Banjos, bikes and black belts...

2007-03-31T12:30:00.000-07:00

This is what Winter riding in Minnesota looked like this year. This is the Gentleman's Ride which was happening on Sunday mornings until it got much colder. We would roll along for about thirty five or forty miles at a conversational pace and then end at the neighborhood coffee shop for a cup of the good stuff. The weather really helped me to stay on the bike this year. It stayed mild until January and then it was real cold for a couple of weeks and then it snowed in February. Extreme cold (below 18 degrees F) and lots of snow will pretty much keep me at the dinner table and off the bike. This year that period lasted about six weeks, which is not bad at all for this part of the country. It is now Spring and I am happy to report I am riding and it feels really good to be back on the wheel. Meanwhile, guitars are selling well and that is a happy thing. I have the perfect storm of two weekends in a row of playing at Dulono's Pizza coming up and I am both dreading it and looking forward to it. I love to play music in front of an audience and Dulono's is the ultimate venue around here for live acoustic music. I dread it because it is eight hours per weekend of standing with a fifteen pound banjo on my shoulder and I just am not able to shrug it off like I could as a younger man. I am usually pretty worn by Sunday mornings, but that is what the bike is for. Play, eat, ride; sounds pretty good.

2006-12-02T13:02:00.000-08:00

I have been focusing on riding my bike and playing music when I am not being a Taylor guitar expert. Pam and I took some time off in October and traveled to North Carolina for some hiking and a visit with her dad. The photo above was shot up on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina near Asheville. I'm guessing we timed the fall colors pretty well. The modern age (see title of this entry) is interesting. I started having some issues with email while on the trip and the problems grew until this past week and now the tide of trouble seems to be ebbing. There is no question at all that the life of Guitar Rodeo depends on the web and functioning email. Business is quiet now that there has been a few weeks of disjointed execution in regard to responding to inquiries and getting things done for people. My popularity had grown a lot this summer and fall on the Acoustic Guitar Forum (AGF). I have sold to several people there and they like my service and my prices. However, it came to my attention that emails from people were being bounced back and that the web site was not posted. This means I am out of business if the problem isn't repaired. The issues are fixed now, what with a new server farm being used by my web host and a new registrar for my domain name. Hopefully, business will trickle back and things will go better. Meanwhile, I ride in the cold and the Gentlemen's ride has moved to Sunday so we can start later when it is warmer. I have spruced up my cold weather gear and the riding is exilirating. Soon, the conditions will warrant switching to the old Gitane slop bike as it would be unwise to ride the Ottrott on the messy winter roads. I already rode the old bike a couple of times and switched back to the Serotta. There is no comparison. I am hoping the winter riding passes quickly as I will be glad to get back on the Ottrott in Spring.

2006-09-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

Friday morning is the morning for the "Gentleman's Ride". A bunch of older ex-racers meets on the Greenway for a thirty mile easy pace spin on bike trails, greenways, and LRT walkways. Lately, a couple of the active racers from the Flanders Brothers Cycle "A" team have been on the ride. One of these guys is Scott Flanders, who at age 48 won the Senior category of the 2005 Minnesota State Championship Road Race. I reckon some folks would immediately think that the level of competition is low if an old guy like Scott could win against all comers 18 years and older. I don't think so. Scott has won hundreds (yes, hundreds) of road and criterium races over the years. He is seriously fit and may actually have more experience racing than the rest of the racers combined. In his youth he rode for the national team in races in South America. It is an honor to ride with him and needless to say he regards the Friday morning ride as a rest and recovery ride. I had seen him very early one Saturday morning a couple of weeks before going the opposite direction than I on the Greenway. When he was on the Friday ride I asked him about that because it was an unlikely place for me to have seen him. He said that he rode solo to Duluth that day and he had maintained an average ride speed of 21.5 mph. Duluth is 150 miles from where I saw him. He said he felt really good that day and he thought it was a good effort for him. I remembered that he had won a state border to border race one year (in the mid-1980's) where he rode solo for exactly two hundred miles and finished in eight hours flat. Of course, that day he had a prevailing tail wind so it was easier. Still, I have ridden centuries with these guys in the past. Riding a hundred miles is hard, even with a group to help pace and shelter you. On days like that I carefully planned how I was going to do nothing for the remainder of the day except lie about whimpering and sipping cool drinks. It boggles my little mind to think about doing some of the rides Scott does on a regular basis. Scott's older brother Jim is the ride leader for the Friday ride. Jim is also a former State Road Champ and winner of LOTS of races and a former US national team member. I met Jim and Scott in 1980 and I have always cherished their friendship and I feel pretty lucky to learn from them and to spend time riding with them.

2006-08-16T14:25:00.000-07:00

I have been busy with completing the new store remodel, selling guitars, riding my bike, doing fun stuff with Pamela, and building metal projects as a specialty fabricator. I am posting some pictures of the completed store today and offering my apology to anyone who has been checking this blog to see if I would ever publish again. I will toss out more pix as I come back to the blog with more entries. I have been playing banjo quite a bit. This coming weekend, Pamela and I will travel to Bayfield Wisconsin so I may perform at a wedding with Bill, Kathe and Lincoln. We will hang around in some of the most picturesque scenery anywhere and I will be able to pay for the trip playing the banjo. It should be very sweet.

The store is now officially open and Taylor sent my Regional Sales Manager and two technicians to my store yesterday. They had published to their email list and on their web site that they were going to do this. The technicians restrung and analyzed the condition of customers' guitars. They put new strings on, adjusted and/or reset necks, adjusted bridge height, and even dressed frets for anyone who brought their Taylor guitar to my store. I would guess that upwards of thirty to forty people showed up with their Taylors in hand during the four hours they were there. It was a lot of fun and the players who brought their guitars to the store were very happy they did.

2006-04-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

It is time for another entry in order to maintain the interest of the 60 or so people who drop by this blog weekly...

In the last installment, our hero had just moved his store into a new location. This event happened within ten days of his realizing he needed to find a new store, execute a lease, give notice and move the stuff out of the old and into the new. Done. Week one of the new month was design the new space and demolish the old store decor. Week two was procure the drywall, lumber and electrical components, frame the walls and move the electrical outlets to where they needed to be. Week three was drywall and mud all the time. Week four turned out to be the same as week three as the construction crew rebelled and demanded that the bike was being ridden daily in the warmest and most pleasant April in the history of the state. Meanwhile, guitar sales were strong and the folks who give me my paycheck needed to get their guitars as if Guitar Rodeo was there for them and not a temporary construction firm on a work slow down/early season training regimen. The photos today represent progress to date. The new showroom (lower photo) is going to be cool. The one wall has to "float" in order for the heat and cool to circulate throughout the entire store. The upper photo is from the same perspective as the interior shot in the last post and shows how different things look now. I will post another view next week, I promise.

2006-04-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

These are the before photos of my new guitar store. My old location was a 45 minute drive from where I live, and the old landlord was of a mind to get twice the rent he was getting from the space only thirteen months earlier. I just couldn't do that so I gave notice and moved closer to home and into a better and bigger space. My drive time is about five minutes now. The outside is already cool and the location is a great spot to have a store. The inside needs a lot of work, which I would be doing now instead of blogging but I need to take a break now and then and keep the guitars moving. One of the motivating factors in making the move is that I am now the largest Taylor dealer in Minnesota. In the world of guitars, like so many other worlds, the big dog gets to choose where he lays. I was in my first spot because it satisfied the requirement that I not impose on the territory of the existing dealers. When I asked Taylor what they thought about this location they were pretty easy going about it. I hope it works out. I am going to use the hour and a half of extra time I now have every day (by not driving so far to work) to ride the Ottrott and get lean and mean again. Things are looking up. I am a lucky guy.

