Richard & Mimi Farina and the 6 1/2th Fret

In about 2013 I was teaching my “Build a Ukulele in Four Days” course at the Crucible in Oakland, and one of my students was a wonderful artist named Wayne Jiang.  On the second or third day of the class, we were all eating lunch in the workshop and chatting, and Wayne happened to mention his love of mountain dulcimers and that he and his partner, Patricia Delich, were working on a film to be titled, “The Heart of the Dulcimer” centered around the surge in popularity of the instrument in the 1960s and ‘70s, much of which was inspired by Richard Farina’s use of the instrument in some of the earliest folk-rock.

When Richard’s name came up, I casually said, “Oh, I put an extra fret in Richard’s dulcimer in 1965.”  Wayne was astounded.  “You put in the 6 1/2th fret?”  “Yes,” I said.  “Was that a big deal?”  Well, it turns out that it was a huge deal in the dulcimer community.  It made it OK for the dulcimer to not be a strictly diatonic instrument, and it has now become the norm for the fretting pattern for the instrument.  Here’s the story of “The Night of the Living 6 1/2th Fret”

I’d been touring playing guitar with Ian and Sylvia in 1965, living in Cambridge when not on the road.  We folkies all pretty much knew one another in Cambridge at that time…the Jim Kweskin Jug Band with Geoff and Maria Muldaur and Bill Keith, the Charles River Valley Boys, Taj Mahal, Tom Rush, the guys who would go on to be the Youngbloods…Jesse Colin Young, Jerry Corbitt, Lowell “Banana” Levinger, and Joe Bauer, Jim Rooney, and of course, Richard and Mimi Farina who lived about four blocks from my place on Kinnaird St.   One early evening when I happened not to be on the road, I got a call from Mimi: “We’re doing Robert J. Lurtsema’s radio show tonight on WCBR.  Richard has just written a new tune, but he’s missing a much needed note on his dulcimer.  Can you put in an extra fret?”  “Hmmm, yes.  How are we going to do this?”  Mimi said, “We’ll come by and pick you up, can you put it in at the radio studio?”  “OK!!!”  Because that’s just what you say to a challenge.  So they swung by, and I de-tuned the strings in the back of the car on the way to the radio station, and when we got there, I did a quickie calculation of where that fret should go, sawed the slot, banged in the 6 1/2th fret making sure it was level and even with it’s neighbors, trimmed it, and handed it off to Richard.  They launched into the tune, and much later…by about 50  years…I found out that I’d been a part of dulcimer history.

UPDATE: Thanks to Douglas Cooke, an archivist of the Boston Broadside folk magazine from the early and mid 1960s, we now know that the radio show was on April 23rd, 1965.  Thanks, Doug!

In about 1988 or so, Mimi invited me to be on a KPFK radio show with her, and she and I told the tale with much chuckling and outright laughter.  That woman could be utterly infectiously hilarious.

 

This is the talk I was going to give at the Santa Barbara Acoustic Instrument Celebration, but when I got there, there was nothing in the program!  Oh, well…

For the visuals, you can cut to the chase:  http://www.rickturnerguitars.com/pdf/05_FJ10

 

and then read, or:

Acoustic Guitars…

Structure, Tone and how to Reconcile the Two…

September, 2016

By Rick Turner

Historical Background and My Own Journey

          I started my lutherie career as an apprentice repairman in the caveman era…1963…in a shop in Boston called the Stringed Instrument Workshop.  The work done was crude by modern standards; there was no ASIA, no Guild of American Luthiers, no Internet, and there were but two books on guitar making, both small, both from England, both written to show how to build a classical guitar with a wee nod to steel strings.   Yet we had guitars coming in then that showed some of the now-well known structural issues that plague guitar players and provide job security for luthiers.  Three of those problems were (and remain) the need for neck resets as the geometry of the instrument changes with time and stress; the classic top crack (or two) next to the fingerboard with the top shearing into the soundhole…an issue that I call a tectonic plate shift disaster; and the hump or ski jump where the fingerboard transitions from being on the neck to being glued to the top.  These are not new problems; they all have to do with how the neck intersects with the body of the guitars; yet very few luthiers have taken the time to deal with the issues other than overbuilding the upper bout or making necks easier to reset.

As I started to build acoustic guitars in the mid-1990s, I decided that if I were to do this, I wanted to “bring something to the table” other than just making nicely decorated traditionally built instruments in the Martin/Gibson lineage.  I’d owned (and still own) a number of Howe Orme instruments made in Boston in the late 1890s; I’d first seen them in my 1963 apprenticeship, and they made an everlasting impression for two reasons, both of which involve very clever engineering.  The great thing is that the Howe Ormes are not only engineered brilliantly, but they are built very well…up to the standards of Martin in the 1890s, and they sound both unique and great.  When I showed one of mine, a 12 fret 000 sized one in spruce and Brazilian rosewood to Martin Simpson, his reaction was, “Is this the best vintage guitar ever?”

