Ellis Paul
The interview with Ellis Paul took place at Camp Nashville, in the lower meadow of
Quiet Valley Ranch campgrounds on the afternoon of Saturday 25th May 1996. Thanks to Ralph
Jaccodine of Ralph Jaccodine Management/Black Wolf Records, Boston, Mass. for all his help
in setting up the interview and to Ellis for sparing the time to talk........
Fort Kent, Maine is where I was born. It's on the Canadian border. A lot of French
speaking people live there. It's basically a bi-lingual community, and I had a pretty
heavy duty French accent growing up, until I moved out of the area. My grandfather was a
potato farmer. I worked on his farm, as I grew up. The whole area is based on the potato
industry. Kids got out of school for three weeks each year, to harvest the crop. You wake
up at six in the morning, and go pick potatoes till six at night. They bring you home in
an old dirty bus. The climate when you wake up in the Fall - it'll be thirty degrees maybe
and frost on the ground. By midday it might get up to seventy or eighty and then it would
be cold again at night when the sun goes down. My father was Executive Director of the
Maine Potato Commission. He did all the marketing of the potato product for the state. He
also did research and actually invented a few potato hybrids. And got to name them, but
not after himself. We moved to the Mid-West for a while. My father was working in the
agriculture business in the Dakotas and in Minnesota. We moved back to Maine when I was
about twelve. He was still doing potatoes, since he was a potato specialist by education.
I didn't play guitar until I was twenty-one and was at College - but I was a musician in
High School. That's where I got my interest in music. We had a good music programme, and I
had formal lessons with trumpet at school. Stuff like that. I can read melody lines and
that kind of thing. The High School was in Presque Isle. That's my home town.
You went to College on a track scholarship.
I was state champion for Maine in High School. I was second in the country in the National
Age Group Championships. My distance was five kilometers. I got a few scholarship offers,
and decided to go to Boston College. I got injured, three years into my degree, when I was
a Junior. I had all this time on my hands. I missed music a lot and was looking for an
outlet to express myself. I had to take a year off from running, so I started playing
guitar.
Had you listened much to music up till then.
On the radio. I think around that time, this classic hits station came into vogue in
Boston. You were hearing - Neil Young and Bob Dylan
and James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. Up until that point, they hadn't
been on the air since the seventies. This was like, the mid eighties. I wasn't very
familiar with that kind of music.
Did you feel an almost instant affinity
with it.
Yeah. Because it was acoustic based. When I heard Dylan for the first time, in depth, I
was dumbfounded by the way he sounded. I spent a long time just makin' fun of him, just
because his voice was so funky. Now, I think he's a brilliant singer. A little familiarity
can overcome any prejudice, I guess.
So you picked up a guitar.
I started playing and learned a few songs by
other writers to begin with. I started writing originals within a few months. My songs
were pretty horrendous to begin with. They kept on getting better and better. When I
graduated, I started playing at open mikes in bars in Boston. Eventually discovered that
there were folk clubs where people were actually listening, and not drinking and carousing
while you played. I got involved in that circuit. I think that's why I've become so lyric
conscious - because of those listening rooms, where you really have to rely on words in
those situations.
Were you playing open mikes seven nights a week.
Three or four nights a week. Within a one hour drive of Boston was usually my limit.
Occasionally, I'd drive up to New Hampshire and do a show there. I'd also play the Western
suburbs, or just outside of Boston. There were a couple of regular places I played open
mikes - The Nameless Coffee House in Cambridge, and a place called The Naked City. The
latter one was held in a hallway, in this old building, on Wednesday and Thursday nights.
They just put up candles. Eventually the police found out about it and shut it down. By
that point, there were about two hundred people attending that open mike.
Boston has a strong folk music heritage, particularly in Cambridge during the
sixties with the original Club 47, and later with Passim's.
And it started up again in the late eighties.
From the mid seventies to the mid eighties, there was a real black hole there. Nothing was
being developed. Then the New York FAST FOLK scene started up with people like Shawn Colvin, John Gorka, Suzanne Vega and Jack Hardy - that was in New York in the mid
eighties. And in Boston, it began to well up again.
You had a day job, as a school teacher.
I was a case worker and a teacher for the inner
city kids who had been kicked out of the school system for emotional problems. Many if
them had criminal records. It wasn't a good job for music, because I was so burned out by
the end of the day. Mentally, it was real hard. I had about five years with those inner
city kids, while trying to do music on the side. I finally quit to put out my first record
and live off music full time. I think the progress I made sort of magnified very quickly,
because I had time to concentrate on what I was doing. I put more time into it. More time
to focus. And develop an approach to songwriting.
