Photo Credit: Lori Eanes
I’ve been listening to Geoff Muldaur since I was a kid. I used dig through my parents’ record collection and find Sleepy Man Blues or one of Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band albums and be transported. As a member of Paul Butterfield’s Better Days, he created one of my absolute favorite albums, and maybe my favorite vocal track on “Please Send Me Someone To Love.” It always felt like Muldaur had a passport to an era of American music that was beautifully paradoxical: always simple, yet complex; straightforward but sly. Muldaur’s voice is one that gets under your skin and his arrangements of blues music are some of the best I’ve ever heard.
When I was listening to those albums, Geoff Muldaur wasn’t playing music anymore. He’d stepped away from recording and performing and was working in computer software and did so for seventeen years. But in 1998, he released the incredible album The Secret Handshake, followed by Password in 2000 and an indispensible live album, Beautiful Isle of Somewhere in 2003. And while Muldaur is primarily associated with country blues music, he is currently steeped in composing classical music in Amsterdam and he released Private Astronomy: A Vision of the Music of Bix Biederbecke in 2003.
I first got to see Muldaur in 2001. At the time, he signed a CD and wrote: “Ken: a young man has come to see me; this is good – spread the word.” I have been a Muldaur proselytizer ever since and (nervously) got to chat with Geoff in anticipation of his show at Club Passim this weekend. I’ve seen Geoff four times and he is incomparable. I highly encourage you to get out there on Saturday.
RLR: It’s been eighteen years since you came “back” with The Secret Handshake, leaving your work as a software programmer to play music and tour again. How have these decades making music been similar to and different from the twenty or so years you spent before that hiatus?
GM: It’s probably more accurate to say there were two iterations before that hiatus. The first being the jug band and the second up in Woodstock with [Paul] Butterfield.
And there are good things about playing music today and some not so good. By the time I came back to playing music, I personally had a better attitude and am more grateful for every little thing: for the people who come to shows, for the fact that I can still sing at 72–and part of that is that I took seventeen years off when I wasn’t banging on the road like so many of my contemporaries.
It’s a different world musically. There weren’t CDs when I took a break. And when I left, there were still remnants of the golden age of music in the United States that started in the 1920s–Doc Watson, BB King. That golden age now is basically over. I don’t feel discouraged or depressed. I figure golden ages happen when they happen.
It’s also a different world culturally. I don’t have a lot of interest in going to a restaurant and sitting at a table while everyone looks at their smart phones.
There have been disappointments too. The Secret Handshake came out and The New York Times wrote a piece on it in December, but the label didn’t have it ready time for Christmas. [RLR: You can read that review here. At the time, Tony Scherman wrote “I haven’t heard a better album this year.”]
So you end up writing for the muse and a few friends that get it. You can delude yourself into thinking about posterity, but [with the way things have changed] will history still exist in the same way a few decades from now?
RLR: You have been working on classical music in Amsterdam for the past six years or so. What drew you to that work and how has it evolved over time?
GM: I continue to have enormous interest in heavy musical stuff. Classical music is a world still dealing with geniuses and it’s endless. Just like the blues and jazz was endless. But thinking of golden ages, if you were a kid in Vienna in the late 1700s, you would have been growing up in the time of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.
Everything came in little pieces for this work. I had been working on the Bix Biederbecke project. Someone would help me with a session so I could hear a piece, but they couldn’t necessarily play it. And now I’m dealing with musicians on a whole other level: the principal trumpet from Metropolitan opera, for example. The Bix project emboldened me. I had a vision but didn’t know I could do it. And I did it.
I’m also very comfortable in Europe. On the whole, they’re more egalitarian and live better than us. Following World War II, the United States was perhaps the most dynamic, fair-minded country in the history of the world. Europe did the same thing, but in a more lasting way.
RLR: Richard Thompson’s famous quote is: “There are only three white blues singers and Geoff Muldaur is at least two of them.” What role has race played in your work, particularly as you started out, as a white person interpreting a distinctly black-American art form?
GM: First, I’m not sure anything said about me can be called “famous.” I think anyone who comes to see me is probably a pretty discerning and intelligent person.
But I bet you Butterfield felt the way I felt. He heard this music and it totally filled him up. And he started plunking on a guitar and thought, “I can do this”. And little by little you’re involved in an art form. Your heroes are still all the black guys and then you meet “Spider” John Koerner, and he’s your first white role model.
When I picked up the guitar to play country blues we don’t think there were more than 100 white people doing it in the country. You know, there were six in Berkeley and eleven in New York. And now, there’s tens of thousands. But at that time, you’re under radar and you’re not trying to sound like the Kingston Trio. It was for people who wanted to be different, or who were different and needed a way to express it.
RLR: Your concert at Passim coincides with an afternoon event remembering Eric Von Schmidt with an opening of his art and ephemera. How would you describe his influence on you, and on the folk/blues music of the 1960s and 1970s?
GM:What he turned me onto was Renaissance life. It was not all about music with us, it was life art. It was looking for mushrooms, hanging out at the farm, fishing, cooking, a very social situation. His heart was just gigantic.
You can find more information about Geoff at his website here. Get out to Passim, people. See you there.