I’ve had a great many music teachers between kindergarten and the present day, and this month’s essay means to honor them all.
This will be my last post before the coming election. If you don’t like politics, you might skip ahead to the Teachers section.
Tuesday October 15, 2024
Yesterday, on a predawn on-the-road listen to NPR news, Jan and I heard how spent lithium from old batteries could provide immense amounts of much needed nonpolluting energy. Before we started driving, I had read that NASA is also launching a new mission this afternoon, a trip to one of Jupiter’s moons, where many of the ingredients for life forms apparently are present. Yay science!
We were on an early morning drive home from Benton TN where we played a lovely event Sunday afternoon on the bank of the Hiawassee River. Road construction on the interstate near Chattanooga caused us to take a scenic route to Benton that was heretofore unknown to us, through the Sequatchie valley. So we elected to take the same route home.
I read later that a registered Republican with fake press passes and passports along with illegally purchased firearms, was stopped while driving a car with fake license plates outside a Trump rally in Coachella CA. He was released by the police but is under investigation as a potential assassin. Among other things I imagine. Inside the rally, the former President preached his increasing fascistic sermon on the dangers of evil immigrants in 100-degree heat.
We just passed some young Hispanic looking children standing beside the road, waiting for the school bus. Are their parents violent, drug addicted rapists from the “shit hole” countries that Trump and Stephen Miller are warning us about?
I can say with certainty that this is a very beautiful part of what former president Trump calls our “failing nation.”
There are a lot of Trump signs, but there are also enough Harris signs to make me wonder. Our Harris sign was stolen last week, so we put up three more homemade signs. We anticipated potential sabotage when we put up the sign since it had happened in the past with an Obama sign. I can imagine a lot of silent Harris supporters linger here and elsewhere. And some of those might be better termed Harris tolerators. They might be silent for the simple reason that a lot of folks just plain don’t talk about politics. It doesn’t seem to help.
I had read some Joseph Campbell late Sunday night on Christianity and Buddhism, and it helped me remember that everything is linked and all the seemingly contrary moving parts of the world are part of the same thing. Or as native Americans (by way of our friend Ray Bonneville) say - “left wing, right wing, same bird”. I guess the Buddhist approach to life is to act with empathy and attempt to hold the turmoil in mind without letting it get to you.
We were feeling hungry and I looked for a breakfast spot on my phone but the closest one shown was 30 miles ahead. But Jan spied Medley’s Diner from the driver’s seat, ahead on the left. Score! Country ham, biscuits and gravy, popular prices. Next time we’re in Morrison TN we know where to eat.
My US Congressman Andy Ogles emailed saying illegal aliens will be voting in large numbers if we don’t require proof of citizenship at the polls. He also says the Chinese Communist Party controls the World Health Organization. He says Xi Jinping is lying about his yearly income. I didn’t doubt that last assertion from Ogles, who had his phone confiscated by the FBI last summer over concerns about his own cloudy financial records. I also made a note to self that convicted felon Trump, who enjoys new immunity from prosecution thanks to the Supreme Court, is still half a billion dollars in debt, that his classified document case has been dropped as he meets with world leaders at Mar-a-lago and regularly speaks with Putin by phone, and that his best escape route from creditors and indictments is still re-election.
Then they played Trampled by Turtles on the Outlaw channel.
Now it’s Tuesday and I read about Trump urging his rally attendees to vote on January 5th before stopping his question and answer to listen to music for 35 minutes. In Rutherfordton County NC a man with firearms was arrested for threatening FEMA workers.
I will drink my coffee and get ready for a recording session.
Oct 25, 2024
Happy 72nd birthday to my sister Mollie O’Brien Moore!
