The Blog Captain

I often walk my dog past an old cement stairway at what used to be 1468 Raymond Av, in St Paul’s St Anthony Park neighborhood, but is now an empty lot.  My mother was born in 1919 in the house that used to stand there (I learned this because I have old family letters bearing that address).  I have a photograph of her being held by my grandmother, standing in front of an old frame house—standing on those same cement steps.
My grandfather was a Norwegian architect named Magnus Jemne, and my grandmother was a third generation German-English St Paulite named Elsa Laubach (later, Elsa Jemne).  She was a painter and WPA muralist (the two surviving murals, of the fifteen she did, are in the Minneapolis armory and the Ely, Minnesota post office).  They collaborated on the Women’s City Club (now Wold Engineering) at Kellogg and St Peter in St Paul, and on their two daughters, one of whom was my mother.

My grandmothers met each other in 1912 at art school in Philadelphia, kept in touch, and had a son and daughter who got married and had me.  (My parents have the same middle name, named after the benifactress who helped both of my grandmothers through art school).  While one couldn’t exactly call it an arranged marriage, it was about as close as one got to one in 20th century America.  Call it an encouraged marriage.

My grandparents lived in the house on Raymond while the house he designed for them was being built at 212 Mt Curve Blvd in St Paul.

My mother lived in New York and San Francisco before marrying my dad and moving with him to Ithaca, Madison (where I was born) and Denver.  They finally settled, when I was four, in Norman, Oklahoma, where he was a professor in the English department at the University of Oklahoma.

Thus did I find myself most summers and half of the winters between 1953 and 1963 traveling to St Paul to stay for a chunk of time with my grandparents.  My dad would generally not go, so it was my older brother and my mother and I, in various combinations, who made the trip.

We went by train.  On nights we were to leave, we would go to bed at our normal time, and then be awakened at about 11:00 pm to make the thirty-mile drive to Chickasha, Oklahoma.  There, we would board the Rock Island Rocket at midnight, if it was on time.  We would hit Kansas City at about nine that morning, and, after passing through Mason City, Iowa and Albert Lea, Minnesota, we’d roll into the St Paul depot at about six pm.

This decade coincided with the decline and disappearance of private railroads, and there was lots of evidence of decrepitude from the seat upholstery to the conductors’ uniforms to the rails to the engines to the rolling stock.

I remember that the dining car was run by the same dignified older white gentleman the entire time I made the trip, his uniform growing shabbier by the year.  The rest of the train crew was an even mix of colors and ages.

When we would make the return trip, we would often be driven west ten miles to the Milwaukee Road depot in Minneapolis, the northerly origination point of the Rocket, so as to get window seats.

On one such occasion, when I was traveling alone—very timidly, at age 12—my grandmother had driven me to Minneapolis and gotten me settled into a window seat.  I then walked with her to the door of the car, and when I returned to my seat, it had been occupied, innocently, by a black man of about sixty in a brown suit and a matching snap-brim hat.  He looked very scary to this Okie white kid who had never been around blacks.  (Although Norman was a university town, there were no black property owners at the time, and, in that year, you could count the black students at Oklahoma University on your fingers and toes, even if you were missing one.  As unbelievable as that may seem, I have the Sooner yearbook to support this statement).

So, as the train pulled out of the station, the big black man looked back and forth between my grandmother jumping up and down and gesturing animatedly but indecipherably on the platform and me, standing in the aisle of the car watching her (I assume she was imploring me to speak up for myself and tell the man he was in my seat).  After a few seconds, he furrowed his brows and arched one of them and asked, “What’s she sayin’?”  I mumbled something about addlepatedness and settled in to the aisle seat.

The man traveled as far as Kansas City, and, in that eight hours, he proved to be a very nice gentleman.  And when he got off, I got his—rather, my—window seat.

