Welcome to the Northwest Performer Heritage Project (aka Our Performer Family Tree).
I wanted to know who *my* mentors' mentors were and thus, this project was borne.
In the Pacific Northwest (USA), we are blessed with some of the best comedians, vaudevillians, musicians, and performers in the world. Seattle, Wa. has been lucky enough to
host a large group of these performers, for at least 25 years. We have such a rich heritage, it seemed a crime to let it die with us. This performance bond has actually created
a somewhat make-shift family between us all. That cannot be denied. Even though this may be our personal life history, it is also Seattle, NW, vaudeville, street performer and
performance art history. Our histories, also, belong to the public, as they are part of our creation too. I want to help document and archive our community and culture so
future generations can use us as a reference. Maybe a hundred years from now, street performing will be unheard of, and someone will find our story, and start a whole new
community of entertainers entertaining entertainers, and the community, like we did. Stay tuned for more NW Performer Family Heritage to be posted here!
Here is an example of one of our projects...this was one of our first projects, asking performer family who influenced them to become a busker and/or performer...
My next influence and my introduction to singing and playing with others was shortly thereafter when the British invasion took our country by storm. My older sister, Aleta, being mostly responsible for getting me and several others in the hood involved. She somehow got a hold of some money and started buying 45rpm records, which she'd play over and over on a cheap little turntable. Her first record was by the Beatles, I Want To Hold Your Hand/She Loves You. She'd sing along with the records until she had the songs memorized. Soon a whole band of neighborhood kids began doing the same. We knew the words to any number of songs by popular British bands of the day like the Beatles and The Dave Clark Five. <-Where are they now? We'd get together with other kids in the neighb and pantomime the records as a band, always fighting over would would be Paul, John, George or Ringo. I remember one time when we played records on my sisters little portable record player, we set it on the step behind us as we stood in front of the stoop on the street and pantomimed the bands and songs. Yep, that's when we invented what we called Carry Yucky. We called it that because someone always had the yucky job of carrying around the record player, ya see, which was bulky and heavy and awkward. I hear it caught on in a big way somewhere back East but they call it something else. Some old guy walked by us and actually threw some spare change at our feet! Yup, and that's when we invented playin' music for money on the street. I heard much later that the idea caught on way back in jolly old England where they call it busking for some unknown reason.
Getting back to my mentors, the next in line, in any big way, had to be my mom, who, after years of me constantly working on her, at every opportunity, finally caved, well sort of caved. For Christmas, one year, I received my first musical instrument. Well it wasn't exactly a musical instrument. It was more of a noise maker called a Kookie Kombo by Marx. It's frame was molded plastic made to look like plumbing and it had a neck strap and a waist belt. The whole thing operated with a crank on the side. Different levers, when engaged, would allow various items to be activated. One would start a small plastic hammer crashing into a pan lid, (a sort of make shift cymbal). Another lever would begin a spatula slapping the bottom of a frying pan. Activating another lever would begin a tooth brush scrubbing up and down on a metal wasboard face. The last one would allow a spoon, with a tamborine jingle on the handle end, to begin to beat the bottom of a soup can. All of these could be activated individually or in combination with any of the others and rhythmically slowed or quickened depending upon how fast you cranked the thing. In addition, along the top edge were a number of things that could be tooted. There was a huge kazoo, a two toned train whistle, a police whistle and a three holed flute. In short enough stuff to drive any parent out of their mind. So, I shouldn't have been surprised that the first words that came from my mother's mouth, upon hearing my exhuberant exploration into the intricacies of my first musical menagery were, "Get out of here with that thing! You're driving me crazy!" Easier said than done, as we lived in northern Wisconsin at the time and getting out of earshot meant going outside where there was about two feet of snow on the ground during that Christmas season, a nippy prospect. Undaunted and still reveling in the reward that took so many years of constant effort to finally receive, found me, soon afterward, marching triumphantly in my pajamas and snow boots in circles in the front yard through the light and drifting snow covered landscape.
Woodstock was the next event that struck a chord in me. I seriously contemplated running off to take in the event, but I chickened out, as the world at large was pretty much an unknown quantity for me at the time. It did, however, make a big musical impression and I listened.
