Days with Pumpkinhead and days in Ireland

The main act that night at Moran’s was a band called Pumpkinhead, which was comprised of two couples, Sandi Miller and Rick Epping, and Thom and Kathy Moore, who were all living near Sligo. They were unbelievable, fantastic folk musicians. And anyway, first I got up and did my couple of tunes. Kevin Coneff had explained that they were not going to pay me for singing, but I could have a free tab at the bar. I think that night I drank 16 pints of Guinness. Without getting drunk.

But anyway, as I said, I played Cuckoo Bird and something else. I wasn’t nervous because I thought, “this is Ireland. They play Irish music here. What do they know about American music?” And it wasn’t until much later, driving around the country, that I turned on the radio and realized every radio station in Ireland played country western music. I am glad I didn’t know that before my little ‘gig’. Anyway, Pumpkinhead got on and they had a guest fiddler, and he looked so familiar to me. And at halftime I went up to chat. His name was Marty Somberg, and we figured out we had both been in Santa Cruz at the same time, and I had seen him play on the streets with the Bonny Doon String Band.

Marty introduced me to the rest of the band. Turned out Rick and Sandi were friends of friends too. Rick was a brilliant harmonic player, who has had a long-storied music career, and after a long sojourn back in America, now lives with his wife Joan near Sligo again. Thom Moore was a gregarious, philosophical guy, and a great songwriter. He was fluent in Russian, having studied it in University of California Los Angeles. Later, during a lull in his music career, he became one of the nuclear weapons inspectors for the U.S. in the Soviet Union. Anyway, after that he resumed his music career with a band called Midnight Well. That band included a wonderful singer, Janie Cribs, and genius guitarist, Gerry O’Beirne. They came over to L.A. for a while, and later went back to Ireland, where Thom became very well known for his songs and singing. Anyway, that night Thom Moore said, “we live near Sligo, you’ll come visit us. My daughter might be away at school so we’d have a room to put you up.”

I thanked him for the offer and I remember turning around and as I walked away thinking, “I will never do that because I have just used up all the chutzpah I possess by singing on the stage in this place. By God, I wish I was the kind of person who could do that, but I am not.” Anyway, I think that night or I met this charming Swedish guy named Orn, who spoke English with a slight Texas accent. I asked where he got that accent and he said it was because he’d learned English from watching Westerns on TV, partner.

I told him I was going exploring in the west of Ireland in my van. And he said, I’ll go with you. He was an excellent travelling companion. He’d say things like, before taking a nap in the back van, “OK, partner, wake me when I’m thirsty.” We had a lot of fun, but at a certain point he had to head back to Sweden. At that point I was near Sligo, but still had no intention of taking Thom up on his offer of a visit. I had gone to Donegal by myself, which was beautiful but lonely and I was heading down the coast, near Sligo town, as night fell. I saw a sign for Camping, and turned down a lane heading toward the ocean. Not finding anything but an empty parking lot, I crawled in the back and went to sleep.

And in the morning, I woke up to a grand vista – it was, I later found out, a famous stretch of beach called the Rosses. There were no people around, nothing. So I took a walk on the beach, came back, tried to start my car. I turned the key, and nothing happened. Now, I was familiar with the Volkswagens. When the batteries were low, they went click, click, click. This was something different.

So, what was I going to do? I thought, I’ve got to go hitchhike somewhere for help, and then I’m walking the quarter mile back to the road. Mind you I hadn’t heard a car all night. I’m finally just standing out there on the empty road, and I remembered Thom Moore’s offer. Just then a car came down the road so I stuck my thumb out. He pulled up, rolled down his window and I asked, “do you by any chance know a man named Thom Moore?”. ”Oh, sure, I know him well. Jump in, I’ll take you along to his place.” And he took me to Thom Moore’s house, which he said was close, but wasn’t. I never would’ve found it in a thousand years.

I got to Thom’s house, knocked on the door,  and he answered, not in the least bit surprised to see me, and he said, “oh, good, you’re here. My daughter’s away at school. You can have her room. Now there is a little mouse that’s lost in there. Sometimes he’ll run over your face, but it’s a pet mouse, so don’t worry about it.” I  said great, but then explained my situation and said, that I had to get a mechanic. And Thom said, “Oh no, tonight we’re going to go visit Joe O’Dowd, a great fiddle player.” That night we all went to Joe O’ Dowd’s house. It was a thatched cabin. It was the most tidy, little beautiful Irish thing you could ever see. We went in and Joe played music for us. He was a wonderfully kind fellow, and a genius traditional Irish fiddler. And it turns out that he was also well acquainted with an American guy I hadn’t met yet, Bill Jackson, who would become the greatest friend and music mentor of my life. And Bill knew all these folks. And I got to hear this beguiling mystical entrancing Irish music, which was just mind blowing.

