When I was a kid, a full grown fourteen, big as I ever was, I sometimes took the train to Greenwich Village and stayed with a friend over night. "There was music in the cafes at night, revolution in the air." I hung out with folksingers. Near the town up county where I came from, lived a man who played the banjo, Clyde Franklin. He spoke with a southern accident, lived on his wealthy father's big estate with his wife who came from deep in the mountains of North Carolina. I learned about old bluegrass instruments, foggy mountain breakdowns and all of that. Went to Harvard College. Took to the Boston night and found the Cape Breton fiddlers. Ran into a girl; she was Marie come down to work in "the Boston States", as it turned out, the sister of John Allen Cameron, "godfather of Canadian Celtic music". Went to Nova Scotia with my friend fiddler George Dorian, stayed in Port Hood with Marie and a cast of characters in the thick of the music long before it became the big export it is today. Made my first music buck playin some rhythm with John Allen's family at a festival and played a fast reel on the harmonica, which was a big hit for the novelty of it and the impromptu landing on stage of a legendary dancer named Don Riley, a Maritime answer to Bo Jangles...... He did this weird kind of step dancing, that included a shuffling slide of sorts. Slid right across the stage, his feet going all the time. Now his shoes are bronzed and on display at a museum where the highway crosses into Cape Breton, and on his grave stone is inscribed, "Lord of the Dance". In these early years I also played a lot of American old time music, mainly with THE BUSTED TOE MUDTHMPERS, a group that centered around George the Fiddler and Walt Koken on banjo. This group was an ancestor of The Highwoods String Band who made a few records for Rounder. Walt of course has been a steady force in old time music for all these years.



In the summer of '68 the Thumpers hits the road in a minibus. I rented out my Cambridge room to old friend Loudon Wainright, and headed north with George and Ricky Jay, the magician, harmonica palyer Marty Lebenson, his dog Stoney and Bill Buckman, the owner of the van. I think George talked Buckman into the adventure. Ricky went along because he had no money and nowhere else to go. He had caught a rideshare to Philadelphia where he had a magic gig, but he had fallen asleep during the trip from Ithaca, and the driver had decided on a different destination at some point during the night. That kind of thing happened in those days. So Ricky was in Cambridge with a suitcase full of magic tricks and no paycheck. We had him at our mercy and figured it would be good to have a magician along on such an epic journey. We headed north towards Canada, planning to meet Walt in Winnepeg and take the trans Canada Highway across to B.C. The customs people were skeptical about our being tourists when we arrived at St Lawrence late in the night with musical instruments and lots of brown rice. They decided to interview each of us separately in a little glass cubicle. Ricky was the last of us to be interviewed and when he replied "magician" to the customs agent's asking for his occupation, he was greeted with considerable skepticism. "If you're a magician, make something disappear," said the agent. On the agent's desk was ring of keys, the keys to the border station. "OK,"said Ricky. He picked up the keys and clapped his hands together and "poof", they were gone. The agent was alarmed. The other staff members were looking on along with all of us. After some comical negotiating Ricky pulled the keys out the air and everyone applauded. Since our instrument cases were all open, we even played some tunes and had coffee with the customs folks. I suppose the Canadians might have suspected us of draft dodging, but they were very friendly nevertheless. How the times have changed. That journey is a story of its own. We picked up some gigs, mixing magic tricks with the music, stopping in small towns where there wasn't much entertainment. We ended up in Berkley, playing on the streets. The Grateful Dead were around, the Black Panthers were making noise, the cops were everywhere. R. Crumb came to a show we did at the Freight and Salvage. All and all it was a wild time. We made enough money to feed ourselves. In the fall I went back to Boston to finish school, while everyone else stayed west. A guy named Bob Pine replaced me in the band. The following spring George and Bob were killed driving to Nova Scotia as Goerge and I had done before. They stayed over in Cambridge and tried to get me to go, but I wasn't going to miss my last week before graduation. They ran into some logging truck on a backroad somewhere in New Brusnwick. The speedometer on George's car had stopped at 69699 some months before and the number had been the subject of some randy jokes. It turned out to be the date and approximate time of the accident. So many years later it's hard to believe that this coincidence really happened, but I know it did.

I went to graduate school in Hartford, studying the history of religion and psychology. I started working in the bars at night playing with Coster Welling and Walach, a trio that mixed up traditional fiddle tunes with my original songs. It was the wild seventies and we were good for bar business. The hippies hadn't really heard this stuff before and it encouraged beer drinking. Bill Walach played mandolin and bass, Will Welling played the fiddle. We brought some hard hitting Down East Fiddle tunes into clubs and campuses along with the songs and we started playing a lot, traveling a bit as well. Pretty soon it became a job and I quit school. If I knew then what I know now. We played around the Northeast and into Canada. We had a good run, but as I worked more at song writing I wanted a bigger more arranged sound and teamed up with Barbara Hyde, Sandy Sayers , Yo Oxenhandler and Rich Bloch to form Jacob's Reunion, a very progressive acoustic group that drew from Jazz and classical backgrounds as well as folk and traditional. The record we made was a mini hit. It was a very original sound, Barbara's piano and Yo's violin along with my roots music and some great 3 part harmony. I still see copies of the album for sale in weird places for lots of money (100 Euros!). Personal issues pulled the group apart. We should have stuck it out a bit longer since we were developing a big cult following.


With CW&W and Jacob's Reunion, I was a Hartford based musician. I did a lot of work for the Peace Train, even got a full time artist in residence job for a year with the Round House Review, a group that included Stacy Phillips on Dobro, Walach. Guitarists, Preston Reed and Chris Kleeman and poet Kerry O'Keefe. Hartford was lively music town. I used to hang with the folks from Max Creek. Here I am playing with them all these years later at Eastover Resort in 2008.



During that year with the peace train I recorded Old Stones, Broken Bones, my first John Coster Album. I'd been playing around with my first Medicine Band ,Sandy from Jacob's Reunion and a guy named Craig Sears on guitar and vocals. Arthur Toole was the bass player. Craig, however, had deconstructed himself on a dark and snowy night in upstate New York when he came to the gig 2hours late followed by a policeman and a little old lady who pointed at him and said, "There he is." His arrest marked the end of that version of the group. The album had Sandy and Arthur but many other players as well, including Barbara from JR, Jeff Pevar, Preston Reed, a bunch of great people who were hanging out in Hartford in those days.