Gil
Asakawa
Writing Samples
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Boulder Musicians
Make Music and History
By Gil Asakawa
Quick, think of
the great music capitals of the U.S. -- New York, Nashville, Los Angeles,
Motown (that would be Detroit), Austin, Memphis if you believe Elvis
is still alive and Seattle if you're a grunge-punk fan, right? Right…
but you can add one more city: Boulder, Colorado.
For years, Boulderites
have bemoaned the fact that the town, nestled against the Flatirons,
never developed the music scene they expected. But the truth is, Boulder
has had an impact on the national music industry ever since the Astronauts
launched their career from Tulagi on the Hill in the mid-1960s, and
Boulder's local recording and live music scene has been a thriving,
vital cultural force despite the moaning and groaning.
"We tend to take
this area for granted, but I think the music scene here's been very
successful," says Scott Roche. "I came here in 1972, so I've seen
everything come and go, and it's been a great ride." Roche should
know - as owner of Coupe Studios, he's relied on the scene for a living.
Coupe specializes in commercial and post-production audio work, but
has hosted a stream of local musicians over the years.
Leland Rucker,
who arrived in Boulder during the early 1980s and has covered the
scene since, produced a documentary, "Sweet Lunacy" with filmmaker
Don Chapman in 2001. "A lot of people thought Boulder was going to
be more of a scene than it was, like Seattle, like Austin," he says.
"It never did become a big scene - the music industry has never been
in place here with the apparatus of lawyers, record companies. But
you know, for a city its size, I've always thought we had a great
scene."
WE'RE BAD,
WE'RE NATIONWIDE
It's all about
scaling your expectations to the area, Rucker adds.
"One cliché was
that everyone's after a record deal. Michael Woody and the Too-High
Band is a perfect example of that. Here are great musicians who were
so enamored of a major label deal that he and they turned down a deal
with Michael Nesmith (the former Monkee, who operated a small, independent
label) to hold out for a deal with Elektra Records. That didn't happen,
and then the band broke up."
The hell-raising
Dusty Drapes and the Dusters, nominally a band of long-haired hippies
playing stone country, got a deal with Columbia Records but the album
never came out because the label decided it would compete with another
group already on its roster, the western swing band Asleep at the
Wheel. "The big record deal is not always a great idea," Rucker says
with a chuckle.
Despite getting
burned by industry experiences, Rucker says, Boulder musicians "were
all having too much fun. A lot of people told me about the bad things
that happened to them during that time, like drugs and alcohol, but
nobody had a bad time in the '70s."
"Sweet Lunacy"
holds a special place with older music fans who remember the nightclub
scene back in the day - at the Boulder Theater premiere of the documentary,
the standing-room-only crowd hooted and hollered their approval whenever
a long-gone club, from Shannon's to the Olympic Saloon was shown.
Other popular clubs included Jose Muldoon's, the Walrus and Peggy's
Hi-Lo.
"There's a real
nostalgia for the clubs," Rucker says. "Boulder has always been fortunate
to always have a club that brings in national acts and has local acts
playing. We all have nostalgia for those places - Shannon's, Tulagi,
that resonate extraordinarily with people because they remember the
first time they got drunk, threw up or got lucky, or the first time
they got wildly excited about a band."
For the past
decade, the Fox Theater, which is now undergoing a project to return
its façade to its original historic condition, has been that club.
But in the '70s, neighboring Tulagi on the Hill had featured the Eagles
as they warmed up their act before their first album came out. Tulagi
was also the site for the first-ever gig outside of Texas for a trio
that later became as famous for its beards and sunglasses as it music:
ZZ Top. In the 1980s, the Blue Note on the Pearl Street Mall, the
venerable Boulder Theater and the Boulder Wave off Baseline were the
clubs for national shows. The Boulder Theater still books concerts
in addition to the Fox. Chautauqua Auditorium has also been a steady
source for great national acts every summer during its concert season.
THINK GLOBAL,
ACT LOCAL
But the measure
of a music scene isn't just the national acts - it's in the heart
and soul of young local musicians playing in front of hometown crowds.
And Boulder has never had a dearth of either bands or fans.
The first band
of note in Boulder was the Astronauts, who had a hit, "Baja," playing
instrumental surf music in the early 1960s. By the end of the decade,
though, the seeds of the '70s scene had been planted.
