stories

He played a big Guild F50, and while I had a Gibson LG1, I had always wanted a Martin. After I introduced him to the sparse crowd I started for the door, heading for the Kettle Of Fish, the bar next door that served as my hangout, and meeting place for most of the musicians and other lowlifes that frequented Macdougal Street. I hadn't even made it down the dark, dank aisle to the lobby, when a very large, meaty paw forced me down into one of the booths the back. The large appendage was attached on the other end to a huge, bewhiskered folksinger by the name of Tex Koenig, who growled in my ear, "You listen to this man!"

He started out with a bang, Joe Hill's PREACHER AND THE SLAVE, interspersing the verses with the story of how the song came to be written, and by whom. Do I have to state that I was impressed? It took me a while to make the connection between who I saw that night and U.UTAH PHILLIPS, The Golden Voice of the Great Southwest, that Rosalie Sorrels had been talking about (we all thought that that was a fig newton of her imagination). In fact I heard that one guy walked up to Bruce shortly after he arrived in the Mysterious East and exclaimed, "Damn! You do exist!"

Anyways, that's how we met. We became friends later, although we would occasionally swap stories over drinks in the Kettle. I took off for California in '70, my wife at the time and I hitchhiking across the Continent. Saw Salt Lake City for the first time on that trip. Heading further West on I-80 I finally understood that line in AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL about "purple mountains' majesty". When my wife and I split up at the end of 1971 in Berkeley I came back to The Big Apple (Bruce always called it THE BIG CORE, the apple having long since been eaten).

On Labor Day of 1972 there was going to be a performance down at Battery Park at the lower end of Manhattan; Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, and U.Utah Phillips, and it was free to the public. I actually managed to drag myself out of bed before noon that day (at the time, true folksingers in the Village didn't stop throwing up until 2 in the afternoon), and made it down
to the park in plenty of time before the noon starting time to hang with Utah and renew our friendship. It was a beautiful afternoon and a great show. I caught a ride with Utah back to the Village in "Blanche", his '57 white Chevy panel truck, where he bought me lunch at the Lion's Head (I didn't have much money back then, still don't). He gave me one of his double
sided Echo harps (which I wish I still had), and invited me up to Saratoga Springs where he would be playing at the Caffe Lena prior to his departure the following Monday for a tour of England. I could have caught a ride up to Saratoga with him, but I had committed myself (something that has often been discussed) to a recording session in D.C. for the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, a series of radio spots sharing the hidden history of the United States of America. I stuck my thumb out the next morning at the Holland Tunnel in lower Manhattan headed for the Capitol.

The next night after the session was finished I got some money to pay for a bus ticket to meet up with Utah, and rode the Dog all night, arriving in Saratoga fairly early. Spent a couple of hours trying to find Utah, since he hadn't told me his phone number or address. Just walked into the Four Sons Cafe and asked Phil, the owner, how to find him. Hung out there for a couple of hours until Lena Spencer (the owner of Caffe Lena) walked in. Phil greeted her with, "Lena, we've been looking all over for you!" She told me where the Wildflowers house was. When I finally found his abode I had to wait 'til he woke up. After breakfast he announced that Jim Ringer was recording at the Folk Lethargy (Folk Legacy Records actually, but that's what Bruce always called it) studio down in Sharon, Connecticut, and what say we go down there? We piled into "Blanche", 6 or 7 of us and headed South.

Folk Legacy was a wonderful recording company run by Sandy and Caroline Paton that put out some great LP's of folk music. They were located in a barn that had been converted to a music school which was also their home. Sandy also had some wonderful single malt Scotch that we raided, enough of it went down my gullet that I went to sleep on the couch (It was later told that my snores ruined at least one take). The next day Ringer said he needed an up tempo song for the album so I played him OLD BILL PICKETT which he decided to learn and record that day, with my old friend Jay Ungar backing him up on mandolin. Mary McCaslin, who was Jim's partner, sang backup on the choruses. Utah agreed to take on the publishing, and then took off back to Saratoga to get ready for the coming festivities. I hung around for a day or two more and then hitchhiked back to Saratoga.

