Listening to the Radio Late at Night

I’m sure there are people whose memories are better than mine; I just haven’t met many. On the other hand, I’m sure that some of my self-perception of having a good memory is illusory. One does not remember what one forgets, after all. Still, I have many clear and verifiable memories of events, personal encounters, books read, TV shows watched etc. that has impressed enough people for me to grasp that most people don’t have this sort of access to their past.

Most people do remember where they were, what they were doing, etc. at times of great import, like 9/11, the Kennedy Assassination (assuming you were actually alive then), the Fall of Saigon, and so forth. One feature of my own situation may simply be that I have a lot of marker events in my childhood, so my memories got organized at the same time I was acquiring them. Maybe, self-centered dweeb that I am, I consider my own life events to be as important to me as the world shaking events that others remember.

One type of such event is moving, changing houses, which changes the entire “atmosphere” of a memory. That can sometime deceive, as when you go back for a visit to the old place, to see old friends, but usually the surroundings, the frame of the memory is a pretty good test.

In the spring of 1954, my family moved from a house we rented on McRory Creek Road to 2935 Ironwood Drive in Donelson, which was a move of only a few miles, but it felt huge. In at least one way it was huge; McRory Creek Rd. was semi-rural, while Donelson was definitely sub-urban. At least the Post Office thought as much; the McRory Creek residence was a rural route; the Donelson house had an actual address.

Mapquest tells me that McRory Creek Road has been swallowed by Nashville Intl. Airport. At that time it was Berry Field Air Base, where my dad worked as a radio operator. The house in Donelson, on the other hand, was still there the last time I was there only a few years ago.

So I have a set of memories that are bounded in time by the move. Any memory I have of McRory Creek Rd. happened before I turned 4. I remember my 3rd birthday party; that’s probably close to the limit of my memory. I’ve heard people who claim that they have memories from before they were 3, but, according to developmental psychology, such claims are dubious, though I’ll allow that great trauma might linger in memory longer than other forgotten images of childhood.

“I have a friend whose father every week took him to the toolshed to sandpaper his ass. He’s been trying for 30 years to repress those memories, without success.” – Merle Kessler.

On clear memory I have from the McRory Creek house was of our old radio, one of those huge, jukebox looking affairs, late at night bringing forth music. At least the memory feels late at night, dark, no one else around, calm, private. My best guess is that the radio got left on somehow and I got up in the middle of the night. I had an early bedtime when I was a child.

The song I remember is “Your Cheatin’ Heart” by Hank Williams, a song that seems like it should be angry, or scornful, certainly the lyrics have that in them, but the delivery conveys more about the hurt and loneliness that the anger is trying unsuccessfully to mask.

I remember both “Chicken Road” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, and “The Wayward Wind,” by Gogi Grant (and later by Patsy Cline, but the Grant original is the one I remember), from the Donelson House. The "Wayward Wind" is from 1956; I may not have even heard the Ford song on the radio, since my dad had the record. But it felt like a late night song.

So did “Heartbreak Hotel” which made me an instant Elvis fan at the ripe age of 6. That one is tagged as heard first in Illinois, so that would have been from a trip to my grandparents in early summer of 1956, a couple of months after the release of the record. I slept upstairs, where no one could hear the radio if you played it real low, late into the night.

There’s a feel about late night music radio that you don’t get any other place. McLuhan famously divided media into “hot” and “cool,” with “hot” meaning (more or less, and McLuhan was nothing if not slippery and ambiguous) “high definition” and “cool” meaning “low definition,” both indicating how much participation the medium required. He did, however, classify television as “cool” (as compared to movies, perhaps), but maybe that was a mistake.

In any case, radio gives you a sense of “not from around here.” Television puts everything in your living room, radio shifts your sense of presence to the Great Beyond. Late night radio music is as much a signpost to the World Out There as the train whistle or the truck horn as it moves past your small town headed to who-knows-where. Wherever it’s heading, there are adventures to be had, love, fame, success, whatever it is that you want, and you can’t get where you are.