From the beginning were you a story songwriter - in terms of initially painting a
scene -
I would paint the scene, but I wouldn't develop
the characters or the moment. I've always been good with words and using them as a hook
that you could fit people into. I really didn't start developing the idea of using
character sketches and developing a story - or a moment in the character's life, until
after the first record - when "Stories" came out, that was when
the focus began to be purely on that moment in time in a character's life. Somehow that
explains everything that came before and everything that came after.
Was walking away from your day job,
which paid the rent and put food on your table, a hard decision.
No. Early on, I tried it a couple of times and
kept realising that financially it wasn't going to work out. When I put out my first CD, I
knew from the sales alone that I would be able to at least cover my rent. If I worked hard
enough gigwise, then I would be able to do music full time. I was about twenty seven then,
which is a late start for a full time musician. For a folk musician, that's about the
point where you're ready to go hit the road. You've got enough backlog of songs to
survive.
You released a couple of cassettes early
in your career.
Yeah. It was all my own material. One was called
"Urban Folk Songs" and the second was "My Home."
They're pretty green you know. I went into a little eight track studio, and did them live.
I used a couple of other players. Bass and another guitar, and a singer here and there. I
sold about five thousand of those over the course of two or three years, so I knew when
"Say Something" came out on CD, I'd be able to sell five
thousand copies rather quickly. And they went quickly. "Urban Folk Songs"
was cut at Honey Bear Studios. For the second one, I used a place called Playtime Studios.
They were very basically equipped studios. I self produced them and got some friends
together to help play on them.
You won the Boston Underground Showcase.
It sounds like the open mike in the hallway deal. Was it the same place.
No, that was actually a very serious thing. Two
hundred people sent tapes in and they picked eighty to play. They divided those eighty
performers into ten clubs. Eight people would showcase and two people would graduate as
winners from that night. There were quarter finals, semi finals and the final. I won the
final at this big club in Boston. Got got to play for three hundred people. It was the
biggest crowd that I had played to, at that time.
How did they maintain continuity of
judging.
There was none. It was just a crapshoot. There
were different judges at every club. You never knew who was going to have a particular
taste, musically. These contests are all biased. The bias is based on the opinion of the
judge and what the judge will think of a piece. They're really meaningless, but the fact
is you're going out to a club and you're playing to a lot of people. That's what you need
to be there for.
By then, had you begun playing farther
and farther afield.
No, not really. Just around New England and
doing Colleges here and there. I had no management at this stage.. I befriended a person,
who became my manager. His name is Ralph Jaccodine. He always wanted to start a record
label, and he heard that I was putting a record out on my own, without having a label. He
said "I'll make a label and I'll double your money [NOTE. I think Ellis was
alluding to the recording budget] and we'll go in there and do it right." We
got Bill Morrissey, who is a great songwriter to produce it. It was broadcast on some
commercial station in Boston and sold five thousand copies, basically in town. That
instantly made it affordable to do music full time. I could gig in Boston and make a
thousand bucks. Then I could hit the road and loose that money. Then I could go back to
Boston and make some more money.
Did you pick the musicians who played on
the first album. There are some pretty well known Boston pickers there.
It was a combination of both of us. Bill and I.
We talked it through, to make sure we were both meeting eye to eye on what we wanted the
sound to be like. We got Johnny Cunningham in. He is a good buddy of Bill's. And has since
become a great friend of mine. Duke Levine too.
He has been touring with Mary Chapin
Carpenter lately.
Yeah. He also ended up producing "Stories"
for me. He has also become one of my great friends.
How did Windham Hill pick up on
"Ashes to Dust" and put it on "Legacy II" in 1992.
They made a call to the entire music industry
that they were looking to put out a songwriter compilation album. It had been done before,
but this was going to be a very big thing on a national label. One of the people who runs
the open mike at The Old Vienna Coffeehouse sent in a tape. At that time there was enough
of a buzz about me. There was also collaborative evidence that it was worth their while.
They called me up and said, "Would you like to be on it." At that
point, I thought, "Wow, I've made it." They had done one before that,
and it had done really well. I was very excited to be on that one. It gave me some
national exposure. It didn't sell as many copies as the first one. Will Ackerman, the
owner of Windham Hill, quit. Sold the company. He was the spearhead and energy behind the
label. "Legacy II" was sort of put aside and didn't have as big
an impact, relative to the first record. It was still a calling card and I could say,
"I'm on Legacy II." Every DJ and folk promoter in the
country would recognise it. I got a lot of phone calls about it.