Joe had a number of children, one of whom I’m in still in touch with, through Rick Epping. Rick and Seamie O’Dowd play together with Kathy Jordan in a band called The Unwanted. Seamie is a master guitarist, grand fiddler and all-around musical wizard and plays with all the famous guys in Ireland. And the next day it was, “we’re going to go to a session tonight.” And then the next night I was visiting Rick Epping and Sandi, who were living in this cozy little cottage in the woods, and it was just incredible. And they helped me get a mechanic who would drive me out. When we got to my van he said, “okay, just get in and turn your key. I want to see what happens.”

And when I did, the car just started up. Now I was there another month and a half, driving all around Ireland, and that van never even coughed once. Never missed a beat. At one point I even drove through a flooded river. It never stalled once, just that was it. I went back, said goodbye. And Marty Somberg, who was still staying with them, asked if I’d mind giving him a ride to Shannon Airport. And could we make one stop on the way. So off we went and we made our stop, which was in Peterwell, at an event that was to be a farewell and homage to the acclaimed local musician Joe Cooley.

Days with Joe Cooley

Joe Cooley had been one of the great, early Irish button accordion players. Like many in those times, he had gone to America to make a living. First he was in New York where he soon became central to the New York Irish music scene. And then he came to San Francisco where he became a beloved central inspirational figure in that resurgent Irish music scene. And he had gotten cancer, and had come home to die. And so this night in Peterswell was to be a farewell to Joe. It was being filmed for Irish television by Tony McMahon, an accordion protege of Joe’s, and a TV producer and presenter. The place was full of many of the greatest Irish traditional musicians in the West of Ireland, who had come to pay their respects to Joe. Here is a clip of that night’s music:

and here’s another longer piece about Cooley, also made by Tony McMahon:

Marty and I were welcomed with open arms, being from California. Then Tony McMahon, who was the producer of this program, and very friendly, came up to us and said, “Lads, now would you mind waiting in the other room? Because we’re trying to feature the local color and it wouldn’t do to have a couple of hairy Americans standing in the scene.”

And we said, oh, no problem. We went back into the other room where there were two or three Irish sessions with some of the best musicians in Ireland. For years after that, on nearly every album of Irish music I’d buy, there’d be a photo, and I’d recognize people from that night and that session. And then when the whole evening was over, Joe’s sister Eileen and brother Jack invited us back to Jack’s place. Went back there and laughed and talked and drank through the night, and Marty played his fiddle. He was a very good fiddle player, and Eileen showed us the stick dance, and they told stories until dawn, and then Jack went off to milk the cow. He was this just quintessential Irish guy with piercing blue eye, white hair, and not a wrinkle on his face. He was the older brother. We were a bit worried about him and asked if he was going to be okay after all this staying up all night? And Eileen said, sure he does this three nights a week.

The journey to learning to play Irish music

Anyway, after that, my earthly trajectory shifted, and I knew I had to learn to play Irish music. The next day I asked somebody where I could buy one of those bodhrans. And he told me about somebody, and I found my way to this place, and I bought a bodhran. Then I went to Dublin where I stayed with a student I met at Trinity College. I went to these parties with young people my own age and again, my mind was blown. They were similar to parties back at U.C. Santa Cruz where young people got together and drank more than they should have. But in Ireland, there was a major difference. They got together, they not only drank, but they all sang traditional songs, and they all knew all the words to all the songs. I was just blown away by the culture; the richness of the whole thing. In Dublin, I went to as many music sessions in pubs as I could find, absorbing all I could.

