45 f “M
eanwhile the Jim Kweskin Jug Band was getting ready to put out an album. They were very popular and Jac Holzman at Electra decided that jug bands were going to sweep the nation, so he had to have a
jug band. So they approached us and we said we were already under contract with Victoria Spivey. They went to her house and they bought out our contract. She was a little peeved about it but she kind of made out OK. She’d taken me under her wing to try to help me find songs to play and invited me up to her apartment a couple of times and was playing me old 78s. The thing that I remember the most about that, she played me Memphis Minnie singing Tricks Ain’t Walking and that was another pivotal moment in my young, formative little life.”
“I’m rehearsing and recording with the Even Dozen and we’re all hanging out and palling around together but the only people old enough to be out after dark without our parents were John Sebastian and I. One night he tells me the Kweskin band, which we all considered the real jug band, were in town doing a three-week stint at the Bitter End. So he invited me to dinner and to go hear them. We were both just knocked out by them and both of us were very impressed with this blue-eyed blues singer that was up there warbling away… Geoff Muldaur. I just thought ‘Wow, he is so cool’. I later said to Geoff ‘You sound kind of like a white Mose Allison’. I didn’t even know Mose Alli- son was white!”
“So that’s how I met Geoff and we went on a couple of dates. The Even Dozen Jug Band’s album got released and we did three shows, two of which were at Carnegie Hall – one was a big Hoote- nanny with Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Odetta etc, the other was a Sing Out! benefit and the other one was opening for Nina Simone and Herbie Mann. Go figure! After that there was no club owner that could afford to pay for thirteen people, so there was very little work for us and in the meantime, Geoff invit- ed me up to Cambridge, where he lived, and I decided to stay and then the following late spring one of the members left and I was asked to join the Kweskin band.”
“It was a goofy band and we were very popular and we were very tight, very musical. Other jug bands, like Even Dozen, they just kind of made a lot of noise on the board – they were good but, you know, we had a few geniuses in our band.”
“We met Amos Garret because we had done some gigs with Ian and Sylvia in Canada and he was in the Great Speckled Bird band. We, him and Geoffrey struck up a really cool musical friendship and he was a very cool guy, so Geoff invited him to be a part of the very first Geoff and Maria album. We had Bill Keith, Amos, Geoff and on drums Billy Mundy, who was with the original Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention of all things. We recorded the first album in Boston as we still lived there. Then Mo Ostin wanted another one and paid for us to move to Woodstock and – oh the days! – just gave us a monthly salary to just sit in the woods and explore music together. And that’s when Geoff and Paul Butterfield connected and Geoff and Butterfield and Amos started hanging out more and more. I just continued to do whatever songs I liked, old Appalachian tunes, blues… whatever.”
“After nine years, Geoff and I parted ways. Mo Ostin gave me the opportunity to come to California and make my first solo album. I had no aspirations about being a big star. I just thought I was getting out of the Woodstock winter and going to LA and then I found myself in the studio with Ry Cooder and Dr John, David Lindley, Lowell George, Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon, Bonnie Raitt’s bass player Freebo, I mean, just the cream of the cream.”
The Kweskin band at Newport Folk Festival – Mel Lyman, Maria, Geoff Muldaur, Jim Kweskin, Bill Keith.
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