Tom Rush

Tom Rush is the original singer/songwriter. Honing his chops in Cambridge while attending Harvard, Tom ultimately got record deals at Elektra and Columbia and is famous for not only his own songs, but for introducing those of James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne to the masses. Listen as we hear not only about the history, but Tom's battle with Covid-19 and the aftermath, as well as what he's up to today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Fifth Podcast.
My guest today's see the legendary senior songwriter Tom Rush. Tom. Hi, Bob,
it's good to see you. Okay. Now you had COVID
tell me about that. Well, I don't recommend it. It
was not fun. It was back in March. I was

(00:29):
an early adapter um and I've just felt awful for
about two weeks. It was five days of getting worse,
five days of feeling like crap, five days of getting better.
And I never got most of the typical symptoms. I
just felt exhausted and achy all over, and I ran
a little bit of a fever. But I just slept
twenty hours a day at the at the bottom of

(00:51):
the curve, and then I got better. And then a
couple of months later I was having heart palpitations in
the duck. Told me I should wear a heart monitor
for two weeks. I did. I mailed it in. He
calls me a five thirty on Friday, because these things
never happened Tuesday morning and says, basically, get your ass

(01:13):
to an ambulance and have them bring you to Mass General.
And I said, excuse me, what are you talking about
and he said, we're concerned you might have an event.
And I said, okay, what kind of event? And he said,
well the text the technical term is sudden cardiac death.
And that that got my attention, and in fact, I

(01:36):
didn't go straight in I because that's the kind of
guy I am. I went back to where I was
living and had a nice dinner with a glass of
wine and when in the next morning, uh, and they
put a pacemaker in me. They discovered, quite accidentally, totally
unrelated to any heart palpitations, that my heart rate was
going down to twenty three beats a minute, and so

(01:59):
they put a pacemaker in and now I am pretty
much invincible. Okay, for those of us out of the know,
what exactly is a pacemaker? And do you know you
have it in you? Oh? Yeah, yeah, there's a little
bump in my chest. I mean, I'm I pretty much
have to bow out of all the bathing suit competitions
from from now on. They weren't going well anyway. But no,

(02:22):
it's it. Basically, this pacemaker. They do different things this one.
If my heart rate goes below fifty beats a minute,
it will kick in and keep my heart rate above
fifty beats a minute. And when it does kick in,
are you aware of that? No? Okay, So other than
the bump, it's totally, you know, transparent. You don't know
what's going on. No, No, it doesn't bother me a bit. Okay.

(02:46):
What do they think caused it? They don't know. But
I think I think COVID caused it. I really do.
When I was in the cardiac word at mess General,
which is locally referred to as it's in Massachusetts General Hospital.
Locally it's referred to as Massive Genitals. But when I
was in the cardiac word there, uh, the nurse observed

(03:08):
that they had a lot of COVID survivors. And this
is at a point when less way, less than one
percent of the population were COVID survivors. So it made
me think that maybe COVID causes heart problems. And how
do you think you got it COVID? I think I
got it on a plane. I was doing gigs in Florida,

(03:32):
and uh, I had a week off and then more
gigs in Florida, and I was gonna I came back
to Boston for my week off and started feeling crummy
on on day three, Day four, of the week off. Meanwhile,
all the all the other gigs were canceled. And fortunately

(03:54):
my daughter was staying with me and she took care
of me. And and then she got the same bug
she had. She tested negative, but she had to have
had it. She had the same symptoms. And now I
know you frequently worked with Matt Nakoah. Was he on
that gig with you? He was? He didn't get it.
He didn't get it. There were several people that I
was hanging out with it didn't get it. So I

(04:16):
think I got it on the plane coming north. And
then have you gotten the vaccine. I've just I'm three
days away from being totally invincible. I've had my second
shot almost two weeks ago. Okay, Now, if one goes
to your web page, it appears that you've been doing

(04:38):
live gigs during this interim. Tell us the story there. Well, actually,
I think that the website may have been um misleading.
I'm about to do this this coming Saturday, the twenty March.
I'm about to do a show at the Birchmure in
in Alexandria, Virginia, which will be my first live gig

(04:59):
this year. The website, I think is should be telling
you that this, that and the other gig have been
rescheduled until I guess what I was saying. You know,
I follow you pretty closely, but it seemed like you
were putting it out there that you would play private,
socially distanced gigs. I was doing that. This was I'm

(05:19):
trying to figure out ways to ways to survive this
and the public gigs were being canceled, and I figured, well,
it's you know, the weather is nice. This was in
the fall. I'm in the northeast, and uh, so I
put out this thing and said, hey, let's do some
private shows outdoors, properly distanced outdoor, private shows with small

(05:41):
gatherings and uh and it worked. I did, you know,
five or six of them, and I paid the rent
and and then winter set in. So that's over. I'm
hoping to kick it back into action, uh in a
month or so when the weather is up here. Interestingly,
you will also put your price on the website. You

(06:05):
said you normally get paid ten thousand dollars. Is it
a factor of age and you just don't care anymore,
because certainly this is a business where you could do
the same gig and the price could vary widely, so
people are really loath to quote a price. Well it's
you know, the and the price does very widely. It depends,
you know, if I have to fly to Australia to

(06:26):
do it, it's gonna cost more than if it's just
down the block. Um. But um, I'm basically I was
basically giving about a fift discount on private shows and
and people signed up for them so great. Um, But
then that was shut down because of the weather. And

(06:49):
then I started this Rockport Sundays series on Patreon. Before
we get into the Patreon thing, you know, to what
degree do you have to work to make your nut?
And we talk about different musicians are in different levels,
and also there are a lot of very household name
musicians who have high overheads. So when this shut down,

(07:12):
where you starting to freak out or this was just
impacting your lifestyle? Or he said to god, I could
keep myself busy. Well, it was a little of each.
I mean the cash flow. The twenty was shaping up
to be the best year ever from a you know,
business standpoint, and then just mid March just stopped. Okay,
well let's stop. Why was twenty so deep into your career.

(07:35):
Sixty years into your career, why was shaping up to
be the best? I can't answer that more. You know,
I was getting more bookings for you know, for bigger crowds.
I think I've gotten better over the years. Bob Okay, yeah,
you know. Un Let's that's one thing people don't realize
about getting older. You know that all this focus on you,
we do get wiser. In many cases, we do get better.

(07:57):
But you were answering the question about the cash h oh, well, yeah,
the cash flow, it just went off the cliff. Um. Now,
I don't have a lot of overhead because I don't
have a band uh these days, as you say, I
worked with Matt Nicola. Uh and he gets paid when
I get paid. Uh. And Matt is actually to go

(08:20):
back to the Rockports Sundays. He's been participating on a
lot of those those little episodes. But I don't haven't.
I didn't have a lot of overhead, but I do.
You know, I've got I got to pay the rent,
and now I've got to pay my wife's rent. She's
she's off in Wyoming now, um, and you know, health

(08:45):
insurance and I've got a kid in college and stuff
like that so um, I was invading savings and decided
I had invaded savings about enough, and I should try
to figure out how to how make some money. And
I also it's partly I just I love playing for people,
and I was I was suffering audience deprivation syndrome, and

(09:10):
so tell us about the patriar. Well. I checked out
a bunch of different platforms. I was living in Rockport, Massachusetts,
and I wrote this instrumental years ago called Rockport Sunday
that people seem to like a lot. And I thought, Okay, well,
maybe maybe I'll do this. I'll put out put out

(09:31):
a video clip of one song or a story perhaps
every Sunday, and it'll be a subscription series and it
costs ten bucks a month at the bottom at the
bottom level, and you get it. You get a song,
a video clip of me in the kitchen, very casual.
The production values are good because I've got a guy

(09:52):
who's very professional doing the audio and video. But I'm
very casual. I haven't done one in my pajamas yet,
but you never know. Um, And I'll sing a song
for you, tell you a story about the song, sing
a song, and that's it, and that song will then
be available for eight weeks, uh, and it will then
disappear to make room for whatever the newest thing is.

