Day Twelve - House Concerts, an Origin Story

Hey everybody.

I just got back from playing at a memorial service. So I did my regular session in the park today, as always on a Friday, from 10 to 12, and then I needed to get ready again by three to go and play at this memorial service.

And really, this day kind of turned into a little bit of an absurd day because of all the things I had scheduled and have been trying to accomplish. I wanted to get a mailing out to my mailing list about the website. There are numerous threads that I have to follow up on about my recent visit to the doctor, different kinds of supplements and medications and things that I have to look into and possibly acquire if I can afford to and this daily ritual is something that I don't want to let slide.

So I am sticking with the program here, even though I would love it if I were more prepared on the topic that I was going to talk about, but I will actually go ahead and touch on the history of this thing that I have done quite a lot, which is to give house concerts, little concerts, gatherings in people's homes.

This started back in 2010 when I had completed two seasons in the park, and it became clear that staying here in Ashland and scrounging around to find places to play was unlikely to keep me going, and I was determined to just stay on the case of playing music for people.

Somehow or other, I heard about house concerts. It was kind of just a new thing at the time, and it was mostly, as far as I could tell, a singer songwriter thing. I found a website that was about booking house concerts with singer songwriters, but as I tend to do, I just thought, “Well, why couldn't I do a house concert?”. Because by that time, I had performed for some little gatherings in people's homes, and I knew that I could fill up some time and make a very beautiful evening of it.

I was already experimenting with creating little soundtracks for poetry that I resonate with, and learning those poems and then speaking those poems over these this musical landscape that I created. It was something that really, really inspired me.

Because every poem, I think, has a kind of journey that it takes you on. It takes you to different places. It's almost always imagistic. The best poems locate extraordinary or invisible things in the ordinary and visible things.

So I had been diving into some collections of poems by their collections were authored by edited by Roger Houston, 10 poems to change your life and so on. There's a whole series of books, and he picks marvelous poems. In some of those books, he writes an introduction to each poem, which is very interesting, but that's not what I was really there for. It was the poems he introduced me in those books to several poets that I was not familiar with, and so I was getting deeply into creating these little performances with the poetry and some music that I would record and use as a backup track.

I'd already started doing that, and I thought, “okay, I can put together something along with these musical portraits that I had started composing”.

I had maybe four or five musical portraits at the time. There were other things that I was playing. I was building my repertoire.

So again, this is fall of 2010 when I decided that I'm going to do this tour, and it's hard to believe that I actually cooked up this crazy scheme, because it was a very crazy scheme.

The scheme was, first of all, to think of places where I know people around the country, call them up, tell them I'm going to be in their area at such and such a time, and kind of map out approximately when I could get there. And “would you like to gather a dozen friends and have a concert in your home?”. That was the pitch.

I was so not thinking through all the logistics of this situation. At the time, I did not have a car. I'd run out of money. My car had been, I believe, repossessed, actually, a couple of years earlier. I'd been riding a bike to get around or I was on foot, oftentimes, to take all my things into the park.

So I was really just low to the ground and trying to come up with a way of reconstituting myself as a person who would travel around. So I bought a van. It was a GMC Safari. I can't remember the year. It might have been, like 1980 or something like that, for $1,000. It was a growers van. There was weed, traces of weed, kind of in the back of this van. It didn't have seats in the back. It was just seats in the front.

It got the name of Van Gogh because I figured this is an impressionistic journey. It should have an impressionistic name. I scheduled when I was going to leave, because there were places that were saying yes, please come. I think maybe my first event was going to be in Sacramento. So that was going to be a relatively short trip. Then I was going to take I-80 due east and stop at different places along the way, end up in the Midwest, in Fairfield, where I used to live in Iowa, and make it to the East Coast.

It was ambitious. That was the beginning of what I called the “Irrational Quest For Beauty” tour, which took place from October to December of that year - 2010.

Right before I was to leave, I got appendicitis and had to have my appendix out. I was staying in this little cottage on the property of the home of a friend who was very instrumental in supporting my vision about this, and had actually helped me refine the idea of musical portraits. Her name was Lenore. She was a very good friend to me at that particular point in time.

