Reuben and the Boys

Another good group to hear and see is Reuben Ristrom and the Bourbon Street Boys, who have been together for quite a while. Reuben is the leader and plays jazz guitar and banjo rather expertly. Always a joy to listen to. You'll find them playing at neighborhood parks and various locations. Reuben's wife also helps out Reuben with tasty vocals, and their two sons are also gifted. One plays drums and sings country songs, while the other plays bass and sings Bobby Darin and other classics. Even their girlfriends have been incorporated into the shows, who also sing. Great family tradition here!!

Ralph and the Deep North

The Seward Community Band started in 1978 as a resource for the community. I went to listen to a concert in 1988 at Powderhorn Park that was toted as "Proud Heritage: A Celebration of Anniversaries" marking their 10th year, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Irving Berlin, and other anniversaries. I noticed that Ralph from the Deep North Dixieland Band, that I heard play at the Lake Harriet Bandshell and featured at a private wedding reception for one of my cousins, was in the first trumpet chair. They sounded exceptionally well, being a representation of people from the entire 10 years of the band's history, who had come to take part in the celebration, and even play in a few numbers with the then current band. There were lots of children making noises, etc. A very nice concert setting, and I taped the entire goings on with my boombox that had a cassette recorder. The actual band music turned out to be of fairly good quality on the tape, as I must have been at the right distance, but the speakers were a little out of range to get a clear rendering of what they were saying without being connected up to the mikes and sound system which would render a much better likeness. They performed numbers by Berlin, Ives, Copeland, Gerschwin, Sousa, and some international composers (Bristish march, French can can, Irish melody). Most of this material was pretty complex, and not something the ordinary concert band would attempt. It was near professional quality.

I noticed on the net that the group has since changed their name to the Seward Concert Band and moved to South High as their base of operations for rehearsals on Thursday nights and an occasional concert there to fine tune their numbers for other concerts. I think they perform about once a week in the summer at various locations. If in the Twin Cities area, check them out. They are on the web with details.

Back in the high life

Back in the 60's there were all these garage bands, as we called them. You were either a baldy or a greaser. It was related to gangs I suppose, but by my time the Beatles had become popular and sort of legitimized the hair thing, so that it no longer represented the negative connotations of a previous generation. The whole English invasion had been incredible innovation and every block had a amateur group playing electric guitars and drums with a very distinctive sound. The house directly across the street from ours was a more recent construction and on a hill. The dad was a professional drummer and he taught his oldest son to play. I just remember hearing Shaking All Over, over and over again. They were playing somewhere, probably in a bar, but I just heard them practicing endlessly, the same songs. The vibrato on Shaking All Over is typical of the sound back then. Summertime Blues was another popular number, originally by Minnesotan Eddie Cochran, but lately redone by the Blue Cheer and the Who. Our local groups that were popular had names like the Del Counts, the Castaways, the Trashmen, Gregory Dee and the Avanties, etc. These early rock bands later developed into a purer sound in groups called Crow, Gypsy and Prince. Those are the groups or people most people think of when they think of Minneapolis, but I'm not sure where they all played. It wasn't part of my experience. I just heard them on the radio.
Now I know some of the names of places where they played, such as the Hole Coffeehouse (at Coffman Union), Caboose and the Joint, The Stadium, The Blue Ox, the Union Bar, the 400 Bar, the Viking Bar, the Bel Rae Ballroom, Norma Jean's, etc., but these awarenesses came much later. These are the places where you could probably hear Leo Koettke, Willie Murphy, Bonnie Raitt, Glover and Ray, in their primal manifestations, but I wasn't really aware of them until much later.
At the Coffeehouse Extempore in the 70's, Dale was playing bass with Dakota Dave Hull, an acoustic guitar who discovered Utah Phillips and John Prine. Steve Johnson was occasionally playing harp with Sean Blackburn who didn't really want a harp player to join him. Adam Granger was there, and looking like Santa Claus with a long beard and picking up a storm. This was my baptism into a different kind of music than I had been listening to on the top 40 radio programs or the underground stations. You'd hang out with these guys, but never feel like you totally understood where they got their vibes from. It was more based on blue grass, country and jazz influences. Ralph & Jerry's was a store located at 4th and 7th streets that had a house nearby that was crowded with musicians all playing at the same time. Picking parlour was the name for it. You could learn your chops in company with the community of aspiring folk. The Middlespunk Creek Boys were the most successful of that type of instruments, dobro, steel guitar, fiddle, upright bass, and acoustic guitar. Al Jaspers is a fixture on the Minnesota scene, and can be heard jamming at all the blue grass festivals. Dedicated is his nature. That's why he has endured so long in tune with the sound of the music.