The recording session mentioned above turned out to be mandolin and vocal overdubs on an Oliver Anthony project produced by David Ferguson and Dan Auerbach. Anthony’s breakout hit “Rich Folks North of Richmond” stirred a fair amount of controversy last year. One song on the new project, a real-life blues about opioid addiction co-written with Chris Davisson, is a real standout. Other recording work over the past few weeks has included a session for Country Music Hall of Fame member Charlie McCoy, an Edgar Meyer overdub on Jan and my upcoming record, and a vocal overdub for the wonderful bluegrass singer Greg Blake. I hope to wrap up the production on Jan and my project by the end of next week. A couple new songs are begging to be included so we’ll take a crack at those on Sunday afternoon. I’ll also be producing a recording with my old friend Chris Moore early next month. A fun seasonal track, a song cowritten with Ben Winship: ”Santa Ate a Gummy”, is in process. An animated video should be released late next month.
A wonderful track and video of a song I cowrote with David Ferguson and Bonnie Prince Billy, “My Home” came out this week. I shared lead vocals and played the mandolin. It’s the first single from an upcoming Bonnie Prince Billy project called “The Purple Bird” that Ferg produced. Check it out.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/our-home-feat-tim-obrien/1770808133?i=1770808243
Jan and I played to nice crowds in Boise and Salt Lake City on the 17th and 19th, and we’re looking forward to a show at a mini bluegrass festival at the Country Music Hall of Fame here in Nashville on Saturday, November 9th.
We voted yesterday at the Green Hills public library. We had tried the day before at 11am, but the lines were long and parking was scarce, so we went back the next day at 9am. Looks like the voter turnout is large this time which makes sense. If you have yet to vote there’s still time. As the song goes: “ You can vote early but you can’t vote late, and your rules will vary from state to state.“
When we speak of the status of today’s economy versus the economy during the Trump administration, does anyone but me remember that Obama inherited the 2008 economic downturn from G.W. Bush and then did significant bipartisan work to turn it back around, and that Trump’s time in office benefited from that work as the effects were starting to show? Shouldn’t we remember that a worldwide pandemic caused immense stress to the world’s economy during Trump’s administration, that the US was far from immune to it, and that Biden administration inherited most of the effects of that stress? Economists across the board say the US economy is now in great shape.
And when we speak of the tragic current situation in the middle east, mightn’t we remember when Trump’s administration pushed through the Abraham Accords which threw Palestinians under the bus in favor of an opening of relations between the Saudi’s and Israel? Didn’t that agreement along with Trump’s relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem enrage and embolden Iran and its proxies on Israel’s borders, resulting in the October 7th attacks and a reciprocal devastation of first Gaza and now southern Lebanon? We might want to notice that relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel have since refrozen.
And when JD Vance defends his election denialism with social media’s censorship of Giuliani’s conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden’s laptop, does anyone but me remember that that like all of Giuliani’s “legal work” for Trump, that story was based on nothing but the empty calories of cotton-candy media headlines.
Teachers
I love a particular story about Paul McCartney and John Lennon from the days when they were just starting to play music together. Supposedly, between the two of them, they knew three chords on the guitar. Then they heard a rumor that someone in Liverpool knew a fourth chord. So they got the guy’s name and address and one day they took several buses across town to the other side of Liverpool to find the guy and learn that chord! I can easily imagine doing the very same thing as a teenager.
It seems like I learned a little something, and at times quite a lot, from a great many people over the past 50 years. I’ll try to give a mention to as many of my teachers as I can here. My apologies to those unmentioned here, as I’m sure to leave some gaps.
