50 Years Entry #1

50 years

Welcome to a special journal marking my 50 years as a musician. The milestone snuck up on me! I’m used to updating promotional bios to include the latest details, but it suddenly occurs to me to document the memories made on the paths I’ve traveled - from my earliest months up to the current day – while singing, playing and writing music. Consider this my first monthly entry.

Jan and I started the year with a run of duet gigs in England. We missed the first of 8 due to bad weather in Nashville and cancelled flights, but we powered through the rest and have now arrived in Glasgow for the annual Celtic Connections festival. We’ll be joined by old friends John Doyle, John McCusker, Mike McGoldrick and Dirk Powell for a reenactment of “The Crossing”, a release from 25 years ago. The goal of that project was to mix Celtic and American folk music - they’re closely related after all - and celebrate the common culture of both sides of the Atlantic. Once I set up that frame, I found lots of fitting traditional material and ended up writing several new songs. On Tuesday, Jan, Dirk and I will represent America’s eastern shore while the other three musicians will bring perspective from the western shores of Ireland, Scotland and England.

January 1974

Music was my main pastime through my high school years in Wheeling WV. There were folk masses, school talent shows, and a local folk music contest. During three summers as a counselor at a summer camp in Jackson Hole WY, I led nightly campfire singalongs. I’d played in a bluegrass band called West Virginia Grass in the summer of 1972, and during my two semesters as a freshman at Colby College in Maine in 1972 and 1973, I mostly studied Doc Watson songs. Back home in the summer of ’73, I got a job at Teeter’s tree nursery. By the end of October I’d saved enough money to buy a Black 1966 Volvo 4 door sedan with a special mod: a Jaguar hood ornament. My mother said the car had a bit of mystery about it, and she named it Matahari after the exotic dancer and World War I spy. I’d made a plan and now I was about to make my getaway.

Some friends from the summer camp were planning to winter in Jackson, so I decided to join them with the idea that I would ski by day and sing at Après Ski bars by night.

In mid-November I packed two guitars, a fiddle, a banjo-mandolin, and couple pairs of skis in Matahari and headed west across the plains to meet my destiny! Marlene Lesniowski had worked at the lapidary shop at summer camp, and she was joined by her boyfriend Phil Saccocia just as I arrived. We had thanksgiving dinner in the place she’d rented in Wilson, just down the road from the ski hill. I rolled my foam pad out and slept on their floor and the next day I started knocking on doors, looking for gigs. I heard about a guy named Jann who played banjo around town, got his address, and knocked on his door that night. I didn’t know any better, and he was understandably a little suspicious when I told him we should play together. We ended up playing happy hour 5 days a week with a bass player named Kenny at the Million Dollar Cowboy bar on the town square. They had a fake shoot-out on the square for tourists every day at 5pm, and we were advertised as “Bluegrass After the Shootout”. It was a beginning.

A couple days later I auditioned for an Australian guy named Kim who ran Calico Pizza on the Wilson Road. I played a 30-minute set consisting of Norman Blake, James Taylor, Kris Kristofferson, and John Prine. Kim said, “I think you’re hot, and I can pay you $25 a couple times a week when various tour groups come in for dinner.” Great, I thought. He asked me where I was living and I told him I was looking for a place. Right then and there, he offered me an extra room in the cabin behind the restaurant, rent free. I ate a lot of free burned pizzas that winter and I could cross country ski along the Snake River right behind the cabin. I was on a roll!

I quickly found that I couldn’t afford too many $40 dollar lift tickets, but I learned just as quickly that you could hitchhike up to the top of Teton pass with your downhill skis, and ski down to the bottom. I’d do that and then go back to the cabin, dampen the fiddle’s sound with a clothespin on the bridge, and woodshed. On Sunday nights there was a country jam session at the Stagecoach bar in Wilson, and I’d join the motley band for a few free drinks and some much-needed experience. The leaders of that jam were John Seidel, who played 12 string guitar, and Bill Briggs, a famous ski mountaineer who yodeled and played a long neck banjo.

That routine kept up through January and into February. I remember cross country skiing to a lodge near Alpine on Christmas Eve for a jam session and potluck sleep over with a fiddler and welder named Fred Buckley. Seems like a fiddler named Marilyn was caretaking the place. (I’d met Fred in Wilson right after summer camp had ended in ‘73 and I think he taught me “Ragtime Annie” that day.) There was one two-week stretch of sub-zero weather that January. One day, the temperature minus 20, the key broke off in Matahari’s ignition, but I could start her by turning the nub of the key with a vice-grip and still get around town. After President’s Day weekend, the ski tourist traffic died down and the gigs kinda died with them. But by then I could sorta play the fiddle along with others.

Next month: an epic hitchhiking trip and my first visit to Boulder.

Tim O'Brien newsletter