 |
| Dick Weissman, Denver, 2000 |
Dick
Weissman is an entirely unique mix of historian, musician, teacher and mensch.
He has his curmudgeonly side, but his genuine love of music and understanding
of the times he lives in permeates everything he says. His self-effacing manner
belies a sharp and incisive wit, whether he is dispensing wisdom to a class
full of music industry hopefuls or picking his way through a complicated banjo
piece in front of a rapt audience. He is never less than completely honest and
authentic. As he speaks, his manner and mind recall a different America and a
different type of American. The type for whom art is an occupation not an
abstract concept, and to whom civic engagement is an obligation not an
antiquated joke. He is part of a tradition of American folk musician that
helped define the national character at crucial times in our history. He should
be heard and cherished, and he is right here in Colorado. We spoke on St.
Patrick’s Day of 2019. As his thoughts unwind in lengthy reminiscences it feels
like the history of modern culture is coming alive. His experiences are
defining and trace the development of the now thriving music scene we enjoy in
Colorado.
Visit the Colorado Music Hall of Fame for an edited version of this
article and much more cool stuff at https://cmhof.org/
 |
| Work Camp Stockbridge, MA, 1959 |
Q: Tell us about your early
life and your first introduction to Colorado.
A: I grew up in
Philadelphia… my parents had a commuter marriage: my mother was teaching public
school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and my Dad was a pharmacist in
Philadelphia, had a little drug store; it was during the Depression and my
Mother didn’t want to quit her job because she was afraid of what happens if
this drug store goes under? So my big hobby was collecting travel booklets. I
had all of these Western booklets. So I had a box full of this stuff and I was
pestering my parents - my father took very few vacations, kind of an immigrant
boy who worked 7 1/2 days a week - but, when I was 13 we went to Colorado and
New Mexico - driving. This would have been in 1948. That’s where I met this
sort of old railroad worker at the state capitol who wanted to talk to me - he
fascinated me but frightened my parents. I talked to him for maybe 10 minutes,
but it was kind of a peak experience for me at that age because everybody I
knew was pretty middle class, my parents palled around mostly with medical
people. So that was my first interest in Colorado.
I then went to college in Vermont, which is
where I first learned how to play the banjo from a person whose name was Lil’ Blos, whose main claim to fame was
her father, Peter Blos who was one
of the last living associates of Sigmund Freud. I had heard Pete Seeger at the age of 13, at the Progressive
Party convention, because my brother was very active in unions and politics. So
Seeger kind of intrigued me and I started to buy all these old records - 78
discs. One of things about me which is different than most of the folkies was
that I got equally country-ish and bluesy things. So I had Seeger and Woody but
I also had Brownie McGhee and Lonnie Johnson. When 78’s were phased
out, Walgreens would have 5 for a dollar and I would buy 78’s by Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie and people like that.
Q: Based on what? How did
you know to go buy Big Bill Broonzy?
A: I started doing some
reading and also I went to a few Seeger concerts, who was always pretty generous
without doing the sort of scholarly schtick that the New Lost City Ramblers did - ‘I learned this from Blind Paul
Epstein who learned this from Deaf Dick Weissman, who learned it from his dog.’
Seeger didn’t do that. He said ‘If you like the way I play this you really
should really hear Pete Steele do this.' So I would try to find out who’s this
Pete Steele, how do I find this out? Seeger was an evangelist that way; that
was very constructive and non-egotistical because there’s nothing in this for him
to turn people on to those folks.