2006-03-23T10:34:00.000-08:00

I travelled to Wisconsin last Sunday with the MSCB to play a concert in a community theater in Prairie Du Sac. We were the visiting "stars" from the big city. There were two other bands who were local that preceeded us in a three hour concert. There were at least two hundred people there and the venue was a lovely auditorium built sometime in the past decade. The local bands were staffed by journeymen musicians; competent and fun to listen to. Apparently there is a thriving Bluegrass community around that area and these bands were representative of the quality of players found there. The pay was pretty good for the time spent performing but only so-so for the amount of time it took to drive there, do a sound check, play, and drive home. This is the musicians' lot. Very few people make a good living playing music. For that matter, very few people get any sort of return on the time they committed to learning their instrument. Why do people like me spend their Sundays driving for four hours one way to play for strangers? I suppose because they can. I related in an early post on this blog that I have been performing since I was a kid and knew one song on my instrument. The graduate students in the bluegrass band I hung around with thought it was funny. I was thrilled. I was hooked too. I have always enjoyed playing publicly and stage fright has not been an issue for decades. I play banjo and I like sharing the music I make with others who enjoy listening to me perform. I also enjoy the comaraderie of musicians. The jokes are good, the stories are amusing, and over the years I have amassed enough experience to have my own stories to share, some of which are in this blog.

2006-03-10T14:25:00.000-08:00

The winter bluegrass weekend was a success by any measure. MBOTMA has a huge group of volunteers and the whole thing was as smooth as it could be. My duties as President of the Board were pretty much non-existent. We had a general membership meeting Sunday morning that I presided over and that was the extent of it. There was a group who played there that was really impressive. The group name was Foghorn. They are an old timey band and they nailed it. Excellent, driving rhythm with wonderful tone and great voices. It was kind of like the New Lost City Ramblers with memberships to the gym. The sets I played with my two bands went well too. Folks said it was the best they had ever heard Ivory Bridge. We had practiced our set a lot, including seamless transitions and no talking or screwing around with capos, tunings or whatever. It worked; we sounded really tight and we were comfortable with all the changes and the arrangements. It was a joy. In typical fashion, I played really hot during all the warm-up sessions. I was improvising really well and I was the master of the beat. On stage it is always a different story. I did okay, but I wasn't magical like I had hoped I would be. This is the way of performance. All my life I have experienced this strange juju about performance. There would be performances I would play where I could not hit a note wrong all night; I was just plain hot; I swung, was lyrical, made cool stuff up, and just plain blew my own socks off. No comment from any listeners. Then there would be nights that I wished I could have spontaneously combusted or disappeared down a big hole I played so poorly. Folks could'nt wait to tell me how great my playing was. Go figure. I guess I just don't get the cosmic jokes so I am doomed to be the butt of them. This weekend The Middle Spunk Creek Boys are playing a mini-festival up north with a couple of other bands and we are all guests of the LaPlant family. Lloyd LaPlant makes guitars and mandolins. Just about every "A" player in Minnesota has a LaPlant guitar or mandolin. They are super sweet sounding and beautiful to look at. It should be fun. The LaPlants also like to pick and they enjoy the same type of tunes I do and so I am looking forward to it.

2006-03-04T09:51:00.000-08:00

This is the high point of the Winter Bluegrass Weekend. Last night, after I played with the Middle Spunk Creek Boys to open the concert schedule for the weekend, I got to jam with some buddies. I decided what my blog topic would be based on that jam. A jam is a conversation held with instruments. We had guitar (former state champ flat picker no less), two banjos (my old friend Barry and me), fiddle, and bass. Before I get to my point I want to say that having two banjos in a jam session is VERY tricky. I have often said, on this blog and elsewhere, that banjos are the crudest and clumsiest of instruments due to their volume and the method of playing, which is essentially a steady stream of notes (think mini-gun; lots of bullets and lots of damage). However, if the two banjoists are sensitive (remember, this is banjos we are talking about here) and very respectful of others, it can not only be done but it can be fun too. Well, Barry and I have played together for decades, shown each other tons of licks and tunes, and we pretty much know each other's styles. The jam was going really well; we were playing jam-friendly tunes and everybody was limbering up and improvising smoothly and tastefully. Then, an old friend showed up who had a Dobro. This fellow is a prince among men and is universally well liked as a person, but... well, he doesn't show the same respect for others in a jam as the rest of us and he made the music very tough to enjoy. If he wasn't playing lead, he dominated the rhythm, especially when the guitar was trying to take breaks. He was chopping the back beat so loud that I was getting a headache from the volume. He would play fill licks whenever he wanted without determining if anyone else was doing that (if they were, then his playing muddied up or erased theirs), and he would not adjust his volume to allow the guitar to be heard when the guitarist was obviously taking the lead break. Remember my conversation analogy? If six people are having a discussion, is it annoying if one of the participants does not stop talking? At all? During the whole conversation? And he always talks loudly while others are trying to say something? To me the answer is yes. If you don't think so, I will email this guys name and number to you and you can invite him to your jam. Well, we live in Minnesota and there is a cultural bias against speaking up in situations like that and nobody did. After about three songs I excused myself and went to look up a special friend so I could have fun again. I reckon my real point is that I am getting finicky about what I want out of a jam session and high quality pickers who get it are what I want. So sue me. Tonight Ivory Bridge opens for Valerie Smith and Liberty Pike, the big national act of the weekend. I hope it goes well; it is really satisfying when one plays a great set with a group for a room full of people and that is what we are hoping to do. I will report back.

2006-03-01T14:10:00.000-08:00

I have been elected President of the Board of Directors of the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old Time Music Association. Don't ask why or how; it just is, like so many other things. This coming weekend is one of the major events of the year for MBOTMA. It is the Winter Bluegrass Weekend and it is held indoors at a hotel/conference center in the metro area. There will be non-stop picking and grinning for three days and people will get enough of the festival thing to hold them over until this summer when there are more festivals and fun. I will not only be wearing my crown and purple robes (I hope it's purple; I haven't actually seen it yet...) , but I will be performing on the main stage Friday and Saturday with the two bands I am currently playing with. Ivory Bridge is even opening for the main (national) act Saturday night. We have been practicing like crazy to be ready and to sound our best. Between now and Friday my biggest challenge is to get enough rest as I notice that I play better when that is the case. In fact, I now notice that my vocabulary (such as it is) drops off to about forty words when I am exhausted. Tonight I will go to the home of Kathe and Bill for some dinner and some tunes. Kathe and Bill took very good care of me last Summer when things were tough and their care consisted mainly of spending time with me and feeding me and playing tunes. It was a wonderful Summer in that regard. We all got really good on our instruments too. We had the groove all the time, didn't make as many mistakes, and blended really well. We now reminisce about those months and maybe we can capture some of that magic tonight. Those guys are really special to me. They accepted me into their lives and supported me like crazy. They really and truly like the way I play the banjo, which makes me play the best I can out of sheer appreciation for being appreciated. I had retired from music for over twenty years and these guys heard me play soon after I returned to performing and decided I was the banjo guy for their sound, despite the fact that the rust was flaking off my fingers while I played (it had been a long time since I was in shape). My playing has gotten much smoother and consistent now that I have been playing and performing again for a couple of years. My style is not the currently popular style of banjo. I am kind of a groove player and not a technical wizard or driving traditionalist. Actually, my style hasn't ever been popular but that didn't stop me from just making stuff up and enjoying what I could pull out of my a... arsenal (ooh!).

As for the rest of my existence, Spring is starting to hint that it might show up this year and I am in decent shape after getting to the gym on a semi-regular basis through the cold months and I am hungry for some cycling time. I managed to free up the frozen seat post on my fixie so the seat height could be lowered (I might be shrinking) and I have the new tires on it. It's close; very, very close to biking time. I am glad I got away from the bike for the frozen months and even happier that I kept some fitness. It's the Jim plan for cross training, but instead of cycling Saturday and swimming Sunday and running Monday, I cycled in the Summer, ran in the Fall, and swam in the Winter (you get my drift). Later.

2006-01-18T10:15:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday my youngest daughter Elspeth brought five of her friends to the shop during the Ivory Bridge practice to listen her Dad play music. In spite of the style of music, or maybe because of it, the kids (all in the fourteen to sixteen year old range) loved listening. Here is a typical, world weary, ipod driven group of teens who were blown away to hear acoustic music played a couple of feet away. I forget the sheer power of music that is being performed at arms length from the listener. I always think that being a banjo player is about as dorky as you can be. At times like last Saturday, I remember how hypnotic music was when I was the age of these kids. I had heard acoustic Bluegrass, Folk, Blues, and Jug Band music when I was twelve. I had been exposed to it through my big brother Jeff who is six years older than I am. There was something compelling about hillbilly music; it was undeniably corny but it conveyed a certain lonesome, nostalgic, bluesy feel. I was hooked.