This was the first time in my life I had ever communicated with anyone of color, save the descendants of the Five Civilized Tribes who populated and, amazingly (given what they had been through and the hopeless terrain onto which they had been unceremoniously deposited) flourished in my home state.  Their relative prosperity was, I assume, thanks to their aforementioned “civilization”, and to the discovery of oil on their land.  Literally most of the residents of Oklahoma were—and probably still are—part Indian, and no one thought anything of it.  Black-segregated restrooms in local stores were the order of the day, however, and I remember them well.  And if a store didn’t have segregated bathrooms and drinking fountains, then there simply were no facilities for blacks (largely moot, this, because there were virtually no blacks, as already mentioned).

Coming to Minnesota on vacation was the high point of my year, hands down.  The weather was cool, there were trees and lakes, my grandparents had a wonderful house, and they owned a cabin on Big Sandy Lake (which I now own).  My grandfather’s drafting table and my grandmother’s studio were in their house, and King Pharmacy up on the corner of St Clair and Cretin had candy I couldn’t get in Oklahoma.  And, of course, the whole shebang started with a train trip.  What was not to like?

Thus was it not a surprise to find myself living here, after stints as a professional musician in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Nashville.  Thirty-five years later, I’ve got a Minnesota wife and a couple of Minnesota children and hold, I hope by now, honorary Minnesota citizenship.  I’ve also known many more black people.

[NOTE: This article was written for Inside Bluegrass magazine.]

The Minnesota music community—and the cosmic community beyond it—lost a real pip in May.  William Bradbury Hinkley left us at 9:20 a.m., Tuesday, May 25, 2010.

Bill Hinkley was a good friend of mine, but there are a thousand other people who would say the same thing.  He was a musician and teacher whose influence went far beyond the stage and the lesson studio.  Anyone who was lucky enough to see Bill perform or to play with him found it a solid transcendental groove, and if they didn’t, then they weren’t listening.  And any student who wrote Bill off as a potential teacher because he looked like an itinerant cobbler wasn’t paying attention.  And anyone who came within his sphere and didn’t eat up the experience like prime rib wasn’t hungry enough.

Bill Hinkley started playing music in the Air Force, in which he served from 1961-65.  After that, he played with mandolin legend Frank Wakefield in New York before moving to Minnesota at the behest of old high school buddy Cal Hand to join the legendary group The Sorry Muthas.  When that band broke up in 1972, he and fellow Mutha Judy Larson started what immediately became one of the all-time classic couples acts.  They played on the first broadcast of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion (and on scores of subsequent broadcasts of the show), and they toured nationally for decades.

Bill loved music, and glommed onto it wherever he heard it.  He was completely accepting of anyone and everyone who held an instrument, and of most who didn’t.  He had an enormous heart and the most honest eyes in the world.  If the music wasn’t good, he made it better.  And if the music was good, he made it better.

Bill’s musical genius (and yes, I’m aware of the weight of that word) exhibited itself occasionally through dazzling technical prowess but far more frequently through all the stuff one does when one is busy not being dazzling:  his timing, his choice of notes and chords, his ability to harmonize and his truly encyclopedic knowledge of the many musical worlds through which he soared were far more important attributes with far greater staying power.

Bill was born with amazing recall:  When he was four, his older brother, Seth, would bet unsuspecting strangers that little Bill could identify the make, model and year of the next ten cars that drove down the street.  He never lost the bet.  This astounding memory enriched many a gig, as the most arcane requests were likely to be at least approximatable by Bill (with the rest of the band following).  An example:  Thirty years or so ago, I hired Bill to play with me at a wedding reception.  When we arrived at the gig, we found that the bride was Mexican, and that half of the wedding party was visiting from Mexico for the event.  Now, we certainly could have played our normal repertoire and everything would have been fine, but Bill knew and sang a dozen or so Mexican folk songs.  When he did La Cucaracha (which he did in the style of the great Chicago trio Martin, Bogen and Armstrong), he improvised in Spanish, and included the names of the wedding party in his improvised verses.  I recounted this experience to a colleague a couple of months ago, who told me that Bill had done exactly the same thing on a wedding gig they had played, except that in that case the bride was Danish.

