Keith was playing on a BBC Orchestra recording (Keith Moon?!
Studio gig? BBC Ork? Yeah, right. OK, I said it was apocryphal)
when the conductor stopped the music in the middle of a rundown
and said, to the percussionist, “What can you do to give me a
little more magic?” As I heard it, Keith said, “Abracafuckin’ Dabra.”

Here’s another Brit percussionist story, I don’t remember if it was
about Keith or not, and again, hereay.

The BBC Orchestra (is there such a thing?) or some other British
recording association, was running down the charts for some legit
piece or another. At one point the music called for a GP, general
pause, an intense rest to inject extra drama into a piece with
sudden, unexpected silence.

But the percussionist somehow or other misread the chart, and,
when all the other musicians suddenly stopped playing, right in
the middle of the rest, hit the triangle, hard, like you would in
a marching band. rest.

The conductor stopped conducting, the musicians stopped playing,
and everyone just glowered at the percussionist.

He glowered back, and without missing a beat, said,
“Dinner is served.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

I met Ralph about 40 years ago, in LA, when he was the traveling percussionist with Harry Belafonte and I was lucky enough to be in the band playing with him, et al, on the tracks of one of Harry’s many albums (vinyl days, you understand). So I have a few personal Ralph stories in my repertoire. Here’s one of them, in abbreviated form.

Shortly after I came East to New York, in 1975, and Ralph was showing me the town, he got a call to go out to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Jersey to overlay percussion on some tracks Creed Taylor was producing of/for someone, I think it might have been Patty Austin, but it could also have been George Benson or neither of them. But when he got out to the studio Creed and Rudy told him that actually they’d run out of tracks, save one (of 24), which was earmarked for (illegally) double-tracking the strings to further enlushen a sound that was already pretty rich, tho not necessarily very interesting.

They apologized to Ralph for promising him a gig when there wasn’t one, and Ralph was characteristically generous about letting them off the hook. But before he did, this went down.

“No problem, guys,” Ralph said, “don’t worry about it, shit happens. But I’d like to hear the track, anyway, as long as I’m here.”

Creed said fine, told Rudy to put up the track for us to hear in the control booth. We listened for awhile, then Ralph said, “Give me a headset and let me play along with the track in the studio. What can it hurt?”

Creed shrugged, Rudy shrugged, but I guess they figured they owed him something for the trip he’d made from Manhatten to Buttfuck, NJ, and maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to humor him, since they did use him on a lot of their product, it would be good for the relationship, race relations, whatever.

“But we’re out of tracks, Ralph,” Creed said, as Ralph was rummaging around in his percussion kit. “I’m just saying, so you don’t…” But Ralph was out of the control booth and onto the studio floor with the kit before Creed could finish. He grabbed a stool, took it to the to the center of the studio where there was a mic and a headset, and asked Rudy to turn the mic on, which Rudy did. Ralph asked him to run the tracks.

The tracks began to play, very big, lots of instruments. I don’t remember anything about the charts, which tells you something right there, I guess that there might not have been much to remember. Anyway, Ralph put on the headset, didn’t sit on the stool, began listening intently, like I’m picturing an an air traffic controller might as he lands a couple big liners at the same time. Then, after maybe the first verse, he picks a tambourine out of the kit and starts playing it. I don’t remember what he did with it, but whatever it was, it suddenly got everyone in the control booth’s attention like a two-by-four to the head. The tracks came to life. Everything about their focus changed, and the string and horn figures seemed to now make more sense, like they actually belonged in the arrangement.

The tracks stopped playing after another verse or two, and Creed or Rudy or both hit the talkback. “Uh, Ralph, why don’t we try a take? It might make some sense to have it in the can in case we need it,” read: “Shit, get this on tape, and fuck the strings.”

So they recorded Ralph and his tambourine in one or two takes, finished up and sent out for pizza and we all palled it up talking shop and pussy and everything else except the incredible show an ex-coke dealer/point-guard from Harlem and a dumb rhythm instrument had just put on, which brought verve and soul to some tracks which, it looked like sorely needed them.

Ralph didn’t say anything about it on the way back home, which was in keeping with his style, but I could only guess what he had to be thinking: “Shit, I just took out an entire string section a bunch a white guys payed for and now couldn’t use and made it look like an easy layup. Kiss my ass.”

Anyway, that’s my RMD story for today, and now I have to go to an AA mtng.

