After a summer in San Francisco, and an autumn on the Albion Ridge in Mendocino County, I found myself in Berkeley, California as the new year 1969 approached. In the year or two that followed I was involved in 3 more recording sessions.
John Cohen and Mike Seeger, both members of the charismatic and influential band The New Lost City Ramblers, each had the idea of making recordings documenting the old-time music they heard in Northern California when they came to the area to play concerts.
My memory is fuzzy about the chronology and about some of the details. What I can say for sure is that in a home studio in a Berkeley garage, Mike recorded a wide range of styles and people, whereas John focused on the musicians who lived, had lived, were about to live, or were thought to live, on the lowest and highest floor of an unusual house on Colby Street in North Oakland, and made the recordings at Pacific High Recording studio in San Francisco where many prominent rock bands in the area had recorded.
In those days I would often play pass-the-hat music on the UC Berkeley campus with a rotating cast of characters. Some called this “begging”. Banjoist Mac Benford, called it “free music for free money”. One of the people I often played with was the extraordinary banjo player Walt Koken. I had never encountered this level of skill applied to the clawhammer banjo technique. Half a century later I’ve seen it equaled—maybe— but not bettered. Sometimes we played with a civil engineer from Pescadero named Hank Bradley. Hank was a stunning fiddle player. He had more drive, tunefulness, creativity, and Industrial Strength Oomph than any fiddler I had heard in California. By this time Doc Watson had called Hank Bradley “the best fiddler west of the Mississippi”. Or was it west of the Rockies? In any case, he certainly admired Hank’s fiddling.
Mike Seeger wanted to record the three of us. I was to play mandolin and some fiddle as well so we needed a guitarist. I campaigned for Eric Thompson and that’s who we got. Eric was an old friend and got the best guitar tone of any of us. We met in 1963 at Marc Silber’s “Fretted Instruments” shop in Greenwich Village. Eric had driven across the country in an old panel truck that looked like it wouldn’t make it around the block. I walked into the shop and there was Eric playing guitar in a way that resembled my own way of playing. We played together for an hour or so. It was no mystery why we had similar musical ideas. We had listened to the same music, including fiddlers and pedal steel guitar players. What goes in will come out.
Somebody labeled the ensemble “The Spare Change Boys” and that’s how we’re identified on the album. It was released on Folkways Records as “Berkeley Farms”. The title was a joke about a joke concerning a local milk company. Our quartet contributed two tracks. One was the song “Policeman”. Hank sang it with panache, and played the lead fiddle like a dynamo while I played second fiddle in all senses of the term, hanging on for dear life. The other was “Beasties In The Sugar”, a gorgeous fiddle tune composed by Hank. I played mandolin on that. Both are memorable recordings which feature banjo playing such as had never been recorded before.
I think it was less than a year later that the four of us and seven more, playing in various small, large, and larger groups were recorded for John Cohen’s project. John wanted to document the heterophony, monophony, and cacophony he had heard at parties at Colby Street where as many as a dozen musicians played together. He mistakenly thought this was how we preferred to play music and how we always played.
We were recorded over the outtakes of a Grateful Dead album. It took nearly 4 decades for these recordings to be released. A contract dispute contributed to the delay but there may have been other factors. 24 tracks from the session were released in 2008 by Field Recorders Collective as “Berkeley in the 1960s/ The Musicians of Colby Street”.
Over the years I got to know Mike and John well and also got to know the other New Lost Ramblers, Tom Paley and Tracy Schwarz.
One time I spent 48 hours with Tom during which he produced at least 10 spontaneous puns an hour. After a day and a half of this I held up my hands and said “Enough!”. Tom was sympathetic, saying that he knew it was hard on me but it was much harder on him because it was compulsive. He could not control it.
I got to know Tracy a bit through his wife Ginny Hawker. Kate, Ginny, and I were friends before she and Tracy got together. We were guests in each other's homes over the years and we sometimes made music together. We also had many conversations but I never got to really know him as well as I knew Ginny and the other New Lost City Ramblers.
Mike was very encouraging when my first solo album came out. He even wrote me a letter about it. He involved me and Kate in various recording and performance projects over the years. Of all the instruments he played I thought he was best on banjo. He played beautifully. Eventually tendonitis caused him to have to play very lightly on low tuned strings. This did not impact the beauty of his playing. It might have made it even better. One memorable session was in a tiny hotel room in Portland Oregon. There were four of us. Mike played banjo lightly, so I played guitar with my bare fingers to keep it quiet, and Tom Sauber fiddled quietly. Kate was so enthralled she just lay down on the bed and smiled the whole time.
John and I became close friends. John was kind and generous and philosophical. He was also a film maker. There was an uncanny synchronicity in our relationship. I was the first—along with John himself —to view the final edited versions of a good number of his films. In each case, in various years, I was visiting New York City and we happened to meet on the street as he was headed to an editing/viewing facility to view the films! I stayed with him and his family for many weeks during a year they spent in London. This was 1980-81. Tom Paley had moved there from Sweden. The three of us played a few London gigs. We settled on the name “The Now Lost City Ramblers” but privately John and Tom laughed and said that at last, with me in the band, they could at last be the “Jew Lost City Ramblers”. In the 1950s they hadjokingly encouraged Mike to change his name from Seeger to Siegel so the band could have that name. Mike didn’t find it funny which, of course, made the whole thing much funnier.