(10:16):
And some weeks I tell a story. I told the
story of Clint Eastwood and the Hashish Brownie, and I'll
tell the story about skinny dipping with Janis Joplin's some okay,
you know it just as a teaser for those of
White Side Up. Tell us the story of skinny Dipping
with Jannis. No, no, no, Bobby, you have to subscribe. Okay,

(10:38):
somebody someone Is it already off the eight weeks or
could they still get it? No? I haven't done the
Janis Chaplin one yet, but that was okay, I'll give
you a taste of that. I was on the Festival
Express tour across Canada and it was quite an adventure.

(10:58):
It was a bunch of musicians on a train, The
Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, the band Delaney and Bonnie Ian
and Sylvia um on and on, and we went across
we wanted. We started in Toronto, ended in Calgary. And
when we got to Calgary, this was the best party

(11:20):
I have ever been to. It was we kind of
regarded the stadium shows that we had to stop and
do as unwelcome intrusions into the flow of the party.
We got to Calgary and the promoters had hired the
municipal swimming pool so that we could all go for
a swim, which was very sweet and much appreciated, and

(11:43):
of course all of these hippie musicians wanted to go
skinny dipping, which horrified the pool officials. But it was
our pool, you know. They couldn't stop us. But they
did have a rule, hard and fast rule that anyone
with long hair, which was everybody, had to wear a
bathing cap. And my my mind is permanently scarred by

(12:07):
the sight of seeing Leslie West of Mountains coming out
of the changing room wearing nothing but a bathing cap
over his afro and a second bathing cap upside down
over his beard. You can't unsee something like that. And
uh now, on that festival press, certainly Janis Joplin was

(12:28):
a famous drinker with Southern comfort during that day and
maybe even today. To what degree did you partake in substances? Well,
there were a lot of substances on that On that train,
alcohol was very popular. We in fact drank the train
dry about four hours out of Toronto, which was the

(12:50):
first and we remember we stopped, We made them stop
in a prairie little prairie town, went into the liquor
store and bought everything, every every bottle in that store.
Went back on the train and we continued on, and uh,

(13:11):
it was a very it was a very strange experience.
I'm sure for the staff on the train. These were
guys with jackets and little red bow ties who were
used to dealing with families on vacation and all of
a sudden, they've got a train full of hippies, you know,
smoking dope and doing god knows what um but they

(13:31):
were it was all It was very cool. I remember
seeing Janice job I was I was talking with Delaney
or Bonnie Bonnie Bramlett of Delaney and Bonny. I was
chatting with her. Janie comes running in and says, Bonny, Bonny, Bonny,
you've gotta come. I'm doing an interview with Time magazine.
And I just realized that you and I are the

(13:53):
same person. You've got to come and participate in this
interview with me. And so she gets and I trailed
along because I wanted to find out how it was
that Janis and Bonnie were the same person, and Bonnie
was talking about how talent was. It was a gift

(14:13):
from God, but it was also a curse in a way,
because because God had given you this gift, you were
obliged to go out and share it with people, and
it means leaving your family and leading a very difficult
life out on the road, and but this is what
God demands of you. Janis, on the other hand, was

(14:34):
talking about how great it was to be a rock
star because you get laid a lot. Somehow, they were
the same person in Janis's mind. Just going back though,
when you were on the road, to what degree or
in your career did you partake of drugs, whether it
be marijuana, cocaine, heroin, or anything. I did. I did

(14:57):
a bunch of stuff, U pot. Of course it was
kind of derry gur I did too much cocaine for
a while, and I actually stopped cocaine because I got
ahold of some pharmaceutical coke and it was so good

(15:18):
that I was so pissed that I had been spending
all this money on garbage, been snorting mothballs. I just stopped.
I never got involved in the harder stuff because when
I was a little kid, I was sickly and I
got a lot of injections and I developed a real
aversion to needles. So anything that involved a needle, no,

(15:41):
thank you. Get that thing away from me, which served
me well. Okay. Also, you had a very big birthday
about a month ago. How does that affect you emotionally? Well?
Not much. I mean, I'm I'm feeling good, I think, Uh,
you know, I'm writing more than I ever wrote. Um,

(16:03):
I'm having a lot of fun with Rockports Sundays and
very much looking forward to getting back on the road.
Uh So the only the only part of it was
it was a you know, a big birthday bash scheduled
for the Whang Center in Boston, which is this absolutely
dropped at gorgeous seat hall, and we were going to

(16:24):
get all kinds of guest artists and Garth Brooks in fact,
you know, put together happy birthday video clip for the
occasion and it had to be canceled. So basically, Bob,
I have suspended aging. As soon as we can do it,
we'll have my eightieth birthday party at the Wing Center. Okay.

(16:46):
So what's your relationship with Garth Brooks? Uh, he's he's
credited me many times over the years as being one
of the first people his dad, I guess played some
of my albums for the kids when he was when
he was little, and he was he came to like

(17:07):
my music a lot. So that's that's really the only
connection I've never met the guy. Um. Okay, So you
talk about being very creative and writing at this particular
point in time, but on some level, which is interesting
from an outside observer, the landscape is identical to when
you started. When you started first, you know, there was

(17:29):
fifties rock, rank Sinatra, then the teen idols, and now
we have teen idols again and everything spread out. So
what do you think about this change in landscape and
what motivates you today. I guess what motivates me is
is again, I love to play for people. I love
to get up on stage and make people laugh and

(17:49):
cry and you know, dig into their emotional uh, their
emotional life. I get. I get a big a lot
of pleasure out of that. Um. The landscape is because
of the Internet, is totally different. You know, when I

(18:09):
started out, if you didn't have a record deal, you
did not exist, because it was the record companies who
got you on the radio and got you written up
in the magazines and and that sold tickets and um.
But without that you were invisible. Now any kid with

(18:30):
a laptop can you know, make music in their bedroom
and put it up on the internet. And some of
it's terrible, some of it's wonderful, but you don't need
the record company anymore. Um. And it's become very confusing.
I mean, the whole the whole genre question has become

(18:51):
very muddy. It used to be, you know, there was jazz,
there was classical, there was folk, There were blues and
raw u and that was about it. And I remember
actually my first album came out on a little private
label in Cambridge, and I went into the Harvard Coope,
the local record store, and they'd put my album under

(19:14):
Blues in the blues section. And I went to the manager.
I said, excuse me, I do some blues, yes, but
I also do traditional folk material. And he said okay,
and he took took my albums and put him in
the folks section. I said, well, wait, wait a second.
I yes, I do some folk, but I also and
he finally, after a couple of more of these, he said, okay, kid,

(19:38):
and he put me in miscellaneous, and I learned my
lesson not to argue about categories. But now there's so
many categories. I mean, I want to Actually, I'm thrilled, Bob,
to be able to announce that the last night I
won all the Grammys, every single every single one of them.

