at the Denver Folklore Center – people like songwriter Randy Handley or dulcimer player Bonnie Carol - made records for Biscuit City. There were more professional studios in Denver where more commercial music was made, but the label didn’t have a budget to use those places where a band like Firefall would record.

Ophelia was quite ambitious with its music, and we had our arrangements down, but we were very green in the studio. We recorded our record, really the first project any of us had done, on an 8-channel multitrack machine. It was January of 1977. We sometimes used a single track for more than one part. For instance, if I recorded a harmony vocal on track 5, that meant that there were silent spaces in between the choruses. If all the other tracks were already full, and I wanted to add a second fiddle part that didn’t happen during the chorus, I could record that in the spaces between the harmony vocals. But maybe the two parts on the same track were very different in volume, and meanwhile if you placed the harmony vocal slightly to the left in the stereo spectrum, then the fiddle ended up there too even if you didn’t want it that way. Our engineer, Ty Atherholt, was willing to experiment with us. We were all low down on the learning curve.

Some folks get self-conscious in recording sessions when others are listening. Others thrive on distraction. Our lead singer, Dan Sadowsky had a hard time recording his vocal part one evening, and after a bit he asked if he could try it with the lights off in the room where he was singing. We did that and we all listened from the control room as he sang. It seemed to really help because he nailed it this time. We turned on the lights and saw that he was now completely naked. Washboard Chaz sang lead on one song and unfortunately, we didn’t get a good vocal sound because we recorded his washboard and vocal along with the band live. We learned at mix stage that you couldn’t turn up the vocal without getting more washboard.

It was all analogue, with no automation. To mix the sound, several of us would reach around each other from different sides of the console to move faders up and down as we recorded the mix output onto a different 1/4 stereo tape recorder. If you messed up one little move, that meant you had to do the whole thing again. That Ophelia Swing Band recording, “Swing Tunes of the 30’s & 40’s” came out the following summer. I think the track that Dan sang naked is “Knocking Myself Out”. It’s long out of print but you can hear it on Apple Music:

https://music.apple.com/us/album/swing-tunes-of-the-30s-40s/327731663

I quit the band a few months later and moved to Minnesota to be where my girlfriend Kit was going to school, but I came back to Colorado for the Chautauqua tour that summer. Biscuit City records asked me to make a fiddle record and I recorded in on days off from the tour with members of Ophelia Swing Band as well as with Pete Wernick and Charles Sawtelle. Pete also made a solo record that summer, and asked me to sing and play on it. He recorded at a new studio in Boulder called Mountain Ears. Andy Statman and Russ Barenburg came from the east coast to participate, with Duane Webster, Charles Sawtelle and I joining in. This was much more pro studio compared to Biscuit City, but everyone including the engineer was still on the learning curve. At one point Pete asked to hear more mandolin in the mix, and the engineer said, “Sure, which one is the mandolin?” We recorded on a 16-track machine with 2-inch tape.

With more experience, you (and the engineers) learned how to do things more efficiently. By the time Hot Rize was ready to record, we hooked up with a new studio called Colorado Sound, with Andy Smith engineering. It was also a 16-track, 2-inch tape rig, and we had the choice of recording at 15 or 30 ips (inches per second). You used more tape at 30 ips, but the sound is better, so we went that way. I can’t remember the price of a reel of 2-inch tape – maybe $75 – but again Charles urged us to spend a little more money to get better sound quality. At 30 ips you could record 15 minutes per reel. You’d get a pretty good take and then try for a better one. We tried to limit the number of takes we had to three. After you decided on the best take, you could record over the rejects to save money. We had our arrangements ready and had made some demo tapes at another pro studio with John Macey as engineer, so we were learning how to do it. That studio evolved and eventually moved to a bigger and better place, and a guy I’d worked with at Biscuit City, Kevin Clock, engineered several more Hot Rize recordings there. I made various solo records there with Kevin, as well as three recordings with my sister Mollie. It’s still there on West 71’st Avenue in Denver.