After six months or so I came home. The day after I got back to L.A. I went into McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. I was standing there looking at banjos, and there was a guy standing next to me. He asked what kind of music I liked. And I said I was really fascinated by Irish music. He said he played Irish music on the five-string banjo. His name was Igal Zan, and I am still in touch with him. He now lives in Albuquerque and plays Irish music on the banjo and fiddle. Anyway, Igal said he was going to a party where there’d be Irish music and he asked if I wanted to come. Of course I went to this party and brought my bodhran. I met folks there that have become lifelong friends. Great guitar and banjo player Chris Cooper and the other  members of the True and Trembling String Band were there, and that’s where I met Bill Jackson who, in addition to being a fantastic banjo player, played beautiful Irish fiddle. He couldn’t have been friendlier and more encouraging. He said he usually had weekly music sessions and invited me to come along. So I went and brought my bodhran along. About a month later I saw an ad in the paper for an ‘old banjo’ for a hundred dollars. It turned out to be a beautiful Orpheum four string tenor banjo. I called Bill and asked him what four string banjos were good for. He told me that you play Irish music on them, and I should buy it. Which I did. I kept going to Bill’s sessions and over the next year he taught me piles of his tunes. I still have that banjo. Once, when I was deep into learning the fiddle, I sold the Orpheum banjo, and when Bill found out, he bought it back from the man I sold it to, and gave it back to me, telling me I could never sell it because it belonged to him. I was just the custodian. One of the many things I learned from Bill was that the music doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the culture. The soul of the people. We are just the custodians and we are meant to take care of it as best we can

Days with The Chieftains 

Another kind of magical event occurred when Bill and I went to see The Chieftains on their first performance in Los Angeles. It was an incredible show, and afterwards Bill and I went to Molly Malone’s pub in downtown L.A. for a pint. As we ordered, there was a commotion at the door, and in walked The Chieftains. The bartender then told us that the drinks were on the house as this was a private party hosted by The Chieftains’ record company. We pinched ourselves to make sure we weren’t dreaming, and spent the evening drinking and talking with Sean Keane, Paddy Moloney, Derek Bell, Peadar Mercier, Martin Fay and Sean Potts. They were warm and encouraging, and gave me a feeling like I was “accepted in the club”.

Bill  kept traveling to Ireland, and over the next few years he sponsored Irish musicians to tour the US. Through Bill I met Vincent Griffin, an All-Ireland champion fiddler from East Galway. I got to meet the Boys of the Lough when they met Vincent, with whom they later recorded. And I met Joe and Antionette McKenna, an Uilleann pipes and harp duo. Joe was the first real Irish piper I saw in the flesh, and it took my breath away. We also made trips to the San Diego Folk Festival, where I heard Mike Seeger, legendary folklorist and multi-instrumentalist, and Louis “Pitou” Boudreault, the amazing Quebecois fiddler.

In those days I lived in an office building in downtown Santa Monica where a lot of marginal, deeply intriguing people also lived. It was a rundown semi- shabby place, which had a slightly sleazy Irish pub on the first floor, where very occasionally we’d play music. I was living in this office building and acquiring instruments as I could and learning to play them as well as I could manage. Which for the first year was rather well. My father was the story editor for a TV show called “The 6 Million Dollar Man,” and he arranged for me to write a script, which not only paid me a lot of money, but enabled me to collect unemployment insurance for a year at the highest rate, as an unemployed Hollywood writer. I could afford the $60 a month rent, food, and the instruments.

I told other people about this building, and two guys rented the room opposite me. One of them was Richard Toomey, and the other was Mike Sharp, and both were fiddlers. Mike Sharp played old time music. Richard played Irish music. I would listen to them playing the fiddle, and they were both good fiddle players. And I would just long to play like those two, and like Bill.

I got a fiddle and started to try and learn these tunes I was hearing across the hall. And I’d try and put the tunes I’d learned from Bill onto the fiddle. But it seemed I didn’t learn like most people. Most  of the beginning fiddlers I met learned the bowing and the ornamentation in a thoughtful deliberate way. I just sort of dove in and played by feel. Although a weird side note was that years later, after we’d all moved out of that office building, Richard and I were playing together on a stage in San Francisco, and somebody came up to us and said, God, it was weird watching you guys play together because your bows just went in such opposite directions except on these couple of tunes where you were absolutely in sync. I said, what tunes were those? Well, it was the Kesh Jig and a couple of others which were all the tunes Richard was playing when he lived across from the hall from me. Another remarkable thing about Richard was that he was teaching himself to be a luthier, partly by making banjos.

Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, WA

Now the doors in our office building were big and heavy and made of old walnut. One afternoon I came back and saw Richard staring at his door. He said, “You know I think I could get maybe six or eight banjos out of that door.” And I said, “if you do, I want one.” And next time I came back the door was gone, replaced by a cheap wooden hollow core door. And I still have the banjo I got from Richard, which he made out of that door. It’s the banjo that I used to win the banjo contest at the first Festival of American Fiddle Tunes that I attended in 1977 (this festival, started in Port Townsend, Washington, brought tradition bearers from all kinds of fiddling cultures across America to spend a week sharing music and folklore with eager young musicians who would have no other way to be exposed to such things. And I was one of those eager youngsters).

I won that contest by playing “Skillet Good and Greasy,” then segueing into “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on the frailed fretless banjo. A moment from that contest shows that I was making progress on my vow to myself, made in Ireland, to be more spontaneous. The MC of the contest was the marvelous Sandy Bradley, who later hosted the brilliant radio show called Sandy’s Potluck in Seattle with the grand musicians and showmen and dear musical pals, the Canote twins. Sandy was witty, attractive, brilliant and bold. Intimidating, in short. As she introduced me, she commented, looking at me and the judges, that it was interesting that all these banjo players sported big mustaches. Then she wondered aloud if the mustaches were real. I said, “Only one way to find out,”, and smiled at her. She leaned over and kissed me, then in an aside to the audience said, “It’s fake!” They laughed, and I quickly responded, “But it worked.” Hilarity ensued. The judges were Jerry Gallagher, Jerry Mitchell and another person I sadly cannot remember, but I owe them much, because the prize for winning was to return the following year as a tutor. And I’ve been a part of that Festival every year since then, first as a tutor, then when Warren Argo took over running the festival, he asked me to be the “tutor czar” and I got to help organize and develop the tutorial program as it grew over the years .Each year has provided me ever greater musical inspiration, and a legion of the best kind of friends anyone could ask for as well as mentors, teachers, friends and guiding lights. The list of musicians who kept the fires of my imagination burning and shaped my musical sensibilities  beggars my memory, but here is a sample: Old Time players Allan Jabbour, JP Fraley, James Bryan, Bruce Molsky, Armin Barnett, The Horseflies and Cajun players Denis McGee, Dewey Balfa, Marc Savoy,and French Canadian players Gilles Losier, Liette Remon, Yvon Mimeault, Stephanie Lepine, Davi Simard, André Alain, Raynald Oulette, André Bouchard, Adelard Thomasin, Normand Miron, André Marchand, Lisa Ornstein, Laurie Rivin and Irish players Dale Russ, Liz Carroll, John Carty, Tommy Peoples, the Kane sisters, and Cape Breton players Buddy MacMasters, Barbara McDonald Magone, Carl Mackenzie, Wendy MacIsaacs, Jerry Holland and Basque players Joseba Tapia, David Romtvedt and Arkaitz Miner, and New England Contra Dance players Pete Sutherland, Becky Tracy, Rodney Miller, Kerry Elkin , and many more whose names will come to me tonight at 2 am.

Back to Santa Monica

Anyway, back to my office building About a year after returning from Ireland, I began to read a book called “The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries,” written by a named W.Y. Evans-Wentz, who later became well known as the first American westerner to become a friend of the then Dalai Lama and make a translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But the book I was reading was his graduate thesis when he was attending Stanford University. This was in the early 1900s when Stanford still had a Department of Occult Studies.

The thesis of his doctorate was an exploration of popular belief in fairy lore, and his process was to take evidence by travelling to all the Celtic countries and looking for people who were reputable and who had personal experiences of the fairy world. The book did not contain fairy tales, but rather dependable people’s first hand experiences with fairies and other supernatural entities.

Checking the table of contents, I saw that there was a chapter on fairy music. I had to force myself not to read that chapter first, but I finally got to the fairy music page and as I started reading, the hair stood up on my back of my neck and my arms. Because the place in Ireland most famous for the experience of fairy music was the place, the exact place, where my car had refused to start: the Rosses, near Sligo.

When people ask me how I got into Irish music? I always answer, only slightly joking, that I was kidnapped by the fairies. But something weird did happen there, and similar things which have felt to me to be beyond coincidence have continued to happen for me in my musical life. The way I’ve always understood them was that they were signposts which told me I was doing the thing I was meant to do.