One group that
has had staying power since the late '60s, Flash Cadillac and the
Continental Kids, gained its reputation playing wild, out-of-control
shows at clubs like Tulagi. The band caught the original rock and
roll nostalgia wave at the right time - because of their live reputation,
they were featured playing oldies both in the 1972 film "American
Grafitti" and on a 1974 episode of "Happy Days." And, they kept tearing
up the Boulder stages. The band now is based in the Colorado Springs
area, and often performs rock and roll with symphonies around the
country.
A spinoff band
formed by original Flash drummer Harold Fielden, the 4Nikators, has
kept up the raucous reputation not only with Boulder clubs but also
private performances for corporate clients all over the world. As
you might guess from the band's name, the 4Nikators play hard but
don't take themselves too seriously.
By the early
1970s a blues-rock band called Zephyr had formed in Boulder, featuring
the husband-and-wife team of bassist David and vocalist Candy Givens,
along with a wiz-kid guitarist named Tommy Bolin. Zephyr had a fanatic
following - and a major label deal - but they never broke the national
charts. The group continued playing into the 1980s in various configurations,
but in the early '70s Bolin left to follow his own muse.
Tommy Bolin was
a comet of a musician, who burned brightly while he arced across the
sky, but flickered out too soon. Although he was a talented guitarist
with a penchant for mixing his rock chops with a jazzy mentality,
he bought into the rockstar cliché. While he still lived in Boulder
and was a staple at Tulagi, he joined the James Gang for two albums
and then joined the hugely popular hard rock band Deep Purple, meanwhile
releasing two solo albums. But he died of a drug overdose in 1976,
with his promise unfulfilled.
Also in the early
'70s, a young guitarist and CU student named Jock Bartley caught a
concert with country-rock pioneer and former Byrd Gram Parsons, who
was touring with a young singer named Emmylou Harris. That night Bartley
auditioned for Parsons and a week later, he was part of the Fallen
Angels Band, playing around the country until Parsons' death. Upon
his return to Boulder he replaced Tommy Bolin in Zephyr.
About the same
time, Boulder became a popular nest for a far-flung community of musicians
well-known on the national scene: former Buffalo Springfield member
Richie Furay, fronting the acclaimed group Poco with his high harmonies
and songwriting talent; former frontman for the James Gang, Joe Walsh
(who Bolin was hired to replace); Stephen Stills (who moved to Gold
Hill just west of Boulder and even joined the volunteer fire department
there) and others formed a core of stars who lit up the region with
their presence.
The presence
of producer Jim Guercio's Caribou Ranch Studios in nearby Nederland
also drew a stable of stars, from Elton John and Chicago to Dan Fogelberg
(who still lives in southwest Colorado). A Boulder band, Sugarloaf,
even had a couple of 'top 40 hits in the '70s, "Green Eyed Lady" and
"Don't Call Us, We'll Call You."
DO YOU BELIEVE
IN MAGIC
Although the
band had no hits, the name Magic Music looms large in the annals of
Boulder rock. The group, featuring a young Chris Daniels who had come
from an earlier group named Rosewood Canyon, played acoustic-based
"hippie" music and walked their talk. "We did the jhippie thing. We
lived in school buses and a donut truck in Eldorado Canyon," Daniels
recalls. "The music was like a mix of String Cheese Incident, Leftover
Salmon and the old British folk band Pentangle - we had two acoustic
guitars, a flute, bass and percussion, usually tablas. The songs had
a lot of elves, druids and faeries in them. We had all kinds of brushes
with fame."
The group performed
at the first two Telluride Bluegrass Festivals, but also held its
own in nightclubs, and was often booked at the Good Earth along with
the Freddi-Henchi Band. "Back then it worked," he says. "The hippies
would get all blissed out and mellow with Magic Music, and then Freddi-Henchi
would take the stage and everyone would get the soul shakes."
After Magic Music,
Daniels left Boulder to earn a BA in music theory at UC-Berkeley,
then returned as a member of Spoons, an influential country-rock outfit.
He toured in the early '80s with former Amazing Rhythm Aces frontman
Russell Smith, who lived in Boulder at the time. He formed the R&B
horn band Kings as a one-night joke gig, but the Kings turned the
one-nighter into 18 years of touring the world and nine albums.
Navarro, a band
that split the difference between Magic Music and Firefall, played
the area clubs until Carole King picked up the band as her backup
group. They released two major label albums in the late '70s. By the
late '70s, the country-rock sound pioneered by Parsons and popularized
by groups such as Poco had become a commercial mainstay, both industry-wide
and in Boulder. Jock Bartley teamed up with songwriter Rick Roberts
to form Firefall, a country-rock group born in Boulder that had a
string of late '80s and early '90s hits. And bands such as Michael
Woody's Too High Band and Dusty Drapes and the Dusters, who never
quite broke on the national level, played their hearts out to rabid
crowds in Boulder for years.
