So How'd Your First Gig Come About, Crispo?

Well, first, it was my first paying gig singing and playing guitar. I'd been drumming in various garage bands -- we just called it rock and roll -- I still do -- since 6th grade, and playing drums since fourth. I took clarinet lessons for a year before that but it never took. One of my grandmother's brothers had been a pro drummer in "sweet bands" (big bands that didn't play jazz, essentially) -- his son was a pro C&W drummer -- and he gave me my first trap set, after hearing me practice once on all the gear I'd had before -- a snare and a ride cymbal, each bought for me by my parents, one one year and the other the next. They were real workingclass people raising four kids. They could never have sprung for a trap set themselves, in those days. I started teaching myself how to play chords on a guitar in high school, and started writing songs, really, if the truth is told, because I was too lazy to learn many of anyone else's. I wanted to get to it right away and did, though it's been a more than mixed blessing in a lot of ways. I taught myself a lot of bad habits that limited progress, as it turned out. It didn't bother me much at the time because people seemed to like my songs.

Early 70s -- whichever year was the year of Paul Lawrence, a dirty narc for hire in Vermont who was responsible for scores of bogus drug busts, a police-state atrocity that can be read about here -- my good old music pal Will Patton, who was the first real musician to take me and my songs seriously, though I was still a teenager, told me that I should go see this cat Otto at his bar called Tuner's Place, in St. Albans, VT. Patton was at the time playing in John Cassel's band, which was the hip party band of the time in these parts, a big band by the day's standards. Would be still today. They had horns and eventually even three women singing harmony parts. I was a punk kid hanging around. Somehow John and his drummer of the time, Skeeter Camera (who would later sub for Roger North on a Holy Modal Rounders/Clamtones tour that permanently traumatized him), convinced the various bar owners that it was okay for the kid to be in the bar; he just likes to hear the music. It was they who first started teaching me about jazz and other stuff, hipster ways and lore, etc. I found out about drugs and drink on my own.

John was the first hipster to move here to northern Vermont -- he says he's "the shit that drew the flies," sparking a scene that would eventually include Snock (Michael Hurley), Jeffrey Frederick, Tom Hayes (aka Chief Melting Snow aka Colonel Sweet Potato), Wax, Davey Besset, Skeeter, Michael Kane (who got the call to join The Youngbloods while living there, playing bass with Cassel -- Patton replaced him as John's bass player), Katie Bear (who'd later sing in my VT band Hundred Proof), Dave Reisch now and then, early 70s, Paul Asbell, Tyrone Shaw, and a lot of other people who migrated to Franklin County, and its surrounds. Perry Cooper's another, a longtime pal I met in those early days. Perry was the first guy I encountered whose job was to run the first soundboard I'd ever seen. In those days, most bands were lucky to own their own "PA system," never mind to have their own sound man.

(To make this web denser still, I found out one night a few years back, during Burlington's Discover Jazz Festival, that my favorite musician, Ray Anderson , played his first gig in the Chicago band that Paul was in at the time, before moving to VT. Ray, Paul, myself and the great Lew Soloff were talking over wine and Italian when I asked Ray if he'd known Paul for long. "Long!" Ray said and cracked up. "Since I was sixteen!" But there's more still: Jesse Colin Young, of Youngbloods fame, came up a Bucks County boy along with Snock, Captain Garbage, and Holy Modal Rounders Steve Weber and Robin Remaily. "Hi Fi Snock" and "Armchair Boogie" were both released by the Youngbloods' Racoon label. You'll find Michael Kane on the credits.)

I was only 12 or 13 when John Cassel showed up on the scene. The first year, he played an upright piano, solo, at the local ski area's bar, on weekend afternoons. I'd hitchhike up there to listen all afternoon every weekend. John was playing jazz and I knew even as a kid that he was playing music that was beyond the stuff kids my age were listening to and trying to play. The band came a year or maybe two later, first as a trio before expanding. I became a lifelong jazz guy via those afternoon sessions spent listening to John play. It occurs to me while writing, that would make John's my longest-running friendship, more than 40 years, now.

I remember the night Patton introduced himself to me. He said, "John says you got thrown out of high school for playing in a rock and roll band," extending a hand in friendship that still holds, going on 35 years later. "Anyone who can say that is a friend of mine," he said.