After I had been listening for a couple of years and I had something in common with Jeff that we could enthuse and talk about, he took me to a concert that he knew I would enjoy. We went early to the coffee house so we could get good seats and arrived about 45 minutes before the doors opened. There was only one other person there waiting to get in. We got seats directly in front of the stage, which was a riser about a foot tall. I was sitting square in front, about four feet from the chair that the performer was going to be sitting in. The performer was Doc Watson. Remember that this took place in 1967. Nowadays, Doc draws thousands of people to his performances. In 1967, a kid and his big brother could sit close enough to touch him. When I remember the impact that listening and watching Doc had on me, I can understand how Elspeth's buddies were blown away listening to the Ivory Bridge practice session. I was never the same after that night. I had bought my first banjo by then but didn't know much about how to play it. Suffice it to say I was inspired after watching and hearing Doc Watson at a distance of four feet for three hours.

A year after that night, Jeff put together a Doc Watson concert at Michigan State University in East Lansing. I took the running dog up to spend the weekend with him and enjoy the privilege of hanging out with an icon for a couple of days. Merle and Doc had been driven up from Deep Gap by cousin Jerry. Merle and Jerry schemed all weekend long about installing a still in a semi trailer so it could be driven around to sell moonshine and evade the BATF and the "revenooers". It sounded like a perfectly fine plan to me but I am pretty sure they never did it.

2006-01-14T11:08:00.000-08:00

Later today the other members of Ivory Bridge (see link at right) are coming to my little guitar shop to practice and jam. We are playing at the local Bluegrass music venue at the end of the month and we are whipping our hands into shape so we sound good when we play there. We are going to record the performances of both nights in hopes of gleaning some good cuts to use on a CD we want to put out. I often wonder at how I got to be a "banjoist in demand". There is no secret to how it is done. It is done by taking thousands of insignificant steps over several years and eventually one accumulates experience and skill. There was only one breakthrough event, the night I jammed with the Grateful Dead and learned improvisation. Or at least made a profound gain of skill in improvisation technique. I recount that story in one of the first entries of this blog and it may be of interest to some. Check the archives to the right.

A musician can only gauge their progress by looking back. I was never much for learning big blocks of music. I could only learn snippets and pieces, but eventually they add up and you can play. Earlier this year, I set about to learn a melodic piece named Jerusalem Ridge. It is a fiddle tune (written by and for the fiddle) and consequently has an intricate melody. The five string banjo can either roll through the chord changes, which means try and approximate the melody with arpeggios that sort of fit, or work out the melody note for note just as the fiddle plays it. This style of banjo is called "melodic style"(go figure). Some guys (and gals) can do this easily. I can not. It took daily practice for six weeks to memorize and gain facility with the melodic version of Jerusalem Ridge, and that was with the part already written out so all I had to do was memorize the piece and not find where the melody lays out on the fingerboard. I got it though, and when we play the piece it sounds pretty good. Still, I know and can play hundreds and hundreds of songs and tunes. How did I learn to do this with such a thick head? By playing some every day for years and years. That's why they say, "Keep on pickin'".

2006-01-13T11:34:00.000-08:00

I was about five or six years old when a kid from the neighborhood showed up at the play ground with his ultra, and I mean ULTRA, cool honest to goodness racing bike. It was definitely a Peugot. It was probably a px-10. This would have been in the late fifties when the american bike scene was dismal from the standpoint of euro racing bikes. But this thing sang a siren song to me and in that instant a life long love of skinny tire racing bikes was born. I still remember the moment, the lighting, the smells, the whole shebang. Soon I was rigging up faux derailleurs and wistfully hoping for racing handlebars for my 20" no name hand me down kids bike. Then my mom took me to get a "real" bike when I was getting closer to nine and she bought me a Raleigh Gazelle (at my insistance); a skinny tired single speed wonder that I loved even if it didn't have gears. This bike was stolen and then recovered with the help of my eagle eyed big brother. I was glad to have it back but as I reached my teens I disdained bikes and didn't rediscover them until I was eighteen and I needed a bike to get to work and back one summer. I went to the local college bike shop and promptly bought a 1970 Gitane Tour De France with sew-ups, which pretty much insured I would never earn any actual college money that summer as the bike cost about what I would be making all summer long-$225.00. Naturally I was clueless about sew-ups and I spent a great deal of time that summer putting tires on the bike, learning how to repair tubulars, airing them up at the gas station just to have them explode off the rims on the way home, and other such stuff. It was still fun though. I then reached the phase of my bike education where I learned about the mystical wonder of Campagnolo parts. I started replacing my parts with Campy as fast as my pocket book would allow me to and eventually ended up with a bike I was hopelessly overinvested in and which was an amalgam of inappropriate but Campagnolo parts on an old frame that didn't fit me. I was in my mid twenties and had met a guy who had just discovered the racing scene and I embarked on the longest phase of bike love of my life once I learned a little about spinning and long rides and cycling shorts and cleated shoes and such. It took about three months to progress from total geek to quasi-initiate and the next thing you know I was shaving my legs and getting some shape to my quads. By now I had met Jim and Scott Flanders who owned Flanders Brothers Cycles. I also had a real job with actual income and I could at long last afford real equipment. Naturally, in keeping with my experience to date, I had purchased another star crossed frame (Ciocc) that was too small, fitted it out with my accumulae of Campy stuff, and showed up for a group ride with the Bros. These guys were the undisputed top of the heap-they had both won the state championship many times, had raced on the national team, and ruled the scene in Minnesota. They mentioned to me that my frame was too small, showed my why, and stepped back. It wasn't long before I was in their shop seeking advice and purchasing my first real, proper sized, full Campagnolo Super Record equipped Basso. 100% Italian. Whoa. I had finally reached a state of humility about this euro bike thing where I realized I didn't know much about it. I relied on Jim and Scott to help me select the right stuff and that was an excellent decision on my part. I then bought a new bike every year and sold my old one. In this way I was able to own and ride many Italian frames, always Campy equiped. Eventually I ended up with a DeRosa in 1985 and equiped it with Campy although Dura-Ace was a viable option that year. I also was having kids so I rode that DeRosa for ten years, busting my hip, shattering my elbow, and other such mishaps but I always managed to hurt me and not the DeRosa. I started buying bikes again in 1995 but I have not been able to switch as often as I did in the halcyon days of the eighties. Jim and Scott still advise me of what to ride. I am now on the Ottrott and it is a wonderful bike. It is like riding my own stealth fighter. I miss the days of toe straps and Super Record parts though. Campagnolo had the mystic thing totally dialed in for decades and finally "achieving" Campy was a wonderful and magic experience. Modern parts are so far superior to the old stuff that comparison is impossible, but the magical Campy feeling is still a fond memory for me. I still have the Gitane Tour De France. It is my fixie. It is still too big and has definitely seen better days but it works for slugging out the early and sloppy days of the season which are coming up again soon.

2006-01-10T12:13:00.000-08:00

Why do we do what we do? Today's photos are of a staircase Gruppo did for a philanthropic outfit called The McKnight Foundation. The top shot is the rough fabrication stage in the metal shop. Basically, in case anyone wants to build one of these at home, you get the exact dimensions from the job site of where the thing is going to end up, then you build it in the shop where all your tools are handy, disassemble it and take it to the job site and put it together there for (hopefully) the last time. Pretty simple really. Oh; be sure to measure twice.