Promotion:

Ophelia essentially broke up before we had recordings to sell and we were too inept to make promo t-shirts to sell. But in the early days of Hot Rize we at least had t-shirts to sell. Pete Wernick and I sold our solo records too. Merch really helped fill the tank, first in the 1969 Cadillac, then in the GMC 4104 bus. The bus had lots of storage so we added more sound gear and stuffed the storage bays with cartons of LP’s, boxes of t-shirts, hats, bumper stickers, and even fly swatters! We could also carry gear that Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers needed – amps, other instruments, and stage outfits they used. With our own trusty soundman, Frank Edmonson, we were ready for most anything.

In those days, publicizing shows was in the promoter’s court. They, and later the record label publicist, might line up print and radio interviews and maybe even purchase some advertising. They took advantage of folk and bluegrass organization newsletters, and made sure their concerts appeared in local newspapers’ free listings. One of the first artists I knew to use a personal computer was John McCutcheon. He was ahead of the curve, using computer generated mailing labels for his own newsletters. The internet and social media have eclipsed physical mailings these days, and promoters rely more and more on the artists themselves to advertise shows. Along with that, there are more artists so competition is much greater. Social media is crucial these days, and I’m lucky to have such an internet savvy partner in my wife Jan, who handles those chores.

Record releases are a different game now as well. It’s common for artists to release three or four singles before the entire project is made available. In fact, the Tim O’Brien Band has a single out now, called “You Took Me In”, part of an upcoming release of Tom Paxton songs performed by bluegrass artists, that you can find on your streaming service.

When you bought an LP in my early days, you were making a real commitment and you rarely heard any of the music beforehand. It was harder to hear folk and bluegrass on the radio then. Now we have the internet and streaming. It’s easier to find a recording now, but it’s also easier to turn it off! Maybe the phone rings and you stop that new Sierra Ferrell song to answer. That said, YouTube is my favorite radio station these days, particularly for older recordings. When I want to hear Patrick Sky, Buzz Busby, or Washington Phillips, I look there first.

April 24, 2024

Since my last entry, I sat in with Sierra Ferrell at the Ryman auditorium on March 21st. She’s one of the finer singers and songwriters on the scene these days, and I was flattered to be asked. A few days later I drove to Floyd VA to help produce a recording by the David Mayfield Parade at Mountain Fever studios with engineer Aaron Ramsey. I enjoyed hanging with David and his bandmates Keith and Ryan Wallen, Steven Moore, and Graham Bell. We stayed in a house next to the studio and ate home cooking courtesy of Mark Hodges and his girlfriend Jennie. I’m happy to say that Aaron Ramsey has just released a fine recording of my song “The Church Steeple” on Mountain Fever. Watch for the David Mayfield Parade release later this year. The Tim O’Brien Band played in Evanston IL, Minneapolis MN, Stoughton WI and then French Village MO, after which Jan and I spent a day and a half in southern Illinois at the home of Wil Maring, which was right on the “path of totality” for the full eclipse of the sun. We hung out and picked with Wil, her partner Robert Bowlin, fiddler Barbara Lamb, and 5-year-old Nash Grier on fiddle and guitar. This past week Jan and I played the wonderful Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby NC, Davidson College in Davidson NC, Bass and Grass in Perry GA, and Eddies Attic in Decatur GA. Jan and I will play at the GAR Hall in Peninsula OH on Thursday April 25th, and at the Carroll Art Center in Westminster MD on the 27th. We play the lovely old dance hall in Fischer TX on May 4th, and start a new recording on the 17th. We’ll be at the Strawberry Festival in Grass Valley CA on May 25 with a band including Mike Bub, Shad Cobb, and special addition Mike Witcher on resophonic guitar.