(19:59):
Anybody that's as otherwise it's false and that's false news.
Were you ever nominated programming? To be honest, I can't remember.
I don't think so well except you went there. What
is your thought about the Grammy organization in the Grammy winning?
I don't know. It's I I've fallen so far away

(20:22):
from the industry um that I don't really pay much
attention to it. I mean, it's it's great for the
folks who wins something, but I'm not sure what it means.
It means that a bunch of people with a very
uh skewed point of view voted for them. It doesn't

(20:43):
necessarily mean they're good. It just means they're popular with
a certain, very restricted crowd. So, um, I don't I
just don't put a lot of stock in it. Okay,
now you have very ring levels on peach. We tell
us about that. Well, I started out with just one

(21:07):
that they call them tears. And the tier that I
started out with was the ten dollar a month tier
where you get every Sunday a brand new song or
a story or and then I added a bunch more
tiers for so for twenty five bucks a month, you get,
of course the song or the story, but you also
get pages from a book I'm writing. And it goes

(21:30):
all the way up to a thousand dollars a month
where you get a private concert at the end of
so many months, and uh, you know, some zoom chats
zoom chat once a month and some special treatment. Is
one one of my thousand dollar guys wants me to
come up with an instructional video teaching him how to

(21:53):
play the Dreamer, which is a song I think it's
one of my better songs, not not better known, but anyway,
he's he wants me to and I will got to
come up with an instructional video and he will learn
how to play the Dreamer. Okay, that begs the question
of these people are paying Does that affect your relationship?

(22:17):
And this also blends to you know, you tour sort
of on a circuit, do you tend to know your fans?
Does that good or is it a burden? What's that like?
I don't know the the you know I do. I
do see some of the same face as it shows.
But one of the things I do when I remember

(22:38):
is when I hit the stage and say, how many folks,
how many? How many of you guys have never been
to one of my shows before, and about half the
crowd will put put their hand up, so it's not
the same people coming back every time. UM. The the

(23:00):
Patreon series of rockports Sundays, I get a lot of comments.
People can write comments, and I respond to as many
as I can. UM, and I've noticed that some of
the same people comment every week. UH. The song goes
up at midnight Eastern time, midnight on Saturday and Sunday morning.

(23:22):
I've got, you know, an inbox full of comments from
Patreon and UH, and some of the same people are
commenting each time. But the feedback is really positive. It's
almost as good as live applause. Let's just assume we
had to cut you off from the feedback. Would you

(23:44):
be able to survive it? Would it would cut out
a lot of dopamine, the dopamine rush from the the
applause or the feedback is part of what's part of
what's in it for me. Uh yeah, I want to hear.
I want to hear what you think. I want it

(24:05):
and hopefully you like it. If you don't like it,
then I'd like to know that too. Okay, at this
point in time, are you still concerned with growing your audience?
You know, how do you deal with that? Because as
you say that, the game has changed, we don't have
the record company push and there's so much in the channel.

(24:25):
Oh yeah, I'm very I'm very uh focused on growing
the audience. I mean, it's actually one of the exciting
things about the Rockport Sunday Series online. I keep it
keeps me up at night that there are seven and
a half billion people on the planet that haven't signed
up yet. But I know that having you know, been

(24:45):
on Bob left It's podcasts. Are you're going to the
moon now yet? Year? Fasten your seat belts. Absolutely No.
I think the potential for growth is is terrific on
the Internet because there really is no ceiling. Well, there's

(25:06):
a potential, but there's so much there. Do you find
in this Internet era of last twenty years, when everybody's
got more questions than answers that your audience is increasing
or maybe you can't even tell it all well, the
online audience, UM, you know, I've got I also sent
out a newsletter from my uh website, tom rush dot

(25:29):
com and you can sign up for the newsletter at
tom rush dot com. Um, and people seem to like
that a lot. I get silly. I try to keep
it amusing, and people seem to be amused. So I've
got you know, about fifteen thousand people there, but that

(25:50):
could easily you know that, you know, I would love
to see that grow as well. UM. And as for
the you know, the the the lie of audiences. Of course,
right now it's really restricted. I'm playing the Birch Mirror
this coming Saturday. It's a five hundred seat room. They're
only selling two tickets. H and some of the other

(26:13):
gigs coming up in May and June or that couldn't
be the same kind of thing. Either they've they've moved outdoors,
or they're gonna have restricted capacity and hopefully, hopefully sometime
in the fall something this will, um, this will start
to loosen up. So what's the key to a great show?

(26:36):
I wish I could well, of course me well, I mean,
that's a given. You're here, we're talking to you have
a profile, but you know you're there. Do you feel
that you have to convince them? Or you're singing rock,
you're singing no Regrets and you're thinking about your next
connection at the airport. No, I'm in the best of worlds.

(26:57):
I'm very, very focused on the on the audience. Um.
Part of the fun for me is figuring out who
this audience is. I visualize an audience as being a personality,
and it's been striking to me. I used to play
clubs way way way back in the day. I'd be

(27:17):
it would be a two week gig, show up, you know,
and play every night for two weeks, and it was
really amazing how different the audience was from night tonight.
It was the same town, the same demographic, the same weather,
but the audience would be totally different each night, and
I would have to figure out who that audience is,

(27:40):
who what that personality is, and then basically play to
that person Some audience is really like the funny songs,
so I do more funny songs, and some like the touching,
introspective stuff. The the sensitive ship. As my lead guitar
player used to call it. And so, especially when you

(28:02):
had a band, to what degree did you have a
set listen? To what degree depending on the audience did
you change your repertoire and to this day, Well, I
I know what song I'm gonna start with, I know
what song I'm gonna end with, and in between I'm flexible. Um,
I do have to One of the disadvantages to having

(28:23):
a band is you have to stick to the songs
that the band knows. Um. Whereas solo, I don't have
that problem. And with Matt, I can throw a new
song at Matt and he will play it as though
he'd been doing his entire life. He's quite an amazing talent.
I should throw in Matt Akoa dot Com into the conversation.

(28:46):
He's we've been playing together for about six years, but
he's got his own career which is burgeoning, and I
don't think he's going to be backing me up for
too much longer. I'm hoping when he's playing stadiums he'll
let me open the shows. Okay, you went to Harvard

(29:10):
to what degree? Does that inform your music in your career?
I don't know that Harvard Harvard, If anything, I was
an English major, and when I'm writing, I tend to
be intimidated by the idea that Blake would never say
anything that's stupid. You know Shakespeare. Oh No, I'm nowhere

(29:32):
near that level. Um, So that was a little bit intimidating,
although it did expose me to a lot of really
amazing writing. What was important, I think was being in Cambridge,
Massachusetts at that time, the early sixties, when there was
such a vibrant folks scene going on, and being able

(29:53):
to hang out at the Club forty seven in Cambridge
was a coffeehouse that was one block from my dorm
roo and this was the place they hosted the local kids,
as all their coffeehouses did, but they also brought in
the legends, and you could sit in this little adc
room and listen to Maybelle Carter or Flattened Scrugs or

(30:15):
Sleepy John Estes. They brought in a lot of the
blues guys, and I adored the blues guys, partly because
I was an English major and and just love what
these guys could do to syntax. Okay, so at what
point did you pick up the guitar. I picked up
the guitar as a little kid, I was forced to

(30:38):
take piano lessons for about twelve years, and I hated it.
Nobody explained to me, it's a little bit like studying
English at Harvard. Nobody explained that these were great books
because people loved to read them. It was your grim
duty to study and analyze them. Piano was not fun.
It was an exercise and manual dexterity. Nobody explained that

(31:00):
this music was great music because people actually liked it. Um.
But I had an older cousin named Bo Beals and
Bo and b Beals I'm not making this up used
to come visit. Um. They were my parents best buddies.
And bow Bells was in my eyes as superstar heat.