I still do projects with the lead Gruppo fabricator (of the project in these photographs). He has his own shop and he and I do projects that I continue to take on. I do that because I can support myself while the guitar shop gets up and running. When one of my projects is happening I am a busy guy. I hit the metal shop in the morning and the evening and sell guitars all day long. My weekends are spent in metal toe boots slinging heavy stuff around while trying my best not to tear or saw off any fingers. The way I figure it, I need intact hands if I am going to have any credibility as a guitar purveyor, not to mention as a banjoist. So far, so good. I have hurt myself but so far I have managed to remain able to play the five string with whatever injury I incurred. I am grateful for all that I have and where I have been but I pray for a less exciting and more stable life sometime in the near future.

2005-12-20T10:13:00.000-08:00

Nieman Marcus does an over the top Christmas catalog every year wherein they offer things us mere mortals wonder at. They came to Gruppo one year to commission the company to produce what became known to us as the "Dorothy Lamp", pictured here. This one is the original prototype and is about 30 inches tall. The base is cast bronze and the tornado is glass. This item was to be part of a Wizard of Oz bedroom set that was going for around 100 grand. The designer, who flew in from New York to work with us on this project, wanted more orange in the tornado shade, so this one became a spare and I had the rest of the lamp made from the molds and kept this one for a gift. Not very visible in these photos is the high level of detail in the base, which shows the witches bicycle leaning against the picket fence in front of Dorothy's house and the Gypsy style wagon (actually these are called sheep camps but I only get puzzled looks when I call them that [which isn't often I admit]) belonging to Professor Marvel. I gave this one to my ex-wife for Christmas one year and now my youngest daughter has it in her room. We did not get any orders for additional lamps, therefore only two of these exist. I think that probably Neiman Marcus did not get any takers for the Wizard of Oz bedroom set at 100 g's each. I keep an eye out on Antiques Roadshow for the other lamp to appear. It could happen.

Now that I have tied into the metals company with a link to cycling, I will give an exercise report. I joined the YWCA with a friend this winter and it is turning out to be the best winter exercise routine move I ever made. I go on a regular basis and run and do workout stations as well as sit-ups and crunches and stuff. I am working all non-cycling muscle groups and it feels really good. I am looking forward to getting back on the bike in the Spring. I can get my exercise in without having to feel like I should soldier through the crappy streets on my fixed gear suffering like a dog and freezing my hinder off. I have always known about cross training and knew I should do it but this winter I am. We have been talking about swimming and that sounds really good too. All in all, I am staying much more active during the toughest part of the year to keep in shape.

2005-12-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

Today we have, for your edification, a 2004 30th anniversary Special Edition Taylor XXX-RS. I snapped a couple of shots to show the client what the guitar looked like. He lives in The Netherlands and wanted to see what he had coming to him. It is a beautiful guitar, as are most Taylors. I have been deeply impressed with the consistent quality of the Taylor instruments that pass by me. In addition, Taylor has proven to be an easy company to work with. They like to schedule things well in advance and I do too. Consequently, my production/shipping schedule is accurate and held to. This makes life much easier for everyone. It enables me to build a company that can perform reliably for the customer and at the same time be managable on my end in terms of having a balance of inventory. Lately, Guitar Rodeo has been growing rapidly and I am really excited that I will (seemingly) be able to make a living doing something I enjoy and am an expert at. Did I say expert? Some may wonder if I am, as I profess (and frequently blog to that effect) to be a banjoist. I am a journeyman guitarist. That is to say, I know the chord shapes and can pick tunes and even improvise. My skills on the guitar are advanced, but folks will pay me to play the banjo, hence I am banjo-boy. I love guitar. I have opinions and have much knowledge about them. In my youth I did professional guitar repair and sold them as well as practiced on them. One of my enduring fantasies is to sit around the kitchen table with nothing much else to do but work out fiddle tunes with the flat pick and maybe do a little reading through of some Segovia scales or bringing a note for note Django piece up to speed.

2005-12-08T14:35:00.000-08:00

I have been getting a lot of page views and visits from people who I assume came here from fatty's site. Therefore, its time for another bike entry. If you are interested in custom architectural metal work, the last couple of entries were for you. If you are a guitarist, you are my real target audience but please be patient. I will post some cool Taylor pictures and some (hopefully) amusing anecdotes soon. It is now too cold to bike here in Minnesota. It has been in the unseasonable minus range for the past week. It is warming up and this weekend I vow to get the fixie out in the salt and slush. I know there are diehard types who will ride in low temperatures. I used to do that and I grew out of it. At least give me over twenty farenheit with no wind. I have the requisite rubber faced tights and lots of cold weather gear. It doesn't matter what you wear because you feets gonna freeze, brudda. Those pedals are a remarkable heat sink and the handlebars do a fine job of draining warmth too. After an hour in the cold it isn't fun any more. I have been running, but even that is problematic with zero temps. Push-ups and situps help some. I am even thinking about the rowing machine and sometimes I think about the wind trainer. Oof. I'll keep thinking because that's easier than acting on any of these thoughts. My end game is a long life in reasonable shape and not a personal best iron man triathalon time. I will go through the fixie and make sure it is up to snuff. I have a set of 700c X 25c tires for it to get a bigger footprint. They are baldies which I figure will not be a problem. The streets are salty and dirty but not icy and I am probably not going to try the trails. Maybe a twenty five mile spin around the big lake and call it good.

2005-12-02T13:38:00.000-08:00

Some of you honored visitors may have noticed a link to "www.flyingheritage.com" over on the right there. Today's picture is of my parents and me standing in front of the P-51D Mustang fighter that my Dad flew in 1945 out of England on bomber escort missions. Captain Tordoff is on the right. When I was a kid I used to day dream about flying my dad's plane when I grew up. Because I was a smart kid, I knew that it was only a dream and the plane was already long gone. About twenty years ago an entrepreneur in Florida contacted my dad by tracking him through the pre-web world of public records with dogged determination. He told Bud that his plane had been found in the Dominican Air Force and this guy was bringing it into the country to restore it and put the plane in a museum. That never came to pass and instead the fellow sold it to a group in California that turned out to be a museum owned by Paul Allen (Microsoft). Mr. Allen has put together a museum of flyable war aircraft. My dad's P-51D was totally renovated. In fact, it is the most complete renovation ever done on a P-51D Mustang. They even went so far as to construct a machine to weave the cloth covers on wire just as it was done in 1945 so they could replicate the exact weave patterns of each wire type in the aircraft. Today, the plane is as close as it can be to how it existed the day my dad flew it for the last time in World War II. It has six .50 caliber browning machine guns in the wings. This is a seriously fine vehicle. I did not get to fly it but I did get to sit in it and work the controls and imagine the impossible. My folks and I traveled to near Seattle to visit the aircraft and the museum it is in last summer. Mr. Allen has some other pretty cool toys besides this one. The museum was breathtaking, just absolutely amazing. Almost all of the planes in it, from many countries and every world war, are flown regularly just like this plane. I strongly suggest to anyone visiting this blog to link to the site and check out some of the footage there.

Bud scored nine and a half (two guys helped on one) kills, received the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, sixteen Oak Leaf Clusters, and Lord knows what all. He went back to college and never flew again after he mustered out of the Air Force. I am in awe of him as are all the aircraft people associated with the Mustang at the museum. He says it was the time in his life when he felt most alive. Go figure; a twenty year old flying a plane with1200 horsepower and six fifties at four hundred miles an hour and that's before combat adrenaline kicks in. It also was pretty scary. Still, he scored kills on both the single engine and double engine type Messerschmidt jets, which was very unusual given the fact that they were much faster than the Mustangs. Well, suffice it to say it was very gratifying to realize some small part of a long distant dream from my childhood. I sure do appreciate the service my dad performed for our country. I am really glad he prevailed in combat too.

2005-11-30T11:39:00.000-08:00

Things that are well executed have their own reward. Today's photo is of a large skylight feature for the University of Minnesota Microbial Building. This unit is about twenty feet tall and fifteen feet in diameter at the widest part. Architects would come to Gruppo (that was my company's name and yes, there was a cycling tie-in) with their ideas and it was our job to make their dreams come true. This thing was a computer illustration and basically it is a transected cone made from a special acrylic that looks like glass (green edges you know...) affixed to a stainless steel frame with stand-offs. The geometry involved was pretty intense, especially when it came to cutting the holes in the acrylic panels. Well, it was our job and we did it right no matter how much money it took. The problem is, after the budget was gone it was the company's money that was taken. A company that does this kind of work tries to establish itself with these monumental projects in order to become the "go-to" guys for work such as this. In reality, the successful outfits have a bread and butter product that they churn out daily at an actual profit. We were the go-to guys for odd-ball custom stuff but it was the only work we did. This resulted in a large dollar turn-over at little or no profit as we were always trying to get through the problematic job in hand to get the future (theoretically profitable) job into the shop. Finally, there was a perfect storm of three big loser jobs in the shop at the same time and God in his wisdom showed me there was a better life for me as long as I left this one behind.