Fall 1974 to Summer 1975

I spent the summer of 1974 living at my parents’ house in Wheeling WV, picking up whatever musical work I could. I had gotten a taste of independent living the winter before in Jackson Hole and both my parents and I knew my living at their home wasn’t workable for long.

Sometime that summer, a friend named Jay Odice arranged an audition for me at a folk music club in Chicago called Somebody Else’s Troubles. I drove to Chicago and probably stayed with Jay at his place in Evanston. There was a good folk music scene in Chicago, with flagship venues like the Old Town School of Folk Music and the Earl of Old Town. “Troubles” was a new club owned by Earl Pionke (the actual “Earl” in the Earl of Old Town) along with folksingers Steve Goodman and brothers Ed and Fred Holstein. The audition was more like an open stage, but my 15 minutes went well and I was offered a job playing there later that summer. I made friends that night with another aspiring musician: the ace bluesman Johnny Long, who would also move to Colorado in the coming year.

Meanwhile the Rocky Mountains beckoned. My friend Ritchie Mintz had showed me around Boulder CO the previous February. I sat in with his Bluegrass group, the Town and Country Review, and hung around the music store, Folk Arts Music, where Ritchie worked teaching guitar and banjo and repairing stringed instruments. His boss Ned Alterman who owned the store with his wife Laurel, had offered me a job and both Ned and Ritchie wanted me to join their band. I knew from my earlier visit that there was a vibrant music scene going on in Denver and Boulder, so I called Ned and asked if his job offer was still good. By early September, I had arrived and rented a basement apartment on west Pearl Street. Kelly McNish, a fine guitarist and singer I’d met the winter before, lived upstairs.

I worked the counter and gave guitar lessons at Folk Arts Music, playing various shows with Town and Country as fiddler and guitarist. Besides Ned and Ritchie, band members included guitarist Keely Bruner and bassist Steve Carnes. One day a tall skinny guy named Dan Sadowsky came into the store, and we played some swing and ragtime tunes on some shop guitars. Dan had started a little group called the Ophelia Swing Band with bassist Duane Webster, fiddler Linda Joseph, and vibraphonist Jane Reed. Within a few months I was drafted into that band as well. Both Town and Country and Ophelia played at the Walrus, a bar and restaurant downstairs from the music store, and Ophelia also played a bar attached to the Best Western motel called The Lost Knight.

One group I often went to see at the Lost Knight was the Bluebirds, Kelly McNish’s ultra tasteful trio with harmonica player Ray Bonneville and bassist Eric Johnson. Kelly’s folk and blues repertoire was deep and his finger picking on a National steel or a Gibson flat top guitar was top notch. Another group that played both venues was the tenor sax player Spike Robinson’s quartet which featured guitarist Dale Bruning. I soon learned that a lot of the better guitarists on the front range studied with Dale, and he would later become my teacher and mentor. Over at Shannon’s bar on Pearl Street the popular act was Dusty Drapes and the Dusters, a bunch of young rockers who’d remade themselves into a western swing group. Nationally touring artists played at Tulagi’s on the hill by the University of Colorado, and later at a new downtown club called The Good Earth. As fall faded into winter, I was playing more with Ophelia and gave notice to both the Town and Country review and Folk Arts Music. When we weren’t rehearsing the band’s 1930’s swing repertoire, Sadowsky and I would play a set in exchange for lunch or dinner at the Carnival Café, a co-op vegetarian restaurant at Broadway and Walnut. Boulder was much smaller and more affordable in those days and a lot of the streets were still unpaved, but the University students provided a young and open-minded audience for musicians like me.