So many performers showed up to see of Phillips off to England that instead of doing two sets a night at Lena's, Bruce would do one set, and for the 2nd would just give everyone a chance at the mike. It seemed like everyone was there; Saul Broudy, Dakota Dave Hull, Andy Cohen, Nancy Katz, Jane Voss, Margaret MacArthur, JB Freeman, Ringer and McCaslin, Bodie
Wagner, and a host of others (I really don't remember much after a certain point) .Ringer showed up with a release for the recording of my song and 25 dollars, which Jim, Utah, and I proceeded to drink up in a couple of hours. I will spare you the gory details of that fun-filled weekend, but I should mention that I didn't dare show my face in that town for at least another 6 months.

That was the first time that Utah tried to help what could be laughingly called my career. He always said that there were no career moves in folk music. But it wasn't the last. Every time he would come to New York to do a show I would be there in the house learning what I could from him,; songs, stories, puns, bad jokes, etc. He'd spot me in the audience and ask, "Ross, are you still in New York?" Meaning I guess that I should widen my horizons, which I eventually did.

In '73 he took me off for a week on the road with him, New Jersey and upstate New York, allowing me to do an opening set at some of the venues. In '76 he was asked by the Smithsonian to recommend performers to play in the Working Americans section of the Festival and he got a bunch of us hired. They ran the festival that year for 12 weeks because it was the Bicentennial, and we worked, four of us at a time, four week shifts. Best paying gig I had ever had up until then. 500 smackers a week in government money (check out the inflation rate, that would be the equivalent of about 3 grand a week now). Of course after that, he was never invited back to the Smithsonian Festival again. It might have had something to do with their having to put up with a bunch of layabout, ne'er-do-well folksingers for 3 months. Over the years when a gig came up that he couldn't do, or when there wasn't enough money to make it worth his while to leave home and hearth, and family, he
would turn the gig over to me, which was how I got to play in Butte, Montana the first time. It was 1980, for Miner's Union Day, and the first time in 30 some years that they celebrated that event. Big parade and everything. Took old Art Nurse over with me, he had joined the IWW in 1918, and he won the prize for being the oldest union member present. When the house
trailer I was living in in Missoula caught fire twice in one month, Bruce (along with JB Freeman) raised up the money to allow me to move to Butte, "The only island on earth surrounded completely by land." He always told folks that he got me to move there because he knew I would be safe, there wasn't any work available. I always said it was a town that didn't confuse having character with being one.

I learned a lot from Bruce, which is how he preferred to be addressed by his friends. "Hey, Phillips" reminded him too much of being in the Army, something he would prefer to forget for various reasons. Aside from the music, and the art of performance, he was a never-ending source of information on a number of subjects; labor, the American West, anarchism,
literature, folklore, language, tramping, art, Egyptology (he had taught himself to read hieroglyphics, well enough that when the King Tut exhibit came to Chicago he was invited to lead the private tour. The curator of the Cairo Museum who was there for the tour only corrected his pronunciation), and various other bits of arcana. I remember going to the Met in NYC
with him where he pointed out the mis-translations of bas-reliefs from the Ammanite heresy.

When I moved to Montana we started to work together. I would produce his shows, my only recompense being the opportunity to be the opening act. Well, sometimes I would get a little cash. When we were heading to Chicago in 1984 to record REBEL VOICES live at Holsteins, he was having trouble playing guitar so he asked me to be his hands. He came to Missoula to
rehearse. Right off the plane we went to the Missoula Club for a drink. The upshot of the evening was that I ended up getting my rose tattoo that night, and was officially inducted into the fraternity by its founder.

Though he had sort of given up performing with a guitar because of Dupertyn's Contracture in his left ring finger and focal dystonia in his right thumb (which made it hard, if not impossible to play the guitar with anything approaching dexterity {he was always a better guitar player than people gave him credit for}), when Kate Wolf was diagnosed with cancer , and had to quit the road, she ordered Phillips to take over her gigs. Bruce called me up and asked if I would come out with him and play guitar and banjo. Since I already knew most of his material it made it fairly easy on both of us, though we had to sort of compromise on tempos (he always played his own songs way too fast, I thought).