Change is good. Change hurts a lot but I have ultimate faith that things will continue to improve as they have in the two years since I put Gruppo down and started my quest for something that was rewarding and would allow me to sleep at night. I hear through the grapevine that former Gruppo employees have many negative things to say about me because I, well, failed. Failed big. I believe that their opinions help them to process what was undeniably a large part of their lives. Either the things they say are true or they aren't. I built Gruppo from nothing to thirty employees in a 20,000 square foot shop/office. After 9/11 things got tough. In particular, the metal fabrication industry had a very hard time of it and we were no exception. We could no longer operate and I took it down because it was my company to take down. There are a myriad of ancillary reasons why the company could not survive, and as I was the top dog, they all roost on my shoulders. I wouldn't have it any other way. The employees were, by and large, good people. Some of them worked hard and some didn't. I simply could not find the magic blend of personality traits in myself to make it all work. Instead, life gave me the opportunity to learn from failure on a pretty big scale. This has been the lesson of greatest value for me and I have taken it to heart. Oh, and I am prepared to fail again if that is what is meant to happen. After all, I am alive and my children are healthy. Only a fool wouldn't recognize the value of this.

I sell guitars now and that is a good thing because I enjoy being in full control of what happens in the company and therefore things are exactly as I want them. Every customer I have had to date is satisfied, and every transaction has been profitable for the company. It even looks like the guitar business is going to break even year one. Gruppo broke even year five, I believe. Yes, change is good. Living is good. Learning from what life teaches you is good too.

2005-11-18T09:36:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of photographs of one of five plaques that my old company (Gruppo) made for the Federal Reserve Bank Ninth District. The plaques depicted what the city of Minneapolis looked like at various times throughout history. They are five feet in diameter and they sit in front of the bank on stone plinths. They won a national award from the Society of Environmental Graphic Design the year they were made. They have a lot of detail as you can see from the close up of the city scape.

I have been fortunate to have been able to do cool stuff in my life. People have always been curious to know how I got into this type of work. They were not satisfied with "I am an entrepreneur". They want details. The fact is I have had good luck making the best of things as I bump through life. I ended up with this company because I started my own business and one of the techniques I used was to capitalize on the strengths of the people that were around me. This led the company into the architectural arena in general and manufacturing commercial metal projects specifically. We did lots of cool stuff because cool stuff is more fun to make than boring stuff. We worked hard at it and made quite a name for ourselves as being the go-to guys for oddball and challenging projects.

Being in the construction business was pretty tough. I am grateful to be in the guitar business because getting guitars to people is more satisfying than battling architects and general contractors all day long. Folks are generally happy with their guitar because it is an emotional experience for them and it gives them pleasure to own and play a fine instrument. Actually, the construction industry is an emotional experience too, but not in the fun sense.

2005-11-17T07:24:00.000-08:00

What makes a quality ride? I am a roadie, for the most part. I really enjoy the early morning, no wind, pleasant temperature deserted road type rides. But I have another side too. I love the concept of mountain biking, but in order to ride my mtb I have to drive somewhere for good singletrack. There are some deserted railroad beds that have been converted to trails near me that I can easily get to. The problem with them is they are FLAT, and that means boring. The only grade they have is no more than 1 or 2% because trains used them. I just ride these on my road bike on my way to and from other ride sections of the road routes. Because I need to start and stop at my door (see Fatty's blog about this), I almost never ride the mtb. I am getting the itch to travel to some quality spots for the wonderous experience of riding in the wilderness areas. Thanks for that, Fatty; your blog has ignited my desire and determination to really get out there and see the USA from the seat of my bike... In the meantime, I have developed some pretty cool wrinkles on some of my rides over the years that are unusual for a roadie to do but they really enhance the cycling experience for me.

There is a county parkland that has some excellent roads to it. They do not, however, have good roads coming away from it. If this is confusing (why doesn't he just turn around and ride back the way he came?), please know that cycling must involve a circuit, or loop, in order to be in harmony with the cycling gods. That's just the way it is. I discovered by exploration and map reading that there was a horse trail that led to a class five gravel road that in turn led to a short section of the highway (that I did not want to ride on) that in turn took me to the appropriate tertiary road that was good for biking. This route created the needed loop and kept me off the highway. So, I occasionally treat some park visitors to the weird sight of a lycra clad cyclist on a road bike cruising past their picnic and into the woods on the horse trail, never to return. There is a quarter mile of horse trail followed by a game trail on which I get to bust a pretty cool move. There is a wood barrier that the trail passes under. Hikers need to stoop under the 2 X 12; I ride under it by moving forward of the seat (which clears the barrier by five or six inches) and positioning my chest forward of the handlebars and snaking under the beam. Then its off through the farmers field and around the cows to the gravel road. I love that ride.

Further out of town there is Lake Waconia that has a hilly gravel road around the north shore of it. There is about two miles of this road and it is another of my favorites, as it comes after about fifty miles of road riding and is a welcome relief from pavement for a short while. I know that someday soon this area will be developed and this road will disappear under the tarmac. I will still ride it but I will ride with that melancholy feeling that I get on many roads that I have ridden for years but now have been upgraded and "improved".

These rides will now have to wait until next Spring to be cycled on again. Winter has arrived and it is fixie city until the thaw. I am putting 700c X 25cm tires on the fixie (1970 Gitane Tour de France) to get a bigger footprint and avoid flats. Changing flats below freezing isn't much fun. Its better than changing flats in rain with an air temperature of forty, but only just a little better.

2005-11-16T07:49:00.000-08:00

Fat Cyclist linked to my blog from his blog and I have noticed many more visitors. Welcome to you all. I have been "banjo heavy" on my entries so I thought I should toss out another bike blog entry for all you visitors from Fatty's site. Ergo, here is another Serotta picture to ponder. Fatty even made covetous noises about it when he emailed me about linking to my blog. I admit it is a seriously cool bike and a total pleasure to ride. I would also hasten to add that the reason I have such an over the top velo is that I had accumulated three other high end bikes over the years and when Jim and Scott Flanders teamed up on me to get an Ottrott, I was able to sell the other bikes which made the cash difference to the price of this bike acheivable.

I have always purchased the gear that Jim and Scott tell me to purchase. They both rode on the national road team in the early days (before Greg LeMond even) and they own and operate a pro quality shop. I have been buddies with them since 1981 and I have enjoyed many hours of their company and thousands of miles of pain on rides with them. Oh, Scott won the Minnesota State Road Championship (again) this past summer. That would be the open Cat 2 race. At age 44. Scott is fit and always has been.

I was completely intimidated by the "Bros" when I first saw them because I always saw them as they crossed the finish line one-two at every road race and criterium I watched. I eventually started visiting their shop (I wondered if I needed a special pass to shop there or something but they didn't seem to mind) and one of their mechanics recognized me as a local musician. Once I learned they knew of my musical background I was much more at ease with them, because I had some coolness equity myself. One day Scott asked me if I would like to join the Sunday ride with the team. I had heard stories about the feared Flanders Brothers and how they would take guys out into the deep country side and drop them and leave them for dead. I asked Scott if they were going to go fast and Jim wandered by and said "The pace won't kill you but the distance might"-they were going to ride eighty miles. I had not ever ridden that distance before but I felt I had been riding enough to know the roads and figured I would be able to find my way back to town after I was left behind on the ride, so I said I was in.