 

Adjustable Tilting Neck

The two key features of the Howe Orme guitars are the adjustable tilting neck with the cantilevered fingerboard not touching the top and the “longitudinal belly ridge” where by the center third or so of the top is cylindrically arched giving it fantastic longitudinal stiffness allowing the top to be quite thin, yet stiff enough for steel strings which were indeed available in those days…a full 20 years before Martin made a production steel string guitar.   Note also that tilting necks were a feature on some guitars from the 1820s coming out of the Johann Stauffer shop in Vienna where C. F. Martin learned guitar making, so in my way of thinking, a tilting neck with cantilevered fingerboard is a traditional way to build!

Of these two Howe Orme design features, I chose to start with the tilting neck system. For one thing, it takes care of the whole issue of a neck reset; it takes longer to find the right Allen wrenches to do the adjustment than it does to do the job itself. You can literally reset the neck angle, and therefore raise or lower the action in about ten seconds. Two added advantages is that by not gluing the fingerboard to the top, you have the option of getting more vibrating area from the soundboard, and the fingerboard is no longer subject to dipping down or kicking up past the neck joint, particularly if you use carbon fiber under the fingerboard to stabilize the playing line of the fret tops.

I have modified the Howe Orme system which used a metal fitting at the heel cap as a hinge, and then two bolts threaded into the heel face under the fingerboard (which has a stiffener extension of the neck) which bear against the body close to the top.  The problem with the Howe Orme design is that as you adjust the action, you also change the overall playing string length; the two are locked together.  My approach is to replace the hinge with a bolt so the hinge point itself can be moved in and out.  This allows for a bit of overall adjustment of intonation as well as full neck angle and yaw adjustment.

 Structural Fingerboard

All of this brings up the whole issue of guitar playability from first fret to last.  When designing a guitar or bass, you have to start with a straight line…a side elevation representation of a typical string.  Add your playing length defining nodal points, the string nut and the bridge saddle, and do whatever you like with the string afterlength, nut to tuning peg, saddle to bridge or tailpiece.  Now the next thing is the very gently curved even line of the fret tops from first to last, curved for “relief”.  It is the job of the fingerboard below the fret tops and the neck below that to perfectly maintain the perfection of that relief line.  It should not deviate where the neck joins the body or where the fingerboard is (perhaps) attached to the top of the guitar, and no reasonable and predictable amount of guitar geometry shift, whether that’s from long term stress or from humidity changes, should change the perfection of the relief line of the tops of the frets.  This perfection of line over time is something that “traditionally built” acoustic guitars just do not maintain.  The fret at the neck to body joint define a hinge point, and sooner or later, the fingerboard extension will “drop off” over the body or ski-jump up.  We’ve gotten so used to this that it’s believed that we need to build in “drop off” over the guitar top.  In fact it’s just a workaround for a bad design; the neck and the guitar top support the fingerboard, and therefore the relief line so differently that we’ve just learned to jury rig the fix, often during a refret or fret level, crown, and polish.  And in neck resets, there is often the need to taper shim the fingerboard extension to get it anywhere near the correct relief line.

My solution to this has been to make what I call a “structural fingerboard”…I dado two 1/8” x 1/8” slots into the underside of the fingerboard and glue in two ½” tall x 1/8” wide carbon fiber bars from the nut end of the fingerboard to the very end.  A fingerboard made this way is stiffer than most completed necks, and since the stiffness is designed in to best support a constant relief line, playability is assured.

As for the carbon fiber over the body, I deal with it in two ways:

• Relieve the underside of the CF for clearance with a cantilevered fingerboard. It’s amazing just how stiff the fingerboard extension remains even with the CF down to less than ¼” tall.  There is also no lack of volume of the notes played on the cantilever.
• For a non-tilting neck, I cut two slots right through the top and as needed, into the neck block and any upper bout transverse braces so there is no change in structure for the fingerboard support through the neck joint area.

