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| 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/
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| Work Camp Stockbridge, MA, 1959 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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.
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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.
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