It was a blustery March day and the pace was reasonable I thought. It was interesting to meet some of the characters on the ride and one in particular (Juan Creo, a Spaniard with a colorful past) kept goading me out in front of the group to race up hills and such. Eventually Jim came along side and told me Juan was simply trying to burn me out so I would be dropped. I guess the scales were starting to fall from my eyes. I became more conservative about my pace and stayed in the bunch. We were probably forty miles out when I started peeling off the back of the bunch on a long climb. I figured that the ride was over and I knew where I was so I could make my way home. But just then I noticed another rider coming off the back; it was Scott. He came back to me, asked if I had food, and gave me some grapes when I told him no (I really didn't know much about how to do long rides), made me drink some water and then told me to get on his wheel. He then pulled me back to the group. I was stunned when I realized what was happening because this was contrary to everything I had heard about riding with these guys. I peeled off the next long climb and the same scenario repeated itself. We then stopped in a small town for a break and food at a convenience store. Five or six guys actually laid down during the stop, which I knew would be a big mistake for me. I kept upright and walked in circles until it was time to go. Soon after we got back on the road the route changed and it became much easier to hang with the group. Jim made the comment that I had gotten my second wind-it was a tail wind. I finished the ride with the team and spent the rest of the day in a bath tub adding hot water and making small whimpering noises. I was hooked though. I rode quite a few times with the boys and made friends with them and others through the years.

I never raced because I always felt I was too large (6'4" and over 200 pounds at my lightest) to be effective and I also wanted to preserve the enjoyment of the sport and avoid becoming compulsive about training to the point where it became work or lost its fun quotient. As it happened, this was probably a good strategy as I have enjoyed cycling at exactly the level I ride at ever since learning the ropes of elite cycling. I go really fast for a tourist, enjoy the high end equipment, but don't have to suffer unless I want to. One of the biggest benefits has been the comradeship with the other cyclists. I have always been drawn to eccentric types and the bike world is full of them. Its a great sport, fun to watch, fun to do, and healthy as long as you stay on top of the bike and avoid getting too close to objects such as cars, deer, pedestrians, curbs, etc.

2005-11-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

Banjo players want old and cool banjos. There are a finite number of them and there are important differences between the types that are considered cool and the types that are not considered cool. Basically, Gibson Mastertone banjos made before World War II are cool. But within that group of instruments, there are preferred types. The absolute Holy Grail Mastertones are original (untouched or modified) five string , one piece flange, flat head banjos from the thirties. Worth more than your house, maybe. I recently heard of one going for $110,000.00. I guess you would have to be a serious player to lay down that kind of dough.
My personal favorite type is an archtop, two piece flange Mastertone from the twenties. They are heavier and more solidly built and the archtop tone ring yeilds a brighter sound than the flat heads. The banjo that is pictured in several of my blog entries, including this one, is a Granada model from 1927, and it is an unbelievably beautiful sounding banjo. Most folks who like banjos and hear it comment on it's mellow and full tone. Recently, my son Zimmer had some of his buddies over to the shop to listen to the old foggies play music and one of them commented that he had never heard a banjo that sounded as good as the Granada. Praise from a seventeen year old has a different weight to it than praise from an adult. At any rate, it's a hoss, as the hillbillies say.
I have another archtop two piece flange Mastertone from the twenties. It was made in 1929 and is an MB-3, which means it originally had a mandolin neck on it. It was converted to a five string before I bought it as a kid in 1967. If my math skills are correct, I have now owned that banjo for half of it's life. A sobering thought on many levels. I put a much nicer neck on it, made by banjo neck maker Randy Wood, in 1969. Randy also made the Granada neck in 1973, which is when I bought the Granada from my friend and banjo collector Bill Camp. Randy Wood is considered to be a premier neck maker and his necks are as close to original in terms of value that one can get. So, I am the humble and proud owner of two very desirable Gibsons from the twenties. They are cool. I enjoy them and use them.

2005-10-27T06:58:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about bikes some, after all bikes are in the title of this blog. That's my bike up there and I took the photo in my guitar shop. Its a Serotta Ottrott, an unobtainium/carbon/kryptonite uber bike. I sold three other uber bikes to get it. I have been riding high end bikes since 1970. This one defines the high end. I ride over three thousand miles per year typically and up to six thousand on a good year. That's a lot of miles to a civilian but not much to a bad-ass racer type. Those guys will ride six at a minimum for a local licensed racer and Lance rides 22,000. Dude. Well, remember that the pros only have riding, training, and recovery to do so that's what you get. I believe most European pros ride in the 16,000 to 20,000 mile range. Oof.

I enjoy following the European racing scene, which pretty much opts me out of any meaningful cocktail party conversation or small talk with the guys. I can't fake even a cursory chat about any major league sport team or game, but if anyone ever wants my opinion of whether or not Eric Zabel should have ridden in the 2005 tour, I'm ready.

I have ridden probably close to 100,000 miles in my pseudo cycling career. I have broken my hip, leg, arm, and elbow. Other injuries too minor to mention have come and gone. Now I am a squishy middle aged white guy with a pricey bike who just likes to get out and spin. I used to ride with the feared Flanders Brother's Minneapolis Bicycle Racing Club team. My company sponsored the team during the good times. I can still hang with the Saturday morning coffee rides which are social and easy.

The past three years, prior to this summer, were awful bike seasons for me. My business was failing, my marriage was failing, and things just weren't going my way. I gained a lot of stress fat and lost fitness. When I did ride, I could not recover and therefore lost my only stress relieving activity. It sucked. Now, most of the stress has passed and this year I had a pretty good summer. I lost a lot of weight and regained fitness.

In August, on my first ride after taking ten days off with a broken arm (yes-cycling related), the Flanders/MBRC Tuesday ride overtook me. I sprinted hard to catch them as the dozen guys sped by in single file and I managed to get on the back of the pace line. My heart rate was pretty high by that time. I tucked in and hung on but I couldn't get my heart rate down. I looked at my computer and noticed we were going 30 miles per hour. Then I knew why my heart rate wasn't coming down. The Tuesday ride is the "fast ride", and I am here to tell you that thirty miles per hour is seriously fast on a bicycle on the flats. Its like, pro fast; euro fast; freakin' fast. I knew because my heart rate was high and staying high that I was only going to be there a little while. After a bit, there was a climb and I exploded off the back. It was twenty minutes before my heart rate and breathing were normal. Its nice to know that those guys are keeping fit and not just out fooling everybody by looking fast but not going hard. A couple of days later I noticed a bump in my fitness from that brief interval. I love those guys.

2005-10-26T04:49:00.000-07:00

2

Its amazing how closely one can examine the acouterments of a particular specialty and what one may find there. Take banjo bridges for example. Most people probably don't give much thought to them in their daily lives. Some people do though. In the thriving subculture that is banjo playing, bridges are pretty huge. There are several designs on the current market, all focused on sales but designed to bring out the best sound from your banjo; "guaranteed to make your contemporary banjo sound pre-war". What does banjoboy use, you are probably wondering? Hey, thanks for asking. When I first moved to the Twin Cities area in 1970, I sought out the banjo crowd. I was led to a gentleman in south Minneapolis named Mike Osgar. Mike was a big guy, Scandinavian, and very Minnesotan in the old world sense. Mike made banjo bridges in his basement. He sold them to Grover and Gibson, who put them on their banjos and sold them to the retailers. I would visit Mike every once in a while and once he inlaid some ivory birds in a truss rod cover for my old '29 RB3. I would play tunes for Mike and he would say, "You can get a lot of music out of a five string". A couple of years after I first met Mike, I was working at The Podium, the area's finest guitar/pipe/tobacco/sheet music emporium. The owner mentioned he needed to order some banjo bridges and wanted to know from me what to order. I contacted Mike and we bought bridges directly from the source. I would go through the lots and select bridges that were exactly quarter sawn and showed the distinctive cross grain from that. I gleaned about a dozen through the year or two I was there and those are my bridges. I still use the first ones I put on each banjo, so the other eight or so I have left ought to last me forever and an extra five lives. These bridges are not only made by a master and selected for premium quality, they are now over thirty years old. They rock. They are transcendent bridges and there are none finer anywhere. I love them. I have let loose of only two through the years. One I put on a converted mint 1928 TB-5 that belonged to my buddy Bill's brother that I went through and set up. Eric mentioned to me that he put a new bridge on the TB-5 when I talked to him and I insisted he mail the bridge I put on it back to me. He called back and told me that he would be keeping the bridge I sent. He had spent some time comparing the sound of the two and heard the difference. Other than using some wood from The Cross, I don't know how they could be cooler. But that's just me.

