My So-called Musical Biography
I’ve been playing music since grade school, when I had a brief early flirtation with the violin. A few years later, friend of my family named Ron Hoge moved to town. I heard him fingerpick “Duncan and Brady” and thought, “I want to do that!” My mom found me a used Gibson classical guitar in a pawn shop. Ron started to teach me to play Travis style, and it was off to the races.
I played my first gig with Ron in a church coffeehouse at the tender age of 13. We performed “House of the Rising Sun,” “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright),” “Rosie’s House of Sin” and some other chestnuts. They paid us $7, which Ron was nice enough to split with me.
More obscure details
Shortly thereafter, I heard my first Jimi Hendrix record and foolishly decided to switch musical direction. That led to a series of rock bands, none of which advanced beyond jamming on Grateful Dead songs in the basement — so it wasn’t a complete waste. During college, I reconnected with folk music and bought a Gibson J-45 from a down-and-out farmer in western Iowa. I started playing in a folk duet. That valuable experience taught me that performing covers of Gordon Lightfoot songs is neither a good way to meet women nor find paying gigs.
I eventually fell in with some musicians who shared an eclectic taste that included bluegrass, honky-tonk country, British Invasion music, western swing, hillbilly jazz, outlaw country and 1960s Motown. Despite a lack of thematic focus — and a tendency to drink Jack Daniels until we could barely stand — the succession of bands this ferment produced found a local audience. What had been the band Kilgore Trout before my arrival morphed into Hot Springs, which had a modicum of success working the bar circuit. We opened shows for Vassar Clements, the Red Hot Burrito Brothers, Asleep at The Wheel and the Oak Ridge Boys.
Cure for insomnia, cont.
When the Springs were fairly well sprung, we morphed into a trio known as S.O.D., for either Sons of Durant (a little town some of us lived near in rented hippy farmhouses) or Sons of Dirt-ranch (as we were wont to refer to our little corner of the world). S.O.D. specialized in bluegrass and Americana. There was me on flat-top guitar, and a mandolin player and electric bass.
S.O.D. aspired to continue working the bars, as Hot Springs had done, but we soon decided we needed a drummer. Bars are noisy and filled with drunk people who want to dance. We started gigging with the drummer from our Hot Springs days, who was then using newly acquired electronic drums. Things devolved rapidly from there.
Lost in the musical wilderness
It was about this time I decided that as much as I loved playing music, I did not love hauling amps out of taverns at 3 in the morning. I decided to devote my creative energies to writing and published “I, Vampire” and some other books. The money was better, there was no heavy lifting, and I didn’t wake up to discover the clothes I’d been wearing the night before smelled like a cigarette factory after a three-alarm fire. But I missed playing. Eventually some of the usual suspects got back together to play occasional gigs as what became knows as The Moe Show.
It all started with a series of picnics at the farmhouse where I resided with my wife, Carol, and I lived with our eldest son, Ryan, then but a babe in arms. As a once-a-year gig, we would import musical friends from such far-flung locales as Colorado to participate. We played a little of everything, drained kegs of beer, and cooked out on grills. It was “Father Knows Best” meets “Hank Williams Jr.”.
An invitation to Naked Night
Over time, the Moe Show metastasized and took to rambling across the countryside, a musical Frankenstein escaped from the laboratory to wreak havoc on the peasantry. One spot we terrorized repeatedly was an out-of-the-way marina-and-restaurant compound on the Mississippi River owned by a man who looked like Hunter S. Thompson. He tried to talk us into performing for Naked Night, when everyone would attend au natural. We declined.
The Moe Show grew into either an entertaining and wry commentary on rock extravaganzas (though we still played a little of everything, starting each show with a bluegrass set), or a bloated excess, complete with female backup singers, a horn section, and musicians in Hawaiian shirts. One participant began to refer to the music produced by the strange amalgamation of musicians and instruments as “Moe Sludge.” I tended to agree.
By this point in my so-called musical career I’d developed an interest in Irish music and fiddling, something I’d dabbled at off and on over the years. At one Moe Show performance, after screaming my throat out singing “Mustang Sally” while playing my signature hot-pink Stratocaster, and after not being able to get any fiddle folded back through through the stage monitors so I could hear it over the electric guitars, I decided the time had come to ramble on down the musical road.
The Barley House Band and the Bucktown Revue
For the past decade I’ve played mainly Irish music. I perform with Celtic band called The Barley House Band, with Kristi Ruud (whistle, bodhran, recorder, harp), Tena Hess (flute), and Krista Rittenhouse (vocals). The current lineup includes Amy Klutho (violin), Keith Hentrich (guitar) and Bob Rosensteil (upright bass). They’re all A-list players, and I have to stay on top of my game to keep up with them. The BHB has recorded two CDs.
Though the BHB has never lacked for opportunities to perform, I found myself wishing we had a regular job in a nice venue, with a crowd that was there to listen. The solution was The Bucktown Revue. The Bucktown Revue is a monthly “old-fashioned internet radio program” at the RME inspired by the likes of the Grand Ol’ Opry and Prairie Home Companion. The shows, for which the BHB serves as house orchestra, is held in Davenport’s River Music Experience Performance Hall at 7 p.m. the third Friday of the month September through April.
I write and produce the show and line up the talent. The shows are recorded on an Alesis HD-24. I mix it in Logic and bounce it up to the web and Apple iTunes. It’s a lot of work, but it’s even more fun.
I don’t know why more musicians don’t invent their own gigs. It cuts out the middle man and puts the musicians in the driver’s seat.
The road to Mandolinville
I’ve switched gears from fiddle to mostly mandolin the past few years.
Our middle son, Matt, is an accomplished mandolin player. In 2004, Matt talked me into attending Mike Marshall and David Grisman’s first Mandolin Symposium in Santa Cruz, Calif. I met Mike Compton there, who was John Hartford’s mandolin player, plays on the “Oh Brother Where Art Thou” soundtrack and has recorded and toured with the likes of Elvis Costello and many of the bluegrass greats. I started taking lessons from Mike, an expert in Bill Monroe-style mandolin playing.
The BHB continues apace, as does the Bucktown Revue. I’ve always been interested in recording, and have started producing recordings for some of the folk artists who appear at Bucktown.
As a side project, I’m getting together an informal group of players, the Fair Weather Friends, to play and record some bluegrass and Americana. It seems I’m destined to charge forward into the musical past, but that’s the way I hear it.
Selah.