You mentioned The Old Vienna
Coffeehouse. Was that a place you played regularly.
It was a regular open mike place. I was there
every Thursday night. Passim's, at that point, didn't have an open mike. It was run by
this curmudgeon called Bob Donlin, who we all came to love once we got in the club. It was
a hard door to knock down. It took months and months for me to finally get a gig. The only
reason I got one was because, of a guy named Dick Pleasance. He was the big folk music DJ
in Boston. He said, "You need to hire Ellis Paul and get him in here."
Passim was - I loved the club and I loved Bob - he was not very well organised. The first
day that I got in there to do a show - it was the biggest club gig of my career, at least
in my mind at that point. I was opening for John Gorka. Bob had double booked that slot,
so I got axed in the process. He put me on, maybe the following weekend - he eventually
started using me as a regular opener, for a whole weekend. Then I became a headlining act.
Was End Construction, which you were
involved with, a Boston equivalent of FAST FOLK.
Well, sort of - it became - we were all hanging
out at The Old Vienna Coffeehouse open mike. We were all twenty three, twenty four years
old and decided that we would combine our mailing lists. Brian Dozer, Jim Infantino and a
guy named Jon Svetky. Brian is actually here at the festival. We broke up - sort of like
the Beatles phenomenon - after a while. It was just too many egos, trying to stick their
spoons in the soup. It helped a lot, because we all quadrupled our mailing lists. We
started doing group shows together. It almost turned into a band thing - we went up there
with with four guitars and sat in a circle. We'd collaborate on on everyone else's
material. It ended up being a really wonderful thing. I think by being amongst - Jon
Svetky for example, strums very loudly and does uptempo stuff - I learned a lot from
watching him play. Jim Infantino is very, very funny - one of the best black humour
songwriters in the country, I think. I learned a lot from having to follow him in a set.
You basically had to come up with the goods, in order to keep up with those guys. I had
some advantages - I think I had a prettier voice. My songs were a little bit more
accessible. It ended up being a great thing for all of us. We learned a lot from each
other, but eventually we just burned out on the competitiveness. It had run it's course.
We were talking recently about doing a big reunion show in Boston - doing a theatre show.
I think that we probably will, in the next few years.
Was it a boost to your career when HEAR
MUSIC MAGAZINE picked up your first album.
They helped me out a lot. They put me in the
Editor's Page as sort of the big pick. A folk rocket is like one of
those rubber band wind up things. It goes, and you never know how far it's going to go.
Every little bit helps. I'm realising that, with my music - it's like you get one little
chunk of success. A building block. No single building block is going to be the thing that
puts you over. It's the collective building blocks that build this pyramid, which is large
enough for the world to see. I think I'm at the stage in America, where I can see the
pyramid now. Now, I have to get it big enough so people outside the folk world can see it.
When you came to record
"Stories," was it because you'd met Duke Levine on the "Say Something"
sessions that you got him to help co-produce your second album.
Yeah, we were lookin' for somebody - I really
wanted to have control of what was happening, but I wanted someone who could go places
where I couldn't go in my head, musically. We called Duke and I said, "Basically
what I want to do is co-produce this." I wanted to capture some of that early
seventies, "Blood on the Tracks," The Band kind of thing. Duke's band was
basically that kind of set up, with a Hammond B-3.
Which is not an easy instrument to play
properly.
No. But the guy we used - a guy named Tommy West
was phenomenal.
Who is this other guy, Mark Tanzer, who
shares a production credit.
He was the engineer. I used him on
"Stories" and I used him on my new record "Carnival of Voices."
"Stories" is great. I think I had a whole year to sit on the
songs and write them. I wasn't working a day job. I was living on a farm. I'd go out in
the barn and write till I had the song captured.
Did it take a long time to cut the
second album.
No. We were still working on a limited budget.
It was bigger than for "Say Something," but it was still small
- we cut the record in about two weeks.
In the same year, you were invited to go
to Christine Lavin's Songwriter Retreat in Martha's Vineyard.
Actually, I didn't get invited to go there. I
was touring a lot. I wasn't involved with Christine
Lavin and her circle of musicians, who were doing the annual thing. I went up to play
an open mike. Christine hadn't heard me before. As a result of playing this song at an
open mike, she put me on the record - that wasn't supposed to happen with open mike
singers, because they didn't have any of the recording equipment there. They just ran a
DAT off the board and used professional mikes.
I heard you on the "Legacy II"
album. Nothing prepared me for "King of Seventh Avenue." Where did that song
come from.
I was reading a book called "Emperor of the Air"
by - I can't remember his name, it might come to me - it's a collection of short stories.