The Flying Buttresses

          Over the years I’ve repaired a number of guitars and a mandolin where one or two top cracks appeared next to the fingerboard and the top under the ‘board was shifting into the soundhole like a tectonic plate shift after an earthquake.  Clearly it took a glue joint failure in the upper transverse braces to do this with the guitars; most likely the instrument got hot enough for the brace glue to at least soften, and with a glue like Titebond, 130 F. is enough to do that.  It does not seem that a French slipper foot neck block nor massive bracing can prevent this collapse of the top under the fingerboard; the shear force of 160 or so pounds over years and with heat will do this.  I recently repaired a nice B. C. Rich dreadnought with this issue, and upon researching the guitar, I found that this is one of the better known failure modes for these guitars.  The worst I’ve fixed was a ‘70s Martin D-45 with buckled rosette, and the oldest were a Gibson A style mandolin, and one of my Howe Orme guitars.

 

So how does one design around this problem without just massively bracing the upper bout of the top?  For me, the answer was at the Cathedral of St Denis in Paris, the first of the Gothic cathedrals to feature flying buttresses to support the walls without requiring truss chords inside the building.   I’d been aware of the concept of flying buttresses, but it wasn’t until I saw the building and then stepped inside that I really got it how effective the engineering is.   The cathedral builders wanted no truss chords inside the building to interfere with the soaring lines of the ceiling which is 28 meters…92 feet tall.  The problem is that a roof with no truss chords (the horizontal beams tying one end of the truss to the other in tension) puts outward pressure on the walls, pushing them to collapse.  The answer was flying buttresses…supports outside the building directing the outward horizontal pressure down to the ground.  The Basilica of St. Denis was finished in 1281 AD, and after more than seven centuries, the walls still stand.  http://uk.tourisme93.com/basilica/high-gothic-architecture.html

 

Since the collapsing force on the neck block area of a guitar is inward, not outward, my solution was to put two or four carbon fiber tube flying buttresses inside the guitar from the upper part of the neck block down to the sides just below the guitar waist where the nearly in-line and vertical plane of the sides is extremely strong in compression and where the pressure will be distributed to the sides and not the top.  This allows me to put in very light bracing in the upper bout since the top is no longer tasked with supporting the approximately 160 pounds of compression from the tension of the strings.  Since I’m cantilevering the fingerboard above the top, that area is now able to contribute to the tone and volume of the guitar.  In tapping the upper bout vs. the lower bout of a completed guitar, I find a rather obvious “tweeter/woofer” type of response, and in listening to what these guitars actually do, I hear really wonderful harmonic sustain and an evenness of response that I really like.  The guitars are not necessarily louder than a more traditional design, though they do punch out well, but it’s that harmonic content that I really like.   If one preferred a more traditional Martin or Gibson sound, it would certainly be easy to block the upper bout with more braces specifically to control tone, but those braces would not be needed for neck or fingerboard support.

 

The real test of my approach to these structure issues was the guitar I built for Henry Kaiser to take to Antarctica in 2001 on his National Science Foundation Artist in Residence Grant.  Henry wanted me to design “a real guitar made out of wood”; using carbon fiber to reinforce the wood was fine, but Henry wanted this to be a part of the whole experiment.  Success or failure were both open options, and either would yield a learning experience for both of us.  This was to be a somewhat experimental guitar; I knew it wasn’t going to be a disaster, but I was aware that the climate might wreak havoc on it.   The guitar design itself was part of the grant proposal kind of summed up as “let’s see what happens.”  The climate even in the “summer” is brutal.  Outdoors can get down to minus 50 F. with humidity down below 5%.  Then the instrument…and people…go inside to normal room temperature, the snow they drag in melts, and humidity may go up to the low 20s for a while.   In other words, it’s guitar hell.

Henry spent close to two and a half months down there, and with the adjustable tilting neck, he was able to change the action for standard or slide playing with ease.  When he got back, the structure of the guitar was perfect.  The neck needed absolutely no truss rod adjustment, the action was just fine, and amazingly, though there were a few nicks, dings, and scratches, the basic integrity of all the wood was just fine…as it has remained for about sixteen years now.

To see the inside story on how I approach acoustic guitar design, check out this article that was published in Fretboard Journal a few years back:

http://www.rickturnerguitars.com/pdf/05_FJ10_Turner_all.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.npr.org/2012/08/16/156487498/autosalvage-the-psychedelic-band-that-vanished

Glues I use in lutherie, where I use them, and a bit about why.