While I was living in the office building, I found out that my Mother’s Sister had been secretly married to her best friend Marvin, and that I had a musical cousin about whom I knew nothing. I was introduced to Mickie Zekley at his parents’ house and he was about the most enthusiastic folk musician I had ever met. He played every string instrument including harp, flute, and he maniacally pulled me into a 10×10 room to demonstrate his new found love – Scottish bagpipes. My ears rang, and at that moment I would not have believed that within a year, I would have a set of pipes myself, and would have begun learning to play them. Mickie was a musical force of nature, and I later met, and was slightly intimidated by the rest of his musical tribe, The Golden Toad. People such as Bob Thomas, master piper, William Gilkerson, (who wrote the book The Scrimshander), and his wife Keirstin, Ernie and Debbie Fischbach, Don Brown, Chris Carnes, flamenco guitarist, Sol Feldthouse – it seemed that between them all they had been everywhere and learned everything about passionate. soulful world musics. A few years after that I began to attend the music camp Mickie started at the Mendocino Woodlands, which he named after his music shop, Lark in the Morning. Beginning in 1980, attending Lark has been a yearly ritual which drew me further and further into all sorts of magical nooks and crannies of world music and sealed my fate as a bagpipe addict.

While I was still living in the office building, Bill and I had started playing with the Cluricaun Ceili Band – Don Clark, vocals and guitar, Michelle De Lattre, Vocals and concertina, Silvia Snyder ( later, Woods ) harp, Eve Zanni, vocals, and Bill and I. We played some fun gigs, and I remember playing with them very fondly.One very fun thing we did was provide incidental music for a small production of Brendan Behan’s play, The Hostage, which was organized and directed by a young Jamie Cromwell, who’s had quite an acting career in Hollywood.

Soon after that, Silvia, Bill and I were asked to join Robin Williamson’s Far Cry Ceili Band. Robin Williamson had left The Incredible String Band to move to Los Angeles, pursue Scientology, and reinvent himself as a more traditional musician. Bill and I played with that band for less than a year, and got some interesting gigs, including the UCLA Folk Festival, where I first met the great Cajun fiddler, Dewey Balfa and accordionist Mark Savoy and  the Boys of the Lough.

Go Cut 2 (of 3) and skip to 25:00 to hear Robin Williamson’s Far Cry Ceili

https://californiarevealed.org/do/8246804b-7e59-425c-876d-304d3c213364

After leaving the Far Cry Ceili Band, I started playing with Marty Somberg and Mark Simos and Jo Allen and Michael Alpert in a band called Knoc Na Sí. They were all very gifted musicians and I was lucky to play with them. My next trip to Europe was pretty life changing as well, though when I returned, I found out the band had decided to relocate to the East Coast, and that was the end of that. Marty and Jo later moved to Ireland, and when Marty came back, Jo stayed there the rest of her life. Mark went on to become a big name in songwriting and tunesmithing, and now teaches at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and Michael became one of the foremost scholars and performers of Yiddish music in the world.

Off to Portugal

My next trip was initiated by my Mom, who was working temporarily as a travel agent. She called one day and told me she had just found this deal on one way tickets from L.A. to Portugal for a hundred dollars. I said, buy me three of them. And I got my two high school buddies, with whom I’d been in a rock and roll band, Spencer and Tom, and told them we were going to Europe.

Off we went to Portugal. After two or three days in Lisbon, we headed north. We took the narrow gauge railway, the narrowest we could find, and we just bought a ticket for a random amount. We were not very savvy travelers but we hoped the destination would take long enough to get us through the night. And while we waited for the train, several street vendors offered us some very dubious “scotch whiskey” for sale. You’d look at the bottle and it would have a label in very bad English, and the obvious brown food coloring would only float halfway down the bottle, and then it would be clear on the bottom. We would politely decline.

Daniel Steinberg:
And how did this figure in the trip?

Kevin Carr:
I’ll get there.

We got on this train and it was full of farmers, all dressed in dark clothes, and it was late at night. Everybody was sort of down putting their heads down and looking tired, and all of a sudden, about twenty soldiers, who were on leave, got on, and they’re rowdy and they’re laughing and partying and drinking. I worried that there would be trouble, because these people clearly wanted to rest. I was thinking like an American. But no, every time the soldiers would rouse one of the farmers, the farmers would laugh or react with lovely smiles. And I began to think, “Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Pretty soon the whole coach is clearly ready to party. Then some of the lads came over to us, and offered us some ‘SCOTCH’ whiskey.