Soon after arriving in Colorado, I went with Ned, Laurel and Ritchie to Winfield Kansas for the third annual Walnut Valley Festival. I entered the guitar contest and met fellow contestants like Mark O’Conner and Peter Ostroushko, who placed 2nd and 3rd that year. I met Steve Kaufmann while waiting to compete and we agreed to back each other up. Bill Hinkley played the Irish harp piece “O’Carolan’s Concerto” as his second tune in the first round, which impressed one of the judges - Norman Blake - enough to get Bill into the second round. I had a wonderful weekend and became picking friends with a bunch of folks from Minneapolis and Saint Paul, including Bill Hinkley, Judy Larson, Rudy Darling, Sam Dillon, and Mary MacEachron. With acts like Norman Blake, Dan Crary and Doc Watson, it was a flat-picking extravaganza, but also featured venerable standbys like Jimmy Driftwood, Ramona Jones, and the Lewis Family. New Grass Revival played an exciting set on Saturday night. A certain unfamiliar fiddle tune kept being played in campground jams and onstage, and I kept asking its name. That was the weekend of “Grey Eagle”.

In January or February 1975, I sold my 1966 Volvo sedan and bought a 1970 Ford station wagon for Ophelia – with Jane Reed’s departure now a four piece – to travel in. A few weeks later we drove it to Jackson Hole for a weeklong engagement at the Mangy Moose Saloon. Our next show was in Red Lodge Montana, but on the way there I crashed the wagon into a snowplow on Togwatee pass. No one was hurt but the car was a total loss, and we were stranded a night or two in Dubois while Duane hitch hiked to Red Lodge and brought his brother’s truck back to rescue us. That truck, an International Crew Cab with a second row of seats behind the driver and a topper covering the bed, became our band vehicle for the next few years.

Ophelia Swing Band was playing at the Lost Knight one evening in March of 1975 when my friend Arthur Knapp came in and introduced us to a guy named Fred who was starting a music festival in Telluride, a little town in the southwest corner of Colorado. Fred Shellman lived in Telluride but was partners with Arthur in a startup on the front range called Boulder Notch which was manufacturing a new kind of preamp for acoustic guitar pickups. Fred and his bluegrass band Fall Creek had held a one-day event the summer before in Telluride town park, and now they planned to expand the event into a three-day festival with New Grass Revival as headliners. We shook hands on the deal and made plans to play the second annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival, never expecting the event would grow and endure like it has these past 50 years.

Ophelia Swing Band drove the truck over the mountains in June and we were all stunned by the incredible view as we drove into Telluride, which was then about halfway through its transformation from mining town to ski resort. There were few restaurants and fewer hotel accommodations. The four of us stayed in a room in a house on the hill opposite town park. It had two bunk beds – I’m pretty sure I took the top bunk - and a double bed. Other Colorado acts included Boulder’s Magic Music, Aspen’s Liberty, and the Fort Collins band Everybody and His Brother. I remember seeing New Grass Revival arrive and file into a backstage shed. Having listened to live tapes and seen them perform at Warrenton VA and at Winfield, I was excited to hear them. I put my ear up to the shed’s wall and heard Sam Bush, Courtney Johnson, Curtis Burch and new bassist John Cowan blaze through some fiddle tunes and then sing Bill Monroe’s gospel quartet “The Wicked Path of Sin”. When I see pictures from those early years at Telluride, I realize it wasn’t such a big event, but it seemed epic to me at the time. I’ve often described the early festival as a sort of chemical experiment – scrape up all the hippies from a four-state area into one field, add New Grass Revival, then stand back and see what happens. Fred Shellman and his crew wore special t-shirts that said “Official” and “More Official”.

In the summer of 1975, Pete Wernick came to Boulder with his new wife Joan (AKA Nondi) who was from Denver. The two had been living in Ithaca New York, where Pete had been a full time Sociologist and part time bluegrass musician. He’d released some of the first recordings on the new Rounder label with the group Country Cooking and then published an instruction book called “Bluegrass Banjo” that sold 250 thousand copies. Now he had quit his day job with a tentative plan to relocate to sunny Colorado and play his banjo full time. It wouldn’t be long before we crossed paths.

