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Good morning, this is Mike here with you.
Today I am joined by a very special guest, guitar wizard, songwriter, singer, rock and roll hall of famer, and member of the loyal order of water buffalos, Yorma Kalkanan.
Good morning, Yorma.
How you doing today?
Water buffalos, very good.
Well, here we are.
Yeah, how are you doing today?
Welcome to WJMS.
Oh, thanks.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm really good, actually.
We're heading up to the North country soon.
And right now I'm in the Chicago environs where it's kind of great, but not totally unpleasant.
Sounds nice.
Good luck on your shows tonight.
I hope they go really well.
So I
appreciate
it.
Yes, sir.
So I'll get right to it here, I guess.
With a career spanning six decades, thousands of performances including Woodstock with the airplane, Grammy Awards and collaborations with some of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century,
I know folks here on the go get it Grange.
We're so excited to have you perform for us.
But I think there's a question that everyone here wants to know.
Okay.
So Tom says that your dad attended and graduated high school in Ironwood and that your grandfather who was a minor here is buried in Riverside Cemetery.
However, Ray says that your grandfather moved to LA and is buried in a family plot there.
And you know, we just need answers.
So I think Ray is closer to being on point here.
my of my dad was born in our and both his brothers were were were born in ironwood but i believe they i believe they moved to l.a.
to that we can't consult with that on this because he's been gone for a bit
but
i believe they moved to l.a.
gosh did my dad was born in nineteen ten i think they moved in like twenty one or twenty two something like that and uh... and of all places uh... they wound up moving to uh... to east l.a.
now
When my dad, when my grandparents lived there, my grandfather had a tailor shop, and he made clothes for miners.
And I'm trying to think that Carnegie Library, I visited that library with my dad a number of, like a lifetime ago.
And he learned to speak English to that Carnegie Library.
No kidding.
Which I'm sure is still there.
Yeah, we're celebrating the 100th year
of that library this year.
That's awesome.
So yeah, you do have roots here.
Absolutely.
No question about it.
No question about it.
So in the early nineties, I went up and did did the boundary waters with a buddy of mine and we've, we spent a couple of weeks portaging and hiking and stuff like that in the boundary waters and on the way back to Ohio, which is where I live when I'm not on the road, stopped by Ironwood and went on the Roots tour, the Calcutta Family Roots tour and did all that stuff.
It was great.
Yeah, there's an incredible history and you know, I'd heard a rumor that you were super smitten with the historic Ironwood Theater and we're super glad to have you come in here.
It's very exciting for me.
Only second to the excitement of being at the historic Ironwood Theater is hopefully getting a little bit of pull-up.
Let's see if we can't hook that up for you.
when you get here.
I'll bet it's possible.
You'll have a choice of two or three pasty places if that's in your
realm of desire.
Oh, pasty.
That's a like.
What's not to like.
So I've been keeping up with your blog on the tour and it seems like the tour has kind of become an opportunity for you to kind of reflect on in your life.
You've grown up all over places like Washington DC, Pakistan, the Philippines, Ohio, the West Coast.
So what does it mean for you to finish this tour in Ironwood?
Actually,
You know, it's funny.
It's sort of like a sync.
It's a moment of synchronicity on some levels.
And so I don't think we consciously planned it like that.
But I think that just in this moment, attend this tour at one of the Calcutta family home places, it's important.
It touches me on many levels.
I was also listening to the to Wabash Avenue.
Recently and then listen into this is your latest release of features live recordings from your performances in San Jose in 1965 this album is
kind of
like a Document of what would become your life's work.
It's kind of like it's all already there.
It's sort of wild It's a mix of your own arrangements of folk songs blues and adapted spirituals with even your own originals including embryonic journey
Yeah, so it's a funny.
It's a funny thing about that because
But the Wabash Avenue thing, you know, when I moved to the West Coast, I was going to school at the University of Santa Clara, so I went up to the South Bay of the San Francisco area.