Utah always enjoyed horse trading, always carrying some stuff to trade for something else. He liked to define value not as what something cost, but what use it could be to someone. Once we were doing a show in Missoula and he insisted that we would do a trade on stage in front of the audience. I had this fedora with a fairly wide brim that he coveted, made by Dobbs I seem to recall. He told me that we would do the trade in the second set, but wouldn't tell me what I was going to get in return until we had completed the transaction in front of an audience. I guess it was pretty entertaining to watch, but what I ended up with was sort of like a retractable measuring tape, but instead of inches and feet it had 6 feet of Henny Youngman jokes on it. Of course for the next couple of months I would walk around town with it in my pocket, and when one my acquaintances would ask for the latest joke I would whip it out of my vest pocket, extending the humor covered contents to their full length and instruct my friend to "Pick one." I later sold it to the hockshop downstairs from my apartment for a couple of bucks. Utah bought it back from them the next time he was in town.

One item he had that I coveted was a leather fringed jacket made out of horsehide instead of the more traditional deerskin. A bush pilot up in Canada had made it from the skin of his favorite horse after the animal had died. Utah had admired the garment when he was up North of the border at one of the festivals there, and after the bush pilot died in a crash, his sister showed up at a festival and handed him the jacket saying that her brother had wanted Utah to have it after he no longer had any use for it. With long fringes, and silver conchos, and some beadwork, and what look to be raptor talons, I lusted after that coat. Every time I would come to Nevada City (and I always had something to trade that Bruce wanted), he would ask "What do you want for that?" I would ask for the jacket, and he would tell me that it wasn't on the table. Well, wouldn't
you know it, for my 50th birthday a package arrived in the mail. Yup, it was that jacket, which I would wear proudly when the weather was right. Except a couple of years later I got a call from Utah. He was feeling guilty, and would I trade him back the coat for a Stetson Open Road model fedora in silverbelly? What could I say? Of course. After he passed on I was booked to play at a buckskinners rendezvous in North Dakota and needed to dress appropriately for the period. I asked Joanna if I could have the horsehide jacket back for the occasion, and she gave it to me.

My proudest moment came in 1995 when Bruce asked me to come into the studio with him to do the recording LOAFER'S GLORY for Redhouse Records. He got the company to foot the bill so I had a paid for ticket on the train to come down there from Butte, and 3 nights in the National Hotel in Nevada City. We had worked together in the studio just a couple of months previously,
finishing up my recording of LOOK FOR ME IN BUTTE which Utah co-produced, and for which we had co-written a couple of songs. When wrote the words to LOOK FOR ME IN BUTTE he called me up and dictated the lyrics. I called back an hour later with the music but he wouldn't answer the phone, so I got to change some of the words. We were later nominated for an INDIE for that LOAFER'S GLORY recording, but I didn't find out about it until after we had already lost. Bruce never bothered to tell me. He never cared much for the music industry, or the misguided trappings of celebrity.

Bruce was my mentor, my teacher, my compadre, traveling companion, Oh Hell, I could go on for a while. He taught me how to wear hats ("Never wear a hat that has more character than you."). He taught me to drink whiskey instead of vodka so people would know that I was drunk and not stupid. He taught me how to write songs, how to organize, the art of storytelling, the
art of performance. Taught me about the IWW and the history that we don't get in school, about the radicals who really made this country what it is, and what it should become.

I miss him every day. Every time I pick up a book, or see a picture, or I run into a situation where I'm not sure what to do, I say why the hell isn't he here to guide me through this.
I didn't shed a tear when my father and my mother died. I wept unashamedly at Bruce's grave when we laid him to rest thereon Red Dog Lane in Nevada City. He left a long yardstick for us to measure up to. I hope I can, I'll do the best I can.

Mark Ross ("Smokestack")
Feb. 28. 2013 Eugene, Oregon