A lot of songs lack that quality of longing, but there are so many that have it. Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” pulled me from sleep one night, as did “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield. The Beatles had a slew of them, from “Strawberry Fields” and “I am the Walrus” to “Eleanor Rigby.” The Rolling Stones came through first with “2000 Light Years from Home” and “Paint it Black” then topped themselves with “Gimme Shelter.” I’m not going to try to make a catalog of Motown late night songs, because Ray Charles alone would run to excess. Even uptempo song can be late night radio songs, like “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas.

The choice spots at WRPI, the ones that had the most prestige were late night, the signoff slots. You didn’t have to follow the format, and the show was open-ended, with a scheduled signoff time that you could go as far past as you liked. Sometimes the DJ would go until 3 or 4 in the morning on weekends, and many is the time I’d listen to radio in bed, thinking I’d turn it off as soon as something came on that I didn’t like, and I’d wind up listening until the signal went dead. Firesign Theater’s “Echo Poem,” “Legend Days are Over,” by Beaver and Krause, “To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb” by Lenny Bruce, you just don’t turn it off when you’re listening to those.

I’ve frequently put The Cowboy Junkies, The Trinity Sessions on the iPod rotation. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is another late night Hank Williams song of loss and despair. But there is an affirmation to it, as there is in so many of them, an acknowledgment that there are things worth having and living for. Something worth having is worth grieving over at its loss, late at night in the dark, with the music whispered in your ear by a sweet voice from the Great Beyond.

Joe Malik’s Dogs

Illuminatus by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, is a monster of a book, published as a trilogy and cut down from an even more gargantuan original manuscript. It is, in fact, much too big an edifice for me to describe here, and I shan’t. I may go at it at bits and pieces some other time.

Robert Anton Wilson, who died in January of last year, is also a complex and complicated subject, a man seriously wired into a particular zeitgeist that is quite recognizable to those interested in it: New Age philosophy, politics, sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll, science fiction and several of the attendant pseudo-sciences. Again, too big a subject for the moment.

But Ben and I went to see him once, and that’s a tale to tell.

First off, let me note that I never do this: just show up on the doorstep of some author or celebrity. I mean, it’s rude, no matter how politely you do it. It’s an imposition. It’s all manner of things you shouldn’t do. So I blame Ben. Well, not really, but it sounds better to put it that way.

Wilson, as nearly as I can tell, was used to having things like that happen, although he hadn’t yet the rock star that Illuminatus was going to make him. At the time, only a few months after Illuminatus had been published, he was still living only a few blocks away from U.C. Berkeley, and he was a nexus of one of those intellectual zeitgeist thingees. In fact, he hosted a regular salon, a weekly meeting of Berkeley intellectuals and intellectual wannabes. So Wilson invited Ben and me to the next gathering, which was very kind and gracious of him, see above note about rudeness. He also sold me a copy of Principia Discordia, the photocopied bible of the Discordian Movement, mentioned prominently in Illuminatus. These days, it’s all over the web, but thirty years ago it was pretty rare. I had more than one friend over the years ask for copies of my copy. But, of course, I’d have bought it even if it were crap, again, see the above note about rudeness and consider my wish for atonement.

We did chat with Wilson a bit before we left. We did come back later to his gathering, and that was also much fun, sufficiently so that I became a regular for a while.

Ben and I make a pretty good team. He’s very extroverted, while I’m mildly introverted. He draws people out; I remember what they say. When Ben and I went to Wilson’s gathering we had a fine old time. When we left, Wilson walked us to the door and said, “Loved your act, fellas.” Which is pretty cool.

Then there’s the other thing.