And after I got out of school, I just kind of hung around there because I've been teaching and playing guitar, and I was kind of like a local, you know, a local celebrity, I mean, in a very minor kind of way.
The guy that owned the music store, you know, because I had so many guitar students back then.
that I made more money teaching guitar because I continued teaching guitar like the first six months of the airplane.
I made more money teaching guitar in San Jose than I did with the airplane at San Francisco.
But anyway, so Norm Benner is the guy that owned the music house, the music store.
And he said, you know, you really ought to do an album.
And I said, great.
You know, we didn't think about a studio thing.
That was totally, it would never even been in my universe.
But
We had a friend that had a professional, what was at the time, a professional grade tape recorder and a nice condenser mic that we bought from the audiovisual department of the University of Santa Clara.
We set this up and recorded a bunch of stuff.
And that was, we were going to do a release of that and that was going to make me a minor star in the South Bay area.
But right around that time, right around the time we finished the recording, my buddy Paul Kanner,
Called me up and said you need you need to come up to San Francisco I know you're not interested in playing rock and roll, but I want you to see what we've got going on And I figured you I'll go to San Francisco get a nice good official before if we get a walk away come shrimp cocktail or something and so I went up there and and played with a with a very early incarnation of the Jefferson Airplane got sidetracked and and the tape from from Wabash Avenue
just wound up laying around.
By the way, we called it Wabash Avenue because that was the street that I lived on at the time that I recorded that.
Yeah, the cover is kind of incredible.
It's actually the actual envelope you started.
We're doing what they call the poor man's copyright kind of thing where you mailed the whole thing
to yourself.
Absolutely.
So yeah, that's kind of funny too because yeah, the poor man's copyright where you've got the brown tape or the
the post office stamps over everything so they can see that it hasn't been altered and stuff like that.
I don't know where the original 15 IPS tapes went.
These were as the normal, I guess seven and a half, whatever the normal quote unquote quality recording speed for tape recorders back in those zeroes.
But anyway, the thing just laid around and moved from one home to another, from one box to another, and we were
Vanessa, my wife and I were cleaning out the garage and this thing popped up and I was debating.
We had this huge dumpster refilling up of stuff.
We're getting rid of and I was debating, is this worth saving?
And she said, give me that fag.
And so we had a friend of, we sent it out to California.
My friend Ricky Sanchez opened it up and found it was in good shape.
Did a pass and made a digital recording of it.
And now we get to listen to it.
It's and I find it really incredible because it doesn't just capture your playing at the time, but it sort of captures kind of what What kind of folk music was sort of in general right before the break of that big heavy rock and roll in the 60s where you're doing Piedmont picking on on San Francisco Bay blues, which you know, you're doing these interpretations using other blues forms and styles and It's just this big.
It's just a reminder to me of
how amazing American music is.
And so you've got blues recordings on there.
You've got Follow the Drinking Gourd and Old Spiritual.
You've got Embryonic Journey is on there as well.
When I think about that time, I'm really curious about that transition of the scene there in San Francisco from
you know a bunch of folks going to hooten anise and jamborees and singing michael row the boat ashore to the summer of love and and what
that process
is like you know
it's a really interesting zeitgeist in a lot of ways and you know when you work when i listen to those tapes it's such a window of time in a lot of ways because it captured me in a really fairly early you know moments of my quote unquote
playing career where my versions of the songs that I'd learned from records and from the live people that I knew, it's so much closer to the source back then, to the obvious
reasons
than it is now, you know.
And, you know, to hear like an early version, early version of every other journey and stuff like that, you know, one of my comments was when I heard the tape, because of course I hadn't heard it in a lifetime, is I told Vanessa, I said, you know,
I was pretty good back then for a young
guy.
That kid was really coming along, wasn't he?
But anyway, as you mentioned, the well for that kind of music, for that kind of American music is so deep.
