MISSION STATEMENT:
Whatever I can tell you about “being a folksinger.” Based on what I have experienced and what I have not. For your interest, instruction, and entertainment, and my garrulousity. And, like the kid who told the fella to watch him and get off the bus two stops before he did---a lot of “here’s what I did; don’t you!” (Is that like what the kid told the fella?)
Glad to answer questions and discourse in more detail by e-mail or the comment thread.
AN INTRODUCTION OF SORTS:
Lemme tell you ‘way back when…
Around 1955 an uncle of my mother’s died and left her $50. My folks took this legacy 130 miles south to Tijuana and came home with a pretty rotten nylon-stringed “Spanish” guitar. The old man (well…NOW he’s 90) carried this treasure to UCLA where he had just joined the Speech and Hearing faculty, and signed up for a folk guitar class taught by Bess Hawes. [Bess Lomax Hawes. Sure, you know her. One of the authors of “MTA,” a song I have had to sing three brazilian times, often enjoying it. See, two degrees of separation from me to this famous song. Three, and I’m connected to Alan Lomax. Four, and you are.] I was eight or nine by the time we were having weekly family music nights, featuring “The Poor Potat,” “The Frozen Logger,” and “Gavilan, Gavilan, Gavilan,” which latter Dad translated in the last chorus as “Chicken-a hawk-a chicken-a-hawk-a-chicken-a-hawk…” making life perplexing for a kid with essentially no sense of humor. Once we were at the movies and an injun looked to me like he really got stabbed. Troubled, I ran this by Dad for an opinion, and he instantly replied, “We’ll just have to see if he’s in any more movies.” Sumbitch.
Soon I was regaling (?) the school bus with dramatic renderings of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett. At the end of the ‘Fifties there entered into my household and my ensorcelled ears “The Weavers At Carnegie Hall,” and the Kingston Trio’s eponymous first album. Come ninth grade and Claire Noonan’s birthday party. Tommy Terry arrives over the fence (that’s right --- only black kid in the school, and Mr. Noonan wasn’t having any) with guitar, and entertains us with current hits off the radio. See? First demonstration that these songs could be played by mortals. Same night after the party went over to Bob Bornstein’s house and didn’t he out with a guitar and sing Kingston Trio songs!
Over the top, over the edge, all she wrote, coffin nailed. Week before Thanksgiving that year, 1960---hence, as I write, one-half-century ago come next Monday---got Dad to show me the chords to “Early In The Morning” [KTrio]. June ’61 Bob and I rolled out the act at the class officer election assembly and in a wave of astonishment at this nerd/chrysalis/folksinger evolution the kids voted me president of the junior class. I never looked back.
Hell, yes, I did. “Watch what I did, and DON’T.”
In fact, we are just gonna skip over all the ways for all the years, I did not dedicate myself fully to the craft Tales of inertia, depression, resistance from within and without; fear of hard work. . Maybe some other time, kids.
Jump to 1975. I’m transplanted east on the suggestion that one could, in the hip world of that late date, still make a living as a folksinger if one could Escape From L.A. So here I am, no gloves, no boots, no long johns, prepared to get by shoveling snow for folks. So it snows mightily on November 15th, 1974, and not much again until about April. Friends are sheltering and feeding me, I’m looking about for gigs. This is, like, spend two of my four dollars on a bus ticket from Rochester to Buffalo to audition some joint. Aarrgh. Let’s not revisit that particular week!
Pretty quickly it’s plain the venues divide into two categories: bars and coffee houses.
The bars were straightforward. You played an audition. If the manager liked your show, you could get into the rotation, and make money. In Buffalo in the ‘70s, these paid $15 to $30. Yup, I had monthly incomes of $80, and a lot of help from my friends.
The coffee house experience was like this. There was a place in Massachusetts called The Sounding Board. Respectable coffee house where the circuit stars played to, like, a hundred people. After several conversations and non-conversations they offered me that I should come over one Saturday night and do an unpaid audition set before Claudia Schmidt’s show.
It was a fork in the road. Claudia Schmidt was a big cheese and sure to raise a packed house of receptive folkies. Friends, it is CAKE to play to such a house, and I couldn’t draw one myself. This was as good an opportunity as I could get to put a foot in the pond and splash.
And here’s what I did, and LOOK OUT.
It was a solid 300 miles. I had a ($20!) bar gig at home in Buffalo that I’d have had to cancel. I told the Sounding Board that I earned my living on Saturday nights, and couldn’t be expected to travel 600 miles to play for free. Now, the place was, for a fact, in all my dealings there, a pretty self important venue. It was my ego against theirs. Bottom line, I turned the offer down. And have still never played at the Sounding Board, 35 years later. Or much of anywhere like it.
I went on working at bars, on some principle of working for my living only at music. And continued to do that for 15 or more years. For as long, I guess, as you could still survive on bar gig money and manage health insurance through the League of Arts.
Take the other road…do well that night, make an impression, get hired there, parlay that into getting hired elsewhere…hell, by now I could be divorced from Claudia and two other folk-femmes, drawing my own crowds of 100, getting $800 a show, and living in my car.
***
No, it’s not that you get one chance. You can get lots of chances, but if this is what you want to do, you then have to TAKE the chances.
We’ll talk about more aspects of this.
