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A meditation on Elvin Bishop

P.K. Dwyer was the first musician I ever interviewed, because he made a record with his band the Jitters that I liked, because we had a mutual friend, and because Charley Cross let me write the piece for the entertainment section in the University of Washington Daily he edited and called Pure Pop For Now People.

I had been along for one other interview with musicians, back in high school. My friend down the street stumbled upon a band called Uncle Cookie who were briefly famous for covering the Ramones and letting people in free to their shows if they brought plastic baseball bats. I went along for the interview at this big old house they lived in in the University District. It was a warm and friendly place and there were records neatly filed everywhere. The leader of Uncle Cookie (I still have their sole 45) was Conrad Uno, who had played on the Shorecrest High School golf team years before and who would go on to found PopLlama Records (where my co-editor would one day briefly intern) and Egg Studios, to be associated with the Young Fresh Fellows and to retire (I suspect) on the strength of producing the Presidents Of The United States Of America's best-seller.

As I remember the premise of Uncle Cookie piece in the Highland Piper was that they'd sure like the easy money to be made playing our high school assemblies, and wouldn't they be more fun than the cover band we'd been seeing since junior high school. And as a show of solidarity we went to see them at the Richmond Rec Center, which makes that, I believe, my fourth concert. My first punk rock show, if that's really what it was (and it wasn't, not by today's standards...one song on the single was a dance number called "Hamburger").

P.K., in any event, was a Seattle street singer who had adapted to the new wave with the Jitters. I had just bought my first Sonics album a few days before he came by my apartment to be interviewed (his girlfriend, it turned out, lived across the street; they later left Seattle to go to clown school in Paris, and then he moved to Venice Beach, and now back to Seattle, which probably leaves out some stops along the way, but no matter). Pawing through my crate of recent purchases he stumbled on the Sonics and was emboldened to cover "The Witch" the next time I saw him play, losing his voice in a final song that at last won over the crowd at the Showbox to see Pearl Harbour & The Explosions.

The first disc atop my listening stack today is an advance of a live Elvin Bishop album called Booty Bumpin' that Blind Pig is putting out (street date: June 26), and Elvin Bishop's name always reminds me of P.K. Dwyer. I asked P.K., back in 1980, what kind of career he wanted in music. And he said something like, "I'd like to be Elvin Bishop. I'd like to be able to travel around the country and play to enough people who knew my name that I could make a decent living and keep doing it."

I don't think P.K. was particularly a fan of Elvin Bishop's, it was just the name which came to mind, and he probably had been (or was about to be) through town recently. And "Fooled Around And Fell In Love" which went to #3 on the pop charts in 1976, four years before Mr. Dwyer and I were chatting.

But I have always liked his formulation. Yeah, Bishop probably made enough money on that one hit (and he had a handful of albums in the top-100 in the '70s) that he can afford the luxury of a musician's life. The point is that very few of us get to do the thing we're meant to do, even if we're clever enough to figure out what that might be. And my particular point is that anybody who can figure out a way to make a living that doesn't involve working in a cubicle or a big box, I'm good with that. I applaud that. Encourage it. If that means selling the odd song to a TV commercial, y'know...that's OK. Occasionally there are songs which seem like they belong more to the audience than to the artist associated with them, but...it's a tough world out there, and it's not getting any easier.

And, in a way, I've always sought musicians like Bishop — or, rather, the work of musicians like Bishop — who do it for the love, for the pleasure of playing, for the need, the compulsion, the certainty that it's what they're meant to do. Not for the stardom, not for the money. For the art, or the craft, it makes little difference in the end which. Because it's a kind of work, a hard kind of work, the best kind of work. The only kind of work worth doing.

I've never met nor interviewed Mr. Bishop, nor have I seen him play. Nor do I particularly need to. But it pleases me to find him still making music, to know that Blind Pig has even had some modest success releasing his albums. That a man in his early 60s is still out on the road pleasing the people, playing music because it's what he's meant to do, and he does it well enough to make the night tolerable.

Posted by grant on June 14, 2007 9:52 AM | Permalink