The second band I was ever in included Trenny Blum on guitar and lead vocals, bassist Dave Shaffer, and drummer Mark MacElwain. I was the lead guitar guy. I think I was finishing 8th grade when I joined them, and the other members were one year ahead of me in school. We all compared notes, literally and figuratively, and learned from each other. I was less informed about pop music than they were at that point, and like now, I had learned more intuitively on own than I did from instruction or from copying others. Guitarist Andy Manness joined with us after a year or so, and he was two years ahead of me in school. He played a semi-hollow-bodied electric – a Silvertone or a Harmony I’m pretty sure – that he played through a decent sized Heathkit amplifier. Heathkit gear was more affordable than name brands like Fender partly because it required some assembly, and Andy was the kind of guy who knew his way around a soldering gun. He knew more guitar licks and had more records and had maybe formed more opinions than we had yet. He liked Frank Zappa and so did the rest of us. We were all probably just following the pop music trends, and as the hippies started getting into blues, we did too. I was sitting in Moxie’s bar after school one day with Andy. Moxies was three blocks from my house and about six blocks from his. It was known as a place that would serve beer to minors, knowledge that at that point I filed away, not pretending they’d serve me yet. But we’d meet there after school and drink cokes and listen to the jukebox. I remember one time when a B.B. King record came on. Andy looked across the table at me and said, “Did you hear that chord he just played?” I nodded yes. He said it was a really cool chord, and continued – “You know what that is? It’s a 9th chord”. I’m pretty sure he described how to play it to me right there in the booth at Moxies. Our guitars were at home but he showed me the shape you made with your fingers to make E9 using the top five strings of the guitar, the index finger on the 6th fret of the D string, the middle finger on the 7th fret of the A string, and the ring finger barring the G, B and E strings at the 7th fret. Thanks Andy!
Another guitar friend in high school was Jeff Ring. I met him at Oglebay Park ski area and discovered he played guitar and after that we’d get together and talk music and play. He had a black topped Gibson Les Paul and a red Gibson SG. He learned Allman Brothers twin guitar parts as soon as the records came out, and he played in bar bands when he was 14 and 15 years old.
There was a guy that Mollie and I saw at a folk music contest in Wheeling, a student at the local Jesuit college who was from New York, named Dennis Alvino. He played finger style guitar on a song, made the audience laugh with some talking in the middle of what I would come to know later as country blues – ala Mississippi John Hurt or Reverand Gary Davis. I think later Mollie and I ran into him at the Pizza Inn, which was across Washington Avenue from Moxies. It was another place to go after school, drink cokes, and listen to the juke box, and in this case eat pizza. (I liked the ones with hot jalapeños.) Somewhere along the line, Dennis showed me the basis of Travis style finger picking, variations of which I’d unknowingly already learned from guitar tablature in a Peter, Paul and Mary songbook. He mentioned a few names like John Hurt and Gary Davis and Merle Travis, and when I saw a used Martin guitar that he’d recently purchased, I noticed it was the same brand as what Doc Watson played. I remembered those names and bought some of their records and later I bought my own Martin guitar. One of Dennis’s fellow students at Wheeling College, Rube Fellicelli, didn’t play music himself but was a knowledgeable sorta super fan, who turned me and my sister on to a lot of different sounds. I still keep up with Rube, who now lives in Telluride, Colorado.
The value of singing from an early age - in church, in school, even as a family riding in the car, is hard to underestimate. Repetition trained my receptive ear and led my physical body into early recreations of musical content I’d heard from my very beginnings. There was nothing precious about singing along with a group, and it always seemed easy and enjoyable to me. I liked learning to read from the musical staff in grade school. It provided a tangible way of looking at the intangible thing that is music. Occasional unrestricted access to piano’s provided another tangible entry into this mysterious thing called music. You touch the keys of this amazing machine and tones come out, and there are 88 different choices! By the third grade I already had an idea what a chord was. When friends of mine purchased guitars I imitated what they were doing with their hands and it didn’t seem so hard. A guitar was obviously just another tool for making musical sounds. Singing harmony to melodies in church or along with the radio seemed like a no brainer. I was just finding my place in what I was hearing. Nobody was worried about what I was doing, no one was there to squash my intuitive searching. Getting my own guitar and a little instruction book was all I needed to keep going. Soon, Roger Miller and Peter, Paul, and Mary song books with lyrics and chords were pushing my learning along at a faster speed. I was lucky to have my own room to make those tentative early sounds in private, and just as lucky to have an older sister named Mollie who liked to sing as much as I liked to play.