Needless to say the simple existence of the tape shocked, then pleased me since the music on it was not that bad and the fidelity surprisingly good. It was apparently one of the last sets this band ever played, and was recorded at the Cabale Creamery, a cabaret in the flats of Berkeley that became the center of the folk/roots scene in the East Bay at a time when that music was gestating into what would become an important part of the Rock Revolution.

The recordist may have been Eric Thompson, a local guitarist who, incidentally, may have copped our s arrangement of “John Hardy” for a band he was, the Black Mountain Somethings (I’ll look it up later) with Jerry Garica et al. The Cabale showcased such performers as Janis Joplin, Jim Kweskin, Toni Brown (Joy of Cooking), and, I think, Jerry and others whom I’ll insert here as I think of them.

I gotta go and sheetrock my bathroom, now, but I’ll be back to elaborate on what I’ve posted here.

I’m also doing my “classical” (baroque, really) thing, continuing to play with my own woodwind quintet, the Quints, a couple other wind ensembles and an occasional one-shot, like the trio performance I did a couple weeks ago with two other members of the Quints. It was for the National Committee on Child Poverty, or something like that, at the Roosevelt in NY. It was 8 in the morning, so that was a bitch, but it also included a moment with Yankee outfielder Nick Swisher, the NCCP’s jock celebrity, which we got by playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” behind him and a bunch of starfuckers (including us) who were trying to get to him. He cracked up when he realized where the music was coming from and and came back to take pix with us, while function biggies looked on. Only fair, since some of us (me) got up at 5AM to do this for for free.

Scott Hambly sent me a cd of something he, Pete Berg and I did as the Redwood Canyon Ramblers 45 yrs ago at the Cabale, a club in Berkeley. It’s better than I would have guessed, with me singing Ruby way too high, but on key and auguring possibilities for the future, never realized. (The Doc Watson days were yet to come, and when they did I forgot about singing for many yrs. thereafter. Bad idea, but there it is/was.) I will try to figure out how to get this onto the blog. Try this link, http://www.computerhope.com/clouds.mid Redwood’s Last Stand, tho you may have to download it one tune at a time, but it’s not hard. Don’t know if this will work, but I did manage to find a photo. That’s Scott on mandolin, Pete on banjo, and me on what’s left. Best bet is that it’s from 1962. I was back in LA by ’63.

In other news, did I mention in the last post that I finally placed a couple short storie with Prick of the Spindle, a literary review? Felt good, even if it wasn’t quite the Paris Review. If you’re interested you can go to their eponymous website, look for the March 23rd issue and go to Non-Fiction. It should be there. It was last time I looked. One good chunk of fallout from this is that I’m sending out rewrites of things I’ve done in the past to reviews that were the least bit encouraging when I sent stuff to them last fall and winter. It’s got me starting to write again, which can’t be all bad.

In the meantime, I guess that’s it for April/May for Power-Pickers of the ‘Sixties.

Anyway, it’s another thing I learned from Doc Watson, at his feet,  in my living room, eat yer hearts out, country guitar addicts. He used to stay with me when he played in Los Angeles. This here is  also a test for me remembering how to link to YouTube, in this case with  Country Al Ross performing a Doc Watson Song. This was done Sat before last, March 12,  at the Pleasantville Circle of Friends. You might want to turn the bass up a tad on your audio delivery system.

Anyway, I have a personal Dr. John story. It’s entitled High and Inside with Doctor John and I posted it sometime last year, what month I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure about the title.

In other news… Stanley Owsley died over the wknd.  For most of you this is a name you’ve never heard of,  or if you have,  it’s probably from your parents, and, anyway, you don’t give a shit in the first place. But, boy, was he big in the ’60′s.  Owsley was the refiner and distributor of the purest, smoothest, safest LSD that ever came down the mellow brick road.

It was  called Sunshine or Orange Sunshine or, most often, just Owsley, as in “I did two Owsleys over the weekend and I’m still ripped.”   He deserves a whole post, and I’m going to give him one, but in the meantime go to “Truckin’ with Jerry/Driving Lessons” in these pages, for a whiff of the man in another life he lived.

And, once again, I apologize for abandoning any and all traces of currency with my posts. I can only continue to plead semi-professional pre-occupation. With performing. For little or no money, but lots of EBU’s (Ego Building Units).  I’m beginning to think maybe I have only enough creative energy to fuel one side of my brain at a time, and right now it’s  the right side. Or is it the left? I can’t  remember. Anyway, more TK.