The Coffeehouse

Dale was spending most of his time at the Coffeehouse on the West Bank of the campus, where he was meeting other musicians and making friends with people who would come to listen. I didn't know anything about the West Bank. I was a northsider and this was definitely southside atmosphere here.
I'm talking close proximity to gorgeous city lakes and summertime beaches with bikini clad urchins. This was totally foreign to my awareness and the neighborhoods that I had grown up in. Free love was everywhere. Freedom took the visible expression of long hair cascading below the shoulders. It was a freaky time in the affairs of man from a short hair's view. Values changed overnight almost.
Dale was sort of political and liked to talk about anti-war issues and other things that made me slightly uncomfortable to join in. I'd usually just listen in, and try to remain as neutral as was possible. Dale wanted me to check out the music at the Coffeehouse where he was learning and giving lessons to others on the guitar. Here's what was going on. A grloup named Archangel, patterned after Black Sabbath, heavy metal to the max. Another group called Nasty Habits, a Cream copy cat, with endless riffing the most complex leads on guitar, ala Eric Clapton, and bluesy vocals, ala Jack Bruce. A solo player was a guy named Roy Alsted. He sounded like Hendrix and it literally shook the walls as he played. Later he started a blues band that was not bad called the Mill City Blues Band. But my favorite group was called Gold Rush or something close to that name. One of their songs was titled Blue Sky Day. The harmonies were great and I remember the keyboard player saying that playing was so much fun, not like a job is what he meant. I think this was before synths and sampling. Must have been an electric piano or some kind of organ he was playing. Anyways, they were good, but I've never heard that song played except once. But it haunts me to this day as sort of an anthem of the city. That's the spirit of Minneapolis nice, a blue sky day!

my home town

My friend Dale played an electric guitar. I think he saved some money by building it himself, from Allied Radio (which became Radio Shack over time.). His dad was a computer troubleshooter, and he taught Dale about electronics so that he could solder components like transistors and capacitors like a pro. It was all kind of amazing to have a friend that knew all this stuff. He also shared my love for tape recorders/decks. Plus he had a real good ear and knew how to do most of the instrumentals of Beatle songs from the white album that sounded perfect to me. It was like having John, Paul, George and Ringo in your living room. He was that good. He also wrote some of his own instrumental music. In the senior year of high school his family moved from north minneapolis where we both lived to Belle Plaine where his dad opened up or took over a hardware store. So for about a year he sort of disappeared and played in a band called Peace of Whore. He wrote this song called Emotions. I kind of know where that was coming from, as he took my Amboy Dukes' album Journey To The Center of the Mind with him when he left. Ted Nungent was kind of a favorite of ours at the time.
Dale ended up returning to Minneapolis to attend the U of Minnesota and I moved into an apartment on the campus with him. Those were crazy times. Dale dropped out right away and mostly played his guitar. I was the ear for him. Hey, Don, listen to this or that I learned. I enjoyed listening, but I never felt that Dale had achieved a creative self for the most part, but he could learn a Kinks song or a Who song almost by magic. When I listened to music I was not so aware of chords at that time, but more of the melodies. Suddenly I was learning about barring and other theory on the guitar such as the 0 5 7 (key of E would be E A B, etc.), and the music was starting to make sense to me. Up to then I always thought the Beatles were super-human or something. How were they improvising all those great tunes? I was starting to sense some clues as to how it might be done. Actually I had the creativity that Dale seemed to lack. I could write my own stuff with lyrics, but it was more of a singing thing. Dale tried to teach me the guitar, but gave up after a while. He thought I must be tone deaf. Actually his ear was just better attuned to chords and things for making rhythms. But when it came to leads he was not all that good. I was actually pretty good on leads but terribly on rhythms. I also picked up on the harmonica and it was just a natural progression from the music I had heard that included the harp. Once I learned how to do the tongue trick to sound an individual note, I knew how it should sound, then it was easy to blow into just one hole without curling up the tongue. Steve Johnson, another north higher, who lived in an apartment next to ours for a while, showed me the trick. He was actually quite good, he could do Canned Heat riffs. I was more of the I'm A Man by the Yardbirds, The Wizard by Black Sabbath, Foggy Mental Breakdown by Steppenwolf, I Want To Take You Higher by Sly, and other harp tunes by Creedence, Grand Funk and Led Zeppelin. Those were the staple of the musics I was listening to, so that is where I was getting my inspiration. I wasn't deeply into the blues, but of course that was the roots of it. But the thing I learned to play on the harp that impressed me and others the most was J.B.'s Happy Harmonica that i heard on a John Sebastian album. Sort of sounded like Scandinavian folk music or traditional rather than the blues or jazz. I loved to play it and everybody thought I was great, but the problem was I didn't know what to do with it. There was no next step to take. That's when I started learning to bend the notes and do the blues on a blues harp rather than a regular harmonica (or the old standby was another name I recall). There was this place in Dinkytown at the U called the Podium where you could buy pipe tobacco called Apple Jack and harmonicas. I had almost every major key G C A E F and a Bflat. But Steve had some of the more exotic keys and that is probably how he learned the Canned Heat, because they intentionally used those so less people would be able to copy them, Eflat, etc. At some point I figured out that if the song is in a certain key which was the 0 than you play in the 5, so key or E I would play in A. I started learning Jethro Tull riffs on the harp, Ian Anderson had a wonderful style of playing that I liked to imitate. But I never got as good as this one guy I heard playing on a street corner in Dinkytown who just kept improvising and never played the same thing twice as far as I could tell. Boy, I could have stayed there all day and listened. I was into tape recorders, and I always felt sad that I never got the chance to tape any of that street sound that was happening back in the hippie era. It was a period of awesome creativity and improvisation. One of the saddest things about music in my experience is not being able to hold on to these special moments. All you have left is memories of the best things. It is impossible to get it back, but just realize that for a time you had it with you. So it goes, as life moves on to the next posting ...