Peter Yarrow
Yes twenty-two years of Winterfolk in Portland! The annual benefit for Sisters of the Road comes to the Aladdin Theater on Saturday, February 6 with an acoustic music fan’s feast of performers.
This year’s headliner is Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary)! Other performers will include (they tell us):
Brian Cutean from Eugene, Oregon. Brian is one of Oregon’s unique musical treasures. Brian has performed his songs of spirit, whimsy, and power all over the United States, and is a mainstay of the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas.
The Artichoke Music All-Stars: Richard Colombo, Matt Meighan, Leela Grace, Ken Vigil and crew give a performance that epitomizes the “Artichoke Music Experience,” inspiring music and community on Portland’s SE Hawthorne Boulevard for over 30 years.
Nancy Conescu is a world traveler and renowned interpreter of traditional Irish Music. This will be Nancy’s 2nd Winterfolk appearance.
The Wanderers: Bill Murlin and Carl Allen, featuring the Columbia River Songs of Woody Guthrie. In 1941, Guthrie spent a month hired by the Bonneville Power Administration to write songs in the Northwest for a documentary movie telling of the industry and democracy at work at the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams. Bill and Carl have spent 20 years performing these inspiring songs at libraries, folk societies, and historical associations throughout the Pacific Northwest.
David Rea: an integral player in folk, heritage music and contemporary rip-snortin’ string-flashing for decades.
The Tom May Trio; the director and founder of “Winterfolk” returns with some new songs and stories from his travels, and celebrates the 25th anniversary of his national radio broadcast, “River City Folk,” this year.
Tickets are $28 advance and $30 on the day of the show. Available at Ticketmaster outlets, 1-800-745-3000 or online or at the Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave, 503-234-9694 and at Music Millennium, 3158 E Burnside, 503-231-8926. Also at Artichoke Music, 3130 SE Hawthorne, Portland Fretworks, 3039 NE Alberta St. and Sisters Of The Road’s office at 618 NW Davis St.
They also add:
Returning again is Sisters’ annual Guitar Raffle! Try your chances to win a one-of-a-kind Small Jumbo Acoustic Guitar handmade by Jay Dickinson of Portland Guitar ($3,000 value!) and ten hours of studio time at Billy Oskay’s Big Red Studio ($750 value)! Tickets are only $10, and the winner is drawn at the show.
Steve Einhorn and Kate Power
We don’t run whole emails as a rule, but in this case we’re making an exception. Steve Einhorn and Kate Power were synonymous with Artichoke Music until they turned it over to a non-profit a few years ago.
Now the venerable music institution is in trouble. They wrote:
We got married in our living room on Valentine’s Day in 1998. We had moved Artichoke Music to where it is now just months before. Folk icons like Dave Van Ronk, Johnny Cunningham, Martin Sexton, David Grisman, Peter Rowan and even Odetta had already graced the Artichoke stage that year.
These folk heroes were just a few of many who would perform there in the back of the shop. As Oregon’s Glen Moore bowed his resonant bass (old enough to have played Beethoven’s debut compositions live), he reminded the audience just how rare Artichoke Music is for musicians like him. Travel the world over and you’ll see how true it is. There is no place like Artichoke Music.
Artichoke has taken a beating and is standing on one leg. The people keeping it alive are running out of gas and are short on cash. It’s time to decide.
Let’s keep Artichoke Music around. Do what you can.
We’ll be there. We hope you will be too.
Friends of Artichoke Music have organized a benefit open house and fund raising campaign to help out. They hope to raise the $15,000 that Artichoke needs to catch up on rent, insurance and other facility costs.
Please join us for “Give Your Heart to Artichoke” benefit open house on Valentine’s Day, Sunday,
Feb 14 from 2 – 7 pm.
Performers include Kate Power & Steve Einhorn, Sky in the Road, Tom May, Dick Weissman, Anne Weiss and many more! This will be a love fest.
Admission is only $10 and advance tickets can be purchased at the store.
If you can’t come to the show but would like to make a donation, contributions can be sent directly to Artichoke Music, marked “Artichoke Benefit”. Note: this is a benefit for Artichoke’s facility (concert hall, school of music and shop) rather than for the Artichoke Music Foundation, so donations are not tax-deductible.
Dick Weissman has had quite a storied career in music — he was part of the legendary folk group the Journeymen, was a studio musician and producer, then a composer, professor and writer, and still continues to record and put out music (when he’s not engaged in some of the former.) If you think a guy who got his start in the midst of the folk revival has some great stories to tell, you’re right — and you have the chance to hear some of those when he appears at Artichoke Music on Saturday, Jan. 30 with a one-of-a-kind performance that centers around those tales.
“For the last ten years I’ve told stories when I perform music. Some of this is because I play quite a bit of instrumental music, and the folk music audience finds some of it pretty abstract,” Weissman explains when asked how the show came about.
