seattle 1951-1969

By far the best reward from working at music has been meeting—and, in many cases, befriending—other musicians. They are the tribe I most admire, and I picked up music just because I wanted to try to be one of them. For the most part, I have made my living outside of music, but outside of my family my musical experiences have been the most important in my life.

I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. The dominant forces in Seattle during the 1950s and 1960s were the Boeing Company—one out of four Seattleites made their living off of Boeing—and the commercial fishing industry. Seattle was a major port city and the waterfront along Alaska Way was the focal part of town. You could get anywhere in town in 15 minutes. The big annual celebration in Seattle was Seafair, a week-long event that included a large parade downtown and hydroplane races on Lake Washington. In 1962 Seattle hosted a World’s Fair, and thanks to that milestone the city got its first freeway, sports/concert arena, opera house, repertory theater, and the Space Needle. Seattle was really on the map after that.

Our home was in the suburbs north of Seattle. We had a ravine in back of the house where I caught my first trout, a small lake at the end of the street that we floated on home-made “rafts,” a Puget Sound beach a mile away, and miles of woods on the other side of the ravine. I spent a lot of time outdoors, blissfully unsupervised. In the summers I’d be down at the community swimming pool most days. I also did a lot of reading. I wore out the public library on Greenwood Avenue.

Dad playing drums with the Washington State College pep band

I grew up with music. Both my parents played when they were younger and were passionate about the art form. My mother Dannie played the violin through school and was an aficionado of classical music, but her biggest love was opera. My father, Larry Field, was a self-taught drummer who was playing grange-hall gigs in the backwoods of Washington State before he was a teenager. He worked his way through college playing in dance bands. The photo above shows him doing his best Gene Krupa with his college pep band. (That's his brother, my uncle Jack, blowing the trumpet underneath the basketball hoop. Uncle Jack was a serious horn player who became a high-school music director. His daughter, Janeen, is far and away the best musician in the Field family.) Dad was a huge swing jazz fan. My dad ended up traveling the world, but he told me that one of his biggest musical thrills was seeing the fabled Jimmie Lunceford band when they played Spokane. The musical common ground that my parents shared was a taste for jazzy pop vocalists--we always had Sinatra, Ella, Peggy Lee, and Keely Smith going on the hi-fi set. Those are still some of my favorite albums. 

Roy Cummings

The first real pro musician I ever knew was my trumpet teacher, Roy Cummings, who suffered with me all through junior high school because he knew better than I did that I was never going to work at it hard enough to become a good trumpet player. But I sure knew how beautiful a trumpet could sound, and that was because I heard Roy demonstrate the possibilities of the instrument every other Tuesday after school. When I knew him, Roy was the #1 on-call trumpet player in the Seattle musician's union. He got the touring Broadway musical gigs, the circus gigs--all the pit-band work in town. Roy drilled and drilled me about the mechanics of producing the best possible tone on the trumpet, often poking me in the stomach to make sure I had my abd0minal core properly engaged. I certainly carried that bias for tone and the knowledge of how to produce it over to the harmonica and everything else I ever did in music. Roy went on to become the band director at the University of Washington. When he died there was a memorial service on campus. Hundreds of his former students showed up with their trumpets.

Eagles Auditorium, Seattle

The biggest event in a West Coast teenager’s life in the ‘60s was getting your driver’s license. That was your ticket to the big, wide, and, hopefully sometimes wild world. My friends and I were all driving by our junior year in high school, and we started exploring Seattle. Many of us were discovering rock and roll at the same time, and those two pursuits were bound to come together. The big rock venue in Seattle was the Eagles Auditorium at 7th and Union in downtown Seattle. In the late ‘60s the West Coast rock circuit began at the Whisky A Go Go in LA, the Fillmore in San Francisco, Portland, Eagles Auditorium in Seattle, and Vancouver, B.C. A few friends and I caught our first show at Eagles in 1968. The Byrds were the headliner. Like every other American teenager, we were Byrds fans, and we had heard quite a bit about the scene at Eagles and were excited about checking it out.