2005-10-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

One of the most memorable things that Peter Ostroushko, Mike Cass and I did was to back up the national acts that would come to town and play at the Whole Coffee House on the University of Minnesota campus. We would have two or three weeks to learn the repertoire of the visitor, so we would get together and learn the popular songs that the visitor would play. The visiting star and the three of us local guys would get together at the coffee house early in the evening of the job, and cobble together a set list or two that included the repertoire of the visitor and filled out with standards that everyone knew from the common pool of music. Remember that this was folk music, so there was a vast list of songs that were commonly known by the musicians who played bluegrass and old time music.

One time, the booking people at the coffee house engaged us to back up Vassar Clements. Peter and Mike came over to my apartment and proceeded to show me the important tunes. Yes, both of those guys had the stuff either already in their fingers or they would learn it fast. After a couple of painful (for them) and aggravating (for me because I felt so stupid in comparison to them) sessions, we pretty much had the necessary tunes learnt. The big night arrived and it was off to play with the star. We played the gig Friday, went off to someone’s house afterward and picked until the early hours. Saturday we all played on “A Prairie Home Companion” with Garrison Keillor, then the final night at the Whole, followed again by more picking until the wee hours.

To say that the weekend went well would be an understatement. The musical energy was absolutely unbelievable. One of the evenings was taped, and I managed to hear it a couple of times. The music was amazing, just absolutely amazing. We were totally pumped to be playing with Vassar, and he is such a master that his energy could pace ours to any level. Twenty years later, in a completely different and non-musical setting, I met a person who asked if I was the same Jim Tordoff who played banjo. I said I was, and this person told me that they remembered me from playing at the Whole Coffee House with Vassar Clements. They said it was the finest night of music they had ever heard in their life. Well, in my humble opinion, I agree. The tape of that night was magical. If I ever find the tape I will post it on this site. I am still looking. Recently, I heard another tape of a group who was backing up Vassar and it was “deja vu all over again” as Yogi Berra would say. That group was cooking with the gas on full. It was probably the fastest Bugle Call Rag ever played in the known universe. I guess Vassar just has a way of energizing his back up band in ways that defy understanding. Those guys were great.

The three of us also played with Frank Wakefield and that was pretty fun too. No other night ever reached the fever level of the magic Vassar weekend though. Some things can never be duplicated or experienced twice.

2005-10-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

My first instrument was the five string banjo. While I was still a teenager, my family moved to Minnesota where I continued to search out Bluegrass and other banjo pickers to learn from. I met a lot of characters then, many of whom remain friends with me to this day. I have always been extra lucky with the people I found and I have been blessed to have played with a lot of very talented folks through the years.

One day my friend Judy Larson said, “Come with me, there is someone you should meet”. Mike Cass was (still is, actually) a very talented Dobro player and we had a lot in common, music wise.

We decided that we should put a band together in order to improve our skills. Soon, Mike had rounded up a fiddle player. Well, a beginning fiddle player anyway. This kids name was Peter Ostroushko and he had only been playing fiddle for a couple of months. It was a stretch to apply the term “beginner” to Peter because he already played REALLY well, even having only been at it for a while. Mike also found a guitar player who was only with us for a short while, Don. This was the beginning of Bush County String Band. Don left the band and was replaced by Larry Stolberg and we also had hooked up with John Pederson on bass. Bush County String Band only existed for a few months. We played some coffee house gigs and an out of town job or two then the band dissolved. My friendship with Mike and Peter continued. We never were an official band again, but we played fairly often in differing mixes of players and for this job and that. The three of us eventually taught at the West Bank School of Music, and basically hung out off and on through the years.

Peter went on to do well on "A Prairie Home Companion" with Garrison Keillor. He is now an empressario and has quite a following. Mike moved to Nashville and is considered to be the "pedal steel players' pedal steel player" there. He travels with Ray Price and I hear that when he plays, the other Nashville steel cats come to hang out and listen while they hold their tape recorders in the air so they can cop Mike's licks later. I have a little guitar shop and an obscure blog.

2005-10-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

I was a young man of twenty in 1972, an aspiring banjo player living near the University of Minnesota on the West Bank campus. My friend Ralph was a banjo player too and had been friends with Jerry Garcia back in California in the sixties. “Cousin Ralph” told me one day that the Grateful Dead were coming to the Twin Cities to play a concert and, as he and Jerry were old buddies, that the Dead were coming over to a friend’s place after the gig to hang out and jam some. He wondered if perhaps I would be interested in meeting these guys and playing music with them. I knew very little about the Dead and I wondered what interest they would have in making the West Bank scene with the usual suspects. I did, however, understand the concept of food, which I knew would be there. The promise of getting fed was enough motivation for me to actually show up to see what I could see.

I was at the scene at the appointed hour, hungry, and I was not disappointed. In anticipation of visiting rock dignitaries, the local food experts were putting their best foot forward. It was starting to look like a fun time would be had by me whether or not the jam session panned out. Around eleven thirty, some very well dressed hippies came to the party. It was the Grateful Dead, live. Four of them came and soon two of them left. I discovered the two who stayed were Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. I did not know them, as such, because I was not a follower of popular music; I was a bluegrass guy. I sort of knew about them and didn’t know much but I would know more about them soon.

So, this Garcia guy has a banjo case. Well, I thought, this is getting more interesting. Maybe these guys can actually play some string music and not just Rock and Roll. Jerry broke out the banjo and Bob Weir produced a guitar. They made some noises about how much fun it was to just hang around and pick with real people. By this time, I had my banjo uncased and another local guy had his guitar. That was the jam; Jerry, Bob, me and the other guy. I noticed right away that Jerry’s banjo was unusual and a type I had never seen. It was a Weyman and it had a beautiful tree of life inlay up the neck. And, by golly, the guy could actually pick it too! He picked quite well, in fact. Better than I could even, and by a lot. Not only that, his right hand middle finger was missing from the first knuckle but it didn’t seem to slow him down at all.

It was beginning to dawn on me that I had stumbled onto something pretty special. Both these guys were seriously fine pickers, could sing REALLY well, and they seemed to be having a good time. Meanwhile, I was having one of the most profound experiences of my life. Until that night, I was pretty much a student of the banjo. I had learned many tunes in the four years I had been playing, but had not transcended from rote repetition of known songs to actual jamming or improvisation. But that happened while I stood in between Jerry and Bob. Yup, Kansas boy goes to the big city, has opportunity fall in his lap, and makes good. Right there in between Jerry and Bob; picking tunes, laughing at their jokes and acting all nonchalant and like I hung out with rock heavyweights and swapped licks with them every week or so.

I was learning fast. It dawned on me through the haze that this was really different than I had expected; that I was in a very special place and God was smiling on me right then. I started to be able to make up breaks to the songs these guys were playing by the time it was my turn, which was at the same time amazing but, well, expected somehow. And that Garcia fellow was a really and truly excellent banjo player. They were not just playing the old chestnuts either. I had never heard many of the songs, and others were old blues tunes, some were songs that they performed (Friend of the Devil, Casey Jones), and songs I just plain did not know the origin of but had chord changes that were comprehensible. Yeah, this was getting to be really fun but I wondered when they would tire of the locals and split. They must have enjoyed themselves because they stayed until the last dog was hung, which was dawn. And I was right there too. I found that there was a quality about Jerry Garcia that was transformational and I had been transformed by picking with him. I was now a real picker. I walked into that jam a banjo student and came out a picker. I never forgot that night, and the story of my experience with those guys never fails to amuse people when they hear it. If I can’t wow them with the status of being a banjoist (sarcasm) then the “Night of the Grateful Dead” story will at least confuse them.