 |
Weissman observes a set by
Rev. Gary Davis, 1950's |
My junior year (1954) at Goddard in Vermont and
then The New School in New York City was probably my formative musical period
where I took guitar and banjo lessons from Jerry
Silverman, who was one of the Hootenanny crowd. In the fall I met The Reverend Gary Davis, who I played
banjo with but I never took lessons from him. He was very influential in my
understanding. He played at Tiny Ledbetter’s house on Thursday nights. Tiny was
Leadbelly’s niece, who lived in the same building that Leadbelly and Martha had
lived in. In the spring I had gone to the University of New Mexico and met a
guy named Stuart Jamieson. He had
collected banjo music from a guy named Rufus
Crisp in Kentucky. Rounder later put out a CD called Black Altamont, and Stuart produced a lot of those
recordings. So I met these two people, and the way they influenced me was Gary
created this atmosphere around himself where you were sort of lost in this
world of 1920’s evangelical Black - you know, you’re gonna go to hell if you
don’t straighten out kind of thing. Yet there was a schizophrenic kind of thing
where he loved to have pretty girls around him, and he’d ask them to hold his
hand and do crap. He would sing blues when his wife wasn’t around. After a beer
or two and a little coaxing he would do ragtime stuff. So he was one level of
inspiration, and Stuart had this certainty about what he did to where the
insecurities you associate with people who are struggling - he may have these
insecurities, but it’s not apparent. Seeger was not one of those people. I
don’t think that what he did came naturally to him. He had to work to do this,
and I would, of course, say the same thing about myself. I didn’t grow up in an
environment where Blues and banjo music were being played on the predecessors
of Dick Clark. So it was partially through Seeger’s influence, partly through
buying these records and the radio. I wasn’t a real happy adolescent, so
anything that was different appealed to me.
Q: So it was cultural
osmosis, sort of the natural alternative to the “grey-flannel 50’s?”
A: Yeah, exactly. So, when
I was a senior at Goddard I wrote the first lengthy banjo thing that I had ever
done.
Q: Which you learned to
do…?
 |
The Journeymen, Photographed
for Capitol Records |
A: I made it up. I created
a form, that as far as I know no one else has used. It’s called A Day
In The Kentucky Mountains, and there’s three
instrumental parts and a song. The song does what instrumental music does in
most non-classical music - so instead of a banjo break there’s a song break. I
don’t know why I did this, and I’ve continued to do it.
So I graduated, came to New York, started
working on a degree in Sociology and started to get calls for sessions - there
was a music store called Eddie Bell’s
and all the session guys would hang out there, and none of them knew how to
play 5-string banjo - they all played tenor banjo. I remember I did a session
for Raymond Scott that was one of my
first sessions. Raymond Scott was this crazy person who wrote experimental
music but he also wrote jingles. On the session are Barry Galbraith and Al
Caiola who are two of the biggest studio guitar players in New York. They
were very curious about what the hell was I doing - they hadn’t really seen
anyone paying fingerstyle banjo - not bluegrass banjo but sort of like old-timey
music. I would start to get more of these sessions and I took all my credits at
Columbia and I wanted to write a thesis on five blind black blues religious
artists - Gary Davis, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind
Willie McTell and one more. I realized that writing this would be like
warfare with my advisor. I had this theory that non-literate blind people - and
I was ignorant to the fact that McTell was not non-literate - he actually knew
how to read and write braille, and could write music in braille; the idea was
that these people who had been blind since birth or an early age were residues
of the culture that existed at the time that they went blind. I ended up
writing an article, but that was about it.
So that’s sort of where my Colorado thing
started. I had hay fever in August for about three weeks, so I tried to get out
of New York. The first time I went back to Colorado I was 23, and Dave Van Ronk who was a friend of mine
in New York - by the way one of my weird sources of income was that I taught
Van Ronk a song called Bamboo, and it was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary on a record that
sold multi-platinum and we split the copyright, which was a joke because it was
a traditional Jamaican song, but that was the game that was being played in the
mid-50’s until the mid-60’s. Dave was in ASCAP and I was in BMI and you were
not supposed to work together, so after the first pressing my name was taken
off everything after the first pressing, but he continued to pay me my half.
Q: On an informal basis?
“Hey buddy here’s some more money”
A: Yeah, and years and
years later, he made it into a shoe commercial in Germany and I got an
additional 10 grand over time. I still get money from it, because after Llewyn Davis (Inside Llewyn Davis) Folkways
issued a Van Ronk box set and that song is on it.
Q: What did you think of Llewyn Davis?
 |
| Journeymen Publicity Photo |
A: I hated it! It presented folk singers as
being just like pop singers. The story I just told you about Dave Van Ronk - that
wasn’t part of Llewyn Davis. We had
personal friendships and relationships - I’m not saying everybody was honorable
- I’m not saying there wasn’t some level of competition, but none of that
spirit is in Llewyn Davis.The other
thing is that Black people are totally invisible. There is no Black person in Llewyn Davis.