So I set out.

I believe the other piece of this was that I discovered the website which you may have heard of or known about, called couchsurfing.com. Now I'm not even sure this is still a thing, but at the time, it was very much a happening thing because it was an online way of tapping into a network of purportedly trustworthy people that you could simply stay with and be hosted by in different cities and towns all over the United States.

I will just go ahead and tell you now, I will reveal this information that over the course of the next three years, I was on the road from the fall of 2010 to the end of 2013 and I don't believe I ever paid for a hotel, even one night. I might have stayed in a KOA campground one night. But almost all the rest of the lodging was in people's homes, remarkably, using couch surfing.

That was quite a remarkable experience all by itself. I did not know what I was doing. The van was falling apart constantly. The van was really eating my lunch. Every time I got to a place, there were people gathered, I would put on a concert, it was a magical evening. It was incredible, because this combination of music and poetry is just so mesmerizing. I experienced this over and over again.

There was a time when I had an agent who booked civic centers. I got this idea that I should start getting on the civic center circuit. That was also a somewhat misbegotten idea, because I was playing with backup tracks. It really wasn't exactly appropriate for the civic center circuit. But she did book one concert in a little town in Iowa at a rehabilitated railway station that had been turned into a concert venue. It was quite beautiful.

Throughout the time that we were building up to do that concert, she kept getting calls from the organizers saying, “People need some kind of video. You can't just do poems. That's not going to fly. They're used to watching things.”. And I just said, “don't worry”, because by this time, I had so much experience.

Sure enough, I remember all of these farmers and salt of the earth people coming in, sitting down, and as soon as I started sharing Mary Oliver and Rumi and William Stafford, they just dropped in. Their eyes were closed. They absorbed it. They loved it. It was such a beautiful way of communicating.

Then I would pack all my stuff up. I would be using some sort of couch surfing arrangement, or sometimes the concert host would host me overnight. It could be for a day or two. Then I would head down the road.

Over the course of three years, I did about 200 concerts.

There are various myths about dismemberment. I think that theme runs through mythology, because it's a thing that people go through. You may have gone through some kind of period of time where you felt every part of you was being pulled apart, but this time in my life was a recipe for a complete dismemberment.

I remember, after a while, as I would put all my things back into my van, just being in tears, because I was not able to sustain a connection, really, with anyone. There were a few people who I was in touch with on a regular basis during that time, but it was very topsy turvy.

Once I came into a town, oftentimes people who had been at the concert would want to host a concert, and so I got a chance to circle back around to that place I played.

I don't know how many concerts, maybe six , concerts in Elko, Nevada. Which is, if you've ever been there a remarkable kind of mining town., really not what appears to be a culturally lively place, but the people there are actually quite beautiful. Elko, in many ways, changed my life, all by itself.

There were many experiences along the road during that time. One of the most significant experiences of this three year period was that as I played the musical portraits, people would hear these musical portraits, and they would want to commission one themselves. I'm pretty sure that when I went on the road, the price for a musical portrait was like $250.

But very soon I had to raise that price to $500 because it just didn't make any sense. People were just commissioning these left and right. And what that meant is that I would have to arrange somehow, to stay in one place long enough to be able to compose the piece. It was a form of incredible artistic pressure which formed the basis of really some beautiful work. I am still rather astonished at many of the pieces that I composed during that time, many of them are still some of my favorite pieces as a composer.

I think that I have developed in various different ways, but this experience told me that one of the best ways to produce good work is to concentrate my focus and attempt to pull something together as quickly as possible. It's not always possible, depending on what my schedule is, but during those times, that's exactly what happened, and it was often quite amazing what came out of that topsy turvy, rather chaotic situation.

So I traveled all over. I did these house concerts. I kept developing. I expanded my repertoire. I would record both the poems and the musical portraits. I probably, during that two year time period, released three albums. I think I might have already had two. So I probably was up to about five or so by the time I got back to Ashland.