MILES OF STYLES
If it wasn't
country rock, it was the folkier style played early on by the nationally-known
band Hot Rize that kept Boulder on the musical map. Nominally a bluegrass
group, the band, featuring "Dr. Banjo" Pete Wernick, bassist Nick
Foster, mandolin player Tim O'Brien and guitarist Charles Sawtelle
(they all sang), played a quirky mix of traditional and contemporary,
standards and original songs. They also broke their sets with appearances
by an alter-ego country group, Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers.
Sawtelle passed away a few years ago, but Forster is still a Boulder
mainstay with his wife Helen, hosting the national weekly radio program
"E-Town" from the Boulder Theater. Wernick also still performs, and
Tim O'Brien, now base in Nashville, is a respected singer, songwriter
and multi-instrumentalist.
Boulder's folk
scene doesn't get a lot of credit, but groups such as the Ophelia
Swing Band, which played acostic swing and blues in the early '70s,
were incredibly influential on area musicians. A host of singer-songwriters
have also called Boulder home through the years, from Scott Seskind
during the 1980s to Wendy Woo today, and they perform at local clubs
and record in the local studios. The folk influence can still be felt
around Boulder in the current generation of popular bands, such as
the Left Hand String Band, Leftover Salmon and Yonder Mountain String
Band, which play eclectic "jamming" rock infused with bluegrass influences
and instruments.
R&B lived in
Boulder through the efforts of Tim Duffy and his Orchestra of Clouds,
which could jam on James Brown rhythms all night, and in the party
atmosphere of the Freddie-Henchi band, at their home base of the Good
Earth nightclub (they were part owners of the club). The group had
a reputation as the ultimate party band, with its brassy horn arrangements
and dance repertoire. Scott Roche, who worked at the time at Nick
the Greek's music store, was under-aged but that didn't stop him from
enjoying Freddi-Henchi with the thousands of other fans sweating to
their funk grooves. "They were a trip - the Good Earth was my favorite
place, and I used to sneak in during Freddi and Henchi's prime. They
were like Earth, Wind and Fire."
And speaking
of horns, Boulder's jazz community has its place in this story too.
World-renowned saxophonist Spike Robinson lived for years in Boulder
and was a fixture in area clubs before relocating to the UK. He died
in 2001 in his adopted hometown of Writtle in central Essex, England
- he had lived there after World War II. In the 1980s the great vocal
chemistry of Rare Silk earned the a capella jazz group a major label
record deal, and they competed with the Manhattan Transfer for during
the 1980s, touring the world but always returning home to Boulder.
Rare Silk was managed by Scott Roche and his partner, Patrick Cullie.
The group was nominated for three Grammy Awards during its heyday.
Boulder was also
home to the first punk-rock band in Colorado in the 1970s. A group
called the Ravers recorded a single, "Cops Are Punks" in 1977 at the
dawn of the punk movement at Mountain Ears Studio in Boulder, and
received national press from the then-influential magazie Trouser
Press. After moving to New York and changing its name to the Nails,
the Ravers had a minor hit, "88 Lines about 44 Women" in the 1980s.
A young Ravers fan and roadie, Eric Boucher, who was a Boulder High
School student, later changed his name to Jello Biafra and formed
the very influential Dead Kennedys in San Francisco.
Another Boulder
punk band, the Corvairs, was formed in the fall of 1978 by two CU
students, Phil Gammage and Miles Syken, who were heavily influence
by the punk and new wave bands on both coasts and in Europe. Other
bands with names like the Transistors and the Raves rocked the local
clubs. The Milkmen were a one-night sensation when they won a KBCO
song contest but never followed through with performances.
Other regular
names on club marquees included R&B/rock saxophonist Kat Orlando,
now playing in the Detroit area, the Rockin' Rudolphs (a seasonal
favorite), the New Orleans-flavored Gris Gris (which featured the
horn section from Dusty Drapes) led by singer-songwriter and keyboard
player Steve Conn. Conn also was a regular as a solo performer playing
piano at the Hotel Boulderado Mezzanine. He mixed his wide-ranging
musical tastes with political commentary and his acerbic wit. He often
had guests sitting in, including his longtime friend Sonny Landreth,
a Louisiana slide guitar player who was part of the early '70s Magic
Music scene.