Then, seeing my highschool art teachers play music in class one day. One was on guitar and the other on a washtub bass. I didn't know it at the time, but it would be this guitar playing art teacher that would be my biggest influence and mentor. His name was Robert Johnson. He taught during my first two years of highschool but then quit to play music full time. Later he tell me that he could make more money playing music on the weekends than he made all week teaching. It was on one of those weekends, after he had quit teaching, while I was hanging out on the streets of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, that I bumped into him while he was taking a break outside of a local pub. He invited me to come to work for him. He was going to open a ceramic shop to make and sell stoneware. Upon noticing my interest in playing guitar, while I was working with him, he bought me my first guitar as part of my wages. He taught me the first few chords and then let me use his record collection to listen to Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Muddy Waters, Gary Davis etc. I was in blues heaven. Bob was and still is a real role model for me. Seeing his performances gave me a blueprint of how to do it.
I played my first gig while in highschool. I played clubs while going to college. I even had a goofy band that parodied the punk/glamore rock stuff that was happening at the time.
It wasn't till years later, after college, that I lost the last remnants of the Kookie Kombo. My younger siblings had destroyed it while I was away at school, except for the whistle array. I moved to Seattle and lost that last piece in the move.
Shortly thereafter I began playing on the street at the Market, where I met up with a curious fiddler named Crow. He and I were soon joined by an acquaintance of his named Robert Amblade another guitar player. Later we three joined forces with another fiddler named Tom Tilney, a guitar player, Cindy Three Kids, and Dave McKesson who was playing mandolin at the time. We called that combo the Music Circus. It was while trying to hammer out the direction of that band, what kind of music we would play and who would play what, that a real epiphany happened for me, or to me. The majority ruled in favor of a fiddle tunes/bluegrass type of approach, which kind of made me the odd man, coming from a background of fingerpickin' blues. So Dave, (we called him Mudflap) hands me this washboard and says, "Why don't you play this?" I reluctantly did as I was asked and when the only acutrament on it, a Planters Peanut can, fell off during the course of my initial scrubbing, I decided to make my own. Robert Amblade, (Cowboy Dog to us), always claimed it was at his behest that I eventually began turning my basic washboard into what I can only now describe as the adult version of the Kookie Kombo. The long forgotten instrument/toy I had received for Christmas years ago from my mother. It's still evolving today.
My next mentors are those I've run into on the streets while performing. Besides all of those previously mentioned and others more obscure like West Viginia Slim and The Green Dragon from my years of playing at Pike Place, the late great musical saw god Tom Scribner has to be the most influential to my flexing of the razor sharp handtool. Even though we only met briefly, it was his ability on the unruly blade that continues to keep me focused and helps me carry on, risking life, limb and future family hopes, in pursuit of it's haunting timbre.
Washboard Jackson, who I had the pleasure of working with in New Orleans, was a mentor as well as Billy Hultz during the early days of Strangers with Candy.
Garage sales have opened a world of possiblities. Finding wacky old songs by Spike Jones, Bert Williams, Nervous Novus on crusty, dusty, chipped and scratched old 78s has been a constant inspiration, as well as the work of those who do the same.
I began to go to the Portland Saturday Market to busk in the 1980's and there I met David the Minstrel, Bob Shoemaker, Billy Kennedy, the Gravitini Brothers, Tim Miller, and a few others of the Oregon clan. They were all characters and I learned alot from them all. Later I moved to Santa Cruz, where I hooked up with Rebo and Jan Luby, some more of the Karamozov Brothers, Tom Noddy, David and Rosalyn, and that whole circus/vaudeville side of the family...I think I also met Thaddeus and Sandahbeth outside of Santa Cruz, in a busker competition that was fixed. I met T and S again at the Friday Harbor Jazz Fest in 1983, I KNOW that, as S. was doing a nightclub act there and I was very impressed with her voice.
Eventually I made it to ocf where it all came together...where I met Rhys Thomas, Charlie Brown, Mildred Hodittle, Moz Wright, Henrik, UMO, and the Eugene crowd...And now, 24 years after I met everyone, my mentors are still Gramps, Rhys, Mildred, FKB...
This project will grow in time, so stay tuned.
Thank you to Resist.ca for hosting this website!