About Me
Music and electronics have been mixed together for so long in me it is part and parcel now, so electronics first: picture a 5 year old boy, curious and all that, going across the street to a neighbor's garage where the guy is building a chair or something, has this old radio on a stool, no case, bare tubes, wires, etc. The thing about the old radios is they were built with one wire of the power line tied directly to the metal chassis, back when radios had tubes.
As long as you plug it in the right way, the chassis is ground and you are ok.
But if the plug is plugged in backwards, the 110 volts is now on the chassis.
So in comes this 5 year old (me) and seeing this bare radio, am drawn to the glowing tubes and such, touch the chassis and get an elecronic epiphany! It wasn't a deadly shock but you can imagine it really fired up my curiosity as to what in the heck just happened! So that was my first encounter with electronics, about 1948 as a little kid in El Monte, California. So I get an electric train for christmas when I was 8 and found the tracks didn't connect very well and learned to solder the tracks together after some spectacular mistakes of course, so when I was 11, I found myself with a model airplane motor and propeller and wasn't really interested in models but my buddy had a trade in mind, he was into model airplanes, so we traded, he got my motor and I got a pair of earphones and a diode. So they hung around for a while (I am getting to the music part here!) and I was in the home of my step dad and his mom, with my mom and sister, and found this unused room nobody ever went in except to dust. It turned out this room must have belonged to my step grandad, who had passed away a couple of years before. The room was full of over a thousand 78 RPM records, Bing Crosby, Lilly Pons, Andre Kostolantets (sp?) and hundreds more, light opera, Annie get your gun, that kind of thing. Nothing to play them on however. Then I spotted this old turntable, electric, but no amplifier or housing, just the bare turntable. It didn't even sit level, so put it on a box to level it out. Noticed there was a pickup with wires coming off of it. I thought about my newly aquired headphones, and got it and saw some wires sticking out of that. So I hooked each wire to the wires on the cartridge and put on a record, of course no electronics, no amplifier, but lo and behold, I could hear the music from the record! Well I was elated! So I started listening to every record I could in that wonderful collection, and found later some folk music records out in a little shack in the back of the property, I remember one, Vernon Dalhart, Wreck of the old 97 as one and really liked the folk music ones at least as much as the semi classical ones in the main house. That was about the time Burl Ives had a 15 minute TV show where he sang kids songs and I really loved that show.
So I was kind of hooked on folk music by the time I was 11. Didn't get a chance to get a guitar for about 7 years though, now living with parents in Escondido, a nice town about 30 miles north of San Diego. Got a guitar, an old silvertone, and had an uncle who played in a country western band, showed me the big three chords, C, F and G, had a devil of a time with that F chord! So I am practicing with that and got a few lessons with a guitar teacher, not many, and was finally getting some stuff down, I went to a local folk festival and found other musicians and they inpired me to keep at it. This is now about 1960. In 1958, a buddy of mine played me a tape of the Weavers and it was love at first sight, or hearing. In 1960 heard that Pete Seeger was coming to San Diego and went to see him and was deeply effected by him. Then a few months later, I heard Reverand Gary Davis was coming to town, at a coffeehouse called Circes Cup run by Jack and Marilyn Powell. So I went, the opening act was Stu Jamison, a banjo player extraordinarre, whom I became friends with later, and then Gary himself.
What an eye opener. I must have had my mouth open the longest during that concert because Marilyn invited me up to their flat where Gary was staying for a few days. I went there and found a guy I had just met, another folkie, Michael Cooney had been invited also. So we are both talking to the Reverand and we both said, would it be alright if we went home and got our tape recorders? Sure, no problem. So I drove home as fast as I could go, got my old wallensak and so did Michael! So back at the Powells, we set up two old reel to reels and two mics in hand we are going, wait, slow that down, do that Candyman again please, so recorded a couple hours like that. Afterwards, just about wore the oxide off the tape but finally could more or less play the Gary Davis versiono of Candyman. The next year I found a copy of the Harry Smith Anthology of folk music and found two cuts by this guy Mississippi John Hurt. Monday morning blues and Spikedrivers blues. Had to learn them! So another record just about worn to oblivion but ended up doing a passable version of those tunes. Now it's 1962 and the Cuban Missile crisis and in a patriotic mode, joined the air force, trained a year in Denver at Lowry AFB, found out about the Denver Folklore Center and that became my home away from home, Harry Tuft ran the place, and in 1963 he showed me this record that blew me away, and a lot of other dudes it turns out, the record was Lucky Thirteen by Bert Jansch. OMG, what a player! At the time did'nt know anything about the UK crowd, like Davey Graham or John Renbourne, found out about them like ten years later or so but again, another record to play to oblivion! Like his version of Anji, supposedly a Davey Graham tune but Shay Tochner, a friend and great guitarist whom I knew decades later in Jerusalem, says his cousin actually wrote anji and Davey took it. The style of the tune is not like much of anything else Davey plays and the version Graham actually recorded is a much truncated version of the incredible one done by Bert Jansch, that is THE version to learn if you want to play Anji. Regardless of the real origin of Anji, Davey Graham is a legend in his own right and has finally come out of his drug days to be a force again in guitar. So I tried to learn Anji and sort of got it, then off to Lincoln AFB and the nebraska bunch, like Roger Welsch, who has a record called Sweet Nebraska land, saw Pete Seeger again, this time had a martin D12-20 12 string and Roger invited me to the bar where Pete was holding court so to speak. I asked him to play my martin and he did, saying, Its nice, A little Small.... I am thinking, Yeah! you play that 12 string Guitaroon! So he taught me Living in the country and I learned that one sort of ok! So out of the AF, back to California, got a job in Andros Island (there is a british submarine base there called AUTEC, I was a technician there for a year) found out much later to my dismay I lived about a mile from Joseph Spence and the Pindar family but even though I had asked about local musicians, all they could think of was this blind piano player in Cokely town on the north island. So missed a chance to meet one of the great ones. Now its about 1970, off to DC area, Alexandria, Va. Right on the river, in the old town. It turns out there was a folklore center there, strangely enough called the Alexandria folklore center and I thought I was hot shyte on the guitar by this time, applied for a job at the center as a teacher. I lived about two blocks from the place at the time.