Dan and Duane and I had tried busking on Boulder’s streets with limited success. Guitarist Duck Baker would often join us, and one weekend we decided to drive to Aspen to see if there was more loose change to be had there. We saw that Liberty was playing at a club that night in co-bill with the current version of Country Cooking which included Alan Senauke and Howie Tarnower. Liberty’s band members included Vick and Jan Garrett, Danny Wheetman, and Jerry Fletcher, and they had opened shows recently for fellow Aspen resident John Denver. John Summers, who played fiddle and banjo in John Denver’s band, was there at the club and offered us a place to stay in a house he’d just bought, presumably with the royalties from his song “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” Summers had yet to move in and the house was unfurnished, but we were grateful for the roof over our heads, even if Duck hated the song which was a big hit for John Denver in 1974-75.

Pete and Joan Wernick stayed around Colorado, looking for a place to settle on the front range. Pete was also looking for musicians to play with. I knew Charles Sawtelle from the Denver Folklore Center, where he managed the music store, and one day that summer he called me asking if I could play a wedding gig. I had no wheels at that point, so I hitched a ride with my fiddle to Broomfield where I got a lift with bassist Gene Milligan to the venue somewhere in the Denver area. The other band members that day were Pete Wernick on banjo, and Warren Kennison on mandolin. Those four – Kennison, Sawtelle, Wernick and Milligan - would soon name themselves the Rambling Drifters (just as often they were the Drifting Ramblers) and start playing weekly shows at the Denver Folklore Center concert hall. That was my first gig with Pete and Charles who I would eventually play with in Hot Rize. Charles drove to the gig that day wearing a nice gray western style suit, and he brought the sound system which would later belong to Hot Rize in the trunk of his pink 1959 Cadillac Sedan Deville.

50 Years entry #2

January 31, 2024

We’re about to leave stormy Glasgow on a prop plane flight to Dublin. I think the last time I flew on one of these was with Danny Barnes maybe 20 years ago. That flight was from Leeds to Dublin, going west over the Irish Sea like we will today.

We had a wonderful turnout at the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow last night and Jan and the guys in the band really came through. It was really fun to play that music from “The Crossing” and its follow-up “Two Journeys” after more than 20 years.

A friend has given us use of his cottage on the Dingle peninsula in County Kerry for some welcome quiet days after the tour in UK. The same friend sent me this podcast about a pretty interesting series of events in 1977 just north of where we’re staying.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/documentary-on-one-podcast/id10792...

Our accommodations are also very close to where, in the 6th century, Saint Brendan and 17 other Irish monks launched an Atlantic voyage in a wood framed, skin covered boat called a currach, a type of watercraft still used on the west coast of Ireland. Brendan, then in his 70’s, and his companions fasted and prayed for weeks before their departure. Historians have studied the text in “Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis” - an account of the voyage published in the 10th century - and comparing its text with what they now know about Atlantic currents, have concluded that Brendan reached the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, and the Faeroe Islands. Norse sagas suggest that Irish monks were already in Iceland when the Vikings first arrived there late in the 9th century. Some say Brendan may have reached Greenland and even North America at Newfoundland before returning to Ireland.

Later: Prop plane in wind and rain? No problem. We ate a burger before the flight and didn’t even feel the need to pray. The plane wanted to skid a little sideways on landing, but the tires held. After we loaded our gear into our rent-a-car, we noticed it had a flat tire, so we exchanged it for a different car and headed to Kildare for dinner and a room for the night.

February 1, 2024

This morning, I noticed a poster listing events commemorating Brigid’s Day which is today. Brigid, the daughter of a chieftain, converted to Christianity under Saint Patrick in the 6th century, and later founded a monastery here She is a greatly revered Irish saint, the patron of among other things, cattle. Maybe it makes sense that Kildare is also horse country. One tradition of Brigid’s day is making crosses from reeds. As we were leaving town, the high school students were assembling to form a giant human Brigid’s Cross at 10am on the racetrack nearby. We were here in Ireland for Brigid’s day last year.

