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79 f


Redding, you never heard of King Curtis, you never heard of…’ you know. And then they started coming. San Francisco was always a fashion town, but it was never a music town. There was all those stupid psychedelic pants who didn’t know how to play. There were some nice folks in San Francisco… I love San Francisco. But Paul Butterfield was fun, man. We shared the arrangements… and then (trumpet player) Howard Johnson came in and made those magical charts. I learned a lot from Howard… horn writing.”


And what about the other outfit


Geoff was a member of, the influential Jim Kweskin Jug Band?


“The Jug Band was a fantastic thing to be a part of… and culturally too. Where we were in the States, there were people in striped shirts and uniforms and we blew that out of them… what started The Grateful Dead was the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Then the Byrds picking up on Fritz’s glasses, and Dylan picking up on the glass- es… it was a cultural thing that we were sort of part of. You can show up on stage, be funny, not have schtick, and dress the way you want to dress… right off the street. Whereas everybody else was in ‘showbiz!’ It was great. When we first played LA, the audience was so stupid when we were doing our last set of the week we did it lying down, you know, we were doing it in protest at the stupidity of the Los Angeles’ audiences. And then, two years later, they were pretty hip. A guy came up when we were in our first two days of playing at the Troubadour and he came up to the dressing room and he said, ‘You know, you guys are pretty good. I like the no schtick schtick’.”


Geoff has had a very long (they met when they were teenagers) working rela- tionship with producer Joe Boyd. So how does Geoff the perfectionist get on with the input from another person? Is the partnership equal?


“No, not with me. I’m the worst. The reason Dick Connette was probably the best producer I ever worked with, on the Bix thing, was the way he could get those people together. We’d have a rehearsal in three months and there’s only a two-hour window for the people we needed and that’s the only day, so I fly in from LA. And he would keep coming up with ideas, which I would keep rejecting, and then every eighth idea I’d go… ‘OK’, like the title of the album, or a musical idea. But mostly I don’t have an interest in having a shared vision with somebody.”


“In the Jug Band, Bill Keith said it was


a democracy, but I was the only one that used my veto power. I probably was collab- orative in that because Keith was such a genius. But, in terms of my own record, well, why do I want to have a conference with people about what might be good or bad? It’s my idea, so let me fail… but then people would throw in ideas. For instance, even on the Bix thing, Joe Boyd came in and he really pushed for one of the best things on there, with Martha singing There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth The Salt Of My Tears. Mostly, I’d select the material for the albums that I did with Joe, but Joe would always come up with good


Geoff & Maria Muldaur, early ‘70s.


ideas or tunes. Dick Connette made these lists, spreadsheets, he was unbelievably efficient… all his stuff and then we’d nar- row it down. With Joe, he’s likely to come up with something wacky and he could suddenly make little miracles happen.”


appearing on the soundtrack of Terry Gilliam’s futurist movie masterpiece Brazil?


T


You’ve never heard the story? OK… so… in order to get the movie ready in time for a festival screening, Gilliam had stolen our recording of Brazil and put it on the soundtrack intending to cut it out later. He put the film in the festival and it won! They couldn’t cut it after that. I did talk to Gilliam after I saw a screening of the movie. I was with Van Dyke Parks and we called Gilliam somehow because I had an idea for an album, which was an album of getting people from all around the world to record Brazil, so every tune was


alking of miracles… how on earth did a recording of Geoff’s – from Geoff and Maria’s Pot- tery Pie album (produced by Joe Boyd) – end up influencing and


Brazil, but one version was done by Ali Akbar Khan and one by Ali Farka Toure, and so on. It’s a great idea, it’s like, you never got away from it, it’s just like the movie, you thought you were out, you weren’t, it was a dream or whatever.”


“Anyway, Gilliam said, ‘Well, I’ll never work again.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll never be able to make a movie again, so I can’t help you.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ But, anyway, he told me they used to put on our album at the Monty Python office and they’d play Brazil, and they’d all get down on their knees and pray to it. Can you imagine? If you’re going to be in a movie, that sure was a great movie to be a part of. The movie had noth- ing to do with Brazil and they just named it Brazil because that tune became this haunting… haah! And the guy who did the orchestration was phenomenal. So that’s the story. Thinking about the Python guys on their knees, praying to some tongue-in- cheek thing we did.”


Does Geoff still perform Brazil?


“Well, I kid about it on stage and I could, I could probably do it. I’ve done it in Japan with Amos Garrett. That was his lick, it’s very difficult, but I use it to warm up. It’s a beautiful chord thing and I came close to recording it with the chamber group. Amos was a folkie on the Toronto scene. I think it was Joe who got Amos in the studio for the Pottery Pie album. I’d never heard him play electric guitar. It was a complete surprise to me… all that bend- ing (notes), all the whole thing. His ears were ridiculous. It came from playing the trombone, which, if you listen to his guitar playing, it’s more like Jack Teagarden than any other guitar player. ‘Bom, bom, bomey, bom, bom’… it’s tromboney. And also barbershop quartet… I think every child should have to play the piano or they can’t go outside, and every child should take sight reading and singing… and be in a barbershop quartet. And this world would just be full of beautiful music.”


(related fRoots interviews: Maria Mul-


daur fR365 /Jim Kweskin fR398/399) geoffmuldaur.com


F


Photo: Dave Peabody


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