(31:23):
This guy could take a lettle cigarette, flip it back
into his mouth, dive in the swimming pool and blow
smoke bubbles from underwater. I mean, when you're ten, that's huge.
And he played the ukulele, and Bo taught me how
to play the ukulele and taught me a bunch of
silly old songs that Abdula bo bol Amir and my

(31:44):
father's whiskers and um, and that was a lot of fun.
And that's where I just you know, came to realize
that music was fun. And then as I got older,
the uku lele turned into a guitar because I thought
it was more manly, and um, I got really swept
up in the rock and roll scene in the late fifties.

(32:05):
I heard my first Josh White recording when I was
around sixteen. Changed my life. I just I'd never heard
a guitar played like that. I've never heard songs like that.
And then I hit Cambridge and there was all this
music going on, all different flavors and stripes, and I
just got sucked up into it. So what was it

(32:27):
like growing up in the fifties with the rock and
roll era, Elvis, etcetera. Well, it was. It was absolutely magical.
I mean I remember Bill Haley and the comments doing
rock around the clock and thinking this is different. Uh.
And then more and more and more kept coming, and
there was it was a fabulous outpouring of talent. I mean,

(32:52):
there were all these really talented people who were not
like one another. Every single you know, Elvis was not
like Fats Domino, who was not like the Everly Brothers.
They were each each and everyone was a totally different
flavor and it was very exciting and it but the
whole thing only lasted how many years, four years maybe,

(33:16):
and then it was gone and what was on the
radio next was really kind of boring in my mind,
and I think in the minds of a lot of people,
which is why the people in the Cambridge folk scene
were so excited about discovering this music that nobody was
trying to push down their throats on the radio. You'd

(33:38):
have to go to the you know, the used record
store and look for seventy eight and discover this stuff
that it was totally new, and it must have been.
I mean, there's a certain irony in a bunch of
Harvard kids sitting around singing about how tough it was
in the coal mine or on the chain gang. But

(34:00):
we felt that we made up in sincerity what we
lacked an authenticity. Okay, you heard that Josh White record.
Did you pick out the note yourself? Or did you
take lessons? Or how did you get up to speed?
I would I just listened to those records over and
over and over and tried to figure out how he
was doing what he did um and was moderately successful

(34:25):
at that. I mean, he was he was playing by himself.
Or with a bass player. Um, so it was not.
His guitar parts weren't obscured by a lot of instrumentation
and uh other stuff. But I was pretty good at that,
and then I also was fairly successful at figuring out

(34:46):
what the blues guys were doing. One of the cool
things about the Club forty seven, though, was when these
blues guys played there, or whatever, the bluegrass guys or
the Scottish balladeers. There was usually a party at been
Betsy Shiggins House after the show, and you could go
to this party and ask these people how do you
do that thing you do? And they would tell you

(35:08):
it would show you. It was quite amazing. Okay, so
do you show up at Harvard with your guitar in
its case? Um? Yes, I did. I did, and fairly
quickly I got a There was a radio show on
Harvard's uh FM station called Balladeers, and I somehow inherited

(35:33):
that show. The guy that was hosting Balladeers was graduating
or moving away or whatever, and somebody said, hey, do
you want to take it over? And I said, well, okay.
And it was a show where the host played a
little bit, but you had to have guests come on.
Every week there would be a different guest, and this

(35:54):
meant that I had to start habituating the coffee house
is going to the hoot nannies to recruit guests to
come on my show. Uh and I. The tradition was
to have local kids as the guests. I also branched
out and started getting people like like Josh White or
Odetta or Pete Seeger to come on, but mostly it

(36:18):
was the local talent, and so I had to go
to the hooting nanny's and listen to people and decide
who I wanted to invite. I discovered that you could
get in for free if you had a guitar with you.
I then discovered you could get in for free if
you had a guitar case with you. So I would
put a six pack in the guitar case and head

(36:39):
off to the hooting nanny and I got caught one
night at the the Golden Vanity Club in Boston. Hey kid,
get on stage. You got in for free. I had
to borrow a guitar. I was terrified, but I got
up and I did twenty minutes or something and apparently
was good enough. I have no idea what I did.

(37:01):
I was so so scared. But about a week or
two later, the owner calls me and said, whoever is
playing to night got sick and could you come down
and be a substitute folk singer. So nice. I did
that for a little while, and it's pretty much been
downhill ever since. Bob. Okay, let's go a little bit slower.
The Balladeer show was on? How often once a week?

(37:25):
And how long was it? It was thirty minutes? Okay, Now,
I certainly remember this folk era, the folk boom and
the hoot Ninnies. But for those people, and you know
we're going out, we're on the wrong side of the curve.
But explain what that scene was like. Well, now they're
called open mics, but basically it was, you know, a

(37:45):
bunch of kids would come and bring their guitars and
there'd be an mc and uh. I can't remember. Actually,
if you had to audition to get into the hoots,
I don't think so. I think it was if you
owed up with a guitar, you could get up and
do two or three songs. And how many of these

(38:05):
places were there? Oh? There were in the in the
greater Boston area there were probably a dozen. And was
there a palpable scene. Did you feel like you were
part of something bigger? You said, well, yeah, this is
just what I'm into. No, I think that, Well, there
was definitely, in my mind there was a scene because
there was a lot of overlap. There were people who would,

(38:27):
you know, go and play this club and then that club,
and um, in my mind, the Club forty seven was
the flagship of the fleet and they definitely had there
was a click there and I wanted very much to
be part of that. And it took a while, but
I finally got got welcomed into the Club forty seven scene.

(38:49):
And how long did that take? Well, I'm trying to think.
I UM. I was playing at a place that called
the Unicorn in Boston. The manager there felt that the
best way to build an audience for an artist was
to have them play every same day every week, and

(39:11):
so I was playing every i don't know Tuesday at
the Unicorn, and sure enough, and you know, an audience
started to accumulate after a while. That guy Byron Leonardos
then went over. He was recruited to come manage the
Club forty seven. Uh, and he basically brought me with him. Right,

(39:32):
you remember how much money you were making. Oh it
was it was big bucks, Bibe. I think you know,
on a good night you could clear ten dollars. But
ten dollars was a hundred dollars then, well, I don't
know about that. It was probably seventy three dollars. Okay, Well,
certainly you know it was enough. It was enough to
buy a six pack and have some fun. But who

(39:53):
else was on the scene at your profile of that. Well,
Joan Bias had kind of grant graduated from that scene.
She shet up and gone. She would show up once
in a while. But um, other people on the scene
were Jim Queskin's jug band, Um Jeff and Miriam Muldar.

(40:16):
That one of the striking things about the Cambridge scene,
I think, Bob, was that it was basically an amateur
scene in the good sense of the word. Uh. These
are people playing because they loved the music, not because
they had professional aspirations. There was, you know, a psycho
pharmacologist banjo player who was who was very popular, uh,

(40:40):
but he didn't plan to be a professional banjo player.
There was a typewriter for Pairman who was a mandolin player,
high harmony singer. It was great, but he didn't, you know,
plan to go on the road or anything. So there
were a lot of really really talented people who were
not headed for professional life. The ones that did go

(41:02):
pro or myself, Jim Queskin of course, um, Jeff Maulder,
Maria maldar Um. It was a fairly small selection. Okay,
since you mentioned Jim Queskin, were you familiar with the
mel Liman family. I was, and it was a very
puzzling thing. Mel was. For the listeners who don't know Mel,

(41:27):
he was. He was a harmonica player, pretty pretty good one.
But he also became a guru. Somehow this guy attracted
to a family. UM not quite like the Manson family.
They weren't. They didn't do anything as bad as the
Manson family. But it was, at least in my mind,

(41:50):
it was a pretty uh strange cult that Mel assembled
around him. Jim question was and is still a part
of that family. Uh Mel Mel died, but the his

(42:11):
his gathering still is together in California, and I guess
they have a pretty successful construction business. Um it keeps them,
keeps them going, but questions still out there playing. I
went to see him. It was probably it was before COVID,
so a year and a half ago maybe, and he's good.