(Actually, I got thrown out of high school forever for having led the "Fish Cheer" -- Country Joe's "Give me an F! Give me a U...!" -- at a school dance where I was playing. I was drunk on dollar-a-bottle, fortified wine and some pills and hootie weed to keep the spark lit. That was the end of my high school career, right there. I remember we played our own version of "Brown Sugar"; I played the saxophone solo on a closely miked kazoo turned up really loud. Many years later, I met Country Joe, twice, at demonstrations, the both of us being anti-imperialist vets. Once when I found myself marching alongside him, I told him the story of how I got thrown out of high school. He apologized. I told him, Hell, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I hated high school more than anything and still do.)

So one day I hitchhiked the 24 miles to St. A and found Otto tending bar, in the afternoon. I told him what Patton had said so Otto told me to play a few and I did. He said he'd book me for a night for twenty bucks and all the beer I could drink if I took care of distributing posters where I lived. Which I did. I remember I filled them in by hand with a magic marker and put them up around local stores and such, like the high school bands of the time did. I remember Patton told me "Hey, I saw your name up in lights at the store."

Just about that time it dawned on me that I had far from enough songs to play a whole night at a bar so I got busy learning a bunch. I really liked Kris Kristofferson at the time. I was disillusioned with what rock had become, and not being in school anymore, I didn't have a band to play it with, anyway. Kristofferson was writing songs I really admired for both style and content, and playing in a countryish kind of way I was leaning toward anyway, at least acoustic music with a kind of country rhythm to it. Plus he had a voice in the low baritone range -- unusual in popular music at the time -- and so did I. Better still, I already knew all the lyrics, especially from the "Silver Tongued Devil" record. And, in any case, I was a kid you could see "wasted on the sidewalk/in his jacket and jeans/wearing yesterday's misfortune's like a smile...." It was a natural fit. So I learned a bunch of KK's songs and brushed up my versions of a few Dylan songs, and some other stuff I can't remember anymore, including many of my own songs from that period.

Dylan'd had an effect on my drift to acoustic and country music, too, especially his "John Wesley Harding" record, which I wore out. I liked it better than "Nashville Skyline" and still do. I worshipped Dylan as a kid, especially his second album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," which I played repeatedly, every day. I'd just keep turning the record over again, for hours. I still pull one out now and then, usually that one "If today was not an endless highway...." I don't even remember the title, anymore. I'm more than ambivalent about Dylan, but as a kid, I thought he was the shit, pure and simple.

So, I showed up at Tuner's Place as planned and found myself playing for a whole lot of adult hipsters and barroom habitues, older and hipper than me by far, but being a kid, what the hell. Full speed ahead. They were likely busier trying to tune me out than in, but what the hell. The kid had balls.

A little ways into my second set, a guy with red hair wearing a sky-blue cowboy hat walked up to the little riser stage and said, "Tell the people Michael Hurley will play the next song." So I did. And so he did. Hearing Michael that night, completely out of the blue -- I knew nothing about Snock at the time -- changed forever my idea of what music is and how it's supposed to be played. Changed my life, really. He really knocked me out. I was too young, still, for most cats to have taken seriously, but Patton and Otto heard something in there, I guess. So, I was on my way but blown away by Snock's playing and his songs that night. Later the next week, I found Michael's "HiFi Snock Uptown" record -- long out of print but you can buy CDrs with color covers from Michael via his website -- which was a current release at the time. I bought it in Bailey's Music Store, which was on Church Street in Burlington, VT, at the time. It was a real music store. It sold lp's and singles, sheet music, instruments, the whole wazoo. Guy who owned it was a noted local drum teacher. That was it, for me, hearing that record. (Later, after enlisting, I came across Michael's "Armchair Boogie," also available as a CDr, by accident in a record store in Japan!)

Otto made good on his pledge of twenty bucks and all the beer the kid could drink. I tried to make good my pledge from the other side and I did drink all the beer I could that night. Later, some of the "older" cats got indignant when I told them he'd paid me twenty bucks because he paid them lighter. I put the quotes on "older" because most of them weren't all that much older, really. It just seemed so at the time. Jeffrey was four years older than me, so he'd have been all of 22 that night, to put things in perspective. Michael had a good number of years on me, of course, twelve of 'em. Patton's an old motherfucker, too, though younger than Snock. I never knew just how old he was til he told me last year. He looks good for a relic. Must be that clean livin'.

Other people besides Snock and Otto who'd figure in the life after that, who were there at Tuner's Place that night, were Jeffrey, Morgan Huber, Wax, and others. It was an auspicious debut for me but of course likely an entirely forgettable night for them.

Who knew?