There's a character in one of the stories - an old guy who used to go out and look at the
stars. He was evaluating his life, by where he was at. I wanted to have that kind of
personality - an older gentleman, who is a widower, who goes out on a ledge of a building
in New York City. He misses his wife and is lonely, You don't really know whether he is
going to jump or not. He's kind of posing the question to himself. All the things he sees,
remind him of his relationship with his wife - silhouettes of people in windows. A couple
fight and then make love - a burglar in another window. Images from real life transposed
in his life, which trigger his memories - and trigger the emptyness of what he's got going
on. Eventually he sees the police coming and a crowd forms - I took a lot of time with
that song. I really, really tried to develop a character and the moment - I think it's one
of the songs I've worked hardest on.
You've been coming here to Kerrville for five years. Did you enter New
Folk from the beginning.
I did. I tried five years in a row, before I got
in. In 1994 I made it. Once I got in, I thought, "Well, I think I got a great
chance" because I knew what the songs were - once you got to know what they were
looking for in the contest, you knew what songs to submit. I wasn't necessarily writing
for the contest, but I might have submitted something that was maybe too political at
first. Or maybe something that was just a little bit too personal. They're looking for
great songs I think, that are kind of universal. That can be sung by another person, and
still have the same effect. That's finally what I sent in to them - two songs from "Stories,"
"All Things Being the Same" and "Here She Is" which I think are pretty
universal themes. It worked. I got in. It's easier to win when there's thirty two people,
which the finals is, than it is to be chosen from eight hundred for thirty two slots. I
was pretty happy to be in.
Did it have many positive benefits.
Yeah. It was the biggest building block, I
found. I think the reason why it was the biggest building block, was because I was getting
all the other building blocks. This was like pure confirmation that I was somebody to look
out for. There was a little buzz happening anyway. Then I won the big contest in the
folkscene. That really started to grease the wheel for me.
Did you enter any other song contests.
Like Telluride.
I hadn't done Telluride and once I'd won
Kerrville, I figured that that was the one I wanted anyway. There were a few people that
were upset that I was in the contest to begin with . I was already getting a lot of
national press. They probably felt, "Well, you don't really need this."
They thought your name was already
established.
And it wasn't. I think regionally in New
England, it was at that point. Winning here was going to be my calling card for the rest
of the country.
How did you become involved with the
Internet Quartet series of concerts.
Through Alan
Roworth who set them up - he and I have become great, great friends. He has been
really supportive of my music. The Internet has been incredibly supportive of my music.
When he was setting it up, I volunteered my services right off the bat. I knew I would be
a big help to the group. A lot of the people in the quartet I was in, hadn't traveled
nationally. Even on the East coast, where I had a following. I knew I could always draw a
crowd and make it an interesting night. Then Buddy
Mondlock got involved with it. [NOTE. Mike McNevin and Dave's True Story {Kelly Flint and David Cantor}
made up the quartet which toured with Ellis.] It was a one time deal with the Quartet,
which lasted for two weeks and maybe ten shows.
Were you touring for long periods as a
solo act by then.
Initially I'd go out for maybe two or three
weeks and just try and get whatever gigs I could. Now it's gotten to the point where I'm
doing four and five week tours. I'm doing almost two hundred dates a year.
How did it work out that Philo signed
you.
DNA, which is Rounder's distributor, was also
distributing "Say Something" and "Stories."
Once they found out how many copies were being sold - we approached them about putting out
"Say Something" but they weren't interested at the time. They
subsequently realised how many copies it was selling and became interested, without us
knowing about it. We put out "Stories" on our own. After it
sold about ten thousand copies, we said "Maybe to get it boosted to the next
level, we need to talk to record labels again." We went to Rounder and said
"Would you like to put this out." They said "We would have put
this out when you recorded it, if you had told us you were looking for a label."
At that point, I guess I was waiting for them to come to me, which is not a good attitude
to have in this business. You have to really go to them. So we put it out on
Rounder/Philo.
You were quite happy with the idea of
moving "Stories" to a national label.
I wanted to get back all the investment I had in
it - for our little label - Ralph's and my label. We did that. We knew that if we wanted
it to really hit bigger nationally, we needed to go to a bigger label. They're doing great
with it. They couldn't do a lot of new promotion with it, because it had been out for a
year, year and a half when they got it - they got it in stores. They licensed "Stories,"
so it's going to come back to me. They're just renting it. When "Carnival of
Voices" comes out, that's going to be their first test as a label for me. To
put promotion behind it and get it in stores.
(cont.)
Kerrville
Kronikle cont.
