The Jim Ohlschmidt Interview
Tell me about growing up in Sheboygan, WI. What was your childhood like and what would you and your friends do for fun growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically the guitar/12 string? Was this something that was relevant around your household growing up?
Sheboygan in the 1950s was a bustling factory town and most of the folks there were blue collar laborers. It was white, mostly German descendants who filled the churches and taverns and children such as myself were either in public, or parochial schools. The sizable Catholic and Lutheran congregations wanted a religious upbringing for their kids. As factory towns went, Sheboygan was fairly cosmopolitan. There was a bustling downtown with retail stores, movie theaters and restaurants. There was also a public library and something that land-locked places could only dream of - beaches, parks and other waterfront attractions on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was a nice, clean, safe town and driving, or walking along the huge expanse of open blue water on our Eastern horizon made it special. I grew up listening to the radio and watching television and those two devices are where all music and glimpses of the bigger world came from back then. No one in our house, or those of my childhood friends, played a musical instrument. The only live music I experienced as a child was marching bands in parades and people singing in church. Like most folks my age, I was seated on the floor in front of our black-and-white TV set on the February night in 1964 when the Beatles made their first American television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. I had never heard any of the great records that came out of Memphis and elsewhere in the previous decade, so for me at the time, the Beatles were the first rock and roll band ever. It would be another three years before I first picked up the instrument and began learning to play. By then the sound of popular music had changed considerably and the electric guitar was at the center of it.
Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your first show and when did it dawn on you that you wanted to be a musician yourself? Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to your solo career? When and where did you play your very first show and what was that experience like? What ultimately inspired you to pursue a career in music?
In the spring of 1967 a local music store had a deal where you could rent a cheap electric guitar and a little amp for three months for $21.00 and you could sign up for lessons with one of three instructors who taught in little cubicles they built in the basement. Soon I was one of hundreds of local kids who wanted to play electric guitar and be cool. The guy who gave me my first lessons, Rick Gustafson, is still a good friend and we play together sometimes. After two rounds of cheap rental guitars, I knew I liked it enough to buy a decent instrument. In January of ‘68 I saved enough to buy a Harmony Rocket, with a snazzy red paint job and a single pickup. I was so proud of that instrument and by then I had learned to strum rhythm without having to stop to change chords. This was enough skill to land me my first gig in a so-called garage band because, yes, we literally practiced in a garage. The guys in the group were about a year older than me, but they needed someone who could get through a song beginning to end without stopping to look where his left hand fingers were going. We played our one and only gig that spring, when we were allowed to perform a few songs at a graduation dance while the real band took a break. I wish I could remember what songs we played, but I do recall how that amateurish effort changed my life. With a guitar, it seemed, doors opened to places and experiences I didn’t have otherwise. From that time on, the guitar was going to be my calling card, but our little band never played together again.
What ultimately inspired you to pursue a career in music? Who were some of your inspirations in your more formative years? I understand the mighty Leo Kottke and the late master of rhythm and strings, John Fahey, played huge parts in your process as a musician.
Soon after that I became enamored with singer-songwriters who played acoustic guitar. Albums by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Cat Stevens, James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel dominated my record player. I was still a very young man and my singing voice sounded like it, but the acoustic guitar seemed much more real to me (and still does) than the overdriven, effect-laden thing rock guitar had become. I wasn’t sure what kind of music I wanted to play at that point. My musical direction beckoned the first time I heard Leo Kottke around 1971. I purchased a copy of his “Greenhouse” LP at our local Musicland record store and was astonished by what I heard. Solo acoustic guitar instrumentals were completely foreign to me. I had heard fingerpicking on other records, but nothing remotely like what Leo was doing. The music was complete, with bass, chords, rhythm and melody all unfolding simultaneously in a rapid fire stream of notes that defied any explanation my limited musical mind could conceive. Just listen to his original track of “Bean Time”. It sounded like at least two guitar players to me. Leo also sang on that record and his voice to me sounded natural, pleasant and authentic with the great accompaniments he played. Another epiphany was the sound of his low-tuned 12-string guitar, which was huge and full and not like any acoustic guitar I had heard. He also played in open tunings on some songs, which was another revelation. I listened to “Greenhouse” incessantly, slowly absorbing the wealth of new musical information on this one album. Local record stores were helpful in finding and ordering more Leo Kottke albums, including the holy grail known as “The Armadillo Album” because of the cover art.