My favorite Bill Hinkley gig occurred over thirty years ago, when Tim O’Brien was booked to perform a weekend at the old Coffeehouse Extempore in Minneapolis with his band, the Ophelia Swing Band.  For reasons I forget, the band didn’t make it but Tim did, so Bill and I played with Tim (along with Tom O’Neill on bass).  I have cassette recordings of this gig which amply demonstrate Bill’s prowess.  I remember that at one point he improvised lyrics to Goofus in order to introduce the band members.

Bill and Judy were woefully underrecorded.  The Sorry Muthas put out one album, The Sorry Muthas Greatest Hits Volume Three and Garrison produced a double Hinkley/Larson album, Out in Our Meadow.  Other recordings exist, but are unreleased:  there is a lot of audio content from old Prairie Home Companion broadcasts which is being looked at for possible release; I have over an hour of video of Bill and Judy from their six appearances on The Cedar Social, the television show Pop Wagner and I hosted in the 90s; and, I have three hours of video shot by John Whitehead of me interviewing Bill in 2007. Maybe someday something will come out of all of that. In the meantime, remember Bill as you knew him, and you musicians out there:  the next time you’re singing a song, improvise a verse and stick his name in it.

A television pitchman hawking an herbal powder told his audience that his product “helps if you suffer from acid reflex.”

In this third and final part of my series on recording and recording studios, I’ll talk about the business end of the recording business as it relates to me and I to it.

Until the era of digital music started big time in—let’s call it 1996—musicians were beholden to recording studios and record labels if they wanted to release an album.  This was not a good situation for musicians for several reasons:  recording studios were expensive, vinyl albums had to be manufactured in multiples of a thousand, and record labels were infested with music business people.

The home recording/digital era changed all of that, and all of the changes were for the better as regards the musician.  Today, using a good microphone and any of a number of digital recording devices and software, one can, wherever and whenever one wants to, record an album that matches that of a studio in technical quality (please note that this is my opinion).  Also, CD duplicators can and will create CDs in numbers far smaller than a thousand.

So the big change that has happened in the last fifteen years is that we musicians can do our own recording and release our own CDs as independently of music business people as we choose.  This is huge.

Another issue for musicians is that of distributorship:  how does one get one’s albums to one’s fans?  Again thanks to the digital age, there are options that did not exist before.  Where one had to go through a label and/or a distributor in the past, one can now sell one’s CDs—or digital downloads— online, via a website or an outfit such as CD Baby.  Again, huge.

So why am I so down on music business people?  Because the music business has an astoundingly high number of slimeballs and wannabes in it.  The slimeballs exploit the artist, and the wannabes love to talk big and don’t deliver and waste the artist’s time.  Sour grapes?  You bet.  I’ve recorded albums on labels other than my own, and I’ve had music book publishing deals with major publishers, and I’ve had CD distributing deals with CD distributors, and these have been across-the-board miserable experiences.  The labels don’t pay on time, the publishers want to mess inordinately with your book and don’t pay on time, and the distributors talk big and don’t deliver what was promised (and, I almost forgot, don’t pay on time).  This is why I produce and publish my own materials:  I get my own way 100% of the time, for better or for worse, and I never have that lousy ripped-off feeling.  I will single out one major publisher as an exception (and, of course, there are others):  Bill Bay, who now runs Mel Bay Publishing, is a stand-up guy, who treats his authors with respect and pays on time.  He also often answers his own phone.

Imagine how liberating these developments are!  The digital age has knocked the music industry on its big fat arrogant cushy butt and made it possible for anyone to record, manufacture and distribute anything they want.  Exhilarating?  Heck yeah.

So how do I make CDs?  I’ve recorded six of my last seven albums in my house on my computer, using—again—a good mike and a USB interface.  Studio pressure and expense are vaporized.  I go to my basement studio and, if the muse doesn’t hit, I do the laundry and return to my studio later.