There are two ways to approach Dingle from the north, and we chose to drive over Conner Pass. I’d been over it once about 30 years ago, and today looked like a clear day for what should be amazing views. Wishful thinking! It is a dramatic, twisting, cliff-hanging narrow road. The sheep grazing on steep slopes seemed happy enough in the sideways rain and mist, but we felt sorry for the motorcyclist we saw. I wonder if any human beings have ever seen anything but clouds from the top. Now we’re settling into a cozy cottage, a peat fire burning, listening to the Gaelic language station.

February 17, 2024

From Dingle, Jan and I went to the White Horse pub in Ballincollig, near Cork City, where we rehearsed with two wonderful Irish traditional players, guitarist Steve Cooney and accordion player Dermot Byrne. Among other material, we worked up versions of traditional Irish pieces “O’Carolan’s Concerto” and “Arthur Darley”, a version of the Hot Rize song “Colleen Malone” and a new song original called “Tunes I Used to Know”. Joe Carey at the White Horse has been very supportive over the years, and he helped arrange a live multitrack recording of our show there. After that show we played at the Glor center in the bustling market town of Ennis in County Claire, shopped at Cash’s Men’s Wear, and heard concertina master Noel Hill in concert in nearby Milltown Malbay. We got home to Nashville on the 12th, but I’m still waiting for my guitar to get here. Jan made me a yummy steak dinner and bought me flowers for Valentine’s Day. I made rough mixes of the live recording and there’s plenty of good results. Seems like it’s a whole cd’s worth. Tomorrow, we head to Colorado to play three sold out concerts with our bluegrass buddies Mike Bub, Shad Cobb, and Cory Walker.

February 1974

In last month’s entry I said that gigs in Jackson Hole got thin in mid-February of 1974, but I guess they were already thin by the end of January. There was a girl living north of San Francisco who I thought liked me, and I decided to go see her.

I wasn’t sure Matahari would make the trip, so I set out hitch-hiking on February 1st. At Idaho Falls I got a lift with a Mormon guy about my age in a pickup truck with a load of barbed wire. He took me to Elko, Nevada, where his family put me up the night. In the morning, they fed me a breakfast of cereal, toast, orange juice and postum (a powdered grain beverage once popular as a coffee substitute). He dropped me off at the western edge of town where I stuck out my thumb. I wouldn’t get back to Elko until the early 1990’s when I attended the annual Cowboy Poetry gathering. At Winnemucca that afternoon I got a lift with two young women who took me all the way to their apartment in Sausalito. We arrived late at night, and I slept on their couch. In the middle of the night there was a break in. They were probably burglars, but they didn’t take anything. They were gone just a soon as they came in, maybe because they’d assumed the occupants were still away, and maybe because they saw me on the couch. (If there’s a recurring theme in my stories, it might be how I’ve generally been both naïve and lucky in my adventures.) That next morning, I made my way to Berkeley where my friend Dennis from the Jackson Hole summer camp was living in a fraternity house. We hung out that night and the next morning, February 4th, we read about Patty Hearst’s kidnapping which had taken place several blocks away. A couple days later I hitched north past Bodega Bay, turned right at the Russian River, and made to the commune where the girl was living. She had told me I was welcome to visit her and David, and I assumed she meant her brother David, but no, this was her boyfriend, David. After a few days I there I headed back in Berkeley where I bought a used Doc Watson record and went to a bluegrass benefit concert at the Freight and Salvage coffee house. The performers included Butch Waller’s High County, The Phantoms of the Opry (with the great Pat Enright on guitar and vocals) and Shubb, Wilson and Shubb (featuring banjoist Rick Shubb who later designed and marketed the famous capo). The headliner was Mike Seeger who played an amazing solo set. He blew my mind when he played rack harmonica and fiddle simultaneously on a Cajun tune.

