Just a small town guy from L.A.
Geoff Muldaur opens his eyes and focuses his musicBy PETER CROWLEY, Enterprise Managing Editor
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If you go ...
WHERE:Bluseed Studios, Saranac Lake
WHEN: Sunday, May 24: 7:30 p.m.
HOW MUCH: $18 general admission, $15 for Bluseed members
SARANAC LAKE - These days, Geoff Muldaur watches birds, tours small-town America and Europe, writes chamber music but still plays with jug-band leader Jim Kweskin, still forms new bands and keeps widening his mastery of musical styles - but none from the last 50 years, which he describes as "a very unfertile time."
Amid the folk-music explosion of the early 1960s, Muldaur recorded as a solo country blues singer and guitarist before joining the Jim Kweskin Jug Band's antics for the rest of the decade. Kweskin and Co. had no chance of being stars - they put kazoos and goofy lyrics front and center and had a serious hankering for the heyday of vaudeville - but their energy and humor could be infectious, and behind the jugs and washboards they were intensely musical. Their arrangements of old songs were unique and alive, and they could really play.
By the time the band broke up, Muldaur had married its fiddler and singer, Maria D'Amato, and they made two critically acclaimed albums before splitting up in 1972. Within a couple of years, she - with his last name - was more famous as a solo singer than he would ever be.
Geoff Muldaur then joined Paul Butterfield's Better Days, made a few solo albums, saw his and Maria's version of "Brazil" become the theme song of Terry Gilliam's famously weird movie of that name and then retired from performing in the 1980s. He spent his sabbatical writing film scores and developing a more sophisticated musical side until 1998's bluesy comeback album, "Secret Handshake," which was roundly praised by critics.
Muldaur has gotten serious radio airplay in recent years, but not commercially - rather, as a regular guest on "A Prairie Home Companion."
He will play a solo show at Saranac Lake's Bluseed Studios at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, and he engaged the Enterprise for a phone interview on May 13.
WEEKENDER: Before we talk about your music, I understand you're interested in birds, and that you're planning to stay here an extra day to go out birding with one or two locals.
GEOFF MULDAUR: Yeah, I'm not a heavyweight birder, but I enjoy it. And because I've gone to so many places, I actually have a decent list - you know, life list. It just gets you out there, man, keeps you seeing. You know, astoundingly, if you haven't been birdwatching all winter and you go out in the spring, and you're driving along a road and a little bird flicks in front of your car, you can't tell what it is. And a week later, after birdwatching, you can tell if it's got wing bars - because you've been focusing for a week. It's astounding.
W: So it helps with your powers of observation?
GM: Oh sure. We don't look at things. We're up in our heads - all the time. So you don't really look at things unless you have to look at things, and then you start to focus. At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
W: Have you ever been to the Adirondacks before?
GM: Yeah, it think I've been to the other side there, to Edwards.
W: All right. The Edwards Opera House?
GM: Yeah, and then I've driven across the Adirondacks. You know, it's astoundingly beautiful, and I'm, as we all are, very upset by the acid rain thing and all.
W: What other impressions do you have of this place, the Adirondacks, just from your brief visits?
GM: It's funny, because of the acid rain and everything, I always think of it in the past. You sort of think of all those paintings you've seen and photographs, the wonderful scenes up there in the '20s and '30s and all this stuff. I don't know much about the Adirondacks at all. I really haven't you know, I lived in Woodstock down in those benign hills, but I don't know much about your area, man. I bet you when I get out there with those birders I'll learn a little something.
W: In December, you posted on your Web site a long and detailed update on your doings of the previous several months, and I was especially intrigued that you wrote relatively little about cities, where famous musicians often spend most of their time, and instead devoted your attention to detail to small towns in Ireland where you played to 40 people in a pub, or revisiting and celebrating the community on Martha's Vineyard where you used to live. Yet you live in Los Angeles, and you recently recorded an album in Austin and presumably perform in a bunch of cities. Do you see yourself more as a city person or a rural person?
GM: Oh, rural, for sure. To me, it's God's big joke that I live in LA. I just happen to, and I have a good life here. But this is against everything I have in my bones. But I'm on the road a lot, and there's less and less city gigs for a guy like me. I mean, I go to cities, but not as much as I used to.
I like getting over to Europe; I'm going twice this year: this summer and again in the fall.
I'll be going to the Vineyard in a few weeks, and I'll be standing in the salt marsh and listening to how that sounds and trying to catch a fish that's what I like the best, you know?
W: How's it changed, as a musician - as a performing, touring, recording musician - since the '60s? You seem to be playing a lot of small gigs like Saranac Lake, for example, places that people may not have made it to back then.
GM: Well, there are many answers to this question. Things are very different than they were in the '60s, in general; I am older, believe it or not; and when I started out there were probably 200 people who could play the guitar - you know, in any American bluesy style - maybe less. Now there's tens of thousands around the world. So it's a different world; there are different types of gigs.
There were a lot more gigs in the '60s, just available, and especially in cities. People could afford to have a little club, and people could afford to come to them. ... Plus, that was the end of the golden era of American music, so it was more interesting in the urban environments that we used to go to because on a night off you could go over and hear some incredible other musician, and, you know, it was just different. I love the rural gigs. I love church gigs; I love all that stuff.
That's just what's going on for me. Plus, I'm seeing the world, so I'm lucky.