Eagles Auditorium was a revelation for a group of sheltered suburban teenagers. Seattle in 1968 was a pretty low-key town. It was all about Boeing and commercial fishing. But lurking in the background was a pretty strong hippie contingent in Seattle, including experienced counterculture pros who had fled the over-commercialized Haight district in San Francisco. That night we entered the doors on Union Street, walked up two flights of stairs to the Auditorium, and queued up in a line of music lovers. Many had old-style, Army-surplus, cotton sleeping bags rolled up under their arms, which we found curious. Eventually we got to the ticket table, paid our $3.00, and walked in.

Eagles Auditorium had been built by the fraternal organization in the 1920s. It was a cavernous, three-story-high place with no seats, a slim balcony, and a large stage. Music started around 8 p.m. The usual program would consist of three bands: a local group, an up-and-coming band with a record or two out, and a headliner. Each would play a set, and then each would play a second set. So the show could go as late as 1 or 2 a.m. That alone seemed incomprehensible to us novices. Since there were no seats, people would pick out spots on the floor and unroll their sleeping bags, inside of which would be a bottle of wine, some food, and a bag of cheap Mexican marijuana. LSD was part of the scene, too. The way the Eagles experience worked, we quickly learned, was that you got comfortable and nicely stoned during the opening set, started to get frisky during the second band’s show, were fully ready for the headliner’s show, and then you hung on until you crashed.

The Byrds had released a strange new album a few months before we saw them. “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” included a few of the predictable Bob Dylan covers, but this was a country and western album. This struck most fans as an incredibly stupid career choice. Country music was for the shitkickers and hillbillies who hated hippies and loved the Vietnam War. That night the Byrds performed a schizophrenic show in which they alternated between their hits (big response from the crowd) and their new, countrified material (many boos from the audience).

But we were hooked, and after that it was Eagles most weekends. 1968 was a high point of the blues revival with white audiences, and the second Eagles show I saw was headlined by Albert King. I had listened to some blues records before that night at Eagles, but I had never seen a blues performer live. Albert King had just released his phenomenal live album “Livewire Blue Power,” which he had recorded at the Fillmore, and he basically reprised that incendiary album for us at Eagles. Albert King was a huge guy, about 6’4” and 250 pounds, and that night he was wearing a gorgeous, maroon, pine-stripe suit and smoking a pipe. He had a great band with horns and his guitar sounded like a jet engine taking off. King played upside down, which, as a southpaw, intrigued me and which gave him a truly unique sound. He sang beautifully, but his guitar playing was other worldly. For us, it was a musical place we had never been to before. For him, it was just the latest of a string of thousands of gigs, and he showed his complete mastery of dynamics as he took us everywhere that live music could take you. I was transfixed, and I worked my way through the crowd until I was standing right in front of the five-foot-high stage. A guy next to me was pounding on the side of the stage in time to the music in a way that he would certainly feel the next morning. Albert broke a string, and there were a few minutes of dead air while Albert put on a new one. The guy next to me was too far gone to understand what was happening, but the abrupt stop to the incredible music broke him. “No no no no no don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop,” he howled miserably, as he began banging his forehead against the side of the stage.

Looking back, my friends and I were incredibly lucky to have come of musical age during the late ‘60s, when the rock shows and the new phenomenon that was FM radio shunned strict categories and featured a vast, mixed bag of talent and recordings. I saw Eagles shows that were all over the map: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cream, the Charles Lloyd Quintet, the Grateful Dead, Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly, Taj Mahal (who one night brought the legendary bluesman Son House onstage with him), Big Mama Thornton, the Youngbloods, Muddy Waters, Spirit, Jethro Tull, Canned Heat, Paul Butterfield, the Steve Miller Band, Terry Reid, and others.

When we weren’t at Eagles, we would cruise Seattle’s North End, often in a new Chrysler Newport owned by a friend’s father. We would listen to the weekend broadcasts on KOL FM by John Chambless, a philosophy professor at the University of Washington who played some great music, especially if you were smoking marijuana in a Chrysler Newport with stereo speakers front and back. We kept a notebook and a pen in the front seat, and every time Chambless played a particularly cool tune we would write the name and the band down. The next day we would go to Discount Records on University Avenue and spend our limited funds on albums containing those tunes, which got you a mostly great record collection along with a fair number of “what the hell was I thinking when I bought this one” discs.