“I did a show at Artichoke in the fall, and the owners, Richard and Jim, said to me, ‘Why don’t you do a show that has more of the stories as the centerpiece, and uses the music as a backdrop, rather than the other way around?’ This is that show. I really have no idea how it will be received, but I’m always interested in trying something different, if it makes any sense to me.”
Even a cursory glance at Weissman’s trajectory shows that openness to exploration. After all, this is a guy who started off as a semi-professional ping pong player and ended up rubbing elbows with John Lee Hooker and Bob Dylan.
In Weissman’s world, there’s even sense in that.
“There was an odd connection between ping pong and music,” he laughs. “Most of my rivals lived in New York, and I’d go up there and got to hang out with them. They were all heavily into Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, so I got to hear a bunch of bebop records.”
When a late growth spurt put an end to his ping pong career, Weissman went back to school — learning how to play the guitar and banjo in the process. Ping ponging between grad school and the NYC folk scene provided the start to some of the stories he’ll be telling.
“I lived in New York in a house with DC current in what you’d call Lower Harlem, on 106th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue,” he begins, when asked to provide a preview. “We had periodic blues parties in our five room railroad flat. One night we had over 100 people there, and my roommate, a black actor named Jim Spruill, and I looked around and realized we only knew about a dozen of the people there.
“John Lee Hooker and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry were there, among others,” he continues. “John Lee Hooker was a very interesting guitarist but not a technical one. Brownie was a more versatile and better-trained musician, and he proceeded to have a cutting contest with Hooker, which was no contest at all. Hooker said to me, ‘Let me go to the car and get my amplifier.’ It was very hard to make him understand that because we didn’t have AC current, the amp would blow out if he tried to plug it in.
“I thought it was pretty funny that this white boy graduate student (me) didn’t have advanced enough technology to accommodate the needs of this ‘primitive’ blues musician,” he chuckles.
If you’ve picked up a copy of Weissman’s fine double album, “Four Directions,” you’ve already had a preview (courtesy of the tracks at the end of each disc with brief explanations of the songs) of how he wryly weaves personal anecdotes with musical inspirations and social movements with an uncanny bird’s eye view of how they all interconnect.
His inherent openness and ability to synthesize disparate influences and ideas have made him a truly innovative banjo player, musician and songwriter. Those same qualities and perceptiveness also make him a great teacher and writer. The same man who co-authored the influential “Folk Music Sourcebook” and wrote “Whose Side Are You On” (an exhaustive look at folk throughout the 20th century) penned the slyly titled “The Music Business: Career Opportunities And Self Defense” and has a new book on the horizon about musical, social change and ethnicity.
“It was a huge research project,” says Weissman. “It has chapters about music of immigrant groups, songs about American history, songs about and by Native Americans, African-Americans, women, Spanish-speaking groups, songs written to encourage social change, and neo-fascist songs.”
You’ll have to wait for that, but if you’d like some of his insight on the music industry without going back to school (Weissman still teaches part-time at Portland Community College) you can catch him at the Musician’s Union on Monday, Jan. 18, where he’ll be conducting a workshop on music publishing for songwriters and composers, and how to write books about music or music instruction materials.
Asked if he has any advice for aspiring musicians, he responds with this nugget. “My advice is not to survive a music career doing one thing, unless you are extremely lucky. You can be a songwriter, a performer, record producer, a teacher, a recording engineer, a composer or whatever, but the more things you can do, the better your long-term career prospects are.
“I studied jazz guitar with a fantastic musician named Barry Galbraith,” he continues. “He told me that whenever anyone asked him whether they should go into the music business he said no, they shouldn’t. If they said, ‘I’m going into the music business, what can I do to help get my career going?’ then he would offer encouragement. His thinking was that it’s a difficult thing to do, and if you have doubts to begin with, why subject yourself to such an uncertain life?”
Undoubtedly, anyone who hears Weissman’s vibrant tales (writing a song at a party while breaking up with Karen Dalton, his tenure with the Journeymen, work writing songs for unions and a lifetime’s more) will likely feel the siren’s song. Hearing Weissman’s tales make history and music spring to life. For some of us, though, it’s safer to view the world through the sage eyes of someone who’s already traveled it.
“The biggest surprise (in my life) is that I have been able to survive a long-term career in music, make a reasonable if not ridiculous amount of money and lead a comparatively sane life in terms of having a family,” Weissman concludes. “I also never expected to have a career writing books about music.”
It’s a pretty fair bet that the former semi-pro ping pong competitor also never expected he’d be living, teaching, writing and performing in Portland and spinning incredible tales about his life in the music biz.
Then again, if anyone could have made that connection it would be Weissman.
7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 18, Musician’s Union, 325 N.E. 20th Ave., 503-235-8791, free to union members, $10 to members of any music organizations or Willamette Writers, $20 to others
8 pm. Saturday Jan. 30, Artichoke Music, 3130 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd., 503-232-8845, $10 advance tickets
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