That first conversation often drifted over to things in Illuminatus and I mentioned The Language and Music of the Wolves which is stipulated as one of the central characters, Joe Malik’s favorite records. A while back, in an essay about WRPI, I wrote a little about the grief that said record had caused at the station, owing to its weirdness. It’s a recording of wolf howls in the wild, and not to everyone’s taste, especially not people who wanted their radios to emit music, not wolf howls. But I’d bought a copy (from the bargain bin, of course) and I’d grown to like it a lot, which is why I spoke of it.

“Ah,” said Wilson. “You’ve found Joe Malik’s dogs.”

See, one of the minor mysteries in Illuminatus is “what happened to Joe Malik’s dogs.” His neighbors were always complaining about his dogs, which were against the rules in his apartment building, but no one ever saw them, and, when Malik disappears, the police never find his dogs, either.

Well, of course, there were no dogs, just wolf howls on a record. I hadn’t made the connection, actually, partly because that wasn’t a mystery that I cared about. Or maybe my subconscious had solved the mystery and didn’t bother to tell me. But it did tell Wilson.

I’ve done this more often than you’d think. I once made an innocuous remark to another author that convinced him that I knew of a pseudonym he was writing under, so he proceeded to tell me all about it. I never told him that I had no prior knowledge of the matter, because, well, magicians never explain their tricks, and that’s one of mine.

The Indian Music Show

I've heard it said that everything in the 60s can be traced back to Kennedy, Dylan, or the Beatles. Okay, it was me who said it, and I agree that it isn't true or fair, except insofar as it is.

Take Ravi Shankar. He was the most acclaimed musician of the sitar of his generation, and his fame reached beyond India even before his Beatles-linked fame. Put it another way: without the celebrity from his connection to George Harrison and popular music, Shankar might still have recorded his collaboration with Yehudi Menuhin, but the two musicians might have been of equal fame, or Menuhin might even have been the more famous of the two. As things actually transpired, it's safe to assume that the vast majority of those who purchased recordings of the collaboration did so because of Shankar.

By the time I worked at WRPI, there was a wealth of Indian music available on record, but, of course, Shakar was getting most of the progressive radio airplay. I have no specific recollection of the events leading up to the decision by Bruce Barnett and myself to start an Indian Music show on WRPI, but I vaguely recall that it had to do with us bitching about how we preferred the sarod to the sitar, and Ali Akbar Khan to Ravi Shankar. Then we probably compared notes on which of the available Indian music recordings we had scored in the bargain bins over the years, and we realized we had enough to do a one hour show every Sunday.

Purnima Jha
Indian Kathak Dance

I also expect that this happened over the summer; given the nature of volunteer college radio, you can do almost anything during the summer. There aren't enough people around to keep a full programming slate, and who's going to stop you, anyway?

Sundays were WRPIs "block programming" day. Many college stations (and non-profit stations of all stripes) resort to block programming, x amount of time devoted to a particular type of music, or some non-musical format, followed by a complete break and into some entirely different deal. WRPI was something of an anomaly, as was the progressive music format generally, although it has morphed into the "alternative" format that still exists on many college campuses. (WRPI currently seems to be entirely block programmed, however).

There is a minor paradox that what was, by far, WRPI's most popular show in the late 60s, "Request Line Oldies" was in the block programming ghetto. RLO was so popular that at least one local radio station (the dj, it must be admitted, was a WRPI alumnus) simply listened to the RLO programming and ran the same songs with a little delay. But, of course, "Hey, Baby, They're Playin' Our Song," (the show's theme song) is bound to get an audience.

Another block show of note was the folk music show, albeit not so much the version that existed in my first years at RPI, "Folk Fest," which tended toward performers like Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, which is to say, singer-songwriters who had started in the folk tradition. I once heard Merle Travis perform, and he told the story of being asked by a record label to write and record an album of folk songs. He said that he explained to them that they were sorta asking him to build antiques, but, hey, money is money, and he wrote "Sixteen Tons," and "Dark as a Dungeon," for it.