So, Dave told me I could get a job at Hermosa
Beach working at this club - I didn’t know anything about Los Angeles at this
point - I didn’t have a car, I didn’t know how to drive. Hitchhiking back to
New York I get stopped in Colorado because it is illegal to hitchhike, and the
state cops escort me to the bus station. So I go to Al’s Loans on Larimer Street,
and I bought three cheap guitars, go to the bus station and there’s Tom Paxton. I don’t know what he’s
doing in Denver, but we were both going to New York, so he and I played for
about an hour until I realized that people were trying to sleep. He would have
kept playing. There was no stop sign in his vocabulary for that. So that was my
first trip to Denver.
Somewhere in there I met Walt Conley who
was one of the three best known folk people in the Denver area. Harry Tuft and maybe Judy Collins. A couple of years later,
I had a friend who was a guitar student of mine named Art Benjamin, and I said ‘why don’t we drive out to Denver?’ The
first thing I did was to look up Walt Conley who lived in a house somewhere
between Capitol Hill and Five Points. His house was a
24-hour-a-day party and there were friends and girlfriends, whatever. This was
’59 and he was slightly older than I was. I only recently found out that Walt
Conley was working for the F.B.I., reporting on radical folk singers. Because
of the nature of Walt’s house, I met a woman named Karen Dalton, and she and I started a relationship, and my friend
Art started a relationship with her sister who was 17 years old and had been
married for 10 days to a folk singer named Dave
Hamill. Walt was booking the Satire
Lounge and I ended up as the opening act - Walt would do a set, and then The Smothers Brothers would do a set,
and Dickie Smothers, who was the
straight man, his wife was working as a waitress at The Satire - it was so
early in their career that his wife had to work as a waitress in the club. The
Satire was a pretty wild and woolly place in those days. That was great fun for
me. I can’t remember what I got paid - probably 10 or 15 dollars a night, but I
didn’t go out there to make money, I went to avoid hay fever.
Q: You were on stage by
yourself? Did you have patter? Were you a showman?
 |
Public High School ping pong Champs, 1950
Dick: Front row, far left |
A: I had no patter. I
didn’t have any show. That evolved in Los Angeles the next year. At The
Ashgrove, the opening act there was Rene
Heredia who was 17 years old and on fire at that point. He was this kid who
had come from Spain, and I guess he had some things to prove, and he just
really impressed me. I didn’t see him again for 15 or 20 years when I moved to
Denver. I went back to New York and I lived with Karen for 3 or 4 months; and
in the course of that time I met John
Phillips who had been part of a band called The Smoothies - I played on a session with them - and it was clear
that their label Decca wasn’t
interested in them as a folkie-pop thing like The Kingston Trio. John knew a guy named Scott McKenzie, who was lead singer in The Smoothies, and the three
of us would form a trio. Because I was living with Karen, I suggested we try
and put Karen in the group. John was a lot more worldly than I was, and he knew
very well that my relationship with Karen wasn’t going to go very far. We had
two of the very worst rehearsals I’ve ever had in my life - which consist of
Karen arguing about vocal parts with John. John was a great vocal arranger, and
his idea of fun was he’d get five people in a room and give each of them a
part, and they might sing anything - it might be The Teddybear’s Picnic, it might be Tom Dooley - whatever, he was really into vocal music. I don’t know
that I ever became a great showman but I learned how to tell stories on stage
and that was a revelation to me.
Around this time I met a woman named Barbara Dane who was a white blues
singer and sang with Dixieland bands. She had a tour of the Northwest and she
offered me this tour, so I called John Phillips and said ‘are you serious about
this band because I just got a chance to play Portland and Seattle.’ He started
to laugh and he said he had just turned down a trip to the beach in Ibiza so
that he could start a new group. I said ‘Okay John, I’ll be there.’
