Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
I’ve got a 2007 Ford E150 eight passenger van with something like 245,000 miles on it. As a matter of fact this is my third, although Session Americana has put so much money into maintenance and tires at this point that it really belongs to the band. I was a carpenter/contractor for many years in addition to always being in bands, so in the beginning they were work vans with a bolted in back seat and a sleeping platform that I could shove tools or gear on and under. The last one died when the back suspension went through the rusted floor at a pothole, but then I found out about these fairly rare eight passenger ones. It’s much more lux than the work vans and has two back bench seats that clip in or out, and a lot of space behind the back one for the gear. It’s perfect for the six of us.
It is aging though (aren’t we all). We were two days into a two week midwest tour last April when the exhaust pipe split open in the middle of Ohio. Sounded like we were at the drag strip. We got it into a Lowe’s parking lot and bought some plumbing clamps that I could get around it to keep things together. Then we drove it onto a curb so I could get under (mind you there was a nice ‘wintery mix’ coming down too) and wang on the broken parts with a rock to get them back in line to fit the clamps on. We definitely still had the muscle car vibe going when we pulled up to venues for the rest of that tour, but we made it to Wisconsin and back.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Salads. They make fun of us in Europe because we get to a venue and the Americans all want wifi and salad. A lot of the band are sort of foodies, so we don’t go for fast food at all…and we drink a LOT of wine. Part of the challenge is to find the cool little ethnic places with good food along the routes.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
Well, there are two other guitar players in SA now so I’m mostly playing pump organ, accordion, and mandocello. The strings on that are massive so I think I’ve only broken one or two in twenty years. Like a mandolin, it has four double pairs of strings and I don’t like it to sound too bright, so once or twice a year I’ll change half of them at time. Seems to work out. I could get them online, but there’s a small local music store I have order them. I don’t buy enough to keep them in business but I’m sure everything helps.
On the other hand, for over forty years I’ve also fronted a twenty piece party band called the Funky White Honkies. We only play a few times a year and we make the most of it, so those shows regularly turn to mayhem by the end of the night. I often get very…um…excited and trash the stage (in a gentle way) and kick the strings off my guitar (in a not gentle but time-tested way). I don’t like to be predictable, and never go into the show intending to do all that, but it seems to happen regularly. Rock and roll. As a matter of fact we just played a couple of nights ago and this was the result.
Where do you rehearse?
Nah, nothing crazy. Session Americana rehearses three or four times a year, usually in the outbuilding studio apartment of our drummer Billy Beard. Otherwise it’s a matter of working things out at soundchecks, on a day off wherever we may be, or at recording sessions. The Honkies have had I think two rehearsals in the history of the band, and the last one was more than thirty years ago.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
Ooh, tough one. In the neighborhood where I grew there was a kid I used to get together and play/write with. I was probably twelve. I had an acoustic guitar with horrible action so my fingers would bleed if you played it too long. He had an electric guitar though so we would take turns…but I did most of the bleeding. Talk about rock and roll. I think we wrote maybe close to a hundred songs but I only remember two, and lost our lyric notebooks a long time ago. Our band was called The Flying Circus and we wrote a theme song, probably heavily influenced by The Monkees.
We’re the Flying Circus and we hope you’d like to know we hope you like our show
We’ll take you on a magic carpet ride
It’s the greatest thing we know ow ow
…and so forth. Genius I tell you. Actually, It’s a pretty catchy number.
Describe your first gig.
The bass player for the Flying Circus didn’t actually own a bass so we rented a local church basement to throw a dance and raise some money for him to get one. I think we had actually changed our name to The Aluminum Egg Corporation about that time…this was probably 1966 or 67 after all. The room was dark and packed, there were lots of girls, people were dancing on chairs, and I think we made $400 after renting the church, paying to rent a friend’s Fender Vocalmaster PA, and paying for a cop to be outside. Pretty heady stuff when you’re 12 or 13 and there was no turning back.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
My folks were not down with the whole ‘being a musician’ thing so I went to college to become an elementary school teacher. However, during my student teaching I quickly realized that the teacher’s schedule wasn’t realistic for me and by that time I was working summer construction dismantling historical houses, moving them in pieces to the seacoast in Massachusetts, then reassembling them. I never did finish college, but fell into starting a renovation business of my own for something like 35 years because I liked doing it, was really good at it, and it provided good pay and a flexible schedule so I could still play music and raise a family. I pretty much only had musicians and artists working for me (Lyle Brewer even did some demo and dumpster loading between tours) and we would start at like 9:30 or 10 in the morning then work until 5 or so. Pretty manageable for the most part. I was always a reluctant businessman, but luckily in the Boston area there was plenty of demand, so we always stayed as busy as we wanted to be. Everyone I worked for knew that if I had to be in New York for a gig I wouldn’t be in the next day. That being said, I never did the whole ‘get in the van and go on tour for months in your 20s’ thing. My first van tour was to New Orleans and the Midwest with the Chandler Travis Philharmonic when I was something like 46 or 47.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
I probably play something like 100-120 nights a year and people will say ‘wow, it’s so great you can earn a living at that’. Well, in no one’s world is what I make from music considered a ‘living’. But I made the decision a long time ago to play the music I wanted to play and figure out how to pay the bills in other ways. Luckily I fell into buying a house in the middle of Cambridge when I was in my late 20s, and if my wife and I live like old hippies now and don’t spend a lot, we get to do the things we want to do and still get by. At the same time, while I’m not playing for thousands a night, I get to travel the world, and when Session Americana went to Spain for the first time a little while ago someone in Madrid called out for a song I wrote. I’ve had songs of mine used for both weddings and funerals on different continents this year, I’ve seen people be overcome with both joy and sadness at songs I’ve written, I had someone tell me a song I wrote got his son to reconsider suicide, and I had my six year old grandson on stage singing Beertown with me last month…so I’m feeling pretty good about music and my life right now. The income will be what it will be. I don’t need to vacation in Aruba.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
It’s funny but I can’t really think of anything. I might have liked to do more national touring when I was younger but then I wouldn’t have had the life I did, and it’s a pretty great life.