(42:34):
He's still as good as ever. He really engages the
audience and draws him in, gets them going. So how
did you make your first record? I was playing at
the Unicorn on a weekly basis. Guy named Dan Flickinger
came in and said, do you want to make an album?
And I'd heard that a couple of times before, nothing

(42:55):
had come of it, so I said, yeah, sure, and
he actually showed up Ah dragging this tape record at
the size of an oven dark dragged it down the
flight of stairs into the basement and recorded two nights.
I remember him saying that it it was unethical to inter cut,

(43:17):
to splice, you know, take the first half of the
song from night one and the second half from night to.
Oh no, that was morally indefensible. I later learned it
was he didn't know how to splice tape, he didn't
know how to edit um. But it was put together
Tom Rush live at the Unicorn on Dan Flickinger's little

(43:38):
non existent label like Hornew which was Latin for Unicorn
or Greek I think um, and he distributed out of
the back seat of his whatever, his studebaker. But it
was an odd thing because I had an album and
nobody else did, and it somehow made me mortallygitimate. I was,

(44:02):
I was, you know, a more serious artist because I
had an album. Never mind that it was, you know,
on a made up label. You know. I think we
pressed three hundred copies. I've seen him go for three
hundred bucks on eBay now. But and then that lasted
for about a minute, and then Vanguard and Prestige Records

(44:25):
came to town and started signing up everybody except me.
I could couldn't get a real record label to sign
me up. And finally Paul Rothschild, working for Prestige, did
sign me up and I made my first, my first
album for a real label with Paul. By the time

(44:49):
I graduated, I'd made I put out two albums, um,
which probably explains why I didn't get better grades, I
would assume so. And to what degree did your profile
at school change as result of having these two albums?
I don't think not not by much. I mean, the
school was one thing, that folks scene was another thing.

(45:11):
There was a little bit of overlap. But um, most
of the people in my dorm had no idea what
I did, except I made you know I made noise
playing the guitar when they wished I wouldn't. Um, So
there wasn't There wasn't too much overlap at that stage. Then,

(45:31):
you know, when when I became better known. I think
the class of sixty three now recognizes my name, but
not not back then. Okay, so you graduate, what's your
next step? Well, actually, before I graduated, I took a
year off. I was on the verge of flunking out,

(45:52):
and in fact I did flunk of course, and I
decided I must, I must take a break or I'm
just gonna get kicked. The obvious question from this era
is what your parents say about that They were They
were you know, I think they were supportive. I mean
they thought forever that I'm going through a phase. My

(46:15):
mom wanted to know to a dying day when I
was going to get a real job. Um. But I
had flunked one course. I don't remember having a talk
with my parents, and I'm sure I must have, but
I said, okay, I want to take a year off. Uh.
And Harvard at that point would let you, and then

(46:35):
maybe they still do, would let you withdraw if you
were in good standing, let you withdraw any time you want,
come back any time you want. I was not in
good standing. I had to actually withdraw and reapply to
get back in. So it was a risky, risky proposition.

(46:55):
But I felt pretty convinced that I was going to
flunk out and be kicked out if I did do this.
So I took a year off and I went to
I started traveling around and doing concerts New York, got
to Philadelphia, I got to Florida a couple of times,

(47:19):
and discovery that I really did love playing for people,
still do, and that I could make just about enough
money to to live. Not nothing more, but I could.
I could make enough money to pay the rent and
buy some cheap groceries. Um. And then I went back

(47:43):
and finished up my three semesters. I quit in the
middle middle of my junior year, so I had three
semesters to go. I went back actually did very well
because I knew what why I was there. I was
there for a diploma. There was nothing, nothing real antic
about it. I went I wanted to get that diploma
and then move on, and uh so I did, and

(48:07):
then continued living in Cambridge for a little while before
I moved to New York City, New York is where
the action was. That's where my record company was. I
made one more album for Prestige with Paul Rathschild. It's
a bit of a funny transition there. Paul. Paul moved

(48:29):
on to Electra Records, where he was there ace producer,
and I wanted to go to and Jack Holsman at
Electra wanted me on the label, but I had a
contract with Prestige. So I went to Prestige and I said,
can I get out of my contract? And said no,

(48:51):
and I so I bluffed. I said, Okay, screw it.
You know I have a Harvard diploma. I don't need
this music ship. I'm going to quit show is um.
But I'll tell you what. I'll make one more album
for you if you'll let Paul Rothschild produce it. And
they weren't happy with Paul at all, and they were

(49:14):
convinced that Jack Holsman would never let Paul produce for
another label. So they said okay, kid, and so Paul
and I went in the studio and we recorded my
second Prestige album, which is all folky, just me and
Fritz Richmond on washtub base. The next week we went

(49:34):
into a different studio and made my first Electra album,
which actually hit the market before the Prestige album came out,
because Prestige didn't know that this was going on in
the background. And that's actually the album that Garth Brooks's
dad played for him. What did Prestige ultimately say? What

(49:58):
did they say when they found out that you had
pulled a fast one on them? Well, they didn't have
They didn't have much to say about it. I mean,
I was out of there, so they might have been
yelling at me, but I couldn't hear them. Okay, Now,
you were famously the first to record so many legendary
singer songwriters, Jackson Brown, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor. How did

(50:22):
you end up with their songs? Well, it's a bit
of a different story, uh, for each one I was
I had made. Oh how many albums did I make
for Electra? I made the first one, and then I
think in any case, I was running out of traditional

(50:43):
folk stuff that I was interested in doing. My next
to last album for Electra was a bit schizophrenic. It
was folk on one side and late fifties rock and
roll on the other. And then I owed them, you know,
I don't. I owed them more albums, and I didn't

(51:04):
have any more songs that I was really excited about doing.
I was playing a club in Detroit, Michigan called the Chessmate,
one of my two week gigs, and this young slip
of a girl named Joni Mitchell came in one night
and I gather she'd been playing there as part of

(51:26):
a duo with her then a husband, Chuck Mitchell, on
a regular basis, but she just started writing songs and
she wanted me to hear some of these new songs
because I might record one or two. And she came
in and did a little fourth song guests set that
just knocked me off my feet. Um. I asked her

(51:49):
if she had any more songs. She said, no, but
give me a minute her words to that effect, And
then a few weeks later sent me a tape with
six fabulous songs, one of which was The Circle Game,
which I named the album after. She actually apologized on
the tape she that I've just finished writing this. It's
not much good. I'm so embarrassed, but here it is,

(52:12):
and I am ended up naming the album after it.
Um Jackson Brown was being published. He was not really
a performer. At that point, he was a writer and
he was being published by Electric so I had access
to his demo tapes and that's how I met Jackson.
James Taylor. Um, it's a bit odd. I had a

(52:36):
roommate on my Cambridge apartment. I had a roommate named
Zach Weasner who was part of a band called the
Flying Machine that James was in. It was James band.
And Zack kept saying, you got to hear it this
guy James. And I kept saying, Zach, would you just
pick up the living room please? And I didn't meet