Q: Before we get too far,
give me a couple of sentences more on Karen Dalton and the different sides of
her talent and personality.
 |
| Journeymen Publicity Photo |
A: Okay, when I met Karen, she
used to sing a lot of mountain music, some blues, in fact I think she was doing
Blues
On The Ceiling by Fred Neil even then, and she sang loud,
and not in a lethargic way but in an energetic way. She was never a really good
performer because she had a lot of unresolved hostility. The audiences tended
to bring that out in her and it got a lot worse if she decided she wanted to be
drinking. Years later when I heard her first records, there was this sort of
behind-the-beat, lethargic, pseudo Billie Holiday type of phrasing, which has
turned into, in a small way a vogue among feminist and music historians who’ve
typed her as a white Billie Holiday, which to me was a joke. I thought ‘that’s
not what she sounds like.’ She was particularly noted for her wild Mountain
harmonies not this (affects slowed down, overwrought vocal) “Blues on the ceiling” type thing, which
to me just sounds like a junkie…which she was. It’s what she’s famous for. This
French record producer and another guy in Nashville who are enamored with Karen
have issued at least 5 CDs of Karen, and only one of them has what I’m talking
about, which was recorded at Joe Lupe’s place,
The Attic, in Boulder has a little bit of that mountain music - open your mouth
wide and just let it out-kind of singing.
Q: Did you think she was a
genuine talent or…
A: I think she was a talent
for doing that. I think she was not a good jazz singer. This need to create
Billie Holidays among Whiteys is crazy, and it also happened with Judy Roderick.
So, now I’m in New York, we (now called The Journeymen ) rehearse for six
weeks, we get a deal with International
Talent, who are booking The Brothers
Four, Kingston Trio, The Limeliters, and later Bob Dylan, and through them we met these managers in San Francisco.
MGM was willing to see us - they
wanted to sign us, they didn’t think we had any hits. Ultimately we had this
scene where we picked up our manager, we went to MGM. He wanted us to be guaranteed
two albums a year and a five thousand dollar a year promotional budget, and one
of the MGM producers looked at me and said you’ll never get a deal like that in
the record business, and 10 minutes later we were singing at Capitol Records, and got that exact
deal. That’s when I became interested in the music business, which really
didn’t surface ‘til some years later when I started teaching. I filed that in
the back of my mind that this business is not what people say that it is.
Somebody can say no and what they really mean is, "I’d rather not."
So, we got the deal with Capitol and we toured
for 3 ½ years - we never played in Colorado but I would come here periodically
because my friend Harry Tuft had moved here and opened The Denver Folklore Center in ’62. At one point Scott McKenzie, our lead singer, got
nodes in his throat and we were out of work for six weeks. I just came to
Colorado and Harry and I did a week at Crested
Butte. So I went from the three of us making $1,500 a night to playing in
Crested Butte to Harry and I each got a room and a hundred dollars, and I went
from playing to 2-3 thousand people to 20-30 people.
Scott rehabbed, we got back together and our
price went up to $1,750 a night.
Q: And the biggest record
sold?
 |
Harry Tuft at the Folklore Center
Denver, 1960's |
A: Maybe 15,000. We never
got any royalties from Capitol at that point. We never recouped the original
advance. Later Bonnie Raitt got
Capitol to tear up all their contracts before 1970, and so Capitol reissued all
of our stuff in their Legacy Series,
all three of our albums and some of our singles on the CDs. I probably ended up
making $5,000 dollars from these, in fact I got a check last month for $60
because it still gets streamed.
Scott and I decided to leave at the end of ’64
and I go back to New York - playing on sessions, writing songs and then
producing records. I did some sessions with Gram Parsons. Gram Parsons was a fanatical Journeymen fan. He and
his band used to follow us around. Gram recorded a couple of my songs. I also
did a solo album for Capitol 3 or 4 months before we broke up because they were
looking for a “Dylan,” and I was the only one that, even mildly in their mind,
could do a Dylan thing. I thought it ridiculous because I really was not doing
protest songs and at that point that’s all that Dylan was doing. I had written
one song called Lullabye For Medger Evers
that later Judy Collins recorded. So I did that on the album and four
others that I wrote and Gram recorded the one about mining called They
Still Go Down.