So they said sure, come in saturday, we will show you the ropes. So saturday comes, I come in guitar in hand, they said, sorry, we just found out Mike Stewart is available so we are going to use him. Who is Mike Stewart, I asked.
Hehe, you don't know Backwards Sam Firk? He is right over there in that teaching booth, go say high. So I do, and we started talking exchange names and such, I asked him to play something, and he played I think Turn your money green, and OMG again! Firk is a friggin genius at picking apart the old 78's and teasing out what they are playing, he has this collection of about 10,000 78's and knew just about every lick on every record or so it seemed to me at the time. So I instantly went from being a teacher to being a student and kept up with him for a couple of years till I move back west, but in the meantime had some sessions with a few local blues guys, like John Jackson, Archie Edwards who had this incredibly long thumb he used in sycopated loops, and Libba Cotton who fed me a nice chicken dinner once and I tried to show her how to play Davis Candy man, but that didn't go, lots of people tried that but a righty teaching a lefty, forget it! Great lady, Libba Cotton.
So I found out then about Tom Hoskins, "Fang", Stephan Michaelson "Delta X"
(clever little math thing), and Mike, Backwards Sam Firk, he got that handle because his name, Michael A. Stewart, the initials spell sam backwards so he got Backwards Sam, then someone added Firk and that is what he is to this day. So Tom Hoskins finds this old map of Mississippi, with Avalon on the map. They knew Mississippi John hurt had a song called Avalon Blues, and so he hopped a bus and showed up at John Hurt's door, after not to much of a search, everyone in town knew all about him. They were suspicious at first, white dude showing up at their door like that unannounced, they thought he was a "revenuer" or something, till Tom pulls out this 78 record of Johns. They get along famously, Tom calls Firk, hey, drive on down here, I just found Mississippi John Hurt! This is 1963 BTW. So Mike heads down there and they all drive back to DC to Firk's place in Patomac Md and John stays there for a few weeks and of course Firk being the sponge he is, absorbs everything John Played! Unfortunutely for me, I didn't show up in DC till around 69 or so and missed out on all that, John was already dead by 1968, so another one I didn't get to meet. But I had learned quite a bit from Mike anyway. So left in '71 and on the way to California found the home of Sam McGee in Franklin Tennessee, I stopped off in Nashville to see if there was a possiblilty for work as a guitarist but I was put off by all the Nashville hype and the one I wanted to meet I did anyway, Sam McGee. He graciously allowed us into his house on his farm in Franklin and wow, what a collection of awards he had! We played guitar all evening long and I had to be on my way but an unforgettable night that was!
So now find myself back where it all started, Los Angeles, off to a job in Thailand for two years, then back to LA and started seeing the Irish music crowd, got together with some local musicians and formed a band there called Southwind Irish Band, we learned basic licks playing for change at the LaBrea Tar Pits Museum and ran into some people like Tommy Makem who saw us play, we of course being a bit red faced to meet such a legend, but we got better and started getting real gigs and went through a number of band members, finally with Ken O'Malley, Sylvia Herold, me, and Larry Model,
started getting serious gigs, first at a theater (long since dead) called the Onion Company Theater and we played 4 nights a week for 5 months, a play by Brendan Behan, called The Hostage, starring James Cromwell and Redmond Gleeson and everyone in the cast really fine actors. So we played in the backstage area when songs were called for and on stage between acts and a fine time we had for sure. A couple of years later, Redmond got a gig on a nationally televised show, the Lou Grant show, and Ed Asner asked him if he knew of any local Irish bands, it seems the show he was thinking about was to do an IRA gun runner idea because the airing night was to be St. Patricks day so they wanted an Irish pub scene and Redmond said he knew of one, Southwind. So we got the gig, had a nice time at that! Unfortunutely shortly after that the band broke up, we moved to Scottsdale Arizona.
Started another band, Sugarloaf Mountain String Band, my wife Susan started a dulcimer society, the Arizona Dulcimer Society, still active today.
Then off to Pennsylvania and Susan started another dulcimer society which flopped, then in 1990 started going to Israel as a contractor for my company, Varian, working on Ion Implanters, found out there is an active anglo folk community in Israel, and in 1993 was asked to do a long term contract, took three kids and wife then and stayed over three years, played music at festivals all over Israel with Susan and our daughter in law to be (as it turned out) Charlotte, from Sweden, and our dear friend Ray Scudero who died a year ago, a genius, luthier, songwriter and friend, He is missed.
Susan started another dulcimer society, the Israeli Dulcimer society and it is going strong to this day. Back to the US in '97 and now work in New Jersey at a startup called Inplane Photonics and had time to make a CD of my own compositions, working one CD 2. There you have it!