So the real folkies in the area (and upstate New York has a Lot of Real Folkies), kept carping, until finally, "Mostly Folk," with Jackie Alper, a majorly old-line folkie, took the helm. From there on out, it was pretty hard core folk music on display. (Jackie died last September, having been ill for a long time, but the show is still on the air).

Once Barnett and I started the Indian Music show, we had an excuse to really go hog wild, and both of us accumulated records like the vinyl junkies we were. Also, once the show lit up on the promo radar, we started getting promotional copies of every new Indian Music record released in the U.S. We also contacted (I expect that Bruce was the guy with the initiative on this one) Nonesuch Records, which supplied us with practically every one of its Explorer Series records.

Some of the Explorer Series were Indian music; many were not. So periodically, we'd slip some Egyptian or Balinese music into the mix. One show I did (Bruce was out that Sunday), just traced the sarod/oud/lute/guitar from India to England, by way of Northern Africa (side trip to Greece and the Balkans, however). Placed in geographic context, the cultural diffusion of music is pretty obvious, or at least it was to my ear. Eventually, the show became what would not be called a "World Music" show, but that was toward the end of my time at RPI, and overlapped the time I was banned from the station (a story I'll probably never tell, BTW).

The biggest obstacle we had was getting the audience to accept Indian vocal music. The quartertone warbles that are a key feature of much of it really grate on many western ears, so I spent a significant amount of time on some shows just trying to convince somebody on the phone to give it a chance, really, it can grow on you. Several people who heard me on these type calls remarked on how diplomatic I was being, an indication perhaps of both how much I wanted people to hear and accept the music, and how great my reputation for being, shall we say, less than diplomatic on other occasions.

It turned out that there was a sizable community of Indian immigrants in New York's capitol district, and we wound up meeting a number of them. Basically, they were asking that we play some contemporary music, which translates to movie music, it turned out. So Bruce and I diligently went out and collected a bunch of records and played them on one of the shows. I'm not sure what your opinion is about Bollywood musicals, but let me tell you, the music in them has greatly improved over the last 35 years. I was barely able to listen to our own show that day, though I imagine that, had I taken my own advice and given it more of a chance, well, maybe.

I was also found every one of the Indian nationals that I met to be just impressive, smart, personable, well-educated, the works. I eventually decided (perhaps correctly) that with half a billion people to choose from, we were getting the cream of the crop, and that was bound to be impressive.

In at least one case, Madam Chari, the result was nearly superhuman, or at least so said Bruce. This would be a woman who was a neurosurgeon and concert level sitar player that Bruce raved about for weeks after meeting her. Obviously, however, that would be his tale to tell and not mine. All I can say is that these stories are not always about me.

Playing the Changes

In the late ‘50s into the ‘60s, my Dad operated a small radio/TV repair business. Sometimes it was on the side, occasionally it was his main occupation. He eventually gave it up, as color television and general transistorization shrank the ecological niche. The capital expense of color television repair equipment was too high, and transistor circuit board electronics were too hard to repair and cheap enough to just replace.

During this time he wound up in possession of all sorts of odds and ends. It happens pretty often once people know that you repair things; they just give you stuff, hoping that you can repair it easily enough to make it worth your while, and they’re just glad to get rid of it. You should see my workshop.

One thing that wound up in my Dad’s basement workshop was an old jukebox, designed to play 78s. It no longer worked and Dad gave it to me to take apart, because I liked taking things apart to see how they worked. I still do; it’s just getting harder and harder to figure out how they work, which is the source of my own reply to Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from something that has no business working in the first place.

The old jukebox had an electromechanical system that selected the record to be played: a bunch of push buttons that activated a servo that pushed the selected record out of a rack. Beneath the record was a spindle and turntable that pushed up to move the record off its carrier, up to the needle arm, which stayed at the one height.

Later 45 rpm record jukeboxes had a turntable that stayed at a constant height and the records were selected from a set of 45s that were in a sort of torus that rotated to bring the selection to the top. A mechanical arm then grabbed the correct record, pulled it from its position, then swung around to place the record on the turntable.