“Six and Twelve String Guitar” on the Takoma label had already been out for a few years when I got a copy and like pretty much everyone else who heard It, I was was mesmerized by the tunes and his amazing picking on the 12-string. Tunes like “Jack Fig”, “Busted Bicycle” and “Vaseline Machine Gun” were quite the show-stoppers, especially the latter with his fast bottleneck slide work. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t give up their flat picks and try to play like this. In the early ‘70s there was a dearth of instructional information when it came to playing fingerstyle guitar. You had to listen to the record, over and over, and figure it out. Starting with Leo was like trying to build a Ferrari for your first car. It helps to build a go-cart first, which in this analogy means learning how alternating thumb works, then figuring out open tunings, and finding the chords in those tunings. Only then can you hope to figure out what Leo does, or what he did back then anyway. This is where John Fahey came into the picture. I would not have heard Fahey if I hadn’t heard Leo, who often mentioned him in interviews. The first John Fahey album I bought was “America” and while I heard John’s somewhat simpler approach to fingerpicking, the music was no less revelatory, perhaps even more so than that of Leo’s work.
Fahey painted his music with big, bold strokes, using space as effectively as the notes he played. Although I didn’t know it at the time, his tunes were full of references to the prewar blues guitarists, such as Charlie Patton and Mississippi John Hurt whom he had studied in great detail. Once again local record mongers helped me obtain earlier Fahey albums. Before too long I had a wealth of material to study and I was finding a pathway to my own music. When Takoma, the independent record label that Fahey himself founded in the late ‘50s, released an album of music by Kottke, Fahey and Peter Lang, my musical direction became crystal clear. I wanted to be one of these guys! Over the next few years I began writing tunes of my own, some of which appeared on my debut album “Behind The Eye.” I was more, or less working in a vacuum then. I had several friends who played guitar really well back then, but nothing like what I was interested in. The two 12-string tunes on that first album, “Washington Island Rag,” and “The Delta Freeze” were very much Kottke-inspired.
You released your legendary debut LP “Behind the Eye” back in ‘77. Tell me about writing and recording this album and what that experience was like for you. What was the overall vision and approach to this album? I understand you worked with Paul Martinson and George Hanson on this project. Would you mind giving some background to songs such as “Sky Song”, “Washington Island Rag”, and “The Delta Freeze”?
This was my 1977 self-produced debut as a solo finger style guitarist. At the time I was completely immersed in the work of two favorite artists, Leo Kottke and John Fahey. I had been playing guitar for about ten years, and had become enamored with the acoustic guitar via the recordings of singer songwriters such as Dylan, James Taylor, Neil Young and Cat Stevens. When I first heard Leo’s “Greenhouse” album, the top of my head nearly came off. I had never heard anyone play like that, so complete and rhythmically compelling. Listening to Leo and reading about him lead me to Fahey, who of course was in a musical world unto himself that beckoned with a path into the mysterious history of prewar blues. With these two guitarists as my creative guide, I set about coming up with my own tunes that attempted to emulate and in some cases imitate, their playing. In the mid-70s Leo was recording for Capitol in a studio in a Minneapolis called Sound 80. Dylan had recorded his “Blood On The Tracks” album there and Cat Stevens was working on a new record there in 1976. I enlisted the help of George Hansen, an acoustic music fan and a so-called producer who had helped Robin and Melinda Williams make some records and some other Twin Cities artists. George knew how to get an album manufactured and he pretended to know about engineering in the studio.