THE '80S AND
BEYOND
As the New Wave
rocked Boulder into the 1980s and country-rock faded, a less party-oriented
and more mature music industry of sorts settled into town. A handful
of bands regularly headlined local venues, including Little Women,
a reggae-rock band led by a raspy-voiced singer songwriter named Jerry
Joseph. The group sometimes performed with another group, Big Man,
led by a big man, Devon Christensen. Other groups and solo artists
playing the circuit included Adada, John Bayley, Nancy Cook, The Rooks,
Bruce Odland Big Band.
Some notable
bands strived for national music industry attention, such as Electric
Third Rail, but never quite were able to reach that goal. By the late
1980s, however, bands such as Big Head Todd and the Monsters and the
Samples, had their shot at a major record deal. The Samples even brought
their label, W.A.R.? (What Are Records?), to settled in Boulder. The
Subdudes, a band formed in New Orleans but relocated to Fort Collins,
played regularly at JJ McCabes and the Boulder Theater as it gained
a following and eventually was signed to a major label deal.
Big Head Todd
developed a huge following playing at JJ McCabes every Tuesday night.
Brian Nevin, BHTM's drummer, says the group's original gigs playing
private parties for CU fraternities helped jumpstart their career.
"There are a lot of great die-hard music fans in Boulder, but we started
in an era when mostly college students went out to see live bands,
playing the parties really established our audience," he says. "That's
how we got to have the weekly gig at McCabes. Plus nationally, a lot
of college kids come from out of state, so it helped us establish
fan bases in cities like Chicago and San Francisco - wherever we toured,
CU students would tell their friends about us." The band just released
"Riviera," its seventh album and the first studio recording in several
years, and is back on the road.
Another band
with a regular gig in Boulder was a four-piece acoustic band called
the Predictors. Like many bands playing various clubs, the Predictors
played mostly cover material, focusing on folk-rock and country rock.
Their home was a cozy club called Brandy's connected to the Boulder
Inn, where the band played every Tuesday and every other weekend.
The room also hosted Big Head Todd and the Monsters as they worked
their way up.
Bands like the
Predictors made the rounds of other late-'80s Boulder music venues
such as the Hi-Lo, the Sundance Cafe in Nederland, the Silver Dollar
Saloon, the Walrus, McCabe's and the Bank Saloon (now the Outback).
"The Bank was an interesting gig, at that time they had expanded the
joint, and it had two bars/two stages in two separate areas (it also
featured an indoor basketball court!)," recalls Sharon Meyer, singer,
guitarist and mandolinist with the Predictors. "They would have electric
music on one end and acoustic on the other, and we could tell when
we were playing that the other band was taking a break from the inflow
of people into our side from the other side."
Meyer says of
another regular club she played, "The Walrus had started putting pool
tables everywhere. The stage overlooked a pool table, and our bass
player would sometimes have to jump out of the way to avoid the cue
ball if someone broke the balls too hard."
Bob Skelley,
another member of the Predictors, adds, "I remember it as a really
hopeful time, the Boulder Music scene of the '80s and '90s. There
was lots of friendly competition among various bands. The Brandy's
scene was unique in that other bands came to see the Predictors on
the nights we performed and it was vice-versa for various members
of the Predictors on our nights off."
That collegial
atmosphere continues today with a new generation of bands. Groups
such as Leftover Salmon, String Cheese Incident, the Left Hand String
Band and Yonder Mountain String Band have established large followings
by playing the local clubs and touring nationally. And alternative
bands can make their mark, such as the surf-punk Maraca Five-0, an
echo of the Astronauts of 40 years ago.
"I think Boulder
has always been active in one way or another, sometimes more active
than others," writes longtime Boulderite and music promoter Ginger
Perry from her current home in Hawaii. "In its heyday, the Blue Note,
the Jazz Cellar, Caribou Ranch... there was really some major stuff
going on. I hate the belly aching.. Boulder has been and even continues
to be hot. The energy is there -- the cup is more than half full if
you choose to see it that way -- and I think you really should. Boulder
still IS on the map, in its way...."
"Boulder's rejuvenating,"
says Chris Daniels. "The Boulder club scene was really neat, there
were nights when Gris Gris was playing JJs and we'd be playing the
Walrus, and we'd all be going back and forth between the two clubs
to catch each other. I think that feeling is having a resurgence,
and it's great."
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