I got the opportunity to hear Albert King at Eagles because, although I didn’t know it at the time, I was starting to attend shows just as a blues revival was gaining steam among young white rock fans. Right on the heels of the King show I went to see James Cotton at Eagles. This was in 1968, so James was only 35 and in his prime. He had just launched his own career after twelve years playing harp in Muddy Waters’ band. James debuted with a killer band: Luther Tucker on guitar, Bobby Anderson on bass, Sam Lay on drums, and Alberto Gianquinto on piano. Cotton was not only a great singer and a powerful harmonica player, he was an extremely dynamic performer who would do somersaults on stage during his big harp feature, “The Creeper.” In the middle of his set, Cotton played an atmospheric, echo-laden slow blues instrumental, “Blues In My Sleep,” in which we plays the diatonic harmonica in a couple of different positions and finishes off on the chromatic. I can honestly say that hearing Cotton do that number changed my life. I had never heard such a beautiful sound in my life, and I was completely boggled that he was using a harmonica to get it. How was that possible? I went to a music store the next day and bought a Hohner Marine Band in C and started a lifelong effort to get a sound out of that thing. I was no longer a trumpet player.

I had grown up on my Dad’s Count Basie records, and I was realizing that Basie’s outfit was basically a big blues band. And I was a Rolling Stones fan, and they did a lot of blues-inflected material. Someone turned me on to Paul Butterfield’s first two albums, and then I bought a copy of “Fathers and Sons,” a record that featured Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield backing up Muddy Waters. And then—bang!—Muddy came to Eagles with Paul Oscher on harp and it was off to the store to get “The Best of Muddy Waters” LP, which I completely wore out. That led me to “The Best of Little Walter” and by then I was off to the races when it came to the blues and to learning blues harp.

It was tough to learn blues harp in those early days. Information was pretty scarce. I didn’t know anybody in Seattle who played the harp. I bought Tony Glover’s blues harp instruction book, which had great photos in it but wasn’t particularly helpful. Somehow I figured out “cross harp” or “second position”—that if a tune was in the key of E you used an A harmonica and a lot of draw notes. Then I figured out that most of what I liked about blues harp was those draw notes being “bent” to play a lower note in a really soulful way, so I figured out how to do that, too. Now I was a committed blues fanatic and a wanna-be blues harp player.

The Pacific Northwest had helped to pioneer the rock-festival concept when John Chambless and others put on the first Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair in the summer of 1968. We missed that one, but by the next summer we were more than ready for the Seattle Pops Festival, which was held in Woodinville, Washington, which in those days was mostly farmland. The Seattle Pop Festival was a three-day extravaganza with a pretty amazing lineup of acts. I don’t even remember how much of the Festival we actually experienced. I know we were there on Sunday, the last day, which had the festival endling with a sonic bang featuring Led Zeppelin and the Doors. I remember Chuck Berry doing an interminable version of “My Ding A Ling,” Jesse Colin Young’s beautiful tenor voice wafting over the crowd, Albert Collins’ searing Telecaster mastery, and Bo Diddley’s super funky set.

A band I had never heard of, the Flying Burrito Brothers, made a big impression on me. I had come to appreciate the country styling on the Byrds’ “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” album, so the Burritos’ deeper honky tonk feel sounded good to me. I had no idea that day at the Festival that I was listening to Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, two former Byrds who were the driving force behind “Sweetheart.” The Burritos were a little raggedy live, but they had three big strengths: Parsons’ erratic but captivating voice, the obviously Everly-Brothers-inspired harmonies of Parsons and Hillman (the Burritos did several Everly Brothers tunes during their set), and the totally unique psychedelic pedal steel playing of wild man Sneeky Pete Kleinow. The only competent instrumental soloist in the band, Kleinow and his nonstop picking somehow managed to sound like a couple of guitars and a pedal steel simultaneously.

The best set that day was delivered by Ike and Tina Turner, which was the first time I and no doubt most of the other fans at the festival had ever experienced a topflight R&B revue act. Ike and the band were tight as hell, and when Tina strode into the lights wearing an exceedingly flimsy crocheted dress the audience rushed toward the stage. Tina sang up a storm, and she and the fabulous Ikettes danced nonstop like gorgeous dervishes. An unbelievable show.