Hot Hide Glue

This is the traditional glue used for centuries, and it is still a favorite for many lutherie jobs. Hot hide glue may have tonal benefits largely because of how hard it cures, and because it pulls the glue joint together as it cures. It has better heat resistance than Titebond and other “carpenters’ glues” as per tests done by luthier Frank Ford. It has very low cold creep, and so a properly fitted joint will not move over time due to stress. It is only good for well fit joints. Hot hide glue joints are reversible with moist heat, and some grades can be shocked apart; both of these qualities make it a must for violin construction and repair. New glue reconstitutes old so it is good in repairs of older glue joints without the necessity of cleaning off all the old glue…an issue with carpenter’s glue. A major plus in production is that HHG sands to powder, and thus not loading up gunk on our wide belt sander belts when we use the glue for center seams on book matched guitar tops and backs. Also, when used in repairs, HHG can make a very strong and nearly invisible glue line; I’ve done major repairs where after finish touchup, I cannot see the glue line. Hot hide glue comes in a range of gram strengths, we generally use the 192. For a great treatise on HHG, see: http://www.frets.com/FretsPages/Luthier/Data/Materials/hideglue.html

Uses:
* Center seams for tops and backs
* Gluing braces to tops and backs
* Bridges on acoustic instruments
* Kerfing for acoustic guitars
* Tops to sides on acoustic guitars

Fish Glue

This is another traditional protein based glue but one which doesn’t need to be heated. The best fish glue is “isinglass” made from the air bladders of Russian sturgeon; it’s getting hard to find; Kremer Pigments is a source. It is good for most places you’d use HHG. Fish glue has a long “open time” making it easy to align joints and allowing plenty of clamping time, but it does take a long time to cure. Fish glue can also be made from other fish…cod was a major one, and it’s a favorite of some classical guitar builders like Jose Romanillos. If you remember Le Page’s glue with the funny bottle and rubber applicator top, you know fish glue!

Caveat: Fish glue is more hygroscopic than hot hide glue, and thus it is not good in high humidity conditions. The sturgeon isinglass is the most humidity-resistant type.

Uses:
• Pretty much any wood to wood glue joint in a guitar and anywhere you might use Hot Hide Glue

LMI “Luthier’s Glue” from Luthier’s Mercantile

This glue (I believe it to be a polyvinyl acetate..PVA) has the convenience of Franklin Titebond and other “carpenters’ glues”, yet cures much harder and seems to have some of the favorable qualities of hot hide glue. It is known for low “cold creep”, a possible real factor with regard to tone and the need for neck resets on acoustic guitars.

Uses:
* Peghead scarf joint
* Most assembly of semi-hollow guitar bodies in my shop
* Some less sonically important joints in acoustic instruments

WEST Epoxy

WEST epoxy was developed initially for the purpose of making cold molded yachts using the :Wood Epoxy Saturation Technique”. WEST epoxy cures hard and very clear; it’s great for bonding difficult to glue woods; does not introduce water into the glue line; joints can be taken apart with heat if need be. There are two versions of the hardener that we use…fast and slow, and there are a number of additives to alter the viscosity of the epoxy for use more as a putty, this being more useful in boat building. One of the great things about the WEST system is their metering pumps for the quart and gallon cans. One pump stroke of epoxy to one pump stroke of hardener.

Uses:
* Laminating necks
* Fingerboard to neck joints
* Laminating fancy wood skins and veneers to guitar bodies
* Gluing on “back strap overlays” on the back of pegheads
* Potting pickup coils in the shells

Smith & Co. CPES ( Clear Penetrating Epoxy Sealer )

Another great epoxy often used to stabilize woods like rosewood to prevent cracking. It’s nearly water thin and so it penetrates well into wood. Often used to stabilize rotting wood on boats or buildings.

Uses:
* Primer for wood finishing…pre-sealer
* Rot and spalting stabilizing
* Toughening wood

Franklin Polyurethane Glue

This is glue is catalyzed by moisture; for fast cure, it’s recommended that you mist dampen one side of the glue joint, but I generally do not use any water with it; we allow the ambient moisture content of the wood to do the job. With our semi-hollow Renaissance instruments it’s great for gluing the centerblocks onto cedar, spruce, or other wood tops as the glue line does not telegraph through to the top like it would with a water born glue. With peghead overlays, again, the lack of water makes for a stable layup without subsequent shrinkage as you’d get with the LMI white glue, fish glue, or HHG.

Uses:
* Center block to tops on semi hollow Renaissance guitars
* Laminating layered “skate boards” for “back strap” peghead overlays

Cyanoacrylate, aka CA or Superglue

Gear Up has a range of cyanoacrylate “super glues” and their “Glue Boost” is the best of all the accelerators to speed up cure. The glue also works well with baking soda as a temporary nut slot filler when the slots are too deep.

Uses, thin superglue:
* Gluing and stabilizing frets
* Inlay dots
* Some polyester finish repair. Gear Up’s “Fill and Finish” is formuated for this application
* Some binding work
* Some quick repairs

Uses, thick superglue:
* Inlay
* Some binding work
* Quick repairs
* Making jigs and fixtures
* Bonding carbon fiber to wood

Duco Cement

We just keep coming back to Duco for binding. We’ve tried the rest, Duco’s the best! If you built balsa or plastic models as a kid…or do now…you know Duco! Do not huff the product!