In both cases, the jukeboxes had a sort of mechanized ritual aspect to them: put in your coin, then watch the robotic sequence of actions that culminated in music. In some ways, the ritual is as much a part of the nostalgia as the music itself. Also, because of the delay, different songs never encroached upon one another.

The AM radio experience of the 1950s had a similar feel to the jukeboxs, with the added feature of the Disk Jockey persona, a hyperkinetic voice introducing records, selling product, and generally trying to generate a party atmosphere while sequestered into a tiny room with artificial lights. Often they’d talk right through the intro to the song, stopping only when the lyrics began. Memory tells me that it was a rare event to play songs back to back. That was usually reserved for phone-in “contests” of “Choose your Favorite Song and Win a Free Pen and Pencil Set,” or whatever.

When I got to RPI in the fall of 1968, WRPI-FM had just switched over to the “Progressive Rock” format, following the lead of some ground-breaking stations in NY, Boston, and Philadelphia. The next spring they boosted their power and coverage and became the most popular FM station in the Albany/Schenectady/Troy area.

I didn’t join WRPI until the spring of my Senior year, and I also staying in Troy during the summer between my undergraduate and graduate years at RPI. But I’d converted to the WRPI way of hearing music much earlier, and part of that was appreciating the segues.

A good deal of the joy of Progressive Radio was the mix, not just the music that was being played, but how it fit into the context of the other music that was being played. You can trace it back to the “party stack,” a set of 45s that people would bring to parties for dance music, and hit compilation records, often for a similar purpose. Then you had “Mood Music” which is to say, Music to Seduce Your Girlfriend By. That often had a lot of strings or Johnny Mathis, or Frank Sinatra.

Progressive Radio expanded the vision of the mix, and the segue, the seamless connection of one song to the other was the unit element. The typical radio setup was twin turntables and a mixing board, making it easy to do a cross-fade. We also had various additional sources like cassettes for station breaks, EBS and PSAs, and, for commercial stations, the commercials themselves. At WRPI, we used an eight-track player for pre-records, though there was also a couple of giant reel-to-reel tape decks that were also good for echo effects, or for playing practical jokes by getting a half second delay into the announcers headphones that is absolutely guaranteed to make it impossible to speak coherently.

There was a more-or-less standard evolution of DJ experience at WRPI. Someone would join the station with a particular set of musical tastes, maybe they liked folk, or jazz, or acid rock, and they’d lean toward that set of tastes initially. For that reason, there was a list of “format songs” categorized according to type, with a set sequence of types. You could choose any song from a group during the sequence, but you couldn’t vary the sequence much, though once each sequence you could play whatever you liked. I pushed the envelop on that pretty quickly by playing entire album sides (hey, “The Land of Grey and Pink” by Caravan is a single cut, even if it’s over 20 minutes long), and almost got into trouble for it.

By the time I got there, the “WRPI format” list was something like an inch thick of computer printout. You could literally go for days following the format and never play the same song twice. Some guys did play the same songs every show they had, but it was rare for someone to be on more than once a week, and the next guy would not have the same favorites. In fact, it was considered a gaffe to play something that the previous announcer had played. In many ways, it was the anti-thesis of the radio jukebox.

That, of course, polarized the audience (and our student listeners). Some were very happy with WRPI, and some just wanted a big campus jukebox, maybe one filled with Progressive Rock, but a jukebox catering to student tastes (and requests) nonetheless.

Requests was one of the real issues, in fact. One of the most popular WRPI shows for many years was “Request Line Oldies” on Sunday night (Sunday was block programmed with special shows, the only day in the week departing from the Progressive format). But at other times, the DJs didn’t want to hear from requests.

