In response to Annette's posting above, this type of story amazes me. This recording she's referring to (it's actually a 4-song 33-1/3 rpm EP) was a little project I did with my ex-wife back in the early 1980's. We only sold it to our fans and this was pre-internet, so it was all direct contact at the gigs and snail-mail sales. How in the world this thing ended up in Michigan is a mystery that I'd love to unravel, but we'll never know, I'm sure. Also of note, the keyboard player on these sessions was a gentleman named David Lanz. David was a studio musician in Seattle at that time, and also played some lounge gigs around town. He later became well known as a Grammy-nominated "new age" artist. Anyway, hearing about this recording showing up in a thrift store in Michigan reminds me of the story of Dick Weissman and my 7-string banjo. To start at the beginning, when I was living on Vashon Island off the coast of Seattle, I had a brainstorm one day about building a 7-string banjo. My concept was to have a 6-string banjo but add a drone string, ala the 5th string on a 5-string banjo. The idea was to create a hybrid between a banjo and a guitar, but with the flexibility of muting out the 5th and 6th strings and retuning to whatever banjo tuning I wanted to use. A luthier friend of mine, Jack Hansen (who was also a member of a group I was in at the time called "The New Fireside Singers") worked with me on this project and built a really nice short-scale 7-string banjo out of an old rim he had and a nice mahoganey neck that he hand-carved. It worked as I'd envisioned and I was just learning my way around it when it was stolen one night from my van in downtown Seattle. I mourned for a couple months and then went back to Jack and asked if he could make me another one, which he did. (I subsequently showed this one to Greg Deering and commissioned a Deering version of the instrument, which I use with my one-man band.) Fast forward to the early 1990's after I had moved from the Seattle area to Colorado. I had the opportunity to meet Dick Weissman here, where he taught Musicology at UC Denver. As many of you may know, Dick was a member of The Journeymen, along with John Phillips and Scott McKenzie. He opened once for The Kingston Trio at the Boulder Theater and I later contacted him about doing an interview for a regular piece I was writing in Alan Shaw's "Kingston Korner" magazine. I wrote a column called "The Colorado Trail", in which I featured interviews with several different entertainers that home based here (Jimmy Ibbotsen and John Denver were a couple of my subjects). It just goes to show you what a small world we live in! Good luck, Annette, with your e-bay auction on my old record. Hope you make some big bucks for your charity work. Maybe some of my friends here will bid on it!
Dick came over to my office in Lakewood for the interview and we had a great chat, talking about his work with The Journeymen, songwriting for The Kingston Trio (he wrote "No One To Talk My Troubles To" and co-wrote "Oh Sail Away" with John Phillips). We also talked about banjo strings and other such things and at the end of the interview I grabbed my Jack Hansen 7-string banjo that was sitting in the corner, handed it to Dick and said, "Ever seen anything like this?" He casually replied, "Oh, I've got one just like this." My jaw dropped, and after I recovered a bit, I asked him where he had acquired his. He told me that he'd been visiting friends in Seattle and happened into a pawn shop one day, saw this 7-string banjo on the wall and bought it. What are the chances?!!! Dick had purchased my ripped off proto-type and by further coincidence, it had moved all the way to Colorado to reside within a few miles of it's replacement. Dick has now moved away from Colorado and I never did get a chance to actually hold my old instrument again, but it's a great story just the same.
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