In New Hampshire: Skid Marks

By Jack Skow

"You made a record, and everyone bought it. Then you went on tour, and everyone lined up for tickets. That was all any of us knew about the music business, and that included the people who ran the business." The speaker is Tom Rush, a folk singer, acoustic-guitar operator and onetime rambling man with some mileage on him. Just now, like other New Hampshiremen in Mud Season, he feels entitled to be a touch grouchy. There was plenty of snow for cross- country skiing this winter on the logging roads around his big hillside house, but the maple-syrup season was no damned good at all, and then outrageous rains flooded nearby roads so that Keene and Concord were just about unreachable. Blackfly season is not more than 15 minutes away. Still, the sun is shining, just barely, and yes -- a sour grin -- even the music business is beginning to show signs of life.

Rush, a lean, easy-moving, mustached fellow of 46, got his start as a folkie in Cambridge, Mass., when he was a sophomore at Harvard. Joan Baez was beginning to make a name in Cambridge then, and both of them played at a folk hangout called Club 47.

That was in 1961, near the beginning of what those who know all the verses to Freight Train now call, with the rueful irony of survivors, the "great folk-music scare of the '60s." For the rest of the decade and part of the '70s too, Rush spent most of his time on the road, as he recalls now, playing concerts and club gigs, getting a lavender tan from stage lights, finding his moments of repose watching the mysterious turning, turning of airport carrousels, living a life that made more money than sense. A song he wrote in those cockerel days yipped, "I can't stop more than just a few minutes, baby, make love to you, hey, hey, hey, I'm on the road again." Now when he sings it, a rooted New Hampshire householder with a wife and two young sons, there is a note of amazement in his voice: "Did I really do all that crazy stuff?"

Sure did, while the ramble lasted. Then the national enthusiasm for folk music faded to its customary polite murmur. Rush was still fairly successful, but that was fairly disastrous in the platinum-or-bust pop-music world. Punk was big; should he dye his hair purple and wear Spandex? Or mess around with country rock? A couple of years before, he had bought a shaggy, overgrown 600-acre farm in the southern part of New Hampshire, his home state. He had a good view of Mount Monadnock and enough money to hide out for a year. As the fat years ran out in the early '70s, he retreated to the woods. He spent his time clearing saplings on old logging trails; good folk-song material here. He bought some beehives. He tapped his maple trees in the spring and discovered with a born-again countryman's pleasure that his illustrious ancestor, Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, had written a long letter to Thomas Jefferson, promoting maple sugar as a boon to health and commerce.

Low ambition, low energy, he says now of this period. Low results too; he kept his guitars tuned, but the none-too-healthy pop-music industry, then as now, was preoccupied with selling rock 'n' roll to teenagers. Listeners, when he had listeners, cheered his Drop Down Mama and Rainy Day Man and laughed at his New Hampshire jokes. But in one of the gutsy blues yowls that he had begun to sing in his twangy weathered baritone, he complained about feeling "like some old engine, lost my driving wheel . . ." And that described his stalled career at the end of the '70s.

His moves since then seem logical enough now, but at the time they took some nerve. He began to talk things over with David Sykes, an old friend who teaches a course in entrepreneurship at Boston University. Sykes believed that Rush's fans were still out there, 15 years older and living in better neighborhoods. This audience was still receptive to the music it liked, but not in sports arenas with 20,000 screaming kids.

This made sense to Rush, and so did Sykes' idea of how to be an entrepreneur: "Leave skid marks at the edge of the cliff." Rush was about to leave some. The year before, 1980, he had failed to fill a 500-seat rock club in Boston for a Christmas show, at $7 a ticket. Now he booked the city's classiest concert house, the 2,600-seat Symphony Hall, for a year-end performance at $15. It was a $20,000 gamble, and it paid off in a sellout. A year later, when he repeated the concert, Bostonians talked of his "traditional" Symphony Hall year-ender. Next season public television filmed the show. By this winter the year-ender had grown to a three- performance weekend exhaust-a-thon with Symphony Hall set up cabaret-style and tickets pegged up to $24.50. Rush followed what he calls a Club 47 format, an idea he worked out with Sykes. What it boils down to is not just a lot of guest talent but as much interaction as possible among the performers.

"Chaos describes it nicely," says Rush, but when it works, it means that Guitar Wizard David Bromberg, for example, doesn't just appear, do a three- song Bromberg bubble unrelated to anything else and then vanish. Instead he may back up Rush later on slide guitar and improvise a number with the gifted white Bluesman John Hammond. This season's featured guest was the formidable black Rhythm-and-Blues Pioneer Bo Diddley, whose major weapon is a five-speed turbo electric guitar built in a startling rectangular shape.

This winter, unless he had played the night before, Rush heaved out of bed at 5:30 a.m. He would be on cross-country skis at first light, breaking trail on his logging roads. By 7:30 he had showered, and driven his sons Benjamin, 11, and Richard, 4, to school. He ate breakfast with his wife Beverly, and by 8 a.m. was busy at his desk in an office partitioned off in what must have been the hayloft of his barn. Then . . .

Wait a minute. This guy is a folk singer? A modern Leadbelly? He sounds like one of those hero CEOs in FORTUNE or Forbes who eats nails, sleeps three hours a night and never, never loses his driving wheel. Worse to come: by 9 a.m., the six employees of Maple Hill Productions have started to arrive, make coffee and restructure the music biz. The strategy that Rush worked out with Sykes was to use the Tom Rush name for leverage, once it was re-established. Then he would create a central organization that could bring folk musicians and audiences together. Now, Maple Hill Inc. of Hillsboro, N.H., is percolating as a record company called Night Light Recordings, a booking agent for new and used talent, a publisher, a producer of special events (with clambakes, boat rides and fireworks thrown in, if that's what you want) and a mail-order house that sends out records and tapes and T shirts.

Defining folk music as anything folks will listen to is too broad for Rush and Maple Hill, and confining it to Elizabethan ballads played on dulcimers is way too narrow. Most of the artists associated with Rush and Maple Hill play acoustic instruments, though Rush's keyboardist, Irwin Fisch, for instance, played a Baldwin grand rigged out with a synthesizer at Symphony Hall. Bill Morrissey is a quirky, funny New Hampshireman who sometimes performs with Rush, singing made-by-hand songs about how he should be working the second shift at the shoe factory, except that here he is in this bar and probably won't make it tonight. David Buskin and Robin Batteau are classically trained musicians, sophisticated enough to put across an intricate, pun-mad parody of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice ("He was a great musician, who finally learned decomposition . . .") Christine Lavin sings witty, wistful songs about shouldering your way through the big world when you are only five feet tall and not very fierce.

Meanwhile, there's a spread sheet to be read and plans to be made for a folk-music conference to be held at the farm in June. No, forget June, there are buckets to be taken down on Rush's roadside sugar maples, and it's time to put in blueberry bushes. Somebody's on the phone. Is he really doing all this crazy stuff? You bet. Has he found his driving wheel? Stay tuned.