Uses:
* Binding (plastic/celluloid)
* Laminating celluloid

Melted Celluloid or ABS

You can make your own colored glue for celluloid or ABS bindings by melting down scraps of binding in acetone.

Uses:
* For dealing with gaps and joints in celluloid binding

 

’62-64

 

In September of 1962 I found myself a commuter college student living at home with my parents in Marblehead, Massachusetts and taking a combination of the bus and the MTA to Boston University on the River Charles.  Somehow, I knew almost instantly this wasn’t the right thing for me.  When we…the freshman of the Class of 1966…were all bused up to freshman orientation in Swampscott barely a mile from my parent’s home…the first thing that happened was that along with our “how to behave in college instruction manual” or whatever the hell they were trying to get across to us came a really stupid brown “freshman beanie” that we were all supposed to wear when on campus.  This was to identify us to upperclassmen as an approved oppressed class of sub-humans.  The only hitch was that only three out of about 5,000 souls realized how idiotic this was, and somehow, within minutes, we found one another.  There was Michael Kane, a music major/French horn player slated to be a slave in the football marching band (that was the price of music scholarships in those days), Lowell Vincent Levinger, a theater major from Santa Rosa, California, and myself.  I don’t remember if I had my wonderful 1919 Martin 2-17 with me that day…it became as regular a part of my wardrobe as shoes…but musos find musos…it’s in the eyes or something.  Anyway, we found one another and discovered that we all shared a common interest in traditional forms of American music…black blues, acoustic and electric, Mississippi to Chicago, mountain string band music with the New Lost City Ramblers rising far above the Kingston Trio, and the balladeers like Jack Elliott singing in the Guthrie tradition.

 

I don’t remember quite when and how we started playing together, but I do recollect that Michael discovered that there was little regulation of the music practice rooms in the music department building.   If you showed up and found an empty room, it was yours until you left.   I suspect we were the only ones playing anything other than standard classical repertoire there, and as weird as we may have sounded to anybody walking by the door, nobody bothered us or complained.

 

We all happened to hit Boston during a several year peak of the folk revival, and we figured out very quickly that our real classrooms were the Unicorn, the Café Yana, the Turk’s Head, and over in Cambridge, the Club 47.  I started “staying over” crashing in someone’s dorm room if there was something hot happening at one of the clubs, and soon enough met other like-minded folkies and was invited to all-night parties with folks like the Kingston Trio, Theodor Bikel, Jack Elliott, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, and more local luminaries on the club scene.  I befriended a fiddle player, Jerry Wein, who had one of those apartments that got handed down from one folk musician to another.  The place was right behind the Boston Public Library, and somehow I convinced my parents that I’d do better in college if I didn’t have to commute…yeah, right!   I moved in, and in a few months, Jerry moved out making room for Lowell and Michael, and soon enough we were playing together first as Harmon N. Banana and the Knights of Pythias Wake the Dead Gospel Four…which soon enough became Banana and the Bunch, Old Tyme Music with A-Peel.

 

By Spring of 1963 we’d become regulars at the Unicorn Coffee House which was barely three blocks from our apartment.  We had opening privileges…in the sense that we knew which panel in the front door was loose, and George Papadopulos kind of liked that we’d break in and turn the lights on for him and get the place warmed up a bit.  We also rarely paid to see incredible acts there; I think George saw us as club mascots for a while.  Anyway, this was our kind of classroom, and we studied the music as though we were in for PhDs there.  And of course, along the way we met a lot of like-minded folks, some future drop-outs like ourselves, some who stuck it through their college years…Tom Rush, Bob Siggins, and a lot of the folkies who were three or four years our senior.

 

The three of us kind of stumbled our way not quite well through our freshman year there at BU; I still can’t quite figure out how I got invited to go back the next fall, but there it would be.

 

 

 

It was back to Marblehead for me in the summer of 1963.

 

 

In the summer of 1963, I took my first and only long distance bike trip that summer before, riding from Marblehead to Wood’s Hole and then taking the ferry over to the Vineyard on one long and ass-busting day.    Once over there I stayed at the sort of communal house rented by Dick Randlett, one of the owners of the Mooncusser Coffee House.

 

 

 

Cambridge, ’64-65

 

I re-enrolled at BU in the Fall of 1963 not really knowing why I bothered.  My folks didn’t really understand my dilemma; college was just the thing a young prep school grad was supposed to do, and both of my parents had taken that normal path…Phyllis from a private high school in New York to Bennington, Hamlin from Exeter to Harvard.  Alternatives were not even a consideration.