(52:59):
James back then. And then Paul Rothschild said, you gotta
you should hear this. You should get together with this guy.
And I remember we sat on the floor in an
empty room, no furniture, at the Electra offices in New York.
We sat on the floor with a real to real

(53:19):
tape recorder and James sang, you know, I don't know,
half a dozen songs into the tape recorder for me. Uh,
and he was you know, I just I loved him.
But the the thing was that here were these here
were these songs that they weren't the other side of

(53:41):
the Moon from folk music. They were informed by that
kind of sensibility, but they had they were much more literary.
They had a lot more chords. Uh, there just fabulous songs.
Um And I've been accused of ushering in singer songwriter
Erro with the the Circle Game album because it was

(54:04):
the first, you know, time James Jackson and Janie were
presented to a wider public um. But I wasn't really
looking to uh looking to introduce an era or or
discover anybody. I'd really just I wanted to meet girls, Bob.
That's why I was in the working for you. Yeah, no, literally,

(54:28):
how was that working for you? Well? It worked very
well at the time. Okay, And what kind of guy
were you? Different girl in every town or you know,
hometown honey or what was it like? Well, it wasn't.
It was a different girl in every town kind of
kind of a scene for a while. I mean I
did have I did have a girlfriend, Jill Lumpkin, who's

(54:50):
on the one standing behind me on the Circle Game album.
Um and that lasted for a few years, but um,
you know, I was basically the traveling musician. So I
was working for you. Yeah, I was working for me.
Now uh, the cover of that album with Joe that

(55:12):
was shot by Lynda McCartney Linda Eastman. At that point
it was she was I didn't know her. She was
assigned by Electra to take take me out into a
Central park and shoot some pictures, and um, I got
to know her a little bit later on. She'd keep
in touch over the years. I remember at one point

(55:37):
getting a note from her as playing somewhere on Long Island,
and she sent me a note saying that she and
Paul were in the neighborhood, might stop by, but it
didn't happen. So what was it like with the Beatles, Kid? Well,
I you know, I had I loved the Beatles a lot,

(56:00):
with everybody else. I mean, it was hard to resist
that thing um that they did. But I don't think
it changed. I didn't. I didn't want to become a
Beatle or you know, imitate them. I was. I was
doing my own thing and the folk was was morphing

(56:21):
into folk rock at this point, and I this is
this is when I started getting a band, and we
started getting louder and traveling more vigorously and more relentlessly.
There was a five year period when I think I
had ten days off, But did you feel like, holy
sh it, the British invasion is happening and it's killing

(56:43):
my career, it's killing the whole scene I'm in. I
don't remember thinking that. No, I don't remember thinking that.
I think my take was that there are a lot
more people interested in music now than there were before,
and it might might you know, I didn't have the
you know, the Beatles were We're huge with the with

(57:03):
the teeny boppers, and that wasn't my crowd anyway. Okay,
how'd you end up switching to Columbia after the Circle
Game album? My contract with the Lecture was up, and um,
Jack Holsman was willing to renew the contract but not
improve on it, and Columbia was willing to make a substantial,

(57:27):
a much better offer. So I moved over there and
it was a very There was a bit of culture
shock there, because a Lecture really was a family and Jack.
You know, if you had a problem, you go to
Jack and talk to him about it, and if he could,
he'd fix it. Um at Columbia you had to make

(57:49):
an appointment to talk to anybody's secretary, big big building
with everybody had to wear who had to wear a
tie and uh, very very corporate, wholly entirely different different
scene there. But they did have you know, they had

(58:12):
a lot more marketing muscle than Electra, and they you know,
they could make a lot of noise, which was good. Um.
You know, I never sold the tonnage for them that
you know, a lot of their acts were selling. But
they made money on me. The way the deals were structured. Basically,

(58:39):
they paid for the record production, but then they also
would build against your royalty account that the production costs
were building against your royalties. And I was making I
don't know, twenty cents an LP and they were making
a couple of dollars in LP, so they were in
the black very quickly, but working off a hundred thousand

(59:03):
dollar production budget. Plus then they would they would add
you know, promotional stuff to your production budget, to your
royalty account and paying it off at twenty cents a
copy just wasn't happening. So they made money on me.
I never I never got royalty checks. I would make

(59:25):
some money off of the production budget when the album
was made. But again, you know, the part of the
part of the the benefit was if you didn't have
a record deal, you didn't exist there. You know what
they did for me was they got my name out there,
They got me on the radio, they got me written
up in the magazines, newspapers which sold tickets to the shows,

(59:49):
which is always where I've made my living is you know,
on stage. I've never I've never found recordings to be
really profitable. I've made some on my own label that
have you know that, Yes, I've made money on him,
but but you know, on stage is where I've made

(01:00:10):
my living forever. So on those Clubbia electoral records, are
you still in the red? Are you ever getting royalty checks? Well?
I actually, um, the last album for a lecture, Ladies
Live out Laws, was put on too. No wait a minute,
Wait a minute, wait a minute, Ladies Live out Laws.

(01:00:31):
There's a little bit of a kirk kerfuffle there. Um,
if I may go off on a sidetrack. They were.
They had to deal with me where they had to
renew my contract every year by a certain date. They
failed to do that. This is the electoral Columbia, This
is Columbia. They failed to do that. Um, And I said, okay,

(01:00:52):
I'm out of here, and they said no, no, no,
you can't leave. If you leave and make an album
for somebody else will sue. So I got a lawyer,
and the lawyer gave me basically said yeah, yeah, you
gotta do what they say. The lawyer then within about
a month went to work for Columbia, So I think

(01:01:15):
I might have been getting bad advice. But we made
this the Ladies Live Outlaws album to be the final
album and I was. Then then they dropped me because
it didn't sell as well as they had hoped. So
instead of being out on the street on my own volition,
I was, you know, I went on the street because
Columbia had had dropped me, which made getting a new

(01:01:37):
deal a much more difficult thing, and I didn't in
fact make another album for quite a while. Then they wanted,
decades later, wanted to make a retrospective on me, and
they wanted to record one new song, which John Levinthal
produced um, but we made that a separate deal. It

(01:02:00):
was not not the same under the same contract. So
I did make money on that one on the retrospective,
The very best of Tom Rush actually turned to profit
for me. Uh, And then I didn't record for thirty
five years after Ladies Live outlaws or actually I shouldn't
say that. I made a couple of live albums on

(01:02:22):
my own label. We're profitable. What was going on for
thirty five years in your mind? And what were you
doing that well? And for a while I was courting.
I was courting the major labels, unsuccessfully trying to get
a deal with you know, uh, with a major. And
because that didn't work out, I didn't I didn't go

(01:02:45):
back in the studio. I was, you know, I was touring.
I was making, you know, making good money touring, figuring
out how to connect with my with my audience. Um,
it was you know, it was a it was a
strange thing. It was a strange period of time because

(01:03:07):
the record industry had decided somewhere in the seventies that
that their audience, their core audience, was eighteen to twenty
three years old, and the demographic that had built the
record industry, the baby boom, was no longer eighteen to

(01:03:28):
four years old. They basically the record industry let them
walk out of the room. I remember being at a
meeting at Columbia where they were talking about how do
we get the baby boom to buy our records? That's
really important we've got to get the baby boom buying
our records. And some poor schmuck stood up and said

(01:03:53):
maybe if we made records they wanted to buy, they
would buy them. And there was this awkward silence and
the guy sat back down and the conversation continued about, well,
how do we get these people to buy the records
we're making? Um? Anyway, I you know, I knew that