They had a point. Nobody was getting paid; it was a student volunteer organization. So what did we announcers get out of it? Fame? We were faceless, and many of us used “on-air” pseudonyms (I just used my initials). Groupies? Yeah, right. Something swell to put on our resumes? Maybe for a few guys, mostly the techies. The sound of our own voices? Sometimes there were shows where the music was non-stop for an entire hour, right up to the station break, followed by a quick recitation of the playlist of the past hour, then back to another hour of solid music. It was public speaking for shy introverts.

No, most of us were there because we loved music, and loved to program the shows. Substituting someone else’s tastes turned it into just another unpaid job. Besides, if you’ve spent an entire week thinking about what you’re going to play, setting up a flow and a mood, you’re absolutely not going to suddenly break that flow by inserting Lighthouse, no matter how much you like Lighthouse.

Still, I did play a request from time to time, usually refraining from mentioning that it was a request, because all you had to do was say the word “request” and you’d spend the rest of the show on the phone dealing with the flood. WRPI had a lot of listeners.

I should also mention that there was one guy, John Robinson, (coincidentally a member of the Albany Science Fiction Club that I was part of at the time), who had an uncanny knack for calling me to request a cut that I had on my list for the night, often only one or two down. John had my number, I guess, in more ways than one.

Anyway, getting back to the DJ evolution. After first getting their “fave raves” out of their systems, getting tired of playing the same things over and over, the next step was to branch out or go deeper. The guys who started on Dylan would get to Van Ronk, or Buffy St. Marie, then whoops! Folkways and Rounder were filling their stack. The jazz guys would go from Brubeck to Miles, then to Coltrane and Coleman. And so forth. Even so, the format was there to keep them in line, more or less.

In the evenings and nighttime, though, the announcers were no longer subject to the format. Those were “prime time” (which extended to 2 A.M.), where the most experienced announcers were slotted. And during the “Great Music Drought” of the early 1970s, when rock hit a dry spell, some of the evening guys went over entirely to something else, most often jazz, to the further exasperation of the audience.

But after the overt musical glitches worked themselves through a DJs tastes, most of us began to work the flow itself, playing music that blended into a particular mood or theme. Then came the sort of one-upsmanship that enjoyed putting two things together in a way that both surprised and satisfied, like rubbing Neal Diamond up against Firesign Theater, or “Let It All Hang Out” into Frazier and Debolt. Sometimes the idea was to jolt the listener a bit, which could be as simple as hard following soft, or loud following quiet. I never did manage to find a place for the most jarring segue I ever heard, though. That was an accidental juxtaposition that came on a Sunday, between Barnett’s and my Indian Music block, and the following blues show. Soft Carnatic flute music flows into John Lee Hooker with all the grace of The Titanic into the iceberg.

The group dynamic that developed was competitive, with a little taste of messianic snobbery thrown it. “Here’s the good stuff,” we’d say, “And by the way, didn’t I just do a really good show?” The goal was to get people to call in, not to ask for you to play something they already liked, but to find out what the hell it was that you just played. Or to call and tell you how much they enjoyed what you were doing. Even better if it was your peers, though we know what happens when the comic starts getting laughs only from the band. In any case, the general consensus was that I was very good at whatever it was that we were doing.

Over the years, I’ve made mix tapes and more recently CDs. I’ve also listened to other people’s mix tapes, and some are good, but most are just ordinary, because that’s what ordinary is, isn’t it?

More recently, we have the phenomenon of the iPod and related devices, but I think the real advance there is the “shuffle,” which lets the machine surprise you. Most recently, I’ve loaded mine with albums by T-Bone Burnett, Mark Knopfler, Blossom Dearie, The Clash, African folk, African pop, The Low Millions, Cyndi Lauper, Jack Teagarden, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, The Cranberries, Elvis Costello, Javanese Gamelan, INXS, Diana Krall, Kaki King, The Crystal Method, Chris Issak, Suzanne Vega, The Don Redman Orchestra, and Artie Shaw. I’m paying particular attention to the segues that the shuffle provides.

I do wish it had a cross-fade function though. Sometimes the wait between songs just drives me crazy.