 

I did not like BU.  All the classes save one were huge; it was like the worst of going back to public high school magnified ten times, and the required courses were just a ridiculous.   Moses Brown had been rigorous…a real intellectual challenge…and exciting.  My teachers had all been very bright and very engaged.  BU was a huge institutionalized diploma factory.   If there had been some sort of alternative curriculum that allowed mixing liberal arts with engineering and music, I might have thrived, but it was not to be.  At one point I went to the counseling department there and took a whole battery of psychological and aptitude tests.   I scored in the top percentile for engineering aptitude and they told me I should never consider farming.  They also said I was clearly unhappy with my situation there at BU.  Big help!

 

Banana, Michael and I found a place in Brookline a reasonable walk from BU…and two of the more notorious folkie coffee houses in Boston.   One was the Café Yana which featured gorgeous waitresses in black tights and mini-skirts with deliciously bored expressions…and was the site of an infamous pot bust with future pals Chuck Shefreen and Jeff Gerber  having been set up by Boston’s finest narcs.  The Yana was about a block from Fenway Park which made for a strange mélange of beatnik and sports fans.  The other place was the Unicorn, a larger club owned by George Papadopulos, and it was about two blocks from our old place behind the Boston Public Library.   The Unicorn was a top-tier national venue for acts like Doc Watson, Ramblin’ Jack, Dave Van Ronk, Rev. Gary Davis ( who, though blind, had an amazing ability to find the waitresses breasts…), Odetta, and guys who just blew our minds, the Kentucky Colonels with Clarence White practically melting the strings on his D-18 and D-28 Martins.   Papadopulos had taken a liking to us for some reason or other and let us open the club…by slipping through a section of his glass door where a Masonite panel covered for the lack of glass.  Once in, we’d unlock the place and turn on the lights and that was about it, but we were in free.

 

Our lives became more and more about music, and we got to know some of our favorite musicians in town and those on the circuit.  I’d already met Ian and Sylvia on Martha’s Vineyard, and we became good pals with Peter Stamfel and Steve Webber…aka “the Holy Modal Rouders” who would crash at our place and we at Peter’s on occasional forays down to New York.

 

Along the way, we’d been playing music together as “Banana and the Bunch, Old Time Music with A-Peal.    We were sometimes three, sometimes four with the addition of Peter Golden on guitar and vocals, and sometimes five when Al Wilson, later to play with Canned Heat, would join us on harmonica.    Al was really great then, but with the odd habit of stuffing his nostrils with Kleenex so he wouldn’t lose any breath out his nose when he wanted all he had for the harp.    One of the more bizarre parts of our act was when Peter would read from the “Good Book”, an incredibly large book that was a “Compendium of Medical Knowledge” from about 1875.   Between songs, Peter would randomly open the Good Book and read whatever the hell was on  the page in front of him.    There were particularly graphic descriptions of scurvy, the depredations of masturbation (self abuse), cattarh, boils, etc. with which Peter would utterly mystify our poor audience who would wonder why they had paid to come and sit and hear of the plagues of the past while sipping on their Medaglio D’Oro espresso and eating cheese cake, the two staples of 1960s coffeehouses.   We thought of it as a kind of modern performance art thing, although we’d never heard the term “performance art”; maybe we were inventing it.   Whatever it was, it went nicely with the dope we were smoking, because yes, pot was becoming a regular part of our lives despite some of the major busts, including Paul Rothchild, one time manager of the Club 47 and later to be producer of “the Doors” and Ed Freeman who would go on to produce Don McLean’s “American Pie” album.

 

MORE TO COME 

 

 

Island String Shop, summer ‘64

 

In the spring of ’64 we were at a party at the apartment of Dick Randlett, co-owner of the place on the Vineyard.  He was an electronics designer by day and folk music fan at night.   Dick and his partner, Charlie Close were gearing up for another summer on the Island with a great line up of booked talent.   Banana and I got the idea of opening a music store in a part of the building that had it’s own store front and  backed up to the Mooncusser’s kitchen.  The store was on a side street there in Oak Bluffs, right next to an incredible Portugese bakery and two doors from the post office.   It was a perfect setup for us.   Banana and Michael were making music with John and Jane Nagy as the Proper Bostonians, and they all needed a summer out of the Boston scene to practice.    Banana found us a great huge apartment above an African American beauty salon about a block and a half from the club.    We painted the apartment totally weird colors, which bothered Jane, but she got over it, and so we all moved into this place, none of us having the slightest idea of how we were going to do financially.   And that should have been a worry, as the store was a disaster from that point of view, but we really didn’t care.   We had access to all the coffee we could drink, a “day gig” which consisted of hanging out and doing a little bit of guitar repair work, and nights in the club where we were both the house band and I washed dishes for spare change.    How we paid the rent I don’t recall, maybe it was from the proceeds of selling some pot, but there was a day when we were happily broke, figured we needed protein, and there it was, canned mackerel kind of down at the end of the cat food section in the market.   It wasn’t labeled pet food, but it sure was cheap.   We bought it, ate it, and prospered.