I think I’ve already mentioned Posey Hazelett and Harvey Marshall, who taught me songs and finger picking patterns at 12 and 13 years of age. My brother Trip (Frank O’Brien III), ten years older than me, was an early role model in sports and Boy Scouts and then with music. Albums he brought home from college, and then left behind when he went into the military were early pathways into folk, jazz and pop music appreciation. The Beatles, The Animals and other British invasion bands offered something a little more raw, and their popularity reinforced my efforts at playing that music. When a new young priest, Charles Braun, arrived at Saint Michael’s parish and promoted the folk mass, I found myself with an early gig, one with very little stress. Once again, I was just doing it along with other kids in a group. But now suddenly, I had something to offer, something to work toward, and low stake experiences playing a musical instrument in a group. Folk music in general was very attractive. For one thing, you could play it alone, with another person, or in a group. Being acoustic, you could play it under a tree, in your room, or on a stage. After all, John Lennon and Roger Miller played acoustic guitars, and I knew they were cool.
One day I found a program on the new public TV channel 13 from Pittsburgh. It was live footage of a folk music festival in Berkeley, California. A guy with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica in a rack on his neck stood while a stagehand placed a few microphones around him. They introduced Doc Watson and what I saw and heard in the next few minutes astounded me. I’ve written much about Doc’s influence and suffice to say that he has taught me as much as anyone ever did. I studied his and James Taylor’s fingerstyle playing closely in those early years. Doc’s flat picking made me learn to use a straight pick and opened the doorway into the world of fiddle tunes. That whole side of traditional music led me next into the bluegrass and old-time music genres. Soon enough I was able to connect Folk versions of “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “I Had a Dog and His Name Was Blue” to artists like Ralph Stanley and the New Lost City Ramblers. Flatt and Scruggs music had long been easy on my ears, but now I started developing a taste for the more strident sounds of Bill Monroe and Roscoe Holcomb.
My appreciation of songwriting was fed by my appetite for both the clever wordplay of Roger Miller, and the musically inventive sounds of the Beatles. But I should also credit English literature with expanding my interest in writing original material. One high school English teacher really helped me connect to and learn about the world through reading. His name was Max Laborde and I studied with him in my junior year of high school. A few books in particular – “How Green Was My Valley” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” – really opened the way. Laborde also taught me how to read and respect poetry. He showed his students how poetic phrases could be “pregnant with meaning”. I gained an appetite for storytelling, metaphor, and theme, and became something of a voracious reader. I could learn about different subjects, history, religion, human nature, all while being entertained. The on-the -road life of a traveling musician is particularly conducive to reading. Many musicians I met along the way kept a paperback handy for the long limbo of down time hours.
Another high school teacher, Douglas Haigwood, was very influential. He was the band teacher, but I didn’t play in band. It was his “Glee Club”, an elective class period at Linsley Military Institute, that I really looked forward to. This all-male chorus worked on material ranging from barbershop quartet harmony (“Lida Rose”) and Black Spirituals (“Set Down Servant”) to challenging modern classical pieces (Randall Thompson’s “A Testament of Freedom”). Haigwood also produced an the annual Linsley Minstrels show, and I participated in those programs three out of the four years I attended the school. Linsley’s show was a large form version of the old black-face minstrel show, but by the time I was involved, the comedic black-faced “end men” had been reborn as hoboes, costumed in ragged, patched clothing, with “dirt” makeup in place of black face paint. Linsley was a boys school, but the participants in the Minstrel chorus could invite a female date to participate. Rehearsals were on Saturdays. The chorus members sang old show tunes and wore white gloves which shown in the lights – another vestige of the black face era – as they made choregraphed rhythmic moves with their hands along to the music. The Glee Club and the Linsley Minstrels, like the folk mass, were opportunities to learn and perform musically. My sister Mollie and I performed at least once as a folky duet on the minstrel show, which was held at the Capitol Theater, the same venue for concerts by the Wheeling Symphony, and for the WWVA Jamboree, a weekly live country radio broadcast. The audience for the Linsley Minstrels was mostly made up of relatives of Linsley students and alumnae but it seemed like a big deal.