Café Lena and Fox Hollow

One bright afternoon at RPI, my friend Tom came in and said, “Utah Phillips is playing at Café Lena tonight. Want to go?”

“Okay,” I argued, and off we went. Thank God Café Lena wasn’t in Denver.

Café Lena was in Saratoga, NY, only about 30 miles up the Adirondack Northway (I-87) from Troy. Drive time was about 45 minutes, and the Utah Phillips show was the first of many. It wasn’t the only folk venue around, but it was the most venerable, and I went back a lot.

That first concert would have been during my junior year, 1970-71. In the summer of ’71 I also attended the Fox Hollow Folk Festival near Petersburg, NY. That one is easy to date, because it was the last Fox Hollow before the death of its founder, Bob “Fiddler” Beers, in 1972. I went to Fox Hollow until I left the East Coast, in 1975. The next year, 1972 was the Year of the Northern Lights, visible during the clear mountain nights that year. In 1974, Nixon resigned during the festival and you have never seen such a happy bunch of folkies.

I’m not always sure in which venue I saw which performers; often it was probably both. So I’ll just give the usual list of those who come to mind:

Utah Phillips, Dave van Ronk, Michael Cooney, David Bromberg, Jean Ritchie, Gordon Bok, Leon Redbone, Patrick Sky, Putnam String County Band, Bill Spence, Bottle Hill, Billy Vanaver, Alan Stowell, Jim Ringer, Mary McCaslin, John Roberts and Tony Barrand, Sarah Grey, Jean Redpath, The Boys of the Lough, Bill Staines, Horald Griffiths, Jim Kweskin…

You know, I’d probably be able to get a better list if I had the complete listing of Rounder and Folkways Records circa 1974. There doesn’t seem to be a performers list of Fox Hollow anywhere on the Web, and the Café Lena list is just that, a list, with no dates attached.

I do remember a few acts that were unquestionably specific to Fox Hollow, like Alhaji Bai Konte, a Gambian musician, who played the Kora. On the other hand, I have specific Café Lena memories of Horrald Griffiths and Dave van Ronk. Many of the others, like Michael Cooney, I saw in both places. And there are the acts that I remember, but the names are lost to memory, like the high school steel drum band, and the bagpipers, and man, did the team up between those two wake the dead.

There was some tension at the time between the “virtuosos” and the “folksy” type musicians, one that had some repercussions in the management of Fox Hollow around that time. This was not entirely unlike the format fracas at WRPI that also happened around that time. One of the Lena waitresses, Mary, was a bit perturbed at the overabundance of string band and fiddle players at Fox Hollow in 1972, but I was pretty firmly in the musicology camp. Fortunately, there were a lot of performers who were both.

Then too, there was all the politics. Utah Phillips can make the Wobblies sound fun, which is more than the Wobblies can do, and it’s sometimes a little creepy to hear middle class computer programmers singing about Joe Hill. Still, though I was never a leftist, except in the classical sense of not being in favor of hereditary aristocracies, in the early 1970s it wasn’t hard to find common ground with people who thought that ordinary people were getting screwed. Truth to tell, it’s pretty easy to support that opinion at any time and any place.

I have a number of treasures that came out of that period and those venues. One is the appreciation of folk music in the global sense. For a time at least, Fox Hollow was a confluence of world folk musicology, with everything from Balkan vocal groups to African M’bira to French Canadian accordion dance troupes. When Barnett and I branched out from the Indian music show on WRPI to a World Music exploration, the Upstate New York folk music scene was doubtless a major catalyst.

A slightly more tangible result came from the fact that a good bit of the sound technician staff at Fox Hollow came from WRPI engineering. Through a tangled web of acquaintance, that is how I happen to be in possession of a tape dub of a singular performance, Billy Vanaver backed by Alan Stowell on “Mad Tom of Bedlam.” It’s quite extraordinary, and maybe someday I’ll get permission to upload it. Until then, you’re just going to have to envy me my good fortune.