HOW I GOT HERE
THE STORY
Interstate Blues is my first album.
The cover songs go back before before the Beatles, before Dylan, to Furry Lewis, the Carter Family, and Clarence Greene learning from Blind Lemon Jefferson. The originals take off from a sound that, to me, came from Woody Guthrie through the New Lost City Ramblers and then reached towards alt country roots music.
It all starts from a bookish New York Baby Boomer and somehow ends up with songs about truck drivers and Interstate Highways, cowboys on the prairie, and, of course, guitar players, singers, and disappointed lovers.
If I’d known I was going to end up here, I’d have spent less time thinking and more time practicing.
THE BACK STORY
A baby boomer in New York, I grew up in the late 1940’s glow of FDR, the New Deal, and the United Front – the city’s Jews, Italians, Irish, and African-Americans – combined to defeat Fascism. Before and early into the LP era, I remember listening to Peter and the Wolf, Scheherazade, Harry Belafonte, and My Fair Lady, but my musical bones were made up of Woody Guthrie and the Weavers. In 19xx, I bought a single of Johnny B Goode, the last record I bought until the New Lost City Ramblers.
My sister had Erik Darling’s first solo record. When I play Aboline I always want to follow it with Swanowa Tunnel, “all caved in, baby, all caved in.” I guess that was junior high school.
I hit high school and fell in with Monte Dunn, who became a sideman to Ian and Sylvia. Monte pulled me out of the History Society to form the Folk Song Club. Monty was a natural musician and needed a rhythm player behind his lead guitar and mandolin. This was 1961. I took all the money I had left from gifts, $130, went down to Silver and Horland on Park Row, and bought a Martin D-18.
Our Beatles were the Ramblers, Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and, in those days, Tom Paley, my first guitar hero. I got Railroad Blues and Johnson City Blues from him. Monte claimed to know John Cohen, who lived down the block from high school on Astor place. Our ritual was to go down to visit him, but he was never at home.
At the Donnell Library Record Room, I listened to Joan Baez and to the Anthology of American Folk Music. Furry Lewis doing Kassie Jones. Monte outplayed me but I followed along to parties and meetings. My music appreciation teacher threatened to fail me after I skipped class to go down to the WBAI studio where I played poorly and met David Bromberg. Monte went off to college in Buffalo, to Toronto to make a name for himself, and we lost touch.
I found the Beatles and the Stones, got turned on to Sweetheart of the Rodeo and the Flying Burrito Bothers, tried to learn to play electric, and never got very good. Small hands and irreversibly sloppy technique. And I puttered on guitar into my Fifties,
I started lessons with Steve Tarshis, stopped, and started again until Steve was gone. I was enthusiastic, but more than guitar, Steve taught me about music. Robert Johnson and Muddy and Wolf, and then, after being told by someone I took seriously, that I had to listen to “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, and Townes van Zandt.
I wanted to sing Beatles songs, so Steve sent me to Janie Barnett for some voice lessons, and somehow, over the first few years of I started trying to write songs. I wanted to, and still want to write Tom Petty songs I can play with a band, but what came was somehow a city version of alt country, roots music. After I got serious, Janie took me up to Paul Guzzone’s studio and we made Interstate Blues.
Life seems to be made up of such accidents.