We were all waiting for the last two acts, Led Zeppelin and the Doors. By the time Led Zeppelin came on, the festival was running hours late and the moon was up. The crowd had spent the day basking in the hot sun, drinking cheap wine, and smoking marijuana, but now it was dark and the temperature had dropped to about 60. We rolled up in blankets or tarps or whatever to try to keep warm. The crowd loved Zeppelin. I was less than knocked out. Robert Plant’s shrieking tenor didn’t sound very musical to me. I didn’t realize that night that his singing style would completely take over rock and roll and help propel me away from that genre and deeper into roots music. I remember a violin-bow guitar solo by Jimmy Page that went on forever, and thinking that the drummer was far and away the biggest talent in that band.

There was another long wait in the murk and the cold, and then the voice of the announcer over the loudspeakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Doors!!!!” We stumbled to our feet and focused on the stage. We had been waiting all day for the slim Lizard-King Jim Morrison on the album covers, but some fat guy with a beard was singing something unintelligible. My first thought that this was a roadie and we were hearing some kind of sound check, but it slowly dawned on me that no, this was a song, the set had actually started, this bearded fat guy was Jim Morrison, and Jim Morrison was mightily fucked up. My recollection is that he spent much of the night on his hands and knees and there were only a few moments when his singular baritone really shone. And the band was not exactly a powerhouse, given Robby Kreiger’s thin guitar sound and sonic limitations of Ray Manzarek’s Vox organ.

A month later my friends and I were in Tenino, Washington for the second Sky River Rock Festival. We spent three days camped out at that one. There were several great blues acts at Sky River II, including Buddy Guy and James Cotton. This was where I first saw Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. This was a stellar band and show that brilliantly showcased Hicks’ great original tunes. And Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers played all three days, so I got even deeper into that band. I shot some 8mm movies of Parsons singing onstage in front of a huge American flag, stripped to the waist and sporting warpaint, that somehow got lost in one of my many moves over the years. I had bought the Burritos’ debut album, “The Gilded Palace of Sin” after I had seen them at the Seattle Pop Festival, and I played the hell out of that record. Most of it was original material set solidly in a country ambience but updated in a cool way. It had Gram Parson’s phenomenally soulful vocal on his own brilliant tune, “Hot Burrito #1,” and there were a couple of soul covers on there, “Do Right Woman” and “Dark End of the Street.” Strange, hip stuff.

It came to me that if I liked the Burritos I should check out some real country music. What if there was a payoff there like my discovery of Muddy Waters after checking out who inspired the Rolling Stones and Paul Butterfield were coming from? Where were the Flying Burrito Brothers coming from?

It was a tricky time to decide to delve into country music. This was 1969, and the protests against the Vietnam War, which I was participating in, were at their peak. The country was deeply divided, and a lot of us felt that country music fans were basically the same know-nothing hillbillies who were gung-ho about the war and hated us longhairs. This division was celebrated, obnoxiously, by the #1 country record, Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee.” Probably out of perversity, along with a sense that he had a good voice, I bought Merle’s current super-hot hit live album, “Okie From Muskogee.” If this asshole can get me into country music, I figured, then I’m ready for it and it is ready for me.

I listened to that album so intensely and so continuously that to this day, every second of “Okie From Muskogee” is engraved on my cortex. The album is a faithful capture of Merle’s stage show in 1969. Merle wasn’t just a talented country singer. The album showed me that he was one of the all-time great American vocalists, a feeling I hold to this day. Merle’s rich baritone was a world-class musical instrument, and he knew how to use every bit of it. “Okie From Muskogee” showed that Merle was equally at home with honky tonk, western swing, ballads, and blues. Merle glides through a series of brilliant tunes made even more stellar by the expert accompaniment of his outstanding band, the Strangers, which included his ex-wife Bonnie Owens singing harmony, Norm Hamlet on steel, and the phenomenal Roy Nichols on lead guitar.

By the time I left home to go to college in New York City, I was already enthralled with four of the biggest musical influences I’d ever have: Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Gram Parsons, and Merle Haggard.