Toward the end of high school, I developed a musical friendship with Peter Bachman, who had spent his post high school years traveling and playing music. He showed me more of the flatpicking tunes I’d started learning from Doc Watson records . We’d spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching football games on tv with the sound turned off while we played “Salt Creek” and “Old Joe Clark”. One summer weekend we went to a fiddler’s convention in Elizabeth WV. I remember that I kept hearing a certain tune being played over and over. It seemed like it alternated every other time with other tunes, both on stage and in jam sessions. At the end of the weekend, I knew its name: “Soldier’s Joy”.
Following high school, at Colby College in Waterville Maine, I met up with Jeff McKeen and his roommate David Smith. We often played music in the stairwell of Dana Hall, favoring its reverb. Their dorm room, which often had a towel pushed against the bottom of the door frame, became known as the “Ozone Music Center”. We played a lot of music in that room, both on records and with our guitars. Jeff had a banjo and a mandolin in addition to his 12-string guitar, and on one long weekend when he and David were gone, I learned a few tunes on the mandolin from tablature in one of his Sing Out magazines. Those two tunes opened the door to my learning to play the fiddle, which shares the same left-hand positions with the mandolin. I keep in touch with Jeff, known these days as Smokey. He’s still in Maine, farming oysters in Dameriscotta and playing music with his group Old Grey Goose. He also officiated at Jan and my wedding in July of 2021.
Other Colby students and hangers on I learned from include guitarist Dick English, and Greg Boardman, Chris Prickett and David Livingston who let me play guitar in their bluegrass group the Northern Valley Boys. I learned as much music as anything else during my year at Colby, and I should thank my roommate John for putting up with my many hours learning various songs and tunes.
As recounted in an earlier post, I withdrew from Colby in my sophomore year, after two weeks in the fall of 1973. Back home in Wheeling, I started playing in a bluegrass group with Peter Bachman, Ed Mahonen, Laura Cramblet, and Vick Marshall. I spent the following winter in Jackson Hole playing solo and with Bluegrass After the Shootout, but probably learned the most from sitting in with the Stagecoach Band on Sunday nights at the Stagecoach bar in Wilson.
My next stop, and it became a long 22-year stop, was Boulder Colorado. The scene there and in Denver were vibrant in the mid 1970’s and I learned about recording and songwriting and performing through experiences with folks like Ritchie Mintz, Kelly McNish, Ray Bonneville, Steve “Dusty Drapes” Swenson, Keely Bruner, Dan Sadowsky, Duane Webster, Linda Joseph, Washboard Chaz Leary, Charlie Davies, Pat Donohue, Mary Flower, and Mike Scap. Harry Tuft and his Denver Folklore Center get special credit for supporting the scene and providing a meeting place for so many of us musicians. I spent a much of 1977 in Minneapolis, and learned a lot from Bill Hinkley, Peter Ostroushko, Adam Granger, Bob Douglas, and Tim Sparks. I moved back to Colorado in early 1978 and began what I often call my musical graduate school with my Hot Rize cohorts Pete Wernick, Charles Sawtelle, and Nick Forster.
I would include my ongoing friendship with J.D. Huchison in that graduate program. He would eventually become an important mentor and sounding board. Meeting the various members of the New Grass Revival and David Grisman Quintet – Darol Anger in particular - was important. These amazing players treated me as one of their peers and inspired me to learn and improve. Sam Bush is impressive on so many musical fronts, and I’ve long been his understudy. Robin and Linda Williams were another important connection, as were connections to Jerry Douglas, Kevin Burke, Maura O’Connell, and Stuart Duncan. In Nashville, there are so many folks to learn from and I am lucky to have worked closely with folks like Jeff White, Bryan Sutton, David Grier, Mike Bub, Dennis Crouch, Charlie Cushman, and Shad Cobb.