In ’68 and ’69 I worked as a producer and
there’s a big Colorado connection there because I had maintained my friendship
with Harry Tuft and he sent me a tape of a band called Frummox and I ended up producing them in New York. Those were
really, really kinda cool sessions. I had hired Eric Weissberg to play some fiddle and mandolin and pedal steel,
and at the end of the sessions he came to me, and he said, ‘every 5 years I do
something I like and this was it for the next few years.’ They were really
good. Everything kind of clicked. Harry also sent me a tape of a band called Zephyr. I didn’t produce them but I did
go to see them, and I took the tape to my boss and we all thought I wasn’t the
guy to do it.
Q: Did you recognize in
Tommy Bolin anything?
A: No. I thought they were
a sellable white, psychedelic blues thing, and I wasn’t a huge fan of that
music, but Harry and , in effect, I were partially responsible for them getting
a record deal. But in ’69 the entire label group I was working for (ABC/Dunhill) was fired. I was still
playing on sessions, and more and more of them were jingles. I was studying
jazz guitar pretty seriously with Barry
Galbraith who was the studio guitarist I admired the most. He was number
one and maybe Bucky Pizzarelli was
number two. I wasn’t playing the banjo very much and began to question why am I
even doing this?
 |
Dick & His Instruments,
1990's |
Q: So at this point the
world of “pop stardom” exists. It is clear. The Beatles and Rolling
Stones and Bob Dylan exist. How did you avoid the pitfalls of that
lifestyle that both John Phillips and Scott McKenzie suffered?
A: John was in effect my
mentor. I saw him destroy himself over a period of years. When I first met him
he was drinking too much and taking uppers and it wasn’t real pleasant to be
around him. Scott didn’t have a particular vice - whatever he did, he would
overdo. It seemed to me like childishness. I started growing up. I got married
in ’65 and it never quite made sense to me, that whole business of having to
lie to people all the time making everybody unhappy all the time. We stayed in
touch after The Mamas And Papas got
big, and this must’ve been in ’66 or ’67 and he invited me to a concert at Forest Hills. He forgot to put me on
the guest list and it was 10 dollars so I left. I did go to the party at the St. Regis Hotel afterwards. So I got
to the party and there’s a table and on the table there’s coke, hash, pills,
and another table with vodka, gin, whatever you want. He looks at me and says
‘I’m the perfect host what would you like?’ So I said ‘how about a beer.’ As
I’m saying this their road manager was stoned out of his brains on acid and
walking on the ledge of the 6th floor balcony. I’m thinking I don’t
really want to witness this. So I had a beer and quickly left. I just didn’t
see the point in all this.
By the late 60’s I still had my hay fever and
came out to Colorado to vacation with my wife. While I’m here I get a call to
do a Texaco commercial. I’ve had jingles that end up paying 2 or 3 grand for an
hour’s work, cause you don’t know how it’s gonna be used when you’re recording
it. So I really couldn’t not do it, plus the fact that if you turn down people
very much they stop calling you. I had told Harry, ‘I’m gonna come here.' He
said, ‘You’ll never come here, you’ll always get these calls from people, and
you’ll end up doing this shit - whatever it is.’ By ’72 I was becoming unhappy
enough with the music thing that it was also penetrating a lot of aspects of my
work and my life. I came out here. The summer before I had seen a brochure from
UCD that they were starting a music
business program. David Baskerville was
the guy who started all this. I went down and talked to him, and they liked the
idea of someone going to school there who had actually had a lot of experience
in the industry, so I came out here and enrolled at UCD.
 |
| Harry Tuft at Dick's Wedding, 1989 |
The first thing that happened when I moved here
was I started to play the banjo again, which was just bizarre. It wasn’t really
a conscious choice.
Q: You immediately got into
a music scene in Denver, such as it was, through Harry?
A: Through Harry.
Q: What was the music
scene in Denver like then?