(01:04:16):
my audience was still out there. They couldn't all have
died at once. It would have been in the newspapers.
So how do I connect with them? And so I
started a you know, a mail order, snail mail campaign,
build a mailing list, and I took out ads in
New Yorker and sold albums through the mail and it
and it worked. You know, I wasn't selling tonnage by

(01:04:40):
any means, but it was profitable. Okay. Was it depressing?
Uh no, maybe maybe it should have been. UM, but
it was a challenge, and I felt I was meeting
the challenge and it was you know, my what I
was trying to do was working, okay. But at some
point you moved into he I'm sure, and you said

(01:05:01):
I'm gonna become an agent. M hm. So you actually
did pivot there at some point. Well, I moved to
New Hampshire. There was a there was a point early
seventies UM when I uh, a lot of my buddies
were moving to the West Coast because that's where the
action was now. And I decided, I'm burned out. I

(01:05:25):
want to go where the action isn't and I went
back to New Hampshire where I grew up, and I
bought a farm. I had six acres with the house
in the middle, and I basically rolled up the driveway
and quit showbiz for about six months. And then I
got an audience deprivation syndrome kicked in and I really

(01:05:48):
wanted to to play for people again, and so I
started on a very small level. Um you know, I
got a I got a secretary and she called the
venues that I used to play and booked me. And
and then I decided, well, there's some other artists, you know,

(01:06:10):
the people I'm excited about, but they're they're just starting
out in their careers. So as long as I'm booking,
why don't I try to book them as well? And
so Christine Lavin and Patty Larkin, Bill Morrissy Um and
a few others. I started started booking them within my

(01:06:33):
little booking agency, which was not profitable because we were selling,
you know, getting maybe two fifty bucks a night for
these people and there's just no way to you know,
pay the phone bill and the heat and the electricity
and the salaries and make that work. So I was

(01:06:57):
funding the operation by going out on weekends and doing shows.
And I remember there was there was an eye opening moment.
I did a show somewhere and I broke a string
in the last song of this of the evening, and
I didn't have another gig for three weeks. And I
got to the next gig and I opened my guitar

(01:07:20):
case and the string was still broken. I said, not,
something's not right with this picture. And so I started
slowing down and basically and at that point, I had
a house fire that's pretty much destroyed the house and

(01:07:40):
the the studio and the office space we were using.
So I at that point scaled way back and just
I was still booking myself for a little while. I'm
now working through Skyline Music, which has been great. Um,
but I got you know, I got back on the road,

(01:08:04):
and one thing led to another, and I finally ended
up signing up with Appleseed Recordings and went back into
a real studio with Jim Rooney, my old buddy UM
producing down in Nashville. And that was on the one hand,

(01:08:26):
it was kind of disorienting because I had not been
in a digital studio. Everything was analog in my head
and I just couldn't adjust my brain to the idea
that I would come out of the vocal booth and
say I think I sang a little bit flat on that,
and the engineer would interrupt me and say, I fixed it.

(01:08:47):
I said, I, but I came in a little bit late.
I fixed it. Why am I here? Why don't I
just sing one note every note once and go home? Um?
But it really is. It's a it's a you know, major,
major step forward. It makes recording a lot more fun,

(01:09:09):
a lot less tedious. And then I made my second
album of Voices, my most recent one with Jim Rooney
and Nashville, and that's the first album I ever wrote
all the songs on. I'd always done mainly other people's
songs a couple of my own, and I didn't set
out to write an entire album, but I just when

(01:09:31):
I sat down and looked at the song list, I said, hey,
I wrote all of these, and I think it's my
best album, and at this point I've got enough enough
new songs for another new album. Okay, let's go back
at what point, like if the Circle Game ironically has
legendary songs by others that you first recorded, but also
a couple of your own legendary compositions, So what point

(01:09:54):
did you start to write and how did you balance
whether you wanted to use other of people's songs or
your own. Well, if you I'll back up to that
first Live at the Unicorn album. There's a song on
there called Julie's Blues, and I'm I'm uncertain as to
whether I should say that I wrote it or assembled it.

(01:10:18):
It's almost entirely compiled of floating verses, which is the
folklore term for verses that appear in a lot of
different songs. So there are a lot of lines in
there that I lifted from this blues or that blues,
and I assembled the song. I don't feel I really
wrote it, but technically it's you know, the copyrights in

(01:10:40):
my name, so I wrote that. The second one was
on the Road Again, um, which I just actually served
up yesterday for Rockport Sundays because I'm on the road
again going to Alexandria to play the Birchmere UM and
that that was based age that that song is from

(01:11:02):
what I call the Rand McNally school of songwriting, you know,
talking about a trip to Florida. And then the third
song I ever wrote was No Regrets, which came about
because my girlfriend Joel Lumpkin, who was on the cover
of UM of the Circle Game album, had come to Boston.

(01:11:22):
She wasn't my girlfriend at that point. She came to
Boston and spent the weekend with me, and I had
never at that point spent an entire weekend with anybody before,
three days and three nights in a row. And I
took her back to Logan Airport on Monday morning to
put her on the plane, and it felt strange walking

(01:11:44):
away alone. And I went back to my apartment and
and started working on No Regrets, which is about the
end of a long relationship where it feels strange walking
away alone, feels strange lying awake along and feel strange
living my life alone. UM. And then we actually did

(01:12:05):
have a long relationship and we broke up, and the
song came true. But that was the third song I
ever wrote, and it's the one that's been covered by
a lot, a lot of a lot of people. Johnny
Cash and Waylon Jennings. And where's Julie Lumpkin today, Jill Lumpkin?
Excuse me, Jill Lumpkin. I've been out of touch with

(01:12:29):
her for quite a while. But my understanding is she's
in in India. While we were together, I sent her
to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. I
paid for tuition to go there, and she got into
the clothing trade and ended up spending a lot of
time in India. My understanding is that she moved there,

(01:12:53):
she adopted a young orphan kid, and that young orphan
kid is now a very wealthy man who bought her
a house and has basically taken care of her, which
I think is a fact fact. Do you know how
the kid became so wealthy? I do not. But she

(01:13:16):
never got married. You ruined her for that. Well, I
don't know about that. I don't think she ever got married.
I'm pretty sure she didn't. Okay, and you've been married twice,
I have been. It's well, I'm I'm currently married, yes,
But your first marriage, how do you definally decide ty
the nod? What killed that? Well, it was being on

(01:13:36):
the road so much. Um, I was just I was
a rotten husband basically being on the road so much.
And you know, I have two boys from that marriage,
and I feel badly, but I was also not a
very good dad for them. I'm hopefully a better dad

(01:13:57):
now than I was back then, but I was just
gone a lot. And you know, my my wife, Beverley,
got got sick of it and moved out and and
we got divorced. And did she ever get remarried? She
did not? Okay, And what's your relationship with those sons today?