Coming back to Ashland was not exactly a plan, it was just where I sort of, I just bounced back as if I was projected with a rubber band. I was going to live up in Portland. I really liked Portland. I loved the creativity of the place. I thought that would be a good choice at that time, but I couldn't really find a place, and couldn't quite organize what my strategy was going to be. All I knew was I had to land at a certain point.

So I did end up staying with a friend in Ashland in early 2014 and there was one day I came to the park, basically said a kind of prayer, asking for a sign of some kind that it was a good idea for me to play in the park again.

Because after having been doing this house concert thing, maybe making $300 a house concert and then spend a lot of that on the various expenses, fixing the van, the van not making it all the way through. I was spent.

Somehow or other, I managed to survive, but it was very, very difficult the day that I came to the park and asked for a sign. On that day, a college choir showed up and sang Hallelujah with me as I played, as the last thing they did on their field trip. They were from Eugene.

One by one, each person in the choir came up and shook my hand after they sang, and said, “this is very beautiful. What you're doing, you should keep doing it.”.

So I decided that I was going to keep doing it.

Even then playing in the park was challenging.

I have during these last 10 or 11 years, still had a number of house concerts, but it's really not quite the same these days. When I was in this position of being the traveling cellist, the story was a magnificent story to tell for the host who was thinking about hosting a concert. They would just say to their friends, “there's this guy that I saw at this house concert, and he wears a hat, and does poems plays cello, this beautiful music, and he's just going to be here at this time. So do you want to come?”. So there were, there were some house concerts that had 50 or 60 people. A lot of times it was a dozen or 20.

It was almost the same thing as in the park. It was whatever people wanted to put into a hat. Maybe there was some suggested donation, but most of the time it was really loose, and somehow or other, it worked well enough for me to keep going.

I love doing these house concerts. I did one last fall at a place in Talent, OR, and that was very well received. Every time I do it, people really enjoy it. I love the poems. I love speaking the poems. And I'm open to doing more!

I've tried doing them over zoom. That doesn't work so well. The whole charm of this situation is: you're in somebody's living room. You're in their home. There's some gathering of old friends, most of whom maybe you know, or some that you're meeting for the first time. And it's intimate and homey, a perfect kind of setting for the kinds of thing that I do.

So I wanted to share that about the house concerts because it's been such a big part of what has constituted my work. Even just finding poems and learning more poems and finding poets and exploring their poetry, and having that poetry inspire music has been a tremendous experience for me.

I will share one more story. Kit Stafford is William Stafford's daughter. One of the first house concerts I gave up in Portland was hosted by a man named Michael. Afterwards, he said that he had dated Kit Stafford in high school, and she lived in Sisters, OR. He said “you should get in touch with her about doing a house concert in Sisters.

Sisters, Oregon is a gorgeous place, sort of situated in the middle of Oregon, roughly.

I spent a certain amount of time going back and forth with Kit on email. During that very first tour in 2010 she was open to the idea of a concert, and when I was coming back to the west coast from the East Coast, she got in touch and said, “Can you do it on this date in November?”. And I said, “Yes, of course.”.

Then I got an email from Dennis and Helen Schmidling, who ran the William Stafford Foundation. They were living in the cabin that William Stafford lived in when he was in Sisters. They said I would be staying with them at William Stafford's cabin. This was blowing me away, because by that time, I had started to feel like William Stafford was following me around all over the country with his poetry. His poetry speaks to me over and over and over again.

So I arrived there in Sisters on a very snowy day in November. I managed to get the van stuck in the driveway before the concert. That was a problem!

But it was a beautiful gathering, and Kit was there, and I did the poem that her father wrote about her. I believe it has them swimming in the ocean. It's a beautiful little poem.

I had an incredible stay there. It had for me this sense of somehow almost having been anointed.

It was such an incredible feeling, because there is quite a lot of reverence in Bill Stafford's work. If you absorb it enough and get close enough to it, something about it starts to live inside you. I'm still discovering poems of his that amaze me.

So this is the story of the house concerts. I am with you on the 12th day of my next 10 years of creation, July 18, 2025.