I have designed my own CDs, but my last seven have been done by a professional graphic designer with whom I barter guitar lessons.

As to CD replication, there are a number of companies available, and it is thus a very competitive business.  I use a company in Plymouth, Mn.  I do small runs—usually 250-500 units.  They burn and silkscreen the CD, print and insert a four-color booklet and shrink wrap the whole thing, all for about 3.50 per unit.  The process takes a week, and they deliver them to my door.
The final issue, then, is distribution, and here I differ from most musicians.  Generally, musicians want to distribute their CDs as far and wide as possible.  They will send out sometimes hundreds of copies to radio stations, they will use services such as Amazon and the aforementioned CD Baby, they will sell the digital files through iTunes and the like.  I don’t do any of this;  I send copies of my CDs to Dale Connelly to air on his Heartland Radio network, to Phil Nusbaum for his Saturday morning bluegrass radio show, and to KAXE in Grand Rapids.  I also send them to Garrison Keillor, who is a friend and who has me on his show regularly, and to a dozen other friends and colleagues around the country, and that’s it.

I don’t use them to solicit work, because I don’t solicit work.  I don’t try to put them in stores such as Barnes and Noble because I then run into the business people I was talking about earlier.  (The way that process works is that you take your CD in and give it to their buyer, and they say they’ll listen to it.  You then call them a week later and they explain that they’ve been too busy to listen to your CD but that once they get over their busy-ness they will listen.  The assumption at that point is that you will call over and over again until they find time to listen and pass judgment.  This is the same procedure for getting gigs, and it’s why I don’t do either.  It is an undignified process that is an insult to the artist and aggrandizes the business person without any merit whatsoever.  In short, it stinks, and I want nothing to do with it.  (And this arrogance pervades the music industry.  I read an article about Austin’s South by Southwest Festival in which a Twin Cities booker was quoted as saying that she could listen to fifteen seconds of a band playing and know if they were worthy of being booked by her.  Juxtapose that appalling arrogance with the plight of bands so desperate to be discovered that they’ll pile into a van and drive across the country for a chance to play a single late-night set at a venue that’s near, but not part of the Festival.)  Fortunately, I’m not interested in being much more discovered than I already am, and I’ve been around long enough that I don’t have to solicit work;  my phone rings often enough to keep my head above water.

And as to distributorship, I’m not too concerned about selling CDs in Cleveland.  The assumption, if you’re distributed nationally, is that you’ll tour nationally to support the CD, and I don’t want to tour on a regular basis.  So I sell my CDs on my company website (granger-music.com), at gigs, at the Homestead Pickin’ Parlor (which treats artists really well), and at music camps at which I teach.  Could I sell twenty times more CDs using other means?  Of course, but the aggravation attendant to those means is not worth it.  If a store approaches me, I sell them some CDs at wholesale, but otherwise, I just refuse to invest time and psychic energy in a mechanism that is so innately disrespectful to musicians.

So then why do I do CDs, if I make so few at a time and am so unambitious in their distribution?  DRIPPY ANSWER ALERT: For the art.  To endow a legacy of what I’ve spent my life doing.  These CDs are of critical importance to me artistically and emotionally.  Every single word and note on and in them is husbanded by me.  The design, while done by my friend, is vetted by me.  I put lyric booklets in the CDs that are laid out exactly as I want them.  I pride myself in the absence (almost) of typos and other errata.  DRIPPY SUMMARY STATEMENT ALERT:  They are my children.

This is the third and final part of my series on the recording biz as I see it.

Oh, and one final note to civilians regarding CDs:  Once a month or more, someone comes up to me and says, “I LOVE your new CD.  I burned a copy for my aunt, and a copy for my brother, and a copy for my nephew, and a copy for the mail carrier. . .”  This is a real no-no in the musician world.  The eleven dollars profit I make on a CD sale goes to research and development (i.e., writing and recording), traveling to gigs and paying the rent, as it were.  I know and accept that most people burn CDs, but don’t tell the artist whose CD you’re burning that you’re doing it.  When this happens to me, I usually express my appreciation for their support, and then tactfully and politely explain that they’re (unintentionally) ripping me off.  Invariably, their reaction shows that this hadn’t occurred to them.