 

The week before the Newport Folk Festival was to take place, we were so broke that I doubt that among the three of us we could have scraped up the fare to get one of us off-island, and that was of tragic proportions in our lives.   The lineup of talent, both on the old traditional side and the city folks and up and coming talents like Bob Dylan was incredible, and we couldn’t go.    Life at the club was good, though, Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band with Jim, David Simon, Mel Lyman, Fritz Richmond, and the Muldaurs, Geoff and Maria were tearing up the nights.    They were at one of their several peaks of performance that summer, and they had a lot of fans on the island.    One of them happened to be a yachtsman, and he popped into the dressing room downstairs from the kitchen and our store and announced to us all, “Hey, I’ve got a 45 foot cabin cruiser and I’m headed for Newport.   Anyone want a ride?”   I hope he wasn’t too shocked at how many takers he had, because we all wanted on-board, and so it was.   Diane Tribuno, she of my first acid trip, was hanging out with me, not as my girlfriend, but just as a pal, so she was literally my bunk mate; Banana and Michael and most of the Kweskin band came along, and so it was that we arrived in Newport with a floating hotel for the duration of the weekend and a ride back.    The only problem was that we didn’t have tickets.   Diane was fine; I think she had scored tickets weeks in advance; the band was fine, of course, as they were playing the festival; Banana, Michael, and I just figured on figuring it out even if it meant slipping under a fence like kids sneaking into a big top circus.    No need…the first person we saw upon walking up to shore from the dock was Bernie Apothecker, a folk scene gig hustler from Boston who was to become Peter Rowan’s manager for a while.   We knew Bernie through John Nagy, and had hung out with him quite a bit.    “Hi, guys, whatcha up to?”, Bernie called to us.    “Just got here on that boat, and we’re trying to figure out how to get into the festival.”   “Oh, no problem…I’m in charge of giving out press passes and I have them all here in my pocket.    Who is going to be whom?   OK, Banana, you represent the BU paper; Michael, you’re from Brandeis, and Rick, you write for the Boston College daily!”

 

 

Cambridge 1964-65

 

In the fall of 1964  Banana (Lowell Levinger), Michael Kane, and I moved to Cambridge from the Vinyard into a second story apartment off of Putnam Ave.   The spot was near the Charles River in an area about equidistant from Central Square and Harvard Square.   We were gone from Boston University, and we were living the folkie Bohemian life in one of the best places to do that in the US.   Rent was cheap, we could walk anywhere in town, and there were always friends like Paul Arnoldi or Jim Mairs who had cars if we needed or wanted to go anywhere the subways and busses didn’t go, and beyond that, hitchhiking was an accepted and reasonably safe way to get to New York, Providence, or wherever.   I remember us hitching out to U Mass to see Bob Dylan perform, and we got a ride from a woman who turned out to be involved with putting on a folk festival out there.    We wound up staying with her and her husband, played well into the night, and her only request was that we not bring any pot to the festival.   Pot?   Us?   No way…never heard of the stuff…   Yeah, sure…

 

I don’t know what Michael and Banana did for money in those days, but I had a real job, working at Briggs and Briggs, an old time full line music store in Harvard Square.   They sold records and had three listening rooms for auditioning the latest albums.   They also had an incredibly extensive selection of sheet music all stored in a wall of filing cabinets behind the counter, and I, with practically no education in classical music, quickly learned to fake it and find the sonatas, concertos and the like being sought by Harvard students.    And down stairs were two rooms with guitars…Gibsons, Epiphones, Guilds, and Harmonys, and since I was the young guitar player, I got to be the guitar salesman, too.   To top it all off, on my way to work lived my first post high school serious girl friend, an “older woman” three years my elder who was a local folk singer playing all the clubs in Boston and Cambridge.    Nancy introduced me to the joys of French press coffee and sex in the morning before going to work.   For a preppy turned acoustic guitar player that was pretty cool stuff all around.   Sometimes I stayed with her, sometimes back at the musician’s boarding house that our apartment had become.   It was right out of “Tangled up in Blue.”

