50 Years entry #4

April 24, 2024

Since my last entry, I sat in with Sierra Ferrell at the Ryman auditorium on March 21^st. 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 25^th, and at the Carroll Art Center in Westminster MD on the 27^th. We play the lovely old dance hall in Fischer TX on May 4^th, and start a new recording on the 17^th. 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 2^nd and 3^rd 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.