At first, eyeing the two-toned liquid, we declined. Then they saw we had instrument cases stashed under the seat. They made us pull them out and play something. This conversation was all communicated in Portuguese and mime. We didn’t know what to play, so of course we played Old Joe Clark. It turned out there are about a hundred verses of Old Joe Clark in Portuguese, so soon we’re playing away, and they’re singing away, and the farmers are singing, and we’re drinking this scotch whiskey. They’re picking each other up on the luggage racks where they’re rolling off. Then they land on the farmers, who just continue laughing and dancing, and it was just this crazy time. And finally, all too soon, though it was in the wee hours of the morning, the conductor came in and looked at our tickets and indicated that the next stop was ours.

We bid emotional farewells and we got off and wandered around in the dark until we found someplace that looked flat and then just fell down. The last thing I remember from that night was wondering if the whirleys would go the same direction as at home. When we woke up in the morning, we found ourselves miraculously unscathed because we had, in the dark, thrown our sleeping bags between dozens of cow patties. We were in a cow pasture. Which was littered with shit.

Trip to Galicia

The next evening we got on another train – really a diesel trolley, that ran on the narrow gauge tracks, ever so slowly. This one did run through the night. The next morning, early, the driver announced, “Santiago de Compostella.”

Now, one of the books I had read when I was living in the office building was called “Bagpipes” and it had photos and descriptions of collections of bagpipes in various museums in Europe. I remembered that there was one in northern Spain, but I couldn’t exactly remember where. So when the conductor called out, “Santiago de Compostela,” I thought that that was a familiar name, thinking that that’s where the bagpipe museum was. I roused my pals and we started from the station into the old city. The train station was down on the flats, but the old city was built on hills. It is a stunningly beautiful medieval city; a world heritage site. It’s also a quite famous pilgrimage site, which, of course, I didn’t remember at the time.

That morning it was very warm. But as we entered the old city, under the archways, the stones were cooling the breeze which gave me the sensation of walking back in time. Such a magical situation. I started to stop people and ask about a bagpipe museum, and they would shrug and shake their heads. All of a sudden, I heard the sound of bagpipes. I can’t tell you the thrill that went through me. We ran around the corner. And there was a student band. This particular band, because we were in Galicia, consisted of two bagpipes and three percussionists. They all wore traditional costumes. I was so excited.

Check out the various images of Galician bagpipes.

I just ran up to the lead guy and just said, ”BAGPIPES!!” He looked at me for a moment and asked me where I was from? California, I answered. And he asked, “Do you know a man named Bruce?” And he did a little imitation of Bruce’s way of walking. And I KNEW Bruce. Bruce was a guy at the one of the Renaissance Faires where I had begun playing back in California, who would stand up in a tower above the entrance to the faire, and play his Galician bagpipe. I said, “I know Bruce.” He said, “Here, I have a package of reeds. You will deliver them to Bruce. Now come, we go to play.” And I took the reeds and put them in my pocket, and months later I did deliver them to Bruce. When I gave them to him, I said, these are from Galin in Santiago. He thanked me without an ounce of surprise, as though this was the most ordinary thing in the world. It was like, no big deal. I later found out that people in Galicia engage in this form of informal postal delivery service all the time. They seem to have complete confidence in coincidence. We went off that day and the group played and people danced, and it was magical. Just magical. We had lunch together and I began to feel my fluency in the Galician language increasing proportionate to my wine intake.

(Sidenote: In 2010, over thirty years later, when I retired from Stanford, I took the family to Galicia. It was a grand trip, where among other things, we played our first gig as a Family Band, and  son my Daniel insisted we finally find the ‘bagpipe’ museum, which turned out to be 300 km east, in Gijón, Asturias. My daughter Molly had already  been living in Galicia for two years, and my son, Daniel, who had  been studying in Peru for six months, met us there. Josie (my wife,  the artist formerly known as Barbara ) and I had rented a little apartment right near a beautiful square. And one day I was walking out the square and I suddenly realized that this was the same Square where I had  first met those pipers all those years before)

After the meal, Galin, the leader of the group, said that we should meet them later because they were going to close traffic so they could have a big dance. When I came back that night the dance was going full tilt, and people were whirling and flying around in the elegant and exuberant dances, and there were drums, and tambourines and pipes, and it was all wonderful and amazing. At some point they noticed I had a fiddle and they asked me to play something from my country. The contrast of the sound of one fiddle with a good few bagpipes and drums was startlingly disconcerting to me,  but suddenly this young woman whipped her head around and asked if I was American. When I said yes, she said she was American too, and not only could she speak fluent Galician, she could call square dances. We quickly pulled  her up next to me, and before too long I found myself  as she called and suddenly they’re all doing a square dance. And one by one all the other instruments joined in. And soon it was a fiddle and pipes and drums all playing Soldiers Joy.