When I think back on those times, I’m amazed how little cash I needed to get by. In Jackson I had subsisted on cheese omelets and whole wheat sandwich bread. I remember my dad asking me on the phone that winter if the recession was affecting me, but I was oblivious. On this hitch-hiking trip I generally mooched off friends and acquaintances. Maybe with my naïve optimism, backpack, fiddle and “kinky red hair out to here”, people took pity on me.

The next day I set out to see Big Sur. I got a ride in a VW bus from Berkeley all the way to San Luis Obispo, where the driver, a guy named Jules, let me out about 11pm at night. I grabbed my backpack but forgot to grab my fiddle as Jules drove away south. The inside walls of the VW had Rolling Stone articles pasted on as wallpaper, and there were stacks of back issues in the back where I'd ridden. I went on my way without the fiddle, wondering if I could and should place an ad in the classifieds in Rolling Stone and if Jules would see it. All I saw of Big Sur was rain and fog and the highway. Next, I hitched east to Boulder, Colorado. I remember sleeping overnight in a building near Salt Lake City that was still under construction.

The summer before I’d met a banjo player named Ritchie Mintz who lived in Boulder. I stayed several days with him and met several musicians. Ritchie and his friend Ned had a bluegrass band called Town and Country review and Ned had a store called Folk Arts Music. I jammed with them, and with Kelly McNish and Ray Bonneville who were starting a trio with bassist Eric Johnson. I also met the members of a new Western Swing Band – Dusty Drapes and the Dusters - who wondered if was living there and if I might play fiddle with them. I went with Ritchie to a club in Denver called Ebbets Field to see the new bluegrass group Country Gazette. On the way we stopped at the Denver Folklore Center, which would become the nexus of my world in the coming years. I liked Colorado’s Front Range, and it seemed like I could find a place in its music scene. I went back to Jackson and got a gig playing from table to table. Jann the banjo player named me “strolling Tim.”

Around that time, I considered taking out a classified ad in the Rolling Stone. Swallowing hard, I sent a check for $75 and placed an ad that said "Jules, I want my fiddle back. Call collect”, listing my parents’ home phone number. By the middle end of March, I was back home in Wheeling, and playing with West Virginia Grass again, this time on electric bass, and testing my parents’ patience. My dad helped me make a homeowner’s insurance claim on the lost fiddle under the category “mysterious disappearance”. (I found the same fiddle I still play today at Walter Shalayka’s little store in an alley there in Wheeling and bought it with the insurance money.) There were various crank calls about the lost fiddle for a month or so, and then nothing. But in mid-May, Jules called. It turned out that the VW bus he'd driven that day was not his after all. He’d gotten home, found the fiddle in the back of the VW, and stashed it at his house before returning his friend's car. Then a few months later, he was hitchhiking himself and there on the seat between him and the driver was the April 11, 1974, issue of Rolling Stone. Marvin Gaye was on the cover and my ad was way in the back of the mag in small print.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Rolling+Stone+cover+April+11%2C+1974&rlz...

Jules saw his name and called the number. He'd kept the fiddle at his house in LA and would work with me to send it to my parents’ place in WV. I gave the claim money back to the insurance company, Aetna, who would then handle the transfer and shipping of the lost fiddle for free. There was a delay, however. Jules's home was a block from where the Symbionese Liberation Army, who had kidnapped Patty Hearst, was hiding. The FBI and Police had cordoned off the area, and they eventually burned the house with SLA members inside. Patty Hearst was not there, but the ringleader Donald DeFeeze, known as "Cinque," was. He shot himself in the head as he was getting burned alive in the crawl space underneath the house on May 17th, 1974.

I got my fiddle back soon after, and about six months after that it was badly damaged. By then I was back in Boulder playing with the Ophelia Swing Band. Our band's fiddler, Linda Joseph, liked to play brushes on a cardboard box for some songs. She didn't have a box that night, so she put my fiddle case (fiddle inside) on a stool and then knocked it off the stool mid-song and the top broke in several places. I got it repaired but it wasn't the same and I sold it.

I wonder what Jules is doing now.