A: Well The Folklore Center
was the center of stuff. Walt was still sorta in and out, but his preeminence
had kind of eroded and he had gotten involved with various clubs where
he…somehow he got involved with an Irish pub or something. Harry had a string
of people work for him; Kim King who
was in Lothar & The Hand People,
Mike Kropp, who was a banjo player and ended up in a bluegrass band in New
England, Paul Hofstadter a luthier
who was a renowned builder, restorer and player of folkie instruments. Those guys
had gone by the time I got here, but Harry had a little music school and I
taught there about 20 hours a week, going to school, and trying to be a family
person. When I stopped teaching lessons there, I pretty much stopped teaching
music, except for a very short period at Swallow
Hill. I was in a band called The
Main Event which was a mediocre lounge group that played Pueblo, Casper, Cheyenne…mostly
conventions, I played electric guitar and banjo - did all the Doobie Brothers stuff - whatever was
popular at the time-Waylon-some
country, some rock, which was basically a paycheck for me, I didn’t enjoy it.
Then
I got involved in writing film scores. I wrote 2 feature film scores, I wrote
about 5 documentary film scores and I did a TV show for Channel Six (RMPBS). Harry was sort of the executive producer on
all this stuff, but I wrote all the music. The main film was called The
Edge. It was done by Roger Brown
who did Downhill Racer and Barry
Corbett who was a film editor who was an Olympic skier who had crashed into
a mountain while filming and was paraplegic, and he had a film editing facility
on Lookout Mountain. The
documentaries were all done with a guy named Dick Alweiss. I did a
number of things for John Deere Tractors
- they’d do these little film shows where they’d introduce the new line and
you’d come up from Oregon or Missouri in you car, and while we’re trying to
convince you to buy a 40 grand tractor we give you some beer, a few pretzels
and show you a couple of short films. So these were 3-5 minute films and they
were fun to do. So from ’74 to ’80 I was doing that stuff. I was teaching at Colorado Women’s College starting in’75
while still going to school at UCD in music business. Tom McCluskey was the guy who was the head of the department and was
the music critic for the Rocky Mountain News, before Justin Mitchell. In ’81 they went out
of business.
In
the mean time I had met Wesley Westbrooks, who was a Black guy who originally
was from Arkadelphia, Arkansas. When
he was 10 years old he was driving a wagon delivering milk and ice cream and
the guy who owned the store, his daughter ran a retail outlet and people in the
town saw Wesley, who was Black, talking to her and she gave him an ice cream
cone without charging him. They came to his father’s house that night and said
‘you need to get your kid outta here tonight or he’s gonna get killed…’ He
moved to Denver, and he got a job working for United Airlines cleaning airplanes, and he wrote about 4 songs that
The Staple Singers recorded, none of
which he’s credited with. The most famous one is He Don’t Knock which was recorded by The Kingston Trio. He also did
a song called Hear My Song Here which
Pentangle recorded in a really nice
version. I wrote a grant to The National
Endowment For The Humanities to write a biography of him. It’s the only
book I have ever written that I couldn’t sell. I got the grant. I spent a year.
It was a wonderful experience. I wrote up the whole thing - this was the Reagan years and I still have the
manuscript, it’s called A Good Time In Hard Times. I learned
a lot of stuff but I couldn’t sell the book.
 |
Dick & Gary Keiski, Astoria, Oregon
Early 2000's |
I
had written a book called The Folk Music Source Book in ’76.
That book came about accidently, where Harry knew somebody who was a writer and
she had been at Knopf which was one
of the most prestigious publishing companies, and she started talking about - Harry
had a written a catalog - The Denver
Folklore Company Almanac - or whatever. Knopf said they’d be very
interested in talking to this guy. So she came back and talked to him and Harry
being Harry he did nothing. So one day I said ‘Look, you’re a moron - here’s
one of the best publishers in the whole goddamned world, and they’re asking you
to write this book. What can I do to help you to do this?’ He said ‘why don’t
you do it? You know how to write, you know how to do this stuff.’ At that point
I hadn’t written any books, but I’d written instruction books for banjo and
guitar - a lot of them. The book was reviewed everywhere. It was reviewed in Rolling
Stone, The New York Times, The L.A. Times. Basically, that’s
how I got into the book writing game. That book won the ASCAP Music Critics Award.
Q: That’s about the time I
started to know who you were because you really started to get a name in Denver
as an academic.