The dancing seemed to go on forever. It was just hypnotic. And when it all closed down, we were all hungry, but there was nothing open. They led us through the alleys to a glass door. There was no sign. They knocked on the window pane until finally this quite beautiful, very ancient woman pulls the curtain back opens the door a crack. She says they were closed. But Galin, the leader of the group, starts singing to her and he takes her hand, and then he starts waltzing with her. And he’s singing to her, “We have friends from another country, could you please cook us a little meal, something to tide us over until the morning.” I’m thinking that she’s going to yell at him. But she just smiles and at last invites us in. She then cooked us a little dinner. And after dinner and more wine, I found myself completely fluent in Galician and I could understand all the stories she was telling us about the secrets of the Galician people. And somewhere I have a cassette of her singing, which was charming. We all joined in, tapping the salt shakers and lightly drumming on the table. And then Galin, with his huge operatic voice gives a long yell, and changes key and sings the last two verses of the song. Oh god, it was thrilling. I finally made it back in the early hours of the morning to the Pensión where I was staying. There was a old watchman who had the keys to all the buildings on each block, and if you were late, he’d let you in. As he’s taking me upstairs to where I’m staying, he stops on the stairway and he looks at me and asks what I think of Henry Ford. And we sat down on the stairs and had this conversation between about the virtues and the vices of modernization and what we were losing and what we’d be gaining. My first experience of an wonderful Galician trait. There is always time to have a good conversation. In my memory this first day in Galicia lasted a month. And after that, when I got home, I bought myself a cheap little gaita.

And that was when I started collecting bagpipes of various kinds from different countries. I already played Scottish bagpipes and I wanted to learn Irish pipes. When I lived in the office building, my sister Darcy had gotten me a Scottish bagpipe for my birthday. She knew I wanted a bagpipe. So, she answered an ad in the paper, paid $100 for an old Scottish bagpipe. I found a woman to give me lessons, whose father was a pipe major in Canada for a big pipe band. She was excellent, though she didn’t look the part, with long red fingernails and big poofy hair, but she could really play. And so that trip to Galicia really opened my mind into the whole world of other bagpipes.

Daniel Steinberg:
What year was that?

Kevin Carr:
I think it was 1976.

About that time Carole Raye, who worked at McCabe’s, helping run the concert series there. She and I started going together. We had a lot of wonderful adventures. The biggest was probably our trip to Europe together. We hitchhiked through Germany and France, spent a romantic time in Paris, then traveled all through England. We hiked the prehistoric path called the Ridgeway, which is near Stonehenge, and went to Avebury and all these neolithic sites, looking for ley lines and Celtic Magic. Not really, but sort of. Then we went to Ireland and visited Vincent Griffin. Vincent Griffin had been an all-Ireland champion fiddler that Bill Jackson had befriended on an early trip to Ireland. He had hung out with the Pumpkinhead gang. Turns out he was old friends with Rick, which I discovered later. When Bill went to Ireland, he met Vincent Griffin and later sponsored him to come to the U.S. and do concerts. He did that at least three times. That was another deep dive in the music because he was such a wonderful, wonderful fiddle player. I was eager to visit him. Carole might have been less enthusiastic.

Vincent took us to meet Martin Rochford, who was a piper and a great fiddle player, too. He was a very vivid human being. When he found out that I was learning the pipes, but I didn’t have them with me, he said, “well, I’ll play for you.” But he didn’t bother to tune his drones. I had these recordings with the most God awful out of tune drones. Evidently, I don’t know for sure, but he either relied on other people to help him tune his drones, or he only tuned them for a certain class of visitor. But he played a bunch of music, including the most beautiful version of a tune called The Steeplechase. I remember feeling when he played, it was as though the music was coming literally from the center of the earth.

It’s been an aspiration of mine to play that way since. To sit in that relationship with the earth when I play.

Daniel Steinberg:
Had you even gotten a set of Irish pipes by that point?