He would sit in front of my guitar as I played with one ear toward the sound hole, as if to study the sound coming out, before he concurred with what the real engineer already knew. That engineer was Paul Martinson, who worked on all of Leo’s Capitol albums then. Sound 80 was state-of-the-art, and so here I was, this totally green kid from Sheboygan, in the same big-time studio where my hero had made the records I was listening to constantly. The sessions went well, at least I don’t recall doing too many takes of anything. There was an overdub or two, but mostly just solo 6-and 12-string guitar instrumentals. I did not sing back then. Things were going well, although all along I was hoping that I might get to meet Leo in person if he came into town work on something while I was there. My wish came true one afternoon when Martinson asked me if I wanted to take a break and walk across the hall to meet Leo. Meeting him at Sound 80 that day is something I will never forget. After a little chit chat where he tried to figure out who the hell I was and what I was doing there, I mentioned to him that I had a 12-string guitar with me he would be interested in seeing. Among the guitars I had brought to Sound 80 to make “Behind The Eye” was a Gibson B-45 that was just like one Leo had before it was stolen from him. I had read interviews with him where he lamented losing that guitar and that if he ever found one again, etc.
This was not his actual stolen guitar (as far as I knew it wasn’t), but it was the same model (the one with the glued-on bridge instead of a tailpiece) and it sounded just like the 12-string guitar heard on Leo’s seminal “Armadillo” album on the Takoma label. The finish was weather-checked but otherwise it was in very good, playable condition. I used it to record the track “Delta Freeze” on BTE. When I showed it to Leo, he immediately took it into the tracking room and started playing it. Engineer Scott Rivard rolled tape. I sat there, mesmerized, watching my hero playing my guitar, until Paul Martinson reminded me we still had some work to before he could go home and so we went back to the room where we were mixing some of my stuff. It might have been an hour or two before we were finished for the day, and I went back to where Leo was to retrieve the Gibson. He was still sitting in the tracking room, playing that guitar. When he looked up and saw I was there, the first thing he said was “I’ll give you three grand for it.” The word “stunned” doesn’t begin to describe what I was feeling. I had paid $350 for that instrument. In 1976 $3,000 was a small fortune, especially for a young dreamer like myself wearing a thrift store sport coat who was driving a mid-60s Ford Galaxy with a mis-matched color passenger door. Somehow I managed to explain that like him, I played 12-string in different open tunings and that maybe we could make a trade so I would still have two 12-strings (my other one was a recent Martin D-35 12).
Never mind that I could have bought any 12-string I wanted at the time with the proceeds, and never mind that my first album would suddenly be paid for in full. Leo was amused with the idea and agreed to meet me at his office the next day to make the deal. When I met him with the Gibson in hand at his office downtown, he had three 12-strings with him. There was a Lo Prinzi, a Martin D-20 12, and a dreadnought size Guild (not the jumbo). He let me play each one and told me a little about them. The one that caught my ear was the Guild, which Leo said he had used to record a track called “Constant Traveler” and a couple of other cuts that I was well familiar with. It felt good, and sounded great, so I chose the Guild and handed him the Gibson. Leo sat down behind his office desk and began playing it. As they say, you could have knocked me over with a feather, to be hearing and watching him play up close and personal. I mean, I didn’t just want to play like Leo, I wanted to be like him. I have no idea how long we might have been sitting there, but at one point the phone rang and after a brief chat Leo hung up and said he had to go. I put the Guild 12-string back in the case and thanked him as best I could given that my mind was absolutely reeling.
Before he got up to leave, Leo reached into one of his desk drawers and took out a checkbook. Without saying a word, he wrote a check for $3,000 and handed it to me. I have no idea what I said, or how I left the building, or how I drove back to my friend’s house, or much of anything that happened the rest of the day and night. Not only was I the owner of a guitar my hero had played and recorded with, my record now was paid for, in full. Most important of all, it was the beginning of a friendship that has lasted to this day. I released “Behind The Eye” in March of 1977 and I sold quite a few copies locally for the next couple of years. I sent one to John Fahey at Takoma Records in Santa Monica and I still have the hand-written letter he sent back with his critique of my work. He liked some of my tunes but he thought the sound of the recording was lacking resonance, likening it to “a Kicking Mule album” in terms of fidelity. I later became friends with John and would hangout with him after gigs and on his occasional days off when he was on the road. I made one more instrumental acoustic guitar LP in 1980, which more, or less ended that chapter of my guitar playing career.