(01:14:20):
It's good, one of them in Scotland, one of them
in Arizona. But we're you know, we're in touch on
a regular basis. And you have a younger daughter too.
I have a daughter who's just twenty one, uh, a
senior halfway through her senior year in college. And and

(01:14:44):
are we have We have a very good relationship. But
you know, when one goes to see you live, there's
tons of humor. You know, you say, well, I decided
to have my own grandkids, etcetera. To what degree is
humor important in your life at in your show. I
think it's essential. It's essential in life. I mean, there's

(01:15:06):
just especially now, there's so much grim stuff going on.
I would rather laugh than cry. So I will try
to figure out where the where the funny side of
things is and go there. And I think for the shows.
I learned very early on Bob that if the audience

(01:15:28):
likes you, they are much more apt to like the
song you're about to do. So I would. I started telling,
you know, stories about the songs, or stories that weren't
about the songs, to try to, you know, lighten the
mood and you know, draw the crowd in and it

(01:15:48):
and it worked to the point where I now get
requests for the stories. Tell the one about the guy
from New Hampshire. It blows my mind. But I put
actually put out an album called Rolling for Owls that
is a compilation of silly stories and funny songs. Somebody
said you should really compile. I was all into on

(01:16:10):
an album and I did, and people seem to like
it a lot. I have to warn people do not
drive while listening to this album, because I've had I've
had many people to say I almost went off the road.
You know the song. The stories the same every night. Um,
they evolve, they evolve. I remember one once in your

(01:16:36):
you questioned the veracity of some of my songs, some
of my stories, and I think my reply was that
my stories are not just true, there in many cases
better than true, having been polished, not unlike gemstones in
the tumbler of time. Now you mentioned you have an
agent you're very happy with. What is your view on managers?

(01:16:59):
I have had bad luck with managers, um, and so
I currently do not have a manager. I am my
own manager, which is a lot like trying to be
your own dentist. Um, it's probably not the smartest thing
to do. But um again, I just I've had bad

(01:17:20):
luck with managers, managers giving me bad advice and getting
me to do things that didn't work out, and so
forth and so on. It's not like, you know, I'd
be a rock star to day if it wasn't for
this crummy manager. But I just, you know, I seem

(01:17:41):
to do okay. And are there certain songs who absolutely
have to play in every show? Um? I I would
say no, although there's a list of songs from which
I should do some I mean, my crowd comes. I've
got a problem in that I've got a bunch of

(01:18:03):
new songs that I think are really good, and in fact,
the audience thinks they're really good. But the fact is
they came to hear the songs they know, and so
I've got to scratch that itch for them. I've got
to do something from I've got to do either Urge
for Going or Circle Game or No Regrets or These

(01:18:25):
Days or Driving Wheel or who do You Love? Or
you know. There's a certain certain number of songs that
I've I've got to I've got to do five or
six of them during the course of the evening. But
the good news is, having been doing this for fifty
eight years, there's quite a long list that I have
to choose from. Every time I've seen you've done the

(01:18:46):
Panama Limited because their shows, you don't do it. Oh yeah, okay, okay,
And so now fifty eight years in you don't have
the choice. But if you could do it all over,
would you be, ah, you've a professional musician, or would
you have done something else? I think, you know, yeah,

(01:19:08):
I can't imagine having more fun doing anything else. My
you know, my career path was not really set having
graduated from Harvard with an English lip degree. There's no
straightforward career path there except to be an English teacher. Um,

(01:19:29):
and I certainly didn't want to do that, So I
don't know what else, what else I would have I
would have done. I want to see David Geffen at
one point when I was shopping for a record deal,
and I knew David from from earlier on in his
career and in my career, and I pitched him the

(01:19:50):
idea of signing me up to UM asylum. And he said, oh,
I I thought she wanted a producer's job and A
and R an A and R job. And I guess,
you know, having you know, having picked songs from Jonny

(01:20:11):
Jackson and James that might have been a a reasonable
notion that, okay, this guy's got good ears, But I
really had no interest in in doing that. You know,
I love getting in front of an audience. And with
the time you have left, anything you want or need
to accomplish, well, I'd like to get Rockports Sundays up

(01:20:36):
closer to that seven and a half billion subscribers. Mark. Um. Yeah,
I've got I've got three books in the works, maybe four,
depending on how you count them. Um. I definitely want
to make another album with Jim Rooney and Nashville Records,
some of these new songs that haven't haven't seen the

(01:20:57):
light of day yet. Uh Um. I'd also like to
you know, the Club forty seven. It was very important
to me and at one point, Um, I now own
the name Club forty seven and I've done shows under
that banner, and the theme of those shows is I

(01:21:19):
get a couple of well known artists and a couple
of newcomers together and I browbeat everybody into playing with
one another. You can't just go out there and do
your regular thing. You've got to you know, you've got
to sing harmonies with this kid, or you've got to
play you know, guitar behind this kid, or this kid

(01:21:39):
has to sing harmonies with you. Um. And the audiences
love it because they get to hear I mean, the
newcomers are monstrously talented, they're just unknown, and so the
audience goes home thinking, Wow, I just heard something really special.
So I would love to do some Club forty seven

(01:22:00):
and shows in the vein of rockports Sundays. I would
love to get different artists that are their buddies of mine,
maybe some that aren't. I would love to call, you know,
I'd love to call Garth Brooks and say, do you
have is there a kid that you're really excited about?

(01:22:21):
Would you like to come do some songs with me?
Where you know, you do a song, I do a song,
We do a song together, the kid does a song,
and we'll we'll, you know, try to get this kid noticed.
I mean, that's partly why you know, I've enjoyed working
with Matt Nikola so much as I do think I

(01:22:43):
have helped get his name out there. I've helped him
move along his audience. He's got a you know, a
different audience than I do, but my audience loves him
to bits and they are now part of his audience.
Just going back to the books for a second, because
I know on the Patreon, in addition to the music,

(01:23:06):
you also reveal or distribute other information that might be
part of the book. So is there one main book,
like an autobiography that you're working on? The books? Well,
part of what I'm what I'm doling out to the
do a month crowd is pages from the the book

(01:23:28):
of lyrics that I'm writing. Um, there's the lyrics to
my songs with maybe a page or two of backstory
about the song and what I was doing at this
point in my life. It's becoming a little bit of
an autobiography. Um. But then the main autobiography is kind
of stalled stalled out the other book that and then

(01:23:53):
there's a novel that I'm only writing from my own entertainment.
I write it because I want to find out what
happened is next. I don't think it will ever happen
to see the light of day, probably. But the other
book that I'm having fun with is um called Roadmap.
Working title Roadmap and subtitle is why you probably don't

(01:24:14):
want to be a touring musician. And it's a story.
It's just stuff about you know, how to do a
sound check, how to conduct an interview, how to keep
mentioning rockports Sundays even though you're not being asked about it. Um,
what does a manager do as opposed to an agent?

(01:24:34):
Band dynamics? You know, how to conduct a rehearsal, how
to read an audience, how to do a sound check? Um.
And I've got about I don't know about three fifty
pages so far. How many more do you are you
are going to be necessary before you whittle it down.
I'm what, They're very disorganized now. So basically, part of

(01:24:57):
the part of what's good about the Patreon model is
that it forces me to work on these things because
I've got to you know, next Sunday, I've got to
put something out, So I've got to finish up this
thing that's only half finished. Um but that book, you know,
I've just written a page or two or a paragraph

(01:25:18):
or ten pages every time something occurs to me. I'm
sure I've covered the same turf twice three times in
some cases, and then there's gonna be gaps where I
didn't write something that should have been written. So basically,
I just I need to organize that and get it,
get it shaped up and presentable. And you know, you

(01:25:39):
do these things rockports Sunday and you have these live performances.
So they all done it once and then dribbled out
or do you get together once a week. No, they
it's it's complex enough to get everybody in the same
rooms that we we record a bunch at once and
then serve them up. Okay, well, I'll look forward to
next Sunday. Thanks for taking the time here, Tom, I

(01:26:02):
know you've got to get back to work for the deadline,
so thanks for doing this. Oh thanks for having me
on pleasure until next time. This is Bob Left Sex