First, tho, a word in my defense. Actually, a reiteration: I’ve been trying to play in public for the first time in forty years,  hence my identification with PCOF, the group I mentioned. For me, playing music with and/or in front of people, including this version of Windy and Warm with Country Al from a performance at the PCOF open mic nite a couple Saturdays ago,  will always trump writing about it. But today I will make a small exception, because of  the interest you, Charlie, have in the Kentucky Colonels, nee the Country Boys, nee the Three Little Country Boys, the ’50′s and ’60′s LA Bluegrass Band that spawned Clarence and Roland White.

I have no quaint story about them today,  just a tip of the hat to a very old friend who made some memorable music with them while bandleader Roland White was in the service: mandolin monster Scott Hambly. I’ve spoken to him a couple times over the last couple of days, and I know he’s having some health problems, from which I’m quite certain he will recover. He is one tough picker.

In the meantime, listening to one of his performances from the ’60′s, hearing his voice, reminds me of the contribution to Bluegrass he has made over the last fifty-plus years in the idiom, which included a stint with the Colonels–I think while they were still the Country Boys, tho I’ll have to look it up. Besides superb picking, he brought a full, rich tenor voice that cut thru the Bluegrass clutter of the time and stamped him, and any group he played with, as unusual in an era of self-conscious high-lonesome, ala Ralph Stanley.

(I will to try to make a sample of his singing and playing available to you, if I can get back into the tech-saddle I need to be in to do that sort of thing, because I want you to hear something about his performances I’d completely I’d completely forgotten about after a half-century: he did them at the same time.

I’m talking about playing and singing simultaneously. I’m talking about playing a near-perfect Jessie MacReynolds accompaniment while he sang solo at the mike. Without a net. Both of those things take highly-focused concentration, and to do them together is unique in my experience. Now, my experience is not comprehensive, but I can’t remember seeing anyone do MacReynolds and sing at the same time. And even if I did, I wouldn’t marvel any the less at Scott doing it, probably having never seen it done, himself. Even after all this time, I can’t stop myself from being suspicious, tho overdubbing was impossible, given the technology of the time.)

I came to know Scott very well, having met in the folk scene in Berekely in 1962 and joining him and banjo player Greg Lasser in a Bluegrass trio, the Ridgerunners. We played many gigs together in the bistro and school auditoriums of the time, and he taught me more about playing a flat-top dreadnought than anyone else in my life. He developed  an instrumental styole that I think is called cross-picking today, decades before anyone else was doing it. I used it myself, and got big kudos whenever I did.

This was going on in the earliest days of the ’60′s music revolution, much of which was going on in Berkeley, tho Scott stayed with his first, and only, real love, Bluegrass. He came to UCLA  in the mid-’60′s, where he studied, and, I think, got a doctorate, in American Folklore and Folkmusic.

That wasn’t an instantly marketable credential to have and he eventually moved back to Berkeley, where he kept playing ‘Grass with old friends from an even earlier band he had, the Redwood Canyon Ramblers. I mention them because he tells me a video-maker in Brooklyn is doing a documentary on them, and he wanted to know about some old recordings and/or photos I might have had. That’s what put us back in contact with each other last week, tho’ we’ve been in touch with each other, even picked together, over the last dozen or so years.

I will get a Website for this documentary and/or the Redwood Canyon Ramblers, and publish it here. The RCR was one of the very first college-student Bluegrass Band in the Country, 1958, I think, and this documentary should be really interesting. I know that you will learn a lot about Scott, since he was the glue that held the group together for quite some time, while keeping his own protean skills honed and ready for use at any time. The Colonels were not the only band he played with down thru the years, just the one that might be of most interest to you, Charlie.

Anyway, now you know a little something about the Kentucky Colonels that you and most other Bluegrass aficionados probably didn’t: they had a life, a vital one, when brother Roland was away, and it was largely made that way because of the picking and singing of Scott Hambly.

(I don’t consider this a finished post. I’m actually afraid to look at it. I just wanted to get something on the Web before Power-Pickers dies from neglect).

Happy holidays.

CA

Enclosed is bad video, almost good audio of Windy and Warm I did in a gig at a Pleasantville coffee house a few weeks ago. The thing was video’ed on a phone with decent quality audio later substituted for the bad phone recording. I’m pretty pleased with the marrying of the two; actually, with the fact that I, technophobe, could actually learn to do it.

Enclosed, also, is an audially-improved version of  Black Mountain and Beaumont Rags, the first thing Greg Connors and I did at an open mic a year ago, using the same technique. Pretty spiffy for Luddite of the Year, huh?

more-more-more-more-more, etc.,  to come,  as they used to type in journalism school. I promise.

A