Kevin Carr:
I had gotten a practice chanter, which is a bag, bellows and chanter. At first, I had no idea where I could get a full set of pipes. Then I came across a tourist magazine called Ireland of The Welcomes. In it was a photo essay of a man making Irish pipes. The article didn’t have an address for the man, so I wrote a letter to him with the town and his name. That’s all, and a stamp. Amazingly, it got to him. He wrote back and said, yes, I will do that if you can have them picked up. Well, it turned out my college girlfriend, with whom I was still friends, told me her parents were going to Ireland. I asked them if they wanted to go to this little village and pick up a set of pipes. They thought that would be a grand adventure, so they did that. I was waiting so excitedly. But when it arrived it was just an absolute piece of garbage. It looked like it had been carved of a broom handle which had then warped. It looked like a giant banana. It never could play in tune. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I called my new found cousin, Mickey Zekley, who had started the Lark in the Morning musical instrument business. I asked Mickey what to do? And he helped me find a buyer for my set. I feel some remorse and shame about that. I sold it to somebody else who wanted pipes desperately, Fel Batista. He’s since told me that he’s forgiven me. We’re still in touch, and he’s become a good piper. Anyway, I then got a set of pipes made by a guy named Ron Konzac – drones and a chanter that worked better.

I then sold that set of pipes to buy an antique set Mickey had come across, made by William Rowsome. And it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen. Unfortunately, the reeds didn’t work in it and I couldn’t find anyone to make reeds for it. By that time, I’d met Sean Folsom, player of hundreds of traditional instruments, including 80 kinds bagpipes, and Denis Brooks, who was a master Uilleann piper. I asked both of them to try, and neither one of ’em could get a reed working in this old style chanter. I remember one day having read a book by Chicago police Chief Francis O’Neill called Irish Minstrels and Musicians , which contained a large number of photos of Irish pipers from the 1800’s and early1900’s. I studied the way they sat with the pipes. Then one day, I went out on the Bluffs near San Francisco and took acid and sat there with my set of pipes for about three hours in the position of a piper. It was all I could think to do.

Still to this day I believe that there was some knowledge gained from that experience. I finally, reluctantly sold that set of pipes to a collector, and then was able to buy a working set of pipes made in England by a man named Allen Ginsberg, not the poet. He was a Welshman. A piper named Peter White had brought it over to sell, and I remember I had to basically wrestle away from another friend of mine who tried to buy it out from under me. But I got the set, and that’s the set I actually started to learn to play on, and then later I got a better one.

Daniel Steinberg:
So all that preceded your trip to Ireland with Carole ?

Kevin Carr:
Yeah, that all happened before I went to Ireland with Carole. I had already played with Robin Williamson and all that stuff.

Daniel Steinberg:
Did Carole play?

Kevin Carr:
No. No, she didn’t. But she was a music lover and appreciator of the highest order.

Daniel Steinberg:
When you visited with that bagpiper friend of Vincent’s, you both must have had a familiarity with the instrument in order to appreciate it.

Kevin Carr:
Oh, yeah. That’s why I was thrilled to see it. I mean, it was just amazing. The first piper I had actually seen live was Joe McKenna when he also was taken around by Bill and to give concerts, and I helped out a little bit. He was an all Ireland chamion on pipes and a grand human.  I remember the first night I heard him I was sitting about three feet away from him. watching him play, awed and amazed. He was like the Jimi Hendrix of pipes.  I remember that he was dripping sweat. And I asked him if it was really that hard to play the pipes? He said not usually, but explained that his  homemade naugahyde bag had a tiny hole in it. So he was just having to pump the whole time.  I was very relieved by his answer. That might’ve been the end of my piping career right there.

After that trip with Carole, my desire to live a certain kind of life was reinforced. When we got back, we moved to Mendocino where my friend Spencer had offered me a place to live. We moved together. But we broke up soon after we moved to Mendocino. We’ve always remained close. She’s made a fantastic life for herself there. She’s learned acupressure and Chinese medicine and she lives in a gorgeous place with a wonderful community of friends. And I was in Mendocino for a couple of years, where I met you, and a host of other musicians: Heath Curdts, a lovely banjoist, Don Minnerly, a round peak style fiddler, Peter Kapp, master Highland piper, Cait Reed, Mickey’s partner and wonderful Irish fiddler and then I eventually moved to San Francisco.