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My
first memory of country music was in the back seat of our family's
'64 Pontiac Tempest station wagon. On summer vacations, my dad
would turn up the radio in an attempt to drown out the bickering
and general silliness coming from the back seat. I remember
the way the speakers crackled to the sound of Johnny Cash, Brenda
Lee, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Dolly Parton. I also remember
how I stopped squirreling around whenever Bobby Gentry came
into the backseat to tell us her story about Billie Joe McCallister
jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge. I still think about that
song now when I'm on a two-lane highway and I cross an old steel
trestle bridge.
To understand why I love country music, take that story and
combine it with this one: Every Saturday, without exception,
My mom would finish making dinner promptly by 5:59 pm and yell
from the kitchen, "Phillip, set up the TV trays".
Within minutes, my whole family would be gobbling up fish sticks
and macaroni and cheese and watching "Hee Haw" on
the tube. My sister and I always grumbled, but it was a lost
cause. My dad never made a fuss about much, but at 6 pm on Saturday,
his control of the airwaves was absolute. Although "Hee
Haw" was somewhat foreign to a suburban grade school kid
like me, I thought it was generally pretty funny, considering
it was a show I was forced to watch. The jokes were stupid and
immature and cast members like Junior Samples single-handedly
formed my conception of what people in the Ozarks must be like.
I didn't always understand what was going on -- especially when
the polka-dotted blondes and brunettes popped out of the cornfields.
To a kid itching to get back outside to play, the concept of
girls was totally lost on me. But the thing that sticks in my
mind the most about watching Hee Haw was seeing all the guitars!
I started fooling around with my dad's acoustic around age 11
and each Saturday night I was treated to a menagerie of 6-strings,
12 strings, electrics and acoustics -- some fancy, some plain,
but all played with mind-blowing precision. I become transfixed
on Roy Clark's hands as he moved from one guitar to the next.
He was simply the best I'd ever heard on every guitar he touched
-- that was, until Chet Atkins was a guest star! I'd sit and
watch and listen and learn and wish that I could make my little
acoustic do half the things I was seeing Roy Clark do.
I guess I must have filed those experiences deep into my subconscious
because within a few years, I had forgotten all about Roy and
Chet -- focusing instead on my new collection of Kiss records.
From there I generally made a nuisance of myself for the next
25 years. After living through the whole rock and roll experience
-- four hairy guys stuffed in a GMC van for 4-6 weeks dragging
their amps around the bar circuit -- I gave it a rest and started
looking for a better way to spend my time. Through the Beatles,
I became interested in Indian classical music, bought a sitar
and started playing a crazy mixture of world folk music with
my new pal, Betse Ellis. We called our improvisational duo The
Dhurries. Now, anyone who has seen The Wilders perform live
will have to really push your imagination to picture Betse and
I seated Indian-style on a Persian carpet playing neo-ragas
on violin and sitar to appreciative but confused coffeehouse
patrons. If you don't believe me, I'll send you pictures!
Enter my dad, again. He innocently(?) gave me a mandolin for
Christmas one year and when I didn't quite get the hint, he
gave me a banjo the next. Mandolins lend themselves to playing
world/folk type music but a banjo -- that's a completely different
animal. Not wanting to disappoint him, I went to the library
and checked out a couple of old bluegrass records so I could
try to figure out what I could do with the darn thing. Something
clicked when I heard the strange yet familiar music coming from
my turntable and at that point and I was hooked (my parents
breathe a huge sigh of relief here). Anyway, this new instrumentation
allowed Betse and I to start fooling around with American traditional
music. We got into an old Doc Watson record on Vanguard and
her boss at the time loaned us some 60's era old time records,
which featured scratchy fiddles, and banjos played clawhammer
style. Needless to say, these records were intriguing but pretty
much over our heads at the time. What I really liked was the
smooth tunes of Alison Krauss, Jerry Douglas, Tim O'Brien and
all the rest of the 1990's newgrass heroes. The more Betse and
I listened to this stuff, the more we liked it. And the more
we liked it, the less we felt like playing our old world/folk
stuff.
Enter Ike Sheldon. Betse and I had known Ike for years. His
band, The Young Johnny Carson Story, had played the same coffeehouse
circuit as us. We liked each other's music so much that we played
shows together and dubbed ourselves "The Mutual Admiration
Society". One night after practice, I got a phone call
from Ike and he got right to the point, "Look," he
said, "I've been doing a lot of this old country stuff
lately and I want to join up with you guys." Well, Betse
and I talked it over that night and decided to retire The Dhurries
and start up a new group with Ike to try to do some of this
country stuff as a trio. Thus, The Wilders were born. I'll let
somebody else tell the rest of the story.
I finish up by saying I've never had more fun playing music
than I have playing with The Wilders. We are all very different
people, but we seem to be our best individually when we are
all on stage together. It has truly been a pleasure and I hope
to continue as long as I am able pick up an instrument and contribute
something.
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