 

It was about this time that I first tried psychedelics in the form of extract of heavenly blue morning glory seeds, courtesy of Maria Muldaur who had given a jar of this vile gray glop to my friend Diane Tribuno, later to be married to bluesman Nick Gravenites.    Diane, Jim Mairs and I did the whole 1964 ritual…we read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we lit incense, we put on Bach organ fugues on Diane’s record player, and then we all took a trip, and it was the real deal.    Laughter, visions, intense profound revelations…at least they seemed so at the time, and just one hell of a good time.

 

In those days there was a new tradition in Cambridge of psychedelic exploration.   Richard Alpert, better known now as Ram Dass, and Timothy Leary had been teaching at Harvard and in the late 1950s they became academically interested in the effects of psychedelic drugs, particularly on creativity.   This whole thing blew up in their faces, and in the spring of 1963 Dr. Alpert was fired from his job, and he and Leary headed for Mexico under a cloud of scandal…and were promptly unofficially declared the patron saints of the whole psychedelic revolution into the back yard of which we had dropped.   We all regarded acid as a combination of sacrament, brain opener, and, well, fun.

 

A few weeks after my first trip a number of us decided to try LSD and go see Hard Day’s Night for the first time.   Three of us would take the acid before seeing the film, three would wait to see if we killed ourselves or anything and get a report from the other side before downing their doses.    I was in the first wave, and what can I say?   It was wonderful, spectacular, those guys were having so much fun just goofing off that we all never wanted the movie to end or we wanted to step into the screen, or, and this is what really happened, we wanted to live life as large as we possible could, get paid for it, and just keep going for the rest of our lives.   The movie, of course, came to an end, and out we stumbled, by then six stoned musicians coming out into a nice snowfall.    For some reason we decided to go over to Bill Lyons’ house and get him stoned too.   Bill was a balladeer around the clubs and sometime guitar repairman.    He was a bit of a curmudgeon, he was gay, and he was fun to hang out with having a wicked sense of humor and having been around the Boston Cambridge folk scene since the very inception.    To get to his place we had to go down a moderately steep drive way to part in back of the house which we did only to find him not home.   So we piled back into the car, probably Jim’s Volvo, and headed for the street.    No go.   The snow and a light sheet of ice had glazed over the driveway, and we only made it up about half way and then started sliding back.    What to do?   Back up a bit further, gun it, and try for the top.   No go.    Back a couple more feet further, and hit it.   No go.     Well this went on for a good half hour.    We were cracking up so much that we didn’t dare get out of the car to try to sweep off the snow or through sand out or get a shovel or do any of the things that normal sane people would do.    The problem was that we were abnormal and insane and we knew it.    Of course it didn’t occur to us that a neighbor might wonder why a car full of proto-hippies with exploding heads was repeatedly attacking a snowy hill with a Volvo.    Too much fun, and the next phase of a pretty good run.

 

Banana, Michael and I sold a bit of pot and we had a fantastic connection for Sandoz LSD that a guy in a Cadillac would deliver.   Up the stairs he’d come with a briefcase full of glass ampules of brown liquid acid of the highest quality from the folks who invented the stuff.    We’d pipette it onto sugar cubes, and move it on.

 

The apartment became a real hangout for musician/psychedelic connoisseurs and we continued to have out of town musicians stay with us there.    One of them was Monte Dunn, guitar accompanist to Ian and Sylvia whom we had met in the summer of 1964 when they played at the Moon Cusser.   We’d all hit it off, and played a lot of music together, an eclectic blend of folk, Bluegrass, and what would become known as folk rock.

 

Another regular, but relatively local was Peter Rowan, a great Bluegrass singer and guitarist drawn into the scene.    We got along famously with Peter, and when his draft notice came, we all got together to strategize how to convince the draft board that Peter was unfit for service.   Bear in mind that we didn’t even know about Vietnam at this point.   We hear vague rumblings of things going badly in South East Asia, and we were for the most part Seegerized anti-war peaceniks, but we weren’t yet anti-Vietnam war protesters.   We just didn’t want our pals or ourselves to be pushed into the army to be trained to kill for no particular reason other than corporate maneuverings and politics.

 

At that point in time, the standard ways to be declared 4-F were to show up without any underwear and unwashed for a few weeks,  say you were queer, or appear to be a drug user,    They hadn’t yet figured out that half their army was about to be drug users and that they could just throw stoned soldiers at the front lines.   So we decided to give Peter a good dose of acid that he would take right before going for his draft physical.     Well, it worked, and how!    Peter went in a mumbling lunatic without having to do very much acting.     They basically threw him out on the street whereupon the legend is that he found a Macy’s department store pet shop and started to let the birds go free from their cages, just as he had been let free.   Ask Peter about that the next time you see him…

 

More to come