A: I had worked for 14 months at The Grammys as their educational
director. That was pretty horrible. I thought I would be some kind of huge hick
there. It turned out everybody there was a huge Streisand or Neil Diamond fan
and that I was like a left-wing hippie. In the middle of that I taught at Colorado Mountain College - they had a
songwriting workshop for 10 years. In Breckenridge - it was great! You got a
condo. I brought Steven Fromholz from
Frummox in. I was doing the musician juggling act; I was writing instruction
books, I was writing books, for a couple of years I taught at Swallow Hill, I
did gigs with The Main Event, and I did what gigs that I could get. I ended up
playing at Winnipeg 3 times which
was great. And I taught at Colorado
Institute Of Art for a year.
I started teaching at UCD in 1990. While I
was there, there was a union called the Oil,
Coke, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union and I ended up doing music for two
of their conventions, a CD and some of the music led to a play about Karen Silkwood, and I did music for a
play by a professor named Larry Bograd who was then at Metro about The Ludlow Massacre. So that was all going on. At UCD I taught
music business mostly and I created a lot of classes, like my favorite was Social And Political Implications Of Music.
A lot of the stuff I taught about - contracts and stuff after 12 years of
it - it wasn’t that interesting to me honestly. Ultimately, I was head of the
department for 2 years and the turf wars and the politics just drove me crazy.
During this time, for some reason, I got good at writing grants, and I brought Peggy Seeger here with a grant, I
brought Len Chandler, who was a Black
protest singer who was arrested like 50 times. I brought a Native American guy Vince Two Eagles from Montana, and
there was no King Center, no
performance space, so they were mostly playing in classrooms. I got a grant and
we set up a label - CAM Records. The
last thing I did at UCD was a class on Advanced
Record Production. I brought three kids in from Jamaica - I had taught at a
Jamaican governmental trade show and then at two songwriting bootcamps while I
was at UCD. So we selected three writers, they came here, the orchestra was a
combination of UCD students and faculty, and the producers were students. It’s
a good experience for people.
In 2003 Dick moved to
Oregon, where he stayed until 2012 when he returned to Denver.
Q: You were happy to come
back here and…it’s different from the place it was one you first came here.
 |
Dick, OME Banjo Co.
Boulder, Mid-2000's |
A: The congestion and
traffic are troublesome. There have been a lot of generational changes that I
don’t especially appreciate. There’s no point in getting upset about it because
that is the world. That’s not Denver, that’s everywhere. There are other
changes that are not Denver like the demise of the recording medium. I’m very
into albums. When I do an album it’s not 12 songs, there’s some relation
between the songs, and I’m not really interested in having people pop off one
tune in a four-part suite, when in fact, it makes no sense. It would be like
taking a Hemingway novel, and you’ve
read the first quarter and you just throw it away, because ‘well I read the
first quarter, what more do I need?’ That’s the way kids consume music.
Q: That’s exactly where I
wanted to come back to, because we talked early on how you discovered music,
that process, how there seems to be something of value in that archeological
process or the organic process that you did of buying the 78s and going to see
Pete Seeger, listening to what he said. It seems that the way people gather
information and art now has fundamentally changed the role of art.
A: I think it’s changed the
role of art, and also another thing that happened is as a musician at the age
of 22, I could work at Folk City for
a week or two weeks. Where do you work in Denver for a week? Nowhere. You work
one day. There’s no money, and worse than that, there’s no development. I was
at The Ashgrove for 3 weeks. During
that time I basically learned some performance skills. If I had been there one
night what would I have learned?
Right
now I’m doing a paper on the musicians' union which I’m presenting next week in
Nashville at The Music Business
Educators Conference. Go to Nathaniel
Rateliff who is a pretty big success. Somebody like that in 2019 - let’s
make him 22 - let’s say the young Nate is here now and he’s making his own
records, he’s booking his gigs, he’s managing his career - what does he need
the union for? So, the union has not been able to…what can they do for him?
There are things they could actually do. Suppose they bought a new building and
make it into rehearsal studios and if you’re a member of the union, the rent is
20 dollars an hour. That would save him a lot of money. But it’s not available
to you if you’re not a member of the union. For the hip-hip people you have
classes on - this is what ASCAP does,
this is what BMI does, this is what SESAC does. Nobody’s ever done that. The
union has no contact with managers. Managers run the game now. Managers often
confiscate, or own, depending on your degree of cynicism, half or all of the
acts’ publishing. He’s making more money, and then he probably turns ‘round and
commissions our songwriting money. Kids don’t know that. The Fray went to UCD, two of them in music business, but they had
to sue to get out of their management contract. What if the union actually
negotiated with managers? There are things they could do.