–Recent electee Rand Paul referred to something “in regards to” something else.
–I was visiting my ill friend, musician Bill Hinkley, at his house last month. He went to his bed to lie down, and I sat and talked to his wife, Judy Larson. As he snored peacefully in the next room, I happened to use the word MISanthropy, pronouncing it, as I always have, with emphasis on the first syllable. From his slumber in the next room came Bill’s groggy correction, “misANthropy”. You can’t keep a good grammarian down.

In the first part of this three-part series, I described different recording studios and situations I’ve encountered in my career as a musician.  Here, I’ll talk about some of the reasons I’ve found myself in the studio over the last fifty years.  In the third part, I’ll talk about the production and marketing end of the business, as I practice it.

The most obvious reason musicians goes into the studio is to make recordings to sell and to advance their careers.  To that end, I’ve recorded thirteen albums, two of which are out of print.  The locations have been, in chronological order:  A living room in a St Paul house;  a bedroom in a house in Springfield, Mo;  the Homestead Pickin’ Parlor, in Richfield, Mn;  the Fitzgerald Theater, in St Paul;  a garage in Norman, Oklahoma (for two albums);  the basement of my house (for two albums);  Brasserie Zinc, in Minneapolis (now The Dakota jazz club);  the basement of my house (for two more albums);  The Rhein Arts Center, in New Ulm, Mn;  and the kitchen of my house.

Besides making albums, there are lots of reasons people record commercially.  To exemplify, a roughly-chronological journal of my other professional recording experiences follows:

–I read the part of Vardaman, from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, for a recording-for-the-blind made in 1962 in a living room in a house in Norman, Oklahoma.

–I recorded a jingle for an anti-war candidate named Keith Myers in Oklahoma in a back yard in Norman about 1966.

–I recorded ad spots for Dogpatch USA in Harrison, Arkansas in 1971.

–I played on a 45 rpm recording Garrison Keillor wrote and recorded of a song called Bombo (about short-lived Twins star Bombo Rivera:  “Bombo, Bombo, Bombo Rivera.  Other players hit one ball, Bombo, he hits a paira. . .”) which was given away to the first xx,000 attendees of a Twins game in 1977 or so.  This recording was made at MPR studios in St Paul.

–I composed and recorded musical scores for eleven then-WTCN documentaries in Minneapolis in the ’80s.  These were multitracked onto a TEAC 2340 reel-to-reel recorder in my house.

–I composed and recorded music for a documentary on ocean-sailor Gerry Speiss for KSTP-TV in St Paul in the ’80s.

–I played guitar and banjo in the sound track recording of Cricket Theater’s production of Woody Guthrie’s American Song at Studio M, at MPR, engineered by John Scherff.

–I recorded a steakhouse commercial in a studio in the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis in about 2000.  It was my first time seeing ProTools being competently used.

–I composed and recorded music for a full-length animation called Art School Summer in a house studio in northeast Minneapolis in about 2000.

–I recorded four sides for a jazz Christmas album by the Moldy Figs, in the old Grain Belt Brewery building in about 2002.

–In the 2000s, I recorded sides for albums by banjo player Alan Munde and singer-songwriter Bob Nordquist, both at a house studio in south Minneapolis, and rhythm tracks for an album by singer-songwriter Barb Ryman at a house studio in St Paul.

–In the 2000s, I recorded an original score for Illusion Theater’s Lloyd’s Prayer, written by Kevin Kling, and improvised music for A Horse Opera, also at the Illusion.  Also at the Illusion, I composed and recorded a score for The Laramie Project.

–In the last year, I’ve done live recording with Alan Munde in Norman, Oklahoma;  St Paul;  and Wenatchee, Washington for possible use as a live album.