And now there's so many people that are very, very good at it.
Back in those days, it was sort of like just coming out of the woodwork, and not that many people did it.
But it's alive and well, and there's some great players out there constantly.
You know, not only reinterpreting the old stuff and writing writing their own stuff that someday if they're lucky will be the old stuff
Hmm.
Hmm.
Well, one of the huge differences between now and then is just our access to that music I can click a couple buttons and I can hear Reverend Gary Davis and most of his catalog What was it like for you guys seeking out that music and trying to learn it and hone it just by using your ears?
so so i got it either your training is really important and i i think it was a good thing for me in the long run so i'm going to any of college of story that's been told many times uh... i'm at this time in the end you can and that was a little bit older than me and he was a friend of reverend gary davis's even with the end was a fantastic player like he could be learned a lot of stuff for the reverend he could do all that kind of stuff you know he could also do london johnson i mean he was just a fantastic guitar player
absolutely didn't care about performing just love to play but i was very lucky that i went up in a house with him and he uh... basically gave me the keys to the highway without one of them and then i have one of the anti-acco up jobs uh... shortly thereafter i went to new york and i got a chance to take to hear the reverend play live i never took lessons from but i didn't have the money to do that at the time but but uh... taxi here in live in here out how powerfully was
And one of the things that happened to me was, is that I never got consumed with learning exactly the way the Reverend did stuff.
I didn't have the ear or the capabilities to do that kind of stuff.
So we'll geek out for a minute on this kind of stuff.
Reverend played with the two fingers of his right hand, his thumb and his first finger.
And Ian, the guy that I learned from, played with three thumb and his first two fingers.
So that's the way I learned how to do it.
And that's how I do it.
So as a result,
Even with stuff where I've studied the reverend closely because the way I did it the groove is a little bit different, but but that's okay
Yeah, well, there's the guitar playing that there's even the singing you know because Not everybody can shout hoot and holler like a Gary Davis or somebody like that, but there is also a traditional blues
a tradition in blues of these softer voices.
And that's one thing that just really strikes out with me when I'm listening to Wabash Avenue or your music in general, is you have the voice that you use to sing these blues.
It is authentic, but it's your own voice.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
And I don't think I planned it that way.
I just think it worked out that way.
But one of the things I think that helped
Me and guys of my generation who came up in that time was that if there were when we play a coffee house or a hoot or whatever If there was a PA and there's a big if there there would be one microphone So you had to learn how to have an aggressive guitar style and how to sing out otherwise nobody would ever hear it hmm
Yeah, so then you start start to move the sound moves from
And what's wild about the psychedelic music thing that happened that exploded is even with bands like The Grateful Dead and Airplane and all these bands that have these wild, huge sounds, you still have these roots in this traditional music.
Yeah, I mean, again, it's such a deep and powerful well.
Think about guys like Jerry Garcia and his pals and the dead and all of us of that thing.
We all came up playing folk music.
Because it was real music.
So I don't mean to demean anybody's music But the general pop music of the time was pretty insipid and from my point of from my judgmental point of view and it's just that That that music we were playing that was rooted in in blues and a lot of blue gas and stuff like that They told real life stories and that meant a lot to us, you know because we grew up in a in or I grew up in an era and a household
where mom and dad didn't really talk about stuff that really interested the kids hardly at all just just everything about the music um you know the folk music the blues what however you want to categorize that kind of stuff it was about real life and uh you know for a kid growing up uh in the era in which i did i was born in 1940 i'm a i'm a pre-boomer but the same kind of thing it just was
It was just so much more interesting that mom and dad stuff.
Yeah, more things change, right?
So
how true
so you've got about eight nine days left on this tour and then I think hot tune
is
getting back out on the road this year.
Correct.
And
then in between that you also run the fur piece ranch guitar camp in southeastern Ohio with your wife, Vanessa.
Yeah.
I'm just going to quickly throw a parenthetical inclusion here.