W: What about, you said, the "golden era of American music?" You draw from so many different types of music, and not just bigger types like blues and jazz but, within those, a lot of different types of blues and a lot of different types of jazz and a lot of different types of country and old-time music - but not really from the last 35 years so much. Tell me about the "golden era."
GM: Well, you must, historically, understand yourself, in terms of the geniuses that hit this planet, even from the 1880s through, like, the '60s. ... All the inventors of what we do lived then. So the strength of their music is astounding. I'm a zeitgeist kind of guy; it happens when it happens. I mean, there were like 60 years between the end of Handel's work and the "Eroica," the third symphony by Beethoven. In those 60 years, you're going from, like, church music to absolute revolutionary, symphonic, mind-bending music - in 60 years: I think 1742 to 1804 or something like that. And you think about, you go back 50 years ago now, there's been no change. We've added rap. And basically we're using the same kinds of chords, the same kinds of rhythms, etc.
You know, this gets to be a difficult thing to talk about, but Louie Armstrong was Louie Armstrong. Duke Ellington was Duke Ellington. And there's a few guys still alive who came out of that, like Doc Watson or somebody, you know? But it's astounding how great they were. And when you go back and listen to Mississippi John Hurt, or you go back and listen to some of these people, or you go back even in opera music and you hear Jussi Bjorling sing in the '50s, it ain't even close. I mean, no one can sound like this anymore. So you say, "Why not?" and the answer is, "I don't know." It just happens. I don't want to bring anybody down, but there are exceptions to the rule and all that, but in general, we're in a very - unfertile time.
Now you young fellas are always looking around for what's coming up and what's going on now, and that's good, and that's the way it should be.
W: So, you described, in that entry, Suzy Thompson's house picking parties with some nostalgia, writing, "Music as a social scene in the U.S. has pretty much fizzled but not at the Thompsons." Now, I can't speak for other areas, but I know from personal experience that social music gatherings do happen fairly regularly in Saranac Lake, at least.
GM: You should be very proud of that. In Cambridge, Mass., we played every day! Now I don't know anyone who plays in Cambridge every day - you know, we had parties all the time! I think that's great you do that at Lake Saranac.
W: It seems to have come a bit with the rise in popularity of old-time string-band music in the past few years. What is the inherent value, do you think, of people getting together and playing music themselves rather than, say, playing recordings on a stereo?
GM: Well, I'm no sociologist, but come on, man. What's the difference between texting someone and talking to 'em? I think brain cells wake up if you're in the moment with other people, you know what I mean? So I would trust a community with old-timey players - instead of everybody just sitting at home clunking away at a computer.
W: So, your upcoming album is, I understand, with a group called the Texas Shieks, who sound like ringers from what I read on your (Web site), and with Jim Kweskin joining as a "Guest Shiek," no less. What can you tell me about that sound, and will you take it out on the road?
GM:Well, if we do gigs, our dear friend Stephen Bruton, whom these sessions were set up for, just passed away on Sunday.
W: Really?
GM: Yeah. So I'm not thinking about gigs. But we've already been asked to a couple of festivals in Germany next summer, not this summer. And my tendencies are in Europe anyway, to play there. It's just so exciting. So we may do a few things, but it's expensive.But as you said, this is a great bunch of people, and you're going to love this record, man. It comes out in September.
W: How would you describe it?
GM: It's shieks music: Mississippi Shieks, Beale Street Shieks. Also, Kweskin brought some more ragtime sounds to it. You know, fiddle, guitars, banjos. It's acoustic music, and kind of jug-bandy. We used a bowed bass instead of a jug; it gets that same kind of sound, you know?
So it was a fun thing to do, and because Stephen was fighting the big fight, we put these sessions together so we could just have fun, which he did, and out of it came this wonderful album.
W: What's next for you? You wrote something about big-band gospel arrangements, I think.
GM: Well, no, not big band. I am doing some gospel arrangements, and I am scheming and electric album. I have very good luck with scheming things and having them happen. I don't know how.
What happened was, when down in Texas - we're not putting this out, but we also recorded like five tunes electric with Stephen. Five horns. I did some of the charts. ... It's more like the Ray Charles sound, the early Ray Charles sound. Very sophisticated horns. That fine line between jazz and blues, you know?
So there's that going on, and then, amongst all of this all the time are my chamber works, and I'm (filling) my file cabinet with these arrangements for, and original compositions for, violin, cello bassoon, French horn and clarinet. And I've performed these a couple of times here in LA, and this is what I will probably fade into the sunset doing. But I figure, if you still can sing and you still can travel and you can still, you know, suit up and show up, then I'll keep doing some of these things that require, you know, hard singin' and all that stuff while I can still do it. I'm very lucky that I can.
W: How do you get ideas for what to do next?
GM: This is sort of like John Lee Hooker said: "It's in him, and it's got to come out." Well, that's what happens with me. It's in the shower and driving the car, and you hear these things. And my thing is, "If you're that good, come back and visit me tomorrow," and then certain things stick with me. And then they make it in, you know, me sitting over at the piano and playing, and then they may make it onto some paper.
And I really enjoy getting into these classical things because it's an endless endeavor. I mean, you could never, ever know enough to write for a violinist unless you play violin, which I don't. So I'm always learning: bowing techniques and difficult figures vs. this and that, and what's the smartest thing to do here and there. It's emdless. And you can tell which people play the violin and which people didn't when you get into this music.
Anyway, that's what I'm up to. Always something.