I should also mention Nashville producers Alan Reynolds, Jim Rooney, Garth Fundis, Gary Paczosa, and David Ferguson. Engineer Sean Sullivan gets and honorable mention. I learned a lot about songwriting from interactions with Pat Alger, Gary Nicholson, Darrell Scott, Guy Clark, David Olney, John Hadley, and Steve Earl. Other songwriting teachers include Greg Brown, Chris Luedecke, Mark Graham, Mark Knopfler, and over the past year, Tom Paxton.
Dirk Powell deserves special mention as an inspiring collaborator. He and the late Kenny Malone taught me so much about reaching the core and touching the heart of music. The late choreographer Eileen Carson also provided a template of how to be an artist. Mark Schatz and Scott Nygaard helped a lot too.
In Ireland and the United Kingdom, I’ve been enriched by connections with people like John McCusker, Kate Rusby, John Doyle, Mike McGoldrick, Donald Shaw, Aly Bane, Steve Cooney, and the great Arty McGlynn.
My sister Mollie was there with me from the very beginning. She cast me in little plays she organized, she was my fellow Beatles fan club member, and she opened the door into the music of people like Gordon Lightfoot and Bob Dylan. Her taste was always spot on, and I was lucky to learn my singing and instrumental techniques alongside her from middle through high school, and then again in my Colorado years. We performed across the US and around the globe, made some wonderful music, and laughed allot.
The remaining name on my list is Dale Bruning and I could have started and ended this essay trying to cover his influence. In my early years in the musical crucible of the Colorado Front Range, Dale held great renown as both performer and teacher. The best guitar players I knew had studied with Dale and I soon became a fixture at his weekly shows with the Spike Robinson Quartet. I started saving some of my gig money to take lessons with Dale. I was playing with Ophelia Swing band and wanted to learn how to play rhythm guitar like Freddie Green in the Count Basie Orchestra, but Dale showed me so much more. He used a repeating four lesson cycle. The first lesson covered technique, the next one rhythm studies, followed by chords and scales, and finally, repertoire. He wrote custom notes to each lesson by hand in a composition book which I still have. I learned positions up and down the guitar fingerboard, and transferred whatever I learned to the mandolin and fiddle which I had started playing more in the mid 1970’s. I took lessons off and on for a few years and returned later to focus more on harmony. I’m still studying much of what he taught me, and learned how better to teach others from him as well. I covered some of his lessons on the modes in last month’s entry. Dale was always supportive and I can still count on him as a sounding board. I try to keep in touch as the years go by. Jan and I attended one of Dale’s performances in Denver last February.
One of Dale’s more well-known students is Bill Frisell. When I first met Bill at a show in Nashville, he gave me a big hug. I think it was because he knew we’d both studied with Dale. Thanks to Nick Forster, the three of us got to record together several years ago. The result, called “Life Lessons”, has never been formally released, but I hope to offer it for sale via timobrien.net in the coming month.
Born in Carbondale Pennsylvania, November 9th, 1924, Dale became a jazz fan through his father who played drums. He recalls the thrill of attending matinee performances featuring the Duke Ellington Orchestra with his father at movie houses in New York City. He went on to work as guitarist, bassist and arranger in New York and New Jersey, and later earned a degree in Psychology from Temple University while simultaneously studying music with guitarist Dennis Sandole. At the time, Temple didn’t consider guitar a real instrument, so he couldn’t major in music there. He says what he learned at Temple came in handy, but the real learning happened with Sandole, who’s other students included John Coltrane. Dale’s lesson cycle came directly from Sandole. Dale played with big bands including Fred Waring’s, and in the US Navy. He later became music director for the Del Shields Show on Philadelphia television station WRCV. With support from guitarist Johnny Smith, Dale moved to Colorado with his growing family in 1964. He often played bass with folk and blues legend Josh White, and started collecting students.
As Dale’s 90th birthday nears, he continues to teach and perform occasionally. I asked him how it looks from his age, and he responded, “It looks OLD. I have 2 speeds: slow and stop?!”
Thanks to Dale and all the rest for helping me on my way.
Terrific - keep em' coming please.