So the Furpiece Ranch Guitar Camp physically no longer exists.
We've been trying to remember.
And we sold the May of 25.
So it's been a while since we've done that.
But the Furpiece Spirit lives on.
If you look at a map of southeast Ohio, there's this tiny little
almost a non-existent town called Darwin down near the river and that's where the Furfus Ranch was.
But we wound up moving to town when my daughter was going to high school, so she'd go to high school in town.
And so we still are doing lessons at our facility in Athens, Ohio, interesting little college town.
And I'm doing a bunch of online stuff.
And we do fur piece on the road.
Like during the winter, we're trying to find a nice
Warm place.
It's true to over the last couple years.
It's been the San Diego, California would certainly be so high on the winter and And also and so in warmer weather we do stuff up in Martha's Martha's Vineyard So the teaching for peace spirits alive and well, but the the mother ship belongs to somebody else now And I hope they have a lot of fun taking care of 126 acres of wooded land.
All right there in the Appalachians you could do worse.
I think
Oh, no.
Are you kidding?
I've been so fortunate.
We just stumbled into the property that became the Furfish Ranch in 89 or 90.
We were at that time, we were able to buy 126 acres of land for about 32,000 bucks.
It seems like a good deal.
Yeah.
Sounds like science fiction to me, Yorma.
Yeah, it really does.
I mean, it does to me too.
It's unthinkable today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I just, I wanted to bring that up because I just, I wanted to let our listeners and other folks know that this tradition and this ethos of folk music and teaching people directly how to play, teaching them the old songs, this has remained a big part of your life.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm really glad that this has become part of our conversation here because
When I was learning when I was coming up the people that taught me were so free about Opening their their art or whatever you want to call it to me and helping me with stuff You know there wasn't one either any this nonsense where they you know Where they turned to the walls so the guitar geeks couldn't find out what they're doing and steal your licks and stuff I mean everybody everybody just shared all the time
And that was important to me, and it's important to me to pass it on to.
And to find somebody, like what I do is kind of an odd little corner of the musical universe in a lot of ways, but to find somebody that's passionate about it is me, love it.
Oh yeah, I mean, I can tell you that whether you know it or not, you've probably taught a lot more people music than you realize.
I was talking with my buddy Eric, and he was a bass player for
you know two three decades and then he started picking up only guitar recently and he said over two three years that you ended up teaching him almost everything he knows on guitar and it's kind of all he does is sit around and pick guitar anymore and so uh big thank you from my buddy bear yeah
well the pleasure is mine believe
me
That's wonderful.
Well, Yorma, we can leave it there.
I know you got a tight schedule and a lot of prepping to do.
Really grateful to have you on the air this morning.
Wishing you a lot of luck as you wrap
up the tour
and then records.
And I'm sure I'll see you when I get iron wet as I recall.
It's been, like I said, it's been the better part of a number of years as I've been there.
I guess I'm going to get to meet you in person.
I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
Well, I would like that.
I would like that.
And if you're interested, you know, maybe I could get Larry involved.
And if you want to tour some of the old mine areas or go through the miners Memorial Park, if you've got a day to do that, um, he can show you around
the old mine
shafts and things
like that.
That'd be wonderful.
Awesome.
Yorma, thanks for joining us this morning.
Safe travels.
Have a good one.
Thank you, Yorma.
Yeah.
Thanks, Mike.
Really appreciate it.
And as they say in Finland, Kitos.
Kitos.
That's thank you.
Yeah Yorma have a great
day.
Thank you so
much.
It's great talking to you sir.
Yeah you too.
My guest this morning was legendary guitarist Grammy Award winner Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Yorma Kalkanan.
He will be performing at the historic Ironwood Theater on Saturday April 25th at 7 p.m.
There are still tickets available for that currently so go ahead and snatch them up before they're gone.
I'm your host Mike LeBeau.
Thank you for joining me on In Our Range.