I was still in a state of disbelief the day after this experience so I broke out my axe to see if I was just imagining having the ability to improvise or if something had really changed about my playing. Something had changed. Ever since that night I have been able to “just make stuff up”, as the old timers say. Now, I am not saying that the stuff I make up is good, but it is made up. Well, that’s another story for another day.

I learned later that Jerry Garcia was a banjo player first and foremost and that he ended up a guitarist so he could make a living. Learning that helped to explain why he would search out, or at least be open to, jamming with the locals. He probably didn’t get many opportunities to jam with bluegrass guys. Obviously, Bob Weir enjoyed playing music at the “folk level” too. These guys both were pleasant, polite, regular guys. Since that unique night, I paid a whole lot more attention to the Dead when I heard them and followed them in the media when they got ink. I will never forget that night and the gift I was given. Those guys rock.

2005-10-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

Last night was practice. It went pretty well and I did remember a lot more of the eclectic tunes but there are still issues. Still, all in all it was good. My main complaint with MSCB is that they play a lot of songs too fast. What they don't seem to realize is that the listener has no point of reference as to speed. The listener cannot tell if a song is being played at 120 beats per minute or 100 beats per minute; it sounds fast either way. If the song is played so rapidly that the banjo player (for example) has to leave notes out in order to keep up, the overall quality of the song is compromised. If the song is played at a slower but still fast speed, the notes can stay in and the overall quality of the song is better. I once coined a phrase (with apologies to R. Crumb),"Tone will get you through times of no speed better than speed will get you through times of no tone". So true.

One of the principle reasons I agreed to join MSCB is that they have a couple of brothers in the band who are serious musicians. Chuck, the bassist, teaches symphony bass in the public school system. Bluegrass is just for fun with Chuck. His brother Mark is a full time musician, and plays with several bands and combos. Mark speaks several languages, fluently, and has taught some of them at the college level. These are guys with musical muscle. They both play several instruments. Mark quadruples on fiddle, mandolin, mandola, and guitar. Before I joined the group he also played banjo. I am a "better" banjoist than Mark. I have a fluid style and arguably know more phrasing and licks than he does. Still, he basically knows anything he needs to know. I manage to maintain my dignity by being a Black Belt to his Brown. Anyway, Chuck and Mark make up the majority of my reasons to be in MSCB. I like Alan and Bruce a lot and the money is good, but the Bros bring a steady beat and an upgrade that I like a lot. I played with MSCB from 1979-1981. It was a much tougher band to be in at that time. I was a much tougher person to have in a band at that time. I subsequently quit playing music from 1981 until 2002, and raised a family and did the career thing and all. I started again when I needed a non-chemical and non-addictive escape when my company and marriage went South. So, here I am. I am grateful for the doors God opened for me, even though many of them looked like chasms at the time.

2005-10-20T07:12:00.000-07:00

I play banjo in a Bluegrass band. Well, two bands, actually. It is a fun thing but for the fact that each band does a lot of original material so there are tons and tons of songs and chord progressions to know and remember. That can be a problem for the old (literal descriptor there) brain. Here's the deal; improvisation takes place over the basic chord structure of any song. If you know where the chords are going (knowing which chord is next and when) then improvising is really simple. But, and its a big but, if you don't know where the chords are going you are basically fooched because you are improvising but you can't because you are lost. Make sense? What is really interesting is that once you learn the progression and can accurately predict the changes, the song structure always seems so logical and you wonder how it ever could have been tricky to learn. The first band I was asked to join, I have learned pretty much all of the songs. The second band? I am still struggling with the repertoire. Now, this is not just your typical 1,4,5 cowboy chord stuff. Give me some credit. Some of these songs even have (gasp!) time changes! Oddball minor chords! Ninths and sixths and stuff! Non-resolving progressions! On banjo! Live! At least neither of these bands require me to sing, which is as much a relief for me as it is a blessing for the audience. Both groups already had the vocal parts worked out with enough voices that I just get to play banjo and be happy. In one group, Ivory Bridge, I am the only lead instrument other than the two guitars so I get to play just about all the fill and back-up stuff. That's huge. It means that, in a typical four hour gig, I am actually playing for about three hours and forty five minutes. Playing rolls that is, and not just keeping time by vamping chords on the off-beat (oomp-chunk, oomp-chunk, oomp-chunk). I would have to say that my back-up stuff is getting a lot better due to all the practice I get at it. The other band, The Middle Spunk Creek Boys, is your typical Bluegrass band build out with fiddle and mandolin, so I do a lot more time keeping and less back up stuff.

Last week I played a concert with MSCB and it was the first concert venue we played where the acoustics were such that everything could be heard. This is as opposed to a noisy bar or outdoor concert where there is ambient noise. In a situation like this, one really has to know one's stuff. There is no place to hide. I did okay, just okay. We had rehearsed the trickier songs but I had sort of a brain problem the night of the concert in that I could not remember stuff. At all. I think when I get tired and don't eat I start to lose some higher brain functions and that was happening. I recovered when we got onstage thanks to the adrenaline and years of playing. I remembered pretty well but more importantly I soft pedaled and hid well in the parts I was fuzzy about. The concert went well. Still, we practice tonight and I would not be surprised if many of the tricky tunes were simpler tonight than they have been in the past.

2005-10-19T12:04:00.000-07:00

Now it begins. I will use my blog to further the best interests of mankind, solve the most difficult challenges facing modern intellectualism, settle disputes between soveriegn nations, tidy up the unified field theory and chart the course of man through the Age of Aquarius and to the final destination wherein humanity can live a sustained existence in perfect harmony with the universe and Mother Earth until our star attains supernova. Failing the above, I will just thrash about mindlessly spewing my own biased opinions and generally making a nuisance of myself. Maybe there will be some good jokes, too. I dunno, I might even get some sort of a theme going on this sucker and maybe I won't. And if you are reading this, you either know me or you have too much time on your hands and you should find something more useful to do with it.

Everybody wants to be the banjo player. Hey, would that be fun or what? Well, I AM the banjo player, so I know exactly how much fun it is. It is fun. It also took a llloooonnnggg time to learn and that was when I was a kid and had fresh brain cells and enough discretionary time to endlessly practice the rolls and stuff. Message to all you older guys who think it would be cool to play banjo: it is cool but its not gonna happen for you in this life. Buy a classic GTO or something instead and learn how to restore classic cars. It will soak up all your banjo time and more. Message to all you folks out there that want to hear the banjo player play "Dueling Banjos" or "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" or "Man of Constant Sorrow"; please go away. I spent countless hours practicing and striving and hurting and being embarrased or frustrated or whatever. I did not spend all that time and energy learning how to play the most gawd-awful hardest instrument on earth just to validate your movie going experience by rehashing one of those sorry tunes for you. Just listen to what I want to play and enjoy it. Honest, I am using EVERY SINGLE NOTE that is used in those other tunes, just in a different order. On the banjo. In the moment, and just for you. And the others that are listening with you. Think of it as an enhancement to those songs, you know, like a sequel, like "Foggy Mountain Breakdown XXXIV or something. Just please don't ask me (or any banjo player) because we all hate those songs and the people that ask for them. Naturally, I will simply play these songs when asked because I am an entertainer first and an artist second, but I love ranting about it.

I also really dig my banjos. I have a couple of them from the twenties and they are seriously cool. They aren't the ones most sought after because those are flatheads and mine are both archtops. The hard core bluegrassers all want flatheads and they overlook the fact that the flatheads were engineered to be easier and cheaper to make than the archtops. Hey, flatheads happened in the thirties; hello, are we having fun in the great depression? There is a subculture of archtop players that love the archtop sound. Include me in that group. We are the subversive and free thinking arhtop anarchists. We like bright sounding banjos that weigh a lot and are old. I bought both of these beauties over thirty years ago and they are worth a lot more now than they were then. The point is, these are the only material possessions I have that I give a rats butt about. Well, I really like my bicycle too but I learned early on never to fall in love with my bike. No one ever told me not to fall in love with my banjo. I believe a lot of what people tell me. I am kind of like a Labrador Retreiver that way. In fact, I am a lot like a Lab in a lot of ways, but that's another blog. Today I am Banjoboy.