Q: So is there a bit of
positive that you can see in the modern landscape to give hope?
A: There are a couple of
dozen musicians around like Bill Frisell,
like Ron Miles, and there’s a niche
for these people that are doing something new. The challenge is to create,
whether it’s radio, whether it’s streaming, whether it’s the union sponsoring
some concerts of music for music’s sake, and I think the university has
abrogated its role in that regard. OK let them teach tech and music business,
but what about music? So how do we make that bridge? The musicians are out
there. There is good stuff around.
Q: How do you find young
musicians that you like specifically and do you have hope for this next
generation? Or will it keep going at all? If there’s no skin in the game
because the internet has accelerated everything so much that nobody actually
has to learn anything, what is the incentive to become a great musician?
A: With the explosion of
Dylan and The Beatles, we had this explosion of a generation that grew up
thinking ‘I could do this, I could make 2-3 million dollars a year, own 2 or 3
houses, have 4 cars, go through multiple wives, multiple drugs' - whatever.
Maybe what we’re coming down to is a world where we’re going back to the
musician in the loft in a way. The people who are going to do significant work
are just going to say, ‘I don’t buy into this, and anyway I can’t win this
game. What I’m going to do is what I always wanted to do which is to do music.’
I think the music is there, the question is, how do we create the mechanism for
the music to be heard?
Trying
to understand Dick Weissman as just a musician, teacher, author, philosopher or
historian is simply inadequate. Dick is an incredibly rare bird in the world of
music. He is an adult. Someone who made his way in the music business by
exploring, mastering and then being the smartest guy in the room about nearly
any facet of his chosen field. He did what he wanted at the same time he was
doing what he had to do to keep home and hearth together. In a world of
tarnished myths and rampant bullshit artists, Dick Weissman is a breath of
fresh air.
-
Paul
Epstein
In 1970 Mel Brooks was something of a new kid on
the scene. His first movie, The Producers,
had been a big hit on Broadway and a successful movie so expectation was high.
His second movie The Twelve Chairs
proved he was both as funny and as talented as he seemed. Set in the
post-revolution USSR, the film plays on the historical realities of the newly
minted communist government as it obliterates the life known by the former
aristocratic class. Ron Moody plays Vorobyaninov, a once rich man who now works
as a clerk in a government office. We meet him as he visits his mother-in-law’s
death bed. She informs him that before the revolution she sewed a fortune of
jewels into the lining of a dining room chair. Unfortunately, she also tells
the town priest Father Fyodor, played with wicked glee by Dom DeLuise. Thus we
are off on a chase across the USSR to find the missing chair with the missing
fortune inside. This is the perfect setup for Mel Brooks to ply his madcap
trade of pratfalls, visual humor and Semitic in-jokes. And ply he does. Along
with Blazing Saddles, Brooks finds
his comedic stride most effectively in The
Twelve Chairs. However, he also is surprisingly effective in creating a
real relationship between the main characters, who, in spite of their
reprehensible greed, actually evoke something resembling pathos by the end of
the film.
Immediately upon learning of the chair,
Vorobyaninov is joined by handsome con-man Ostap Bender (Frank Langella) who
acts as the straight man throughout the movie as Dom DeLuise and Ron Moody
offer a master’s class on physical comedy. DeLuise is one of the great clowns
of modern film. His physical performance in The
Twelve Chairs ranks as one of the best of his career. His rubbery face, loose-limbed
movements, and schoolboy goofiness were never used to greater effect. Mel
Brooks also offers a brief but hilarious cameo as the drunken servant Tikhon. Ultimately
the film belongs to Ron Moody though. His outrage at his lowered social station
is palpable and it manifests in a series of physical and verbal tics and twitches
that anyone who has experienced loss can relate to. He also is a master of the
lost art of the slow burn. His rage and frustration grow and increase
throughout the film exploding as he repeatedly fails to get the right chair.