–In 2008, with filmmaker John Whitehead, I interviewed and played with music legend Bill Hinkley, with no end in mind but to have a bit of him preserved (he is ailing).

This is an incomplete list, but one which demonstrates the breadth of reasons a musician ventures into the studio.  In the third and final part of this series, I’ll talk about the production and marketing end of the business, and my modest approach to it.

I’ve just finished recording a very challenging album and am awaiting its release and am thus in a nether world not unlike that of the maternity waiting room, minus the baby.  I dropped the album off on Wednesday, and will have the album in hand next Wednesday. While drifting in post-mastering cerebral doldrums, I started thinking about recording studio experiences I’d had, and out popped this entry, part one of three:

My first studio experiences were egg-carton outfits in Oklahoma.  Every town of any size had a music store or a record store that had a little one-room studio in back, whose walls and ceiling were usually covered with egg cartons for soundproofing.  If you were lucky, there would be a separate control room with a little window connecting the two.  In Norman, that store was Carl and Bob’s.  Harlow Wilcox and the Okies recorded Groovy Grubworm there.  (What do you mean, you don’t remember Groovy Grubworm?  How old are you, anyway?)  I worked in studios down south that were in one room of someone’s house.  All of these places were, in the main, fine studios.  I recorded albums in studios such as this in Norman and Springfield, Mo.

In St Paul, Minnesota, I recorded an album with the Powdermilk Biscuit Band in the large living room of a large house on Holly.  It was engineered by the legendary Lynne Cruse, who used two Neumann mikes through a mixer onto a Nagra portable reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Lots of great recording has come from airings of A Prairie Home Companion, and the MPR studios have a large facility–Studio M–second to none.  I’ve worked there on a number of occasions for a wide variety of purposes.  There are a number of good studios in the Twin Cities.  I’ve done commercial work in studios in the Foshay Tower, in the old Schmidt brewery, in the St Paul Depot and, again, in numerous houses.

I’ve been involved in lots of live and field recordings which are, as one might guess, some of the best representations of a musician’s actual musicianship.

The advent of digital recording has enabled anyone with a computer to make their own CD (and, it seems, everyone does).  This liberation from the record label/studio is exhilarating.

And on a performance level, I’m one who doesn’t play his best in the studio, so having the option of loading software onto my laptop and getting a (good) mike and USB interface and making album-worthy recordings in my home–or anywhere else–is an attractive one indeed (so much so, in fact, that five of my last six albums have been home-recorded).

In part two of this series I’ll describe the kinds of musical work I’ve done in these studios.

This is my first entry in four weeks.  I’ve been finishing an album which has had a deleterious effect on my mental health and no doubt shortened my life by a few years.

The Sappark listserv has had entries about wild turkeys–a thread started by my neighbor Chris Kalla.  Lister raycomp then referred to them as “urban turkeys” and I thought, what a great band name.

That, of course, got me thinking of good and bad band names. I don’t like names like The ______ ______ Unit (too stupid);  or The ______ ______ Machine (too macho);  or The ______ ______ Hot Shots and The ______ ______ All Stars (too self-congratulatory).

Certain band names have embedded in them strong disincentives for any club owner to hire them.  Imagine seeing on a marquee Free Drinks Tonight, or Closed for Repairs.

And then, there are the names that make people feel stupid because they don’t understand them (never a good idea when you’re trying to get booked).  I was in a swing duo/trio for ten years called The Eclectic Brothers, and , man, did we have trouble with that name.  We often got billed as The Electric Brothers (not good for an acoustic group), but my favorite was playing St Thomas, where we were billed as The Electric Bras.  Man, were those guys disappointed.

One of my favorite band names was a bunch of Oklahoma friends of mine who called themselves The Curb Feelers.  (For those under sixty, curb feelers are little springy wire things that people used to put on their cars which would make a scraping noise when the driver got close to a curb. This would prevent the driver from scraping